MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

Over the last few days I've been travelling in northern NSW and over the Queensland border by train and bus.

I wanted to attend a funeral in Ballina and also visit my uncle and aunt on the Gold Coast hinterland. But I also liked the idea of travelling at a slower pace that allowed me to see more of the countryside and the towns and the people.

I appreciate the stories that you hear from people in the country. This time there were two in particular that stayed with me. One was from my AirBNB host in Lismore and the other the waitress at Curry House restaurant in Casino.

My AirBNB host welcomed me about 8:00 pm and invited me into her backyard for a BBQ sausage and a beer with her husband and her medium term boarder.

She had a large vegetable garden and complained that her neighbour's goat would sometimes get into her garden and eat the plants. When she'd mention it to him, he would nonchalently reply that the goat must have been hungry.

My host was very patient with him because he was always very kind to her and to everybody else he'd come across.

He drove a taxi, and one night picked up a woman living with mental illness who was estranged from her family. The woman said she didn't have anywhere to go, so he took her home to stay the night in his spare room. That was a year ago, and she's still there.

A few days later I found myself in Casino, which is as far as the north coast train goes, since former NSW Premier Bob Carr closed the service to Murwillumbah in 2004. I had a few hours to fill in because the train that connected with my bus from Robina was running late due to the heatwave.

It had been 46 degrees earlier, but in the cool of the evening it was a more bearable 38 degrees. I'd enjoyed the curry I'd eaten in Lismore and was pleased to find a simple Indian restaurant in the main street the town. The waitress wasn't Indian, and she was just there helping out her friend the owner, who was.

I was the only customer, and she sat down to talk with me while I waited for my beef korma (Casino calls itself the 'Beef Capital'). The heat was the main topic of conversation but she got around to telling me about the woman with a mental illness whom she'd taken in until the woman could find better permanent accommodation than the tent in the caravan park that the Salvos had provided. That was many months ago.

My waitress's mother had passed away early last year and she had a spare room, and most likely the need for companionship. The woman with the mental illness was 'no trouble'.

She would leave the house every day at 8:00 in the morning and return around 6:00, with her dog. But the dog was 15 and died of of old age some time after she moved in.

My waitress told me that her boarder was distressed and didn't know what to do. So she took the initiative and went to Bunnings to buy a pot and some potting mix in which to give the dog a dignified burial. The woman was very grateful and now the pot with the dog's remains is her most treasured possession.

There have been many unanswered questions since late last year, when ABC Managing Director Michelle Guthrie began to spill some beans about her plans for a 'full overhaul' of the organisation.

The Australian reported that she's embarking upon 'the most far-reaching overhaul in the organisation's 84-year history'. It said that this 'could see the ABC collapse the television, radio and online departments into one single [digital] division, organising content by genre in a horizontally integrated structure'.

Guthrie needs to spill more beans before we can be sure, but I would speculate that we are going to see a severe reduction - or even the end - of the Corporation's TV and radio 'stations' as we know them. There could be no more ABC TV, ABC2, Radio National, Classic FM or Triple J. It would be just ABC Digital. All or most of the content would be delivered exclusively via its website.

Perhaps this is why the Director of Television has left, and - according to The Guardian's media columnist Amanda Meade - the current Director of Radio '[does] not have Guthrie's ear'. It seems to me that Guthrie wants new managers who - like her - think in terms of digital distribution rather than radio and TV stations. She came to the ABC from Google and has never worked in a radio or TV station.

Eliminating 'over the air' distribution of content would save the ABC about $200 million a year in transmission costs. Much of that amount would be channeled into program making or returned to the Federal Government. In addition, the Government would have its eye on revenue windfalls from selling the spectrum to the telcos who are struggling to satisfy the demand for mobile data.

The Government has already told community TV stations that they must leave the airwaves and use the Internet instead. TVS Sydney has gone and the other stations will follow in coming months. It has stopped funding for community radio DAB+ digital radio transmissions.

