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Again, a lag between blog posts brought on by writing distractions, life, and lecturing opportunities with Seabourn.

Right now we are completing a fifteen day voyage on Odyssey from Auckland, New Zealand via Waitangi (where Māori and Europeans signed the Treaty that now governs New Zealand politics), Wellington, Kaikoura (recovering from a severe earthquake), Timaru (from where we went to my hometown of Ashburton for lunch with my brother), Port Chalmers and Dunedin, then the marvellous Stewart Island and its many walking tracks.

It has all been enjoyable, but the bonus was a jackpot day of fiord cruising through Dusky, Doubtful and Milford Sounds at the southern end of New Zealand.  To see all three on the same fine day is a rarity, so all of us aboard were thrilled.

Many of Odyssey’s guests began their journey in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and have enjoyed an excellent itinerary that took them to Hawaii, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands and several others. But one of the differences for them in these southern waters is that sailing conditions are often stronger –  the rough trip from Waitangi to Wellington was the hardest of the trip according to most, and for some the hardest ever. Even some of the crew thought it unusually challenging.

Those crew are marvellous. The galley gang serve up a constant stream of amazing food, while the deck officer crew make everything look easy, most notably yesterday’s exacting navigation into some tricky waters to provide some of the world’s most scenic views. Unobtrusive cabin staff keep up room standards constantly. And a string of daily stops means preparing for docking, setting up, getting excursion parties away on time, taking care of individual guest needs and wrangling the inevitable issues. Then at the end of the port day it is all done in reverse to get the ship away on time, and that also requires coordination with port and pilot crew.

The entertainment team deliver shows, competitions and social events that make most guests’ days exhausting. One highlight is the presence of the great songwriter, Jimmy Webb (Wichita Lineman, Up Up and Away, By the Time I Get to Phoenix etc) who is doing performances and Q&A sessions en route to Melbourne and Sydney concerts. Another was the amazing live sand art creations provided by Māori artist Marcus Winter.

On this trip I have canvassed topics common to Australia and New Zealand (their respective roles in the Pacific, the making and nature of both countries, the origin and state of indigenous affairs, the rivalry between the two countries). The other speaker is an expert on Captain Cook and the early explorers, so audiences have had a wide range of inputs to consider and, as usual, also made great contributions to the discussions.

And the usual bonus of all this? Meeting an extraordinary array of people from different cultures and backgrounds with a common set of concerns for what is happening in their home countries and the world, and the consequences of all that for the future. We might be all at sea, but we’re trying to work it out.

Meanwhile, I have been writing a few things but mainly preparing to rerelease the Le Fanu crime novel series so have been working with my wonderful New Zealand editor, Adrienne Charlton, to get everything in order. And some readers here might be interested to learn that all this has raised the possibility of  Le Fanu 5 appearing in due course. Stay tuned.

I have also been finalising a couple of other publishing ventures that I hope to bring news of a bit later on. As usual, they will be on vastly different subjects!

The best thing I have read for a while is Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a wonderfully written story about the relationships between three game designers who strike it big but encounter major social challenges along the way. It is a great entrée to a generation and a subculture that also raises thoughts about personal development and change, success and satisfaction, and about the life arcs that suddenly change direction.

And by far the best non-fiction work I have read in a very long time was Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa, a book that took me way too long to encounter by a Kenyan who sadly is no longer with us. He spent a lot of time in South Africa, effectively as an illegal, wrote about several African states, won a writing competition and as a result mixed in strong circles in America and Europe. These essays are all great but start with the signature one of the title, then read the opening stories on aid and development, then read the rest. He has a hilarious but devastating way of upending all outside views on “Africa”, and is essentially a pioneering decoloniser.

Pip Williams’s The Bookbinder of Jericho is her follow up to the wonderful Dictionary of Lost Words. It is again wonderfully written and very good on the details of the bookbinding process leading up to and following World War One. But, for me, as a story there is a sameness to both books which reduced some of the thrill.

Some life stories are among other things I have read.  Sam Neill’s Did I Ever Tell You This? A Memoir is as charming as you might expect, and especially so in that he revealed here his encounter with cancer. It is wry and insightful, and way less gossipy than a lot of people might desire. In that sense it is a very real New Zealand recollection, understated and self-effacing. But it is a delightful read.

Country music star Lucinda Williams’s Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is very different, a searingly frank account of a tough upbringing, a hard road in the music industry and the relatedly complicated personal relationships that eventuated. The book, therefore, adds a dimension to her wonderful music.

Sam Shepard was one of the genuine articles in American theatre and film as both writer and actor, so I anticipated more from Robert Greenfield’s True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work and Times than I think has been delivered. It is difficult to explain because all the elements are here about what Shepard wrote and how he became an actor and how he was a fierce individualist and anti-corporate figure. Yet for all that, the real sense of the man is somehow missing. As in all such things, it may just be me – and the book does provide a full sweep of a genuinely creative life.

