I'm looking through you

With the Saturday papers mainly informing what I'm thinking at the moment - not at all a good thing, in the main - I thought I'd link to this article to give you the grist of some things to think about, in a far more evocative way than I could.

I'll stick by my assessment that the current federal government is doing incalculable damage to the 'body politic' in this country and that, very slowly, even supporters are waking up to this. But around Ozplogistan there are still plenty of people who just reckon the left should shut up and cop it sweet - there is a mandate. Not for this bastardy there isn't. We have a classic case of information assymetry. Anyway...sip of red, deep breaths, change the TV channel and...

I thought I'd return to some of the stories about consular 'clients' I dealt with during those years overseas. It's seemingly a law of nature that the more extreme the circumstances, the better characteristics of people emerge. Those consular cases with relatively smaller problems mainly caused me the most angst. Just after the first APEX (advance purchase) fares were introduced, I got a bloke in Singapore. He'd come for three weeks as I recall, but had spent all his money in two days and now he wanted to go home, but he couldn't fly for 19 days and what was I going to do about it. His predicament was a direct result of his own stupidity and he wanted a bailout, but he wasn't going to get it from the taxpayer. I told him we could contact his rellies and get them to send him some money - no, he didn't want that. Every morning he'd turn up, ask the same question, get the same answer, and then he'd sit there for a while and then disappear. After a while he didn't come, so I guess he got himself home somehow.

On another posting, four Aussies died in fairly messy circumstances. The three sons of one of the couples arrived a few days later to sort out the details - even thought there was little they could do in a practical sense. Mrs V V B and I decided we'd have them stay with us rather than a hotel - the 'logic' was that if they saw how badly this place ran its hotels (they were all government-owned), they'd have some pretty pointed questions about how they ran the airline (and, given it was the second crash in 3 months, quite rightly). On arrival the questions about how it all happened began immediately - not surprising. At that stage we didn't know much so I just had to play along with them a bit.

One thing about this direct contact with families, you learnt a lot more than you might have preferred. There were three sons (there was also a daughter, but I came to understand she was estranged from the blokes). The eldest son was a doctor, the second a lawyer and when I asked the third what he did, I learnt he was a mail sorter and he was the one dealing worst with the loss of the parents. But it was an open window into the dynamics of the family which, while helpful in terms of doing my job, I felt a bit voyeurish.

The doctor came in handy - part of my job was to identify the remains and, in this case, there wasn't that much to go on. Mind you, he didn't fare any better, even though these were his parents. But, in one of those stories that you don't often hear about, the Yanks came to the rescue. Seems they had - maybe still have - a well resourced forensic laboratory based in Hawaii and, though this was a military dictatorship, they offered this service and the 'strongman' who ran the place accepted and so, a few days later, all these pathologists and others arrived to start to try and piece together identities from dental records and the like.

I remember some of those consular 'clients' relatively fondly now, after all these years. At the time, I guess I was just fearful. What of, I don't know now....