In addition, any rollout of DAB+ beyond the five mainland capital cities has stalled, and abandoning the platform was touted by the Government when Malcolm Turnbull when he was Communications Minister. This has happened overseas, with some countries such as Singapore discontinuing digital radio and others such as Canada and New Zealand rethinking plans for digital radio and opting for digital distribution as the replacement for FM and AM.

Earlier this week I had a conversation with a former ABC radio presenter whom I knew when I worked there in the 1990s. It seems that management is already commissioning podcasts featuring high profile presenters, that are not intended for airing on Radio National or any of the other existing stations.

The question is how much it will matter, and I can really only answer for my myself. About 90 per cent of my radio listening is to podcasts, and I choose them by genre and reputation rather than the station from why they originated, if they originated from a station. I also use platforms such as iView and SBS On Demand more than the TV 'stations'.

So I guess Guthrie's plans - if I've guessed them correctly - won't make much difference to me. But for others - especially for older people and those who are not digital natives - the ABC's abandonment of stations will mean the abandonment of them.

I was interested in the Australian Catholic Church's release yesterday of data revealing the relative percentages of child sex abusers in the various dioceses and religious orders between 1950 and 2009.

What was most significant for me was that there were no mention of names of individuals - it was just dioceses and orders. In addition, there was a large disparity among the dioceses and also among the orders. For example, 40.3 per cent of the St John of God Brothers were subject to complaints while the figure for the Dominican Friars was only 1.5 per cent.

This tells me two things. The first is the recognition that child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is primarily a cultural problem - it has less to do with rogue priests or religious. The second is that child sexual abuse is a significant part of the culture of some dioceses and orders and not others.

It is the first time I can recall names of particular offenders being left out of the equation. I interpret this as a statement that the Church itself is the offender - and not rogue individuals.

This is qualified by the statistics that reveal that some dioceses and orders are over-represented. The Church is a confederation of cultures, some more conducive to child sexual abuse than others.

I think it is regrettable that until now, individual offenders and alleged offenders have been portrayed by the media as monsters, and punished as such. In my view, the media have played into the hands of the Church by demonising particular offenders and occasionally individual bishops and heads of religious orders.

Monster portrayal makes for better media stories and more effective community awareness of the problem. But as a result, the rest of the Church has got off lightly and the 'cultural' aspect of sexual abuse has been underplayed or even ignored.

Perhaps the best expert witness the Royal Commission didn't have - because he died in 2008 - is Professor Greg Dening. He was an ethnographic historian - Professor of History at the University of Melbourne - and for some years a Jesuit. His honours seminar History and Anthropology in 1985 was a highlight of my Arts degree.

In parallel with his academic research and writing, he wrote a number of histories of religious institutions - including Xavier College, Melbourne, and the Jesuit Parish of North Sydney - from the point of view of culture.

I would summarise culture as the range of practices we as a community do without questioning.

Dening explained in his North Sydney parish history that pre-Vatican II Catholics would hate themselves without questioning what they were doing. After Vatican II, the culture shifted to encourage them to love themselves humbly.

With reference to sexual abuse, it seems the St John of God Brothers would take sexual liberties with minors without questioning whether what they were doing was right or wrong. It was just the done thing. Sanctioned by the order's culture. For the Dominicans, the 'done thing' would not have included sexual liberties with minors.

I think the implication for this cultural view of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is that the punishment of individual offenders should receive less emphasis. And the Catholic Church as a whole, correspondingly more (with possible variations according to the level of offence within particular dioceses and orders).

The nature of the communal punishment is less relevant than the principle, but it could include property confiscation or loss of tax breaks and other privileges that were granted on the assumption that the Church would maintain its place of honour in the community.

I made a snap decision to do a day trip to Canberra yesterday. It turned out that eight hours in an air-conditioned train was a good way to beat the heatwave.

Last May I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London. I liked it, but essentially it just made me more determined to see our own National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. I'd heard about ours but had never visited. It was established in Old Parliament House in 1998 and moved to its present dedicated building next to the National Gallery of Australia in 2008.

I'd sometimes wondered why it was necessary to have galleries dedicated to portraits. I don't know whether this Wikipedia list is exhaustive but there are National Portrait Galleries in London, Washington DC, Edinburgh, and Mariefred (Sweden). Then there's the Portrait Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Why don't they have a National Still Life Gallery or a National Landscape Gallery?

My theory is that it is an effort to define ourselves as a nation by our people. We want to highlight images of Australians whose achievements and presence in our midst we have valued materially and spiritually, and cherish emotionally.

If we don't focus on the people, we default to abstract and potentially dangerous notions of nationalism, or the use of particular legends or stories that some Australians feel more at home with than others.

Recently I was talking with a friend who is a foreign-born non-Anglo Australian citizen. I asked him whether he felt Australian. He said no. I felt sad and did not want to dwell on it by asking him to elaborate.

But I don't think Waltzing Matilda means much to him, let alone the Anzac legend. On the other hand, a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, with its representation of the images and stories of Australians of diverse cultures, might make him reconsider his answer to my question.

Years ago, somebody I regarded as a mentor told me that he had a strong dislike for flags of nations. I didn't fully appreciate what he meant until the Cronulla Riots of 2005 and I saw the Australian flag as a symbol of ugly nationalism. Since then I have taken the position that we should not change the flag to lose the outmoded Union Jack. Instead we should minimise its use.

I did not notice an Australian flag at the National Portrait Gallery, and there it is no Australian flag on the Gallery's website.

The ABC's Australian Story TV program has done a great job over 20 years putting people at the centre of various preoccupations. Tonight the program begins its 2017 season, the first without its own mentor figure and contributor Caroline Jones. If I was disappointed by anything at the National Portrait Gallery yesterday, it was that they have in their collection two portraits of Caroline but neither is on display.

A few weeks ago a friend sent me a scanned page from a new large format book titled Greek Cafés & Milk Bars of Australia.

It was published last year by Photowrite, a Sydney-based two person team that includes documentary photographer Effy Alexakis and historian Leonard Janiszewski. They have been researching Greek-Australian culture, amassing a huge documentary and oral history archive.

Of particular interest to my friend was the story of Mattie and George Veneris. He knows their grandson James, who is from Albury, where his maternal grandfather ran the Hume Weir Café and his paternal grandfather the Riverina Café.

In the book, James' grandfather recalls their purchase of the Riverina Café in 1954. 'We served American style food - milkshakes, sundaes, burgers ... We stayed until 1977 ... There were about 13 Greek cafés in Albury from the 1950s to the 1970s'.

The Riverina and the Hume Weir are both long gone, but I remember them well from when I was growing up. My family had a dairy farm and our own 'milk run' business, Wodonga Milk Supply, which operated until 1970.

We would deliver 'bulk' (non-pasteurised) milk, which has the purest taste and was still legal in those days. I remember my father telling me that our 'bread and butter' customers were the local cafés.

The Greek café I remember best was the Rose Marie. As was the norm, our father could not cook, and he would always take us to the Rose Marie when my mother was away.

In contrast to today, 'Greek' referred to the ethnic identity of the owners, not the cuisine. At the Rose Marie, I can only recall beef steak and lamb dishes with 'three veg', and desserts including banana splits and sundaes.

I love the memories but would not wish to go back to eating from the Greek café menus of the 1960s. I very much appreciate actual Greek food and that is what I want and expect when I go to a Greek café or restaurant.

I had an interesting experience in November 2015, when I visited the town of Lockhart, an hour's drive from Albury into the Riverina. I'd been told about the Blue Bird Cafe, which was an attempt to recreate something of a café there that was once also owned by the Veneris family. I did a postgrad degree in Applied History in the 1990s and I am very interested in how we try to preserve the past.

The Blue Bird is a family museum that celebrates the past. It sells basic food such as sandwiches, pies and cakes. Although it has shop fittings from the era, is not a recreation of the café like the shops and businesses at the Sovereign Hill gold mining history theme park in Ballarat. It's more piecemeal, and the family wouldn't have the resources for a theme park. Nor is it a café business run on the old Greek café model. It couldn't be. The past is past.

What fascinated me most was the contrast with the rundown Olympia Café in Stanmore, near where I live in Sydney. The Olympia has been operating continuousy for many years, and the publicity shy octogenarian owner is famous for chasing away journalists and documentary makers who try to feature his cafe. A article published last year in the Sydney Morning Herald suggests the Olympia has built its own, very different, mythology, more akin to a horror display in a fun park side show.

'Some imagine something sinister here in the dust and decrepitude, in the gold-toothed gruffness of an elderly proprietor who objects to photographs and only turns a light on his tarnished vintage kingdom when customers rather than rubberneckers visit'.

When my cousin was showing me around Wellington last week, I noticed that his phone was a vintage Nokia, just like the one I was using in 1999.

He's not the type who tries to set retro fashion trends. He just prefers a dumb phone to a smart phone. He says he uses it to make phone calls, and that is all he needs it for.

He does not pretend smart phones cannot be useful. He has reluctantly agreed to buy one for his daughter. But he does not like to see people's lives controlled by their smart phones.

A few days ago I was using my smart phone to listen to a podcast that explained how smart phone app developers can be as unscrupulous and unethical as cigarette companies in exploiting their customers.

Former Google app developer Tristan Harris has founded an organisation called Time Well Spent. He talked about the 'persuasive technology design' class at Stanford that taught app developers how to monopolise the time of smart phone users.

'It's not about giving you freedom, it's about sucking you in to take your time'.

An app will 'notify' you when you have a new email or when a news story breaks. In other words, it will interrupt your conversation or stop you from attending to something in your life other than your smart phone.

How often do we physically bump into smart phone users in the street because they are not looking where they're going? Or perhaps we are the ones glued to our smart phones.

I walk long distances for exercise and always listen to podcasts so that I can stay in touch with what's going on in the world. In fact I miss a lot of what is going on in the world close to me because I am listening to podcasts. My eyes are metaphorically closed to what is around me.

Harris says the key question is how smart phone usage makes us feel on the inside. The average person checks their phone 150 times a day because they feel anxious about what they're missing out on if they don't keep checking it.

I've become aware of this, and I've taken to deliberately missing episodes of my favourite podcasts to ensure that they don't control me. I would listen to 'The Monocle Daily' every weekday, and feel anxious when I didn't. Now I listen to it three or four times a week, and feel better for it.

I do not want to give it up altogether because I enjoy it. It informs me and it raises my spirit, with the humour and intelligence of its presenters. I just want to own my time and my life, and I can do that with measured use of my smart phone.

That was my message to my cousin as I gave him the bad news that he would soon need to swap his dumb phone for a smart phone because the telcos are turning off the old 2G phone towers that have serviced dumb phones for 20 years.

Last night it was three days since our return from New Zealand and we sought to relive the experience by sharing one of the two garlic chocolates we bought at the Ocho craft chocolate establishment in Dunedin.

Ocho is short for 'Otago Chocolate'. The shop and factory is located in Dunedin's Warehouse Precinct, where the distinctive Dunedin buildings have been transformed from a near derelict state and been given a new lease of life.

We discovered Ocho by accident, lured off the street by the coffee and chocolate aromas. We'd just passed on taking a tour of the huge Cadbury plant around the corner.

It is a labour of love for the artist and former journalist Liz Rowe, who says she got side-tracked into making chocolate after spending six months in Latin America in 2011.

I know what it's like to be seduced by chocolate as a traveller to those parts. When I was in Lima in 2015, I went to the Chocolate Museum for breakfast not once, but every morning during my three or four day stay. The displays put the lure of chocolate into the context of its science, history and labour relations.

Later that year I couldn't believe it when my dietician actually encouraged me to eat chocolate - natural chocolate - and how serendipitous it was that the local health food shop had a large batch of Ecuadorian dark chocolate at a good price. I had that rapturous experience of something you've long regarded as sinful suddenly and unexpectedly being revealed as a virtue.

While enjoying the garlic chocolate last night, we talked about how we might entice our garlic farmer friend from the NSW South Coast to get into the business of making garlic chocolate. Somehow I think she would be intrigued enough to give it some thought.

After a Cadbury dairy milk chocolate upbringing, I became fascinated with the possibilities of creativity with chocolate after seeing the film Like Water for Chocolate in the 1990s. I had just discovered kangaroo meat and I attempted a chocolate kangaroo dish. It wasn't very successful but I didn't regret trying.

I think I was attracted to eating kangaroo at that stage by the fact that it had just come on to the market for human consumption and was still regarded by most people as taboo. A decade or two earlier, the same could be said for eating garlic.

I remember my mother telling me that it was anti-social to eat garlic. She said it was one of the things that distinguished European migrants from 'us', but it was something we'd have to learn to tolerate. In particular there was a Ukrainian man to whom we'd often give a lift who always reeked of garlic.

Now we have learned not only to tolerate but to love and appreciate garlic, for both its taste and its health and cultural virtues. Likewise chocolate. No longer a sin but - in right measure - one of life's authentic peak experiences.

This morning I read Antonio Castillo's article in Eureka Street 'US-Mexico relations are officially off-the-wall'. The expression 'off-the-wall' refers to something that is so crazy it defies rational explanation.

The US is making a fast u-turn into isolationism, and 'off-the-wall' could be applied to America's relations with just about any country including Australia. The difference is that with most of the others it's crazy-bad but with Australia it is crazy-good.

In quite an unexpected development, Trump has told Turnbull that the US will honour the Manus and Nauru deal stitched up in the last months of the Obama administration despite the ban on the entry of refugees into the US.

There are not many things Trump does out of the goodness of his heart, and he didn't have to do that. I'm surprised that our media commentators and the Labor opposition are not busily speculating. If the Australian summer has dog days, these are them, and journalists and the opposition appear to have succumbed.

I didn't notice anything beyond Michelle Grattan's headline in The Conversation: 'Trump gives Turnbull refugee deal green light but government provides no detail'. Grattan herself provided no detail about her reference to no detail. In Fairfax, Mark Kenny is way too gentle in his 'wait and see' depiction of Turnbull's 'soft-shoe shuffle around Donald Trump'.

Elsewhere I've seen commentary pointing out that the Trump-Turnbull relationship is somewhat unique among Trump's pairings with world leaders because of their common background in business. They both speak the language of 'the deal'. With Trump, there's no appeal to better angels, and leaders will get nowhere if they persist in speaking about shared values such as democracy and human rights.

So what's the deal here? What is Turnbull giving Trump in exchange for Trump's green light on the refugee deal? In the short term, there's Turnbull's refusal to condemn Trump's anti-Muslim executive order. He said in his media conference yesterday that it's 'not his job' to comment on Trump. In this he is alone among his peers. Even Theresa May, Trump's new best friend of last week, eventually criticised Trump for issuing this order.

We will have to wait to find out what else Turnbull owes Trump in the wake of the Manus and Nauru deal. But I would guess that Australia is not going to be pursuing a foreign policy independent of the US any time soon. Which is a pity, because now is the time to do it because we're at the crossroads.

In December I wrote about attending a gathering of retired Australian diplomats who all believed it was time for Australia to let the ANZUS alliance fade away in favour of an independent foreign policy. They pointed out that there are a number of things the Australian Government is being quiet on.

Most notable of these was America's heavy reliance on the Pine Gap defence intelligence facility in central Australia. This would probably be an early target in the event of a nuclear conflict involving the US, and the fallout would impact Australia's population centres including Sydney and Melbourne.

Is this the price we are paying for Trump's green light on the refugee deal?

I have just read Catherine Marshall's powerful Eureka Street article 'Trump moves against vulnerable women'. It is about his recent executive order that health organisations receiving funding from the US must not provide abortion services or advice, even if the money is not used to fund these services.

It has reminded me of my own inner struggle with regard to abortion. I am resolutely - but not proudly - pro-life.

In my own personal world, I cannot accept that any human being has a right to choose when to end the life of another (born or unborn) human life. That is God's prerogative.

But I am in favour of the current civil laws permitting early term abortion if the mother's physical or mental health is at risk. These are the vulnerable women that Catherine is talking about in her article.

I also think that it is perfectly acceptable for a Catholic publication like Eureka Street to advocate pro-choice positions in this way because they are pro-tolerance positions.

Tolerant Catholics - including me, I hope - do not impose their religious views on others. That is what religious extremists do. I accept that my particular religious views are out of step with the common sense reality of the community I live in. I don't mind that. In fact I cherish it. I like living in a multicultural, multifaith society.

Why I am not proud to be pro-life is that those who are proudly pro-life are often intolerant of the views of others. They are bigots. I like to think that I am not a bigot.

I might try to pretend that abortion is not my business. That it's for women, and perhaps couples, who are having to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. But if I think of it, that's not fair on unborn human beings, who are defenceless. They need the state to advocate on their behalf.

The only point of contention is a big one. It's when human life begins. My religious belief is that this point is the moment of conception. But I don't have a right to impose that on anybody else. In reality, I support the common sense definition that life begins when the foetus is at an advanced stage of development, as determined by the state.

Without considering myself an expert, I think the state - Australia - has got it about right. Until a week ago, America had it about right. That this has changed is reason for protest and civil action.

For the past two or three years, I have fantasised about being out of the country for Anzac Day. It hasn't happened, and it won't happen this year.

But yesterday I was really pleased to be in New Zealand for Australia Day.

I woke up not thinking of Australia.

We went out and had breakfast. Then we took a short walk to the Wellington City Gallery, where we very much enjoyed the exhibition of the works of American 'selfie' photographer Cindi Sherman. In the afternoon I visited my uncle and my aunt - both facing the challenge of ageing. I was then taken out by my cousin, who was in good spirits and an excellent companion for the rest of my afternoon.

In other words, I had a very happy Australia Day away from what I understand was the ugliness of the day at home. In itself my own protest, with Cindi Sherman's clowns providing a fitting backdrop. If I had been in Australia, my form of defiance would have been just as real, but very different, and a bit unusual. I would have attended an Australia Day citizenship ceremony.

I contemplated doing that last year, did the research, but in the end indifference got the better of me.

A citizenship ceremony would have allowed me to take part in the welcoming of 'new Australians' and to affirm my strong belief in a multicultural Australia. I would like it if Australia Day was all about the freshly minted new Australians. Not the (European) less new Australians like me, or even the (indigenous) old Australians. That is why I am happy to ignore what some of the vocal European and indigenous Australians want Australia Day to be about.

I was proud to grow up in a community that included many people we called at the time 'new Australians' (the term was later dismissed because it was thought to conflict - I believe erroneously - with the idea of multiculturalism). It was in Albury-Wodonga, close to the Bonegilla migrant reception centre, which was still operating when I was a child.

In 2015 I had a piece of art made to commemorate my family's personal connection to the new Australians from the Bonegilla centre (pictured).

I also felt good that my 'family' at the dinner table this past Christmas Day was a group of six friends who were all new Australians. I was the only Australian born person at the table.

In Sydney, I love getting the train to a suburb with a concentration of new Australians - walking around and enjoying the food. Recently I had a Persian meal in Auburn with a new Australian friend and her mother in law who was visiting from South Africa.

I would like to think that New Zealand has it right and is able to avoid the ugly politics of nationalism when it celebrates its national day Waitangi Day in ten days time. But sadly my cousin tells me otherwise.