After a break I have crept back to reading some crime fiction and, inevitably, some familiar names appear. Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies is a masterclass in the genre, say no more. Read it. Michael Connelly, too, continues to turn out lovely works and I am filling in gaps in the Lincoln Lawyer series.

S A Cosby has become a star in the field and his debut book, Blacktop Wasteland was impressive. His follow ups have done well and won a lot of awards, but for me the recent All The Sinners Bleed was a touch too formulaic and a bit unsurprising: the first black sheriff in a southern US town runs into racism and coverups that put pressure on a personality shaped by family conflict and expectations. Cosby can really write, make no mistake, but this lacks the spark of the earlier books.

David McClosky’s Damascus Station is a thriller set in contemporary Syria where American intelligence agents become caught up in an operation to rescue an asset now at risk. It all goes wrong and understanding needs to be reached. It is strong on tradecraft if a bit short on place, there is not much of the Damascus I knew even if the protagonists perambulate around the city a lot. And the tone is predicably pro-American. But it is a reminder that this conflict has now gone so long it is producing novels.

Karin Pinchin’s Kings Of Their Own Ocean is a marvellous book about the trajectory of the American tuna industry and the future of oceans that are under environmental threat. The story is told through some memorable figures in the American industry and by way of a series of bureaucratic decisions that regulate tuna fishing. It is a monument to the power of research and commitment to a project.

My reading in that area has been sharpened, of course, by the opportunities offered by Seabourn. Earlier this year we travelled from Fremantle to Zanzibar via Indonesia and the Seychelles, crossing the Indian Ocean where commercial fishing has for a long while been controversial. It was also a reminder of change in the geopolitical world with the rise of the “new” Indo-Pacific brought on by the perception that China is trying to take over the world.

The start of the cruise was unusual in that a storm out of Broome saw a semi-domesticated hawk swept onto ship where it stayed until we reached Bali. There was much speculation about its fate, and in the end Australian authorities refused to have it back so it now is reportedly fine at a new home in a Bali bird park.

A series of sea days reminded us how vast that ocean is and we sailed to the north of Diego Garcia, the American base “gifted” by the British government that recently lost the latest round in an on-going court case brought by the original inhabitants who were displaced.

In the Seychelles, the highlight was seeing the long-lived and ubiquitous tortoises that are a reminder of how nature has worked and continues to work.

But the star for me was Stone Town in Zanzibar, once at the epicentre of the Arab slave trade and still the authentic cross-cultural centre from where the dhows still set out to travel up the East African coast, through to the Gulf and even across to India. The memorial to all those slaves is one of the simplest but perhaps the most moving anywhere.

Because of that I read David Graeber’s final book, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, a fascinating tale of how Madagascar became home to a bunch of pirates fled from the Caribbean, one of whom raided a fabulously wealthy ship owned by Indian princes. Graeber was a renegade academic with an eye for great stories, and although the evidence here is stretched to the limit his imagination was remarkable.

Next year sees more lecture cruises so I am doing more background reading on subjects as far flung as sumo wrestling, present day China, the King and I, and the Pacific fish trade.

I will report back.

Stay tuned, I will try to report back.

It seems appropriate to begin the 2021 blogs on 26 January, Australia Day and also India Republic Day. That is because those two milestones are linked: Australia is desperately seeking a stronger relationship with India to offset an awful and deteriorating one with China; and more broadly, both are in many ways dealing with post-colonial consequences.

Which, in a strange way, is where Leicester University enters the story. It was announced recently that, as part of a significant set of academic staff reductions, a swathe of English literature courses there would be jettisoned so that, for example, Chaucer and other early moderns would no longer be taught. All those “traditional” courses would be replaced by ones focused on more “relevant” issues like diversity, sexuality, race and ethnicity in a move to “decolonise” the curriculum.

Needless to say, that has sparked controversy in that it raises a host of questions about the nature and purpose of learning (and teaching), the politicisation of education, the balance between student “demands” and educational principles, and all the rest. Australian readers will see an updated return to the struggles over “black armband” history as denounced by John Howard when he was prime minister, while others around the Western world will see various “culture wars” revisited.

One clear marker in all this, however, is confirmation of the power of language and the significance of words. In Australia this year, “Australia Day” as a celebration has been renamed by many as “Invasion Day”, signifying the idea that the 1788 arrival of the first settler ships with all their convicts began the history of subjugating indigenous peoples.

What seems to be missing here is the idea that any resistance might have occurred. I am currently reading Waves Across the South: a New History of Revolution and Empire by Sujit Sivasundaram, who argues that populations across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific were far more energised by and activist as a result of the idea of revolution during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than previously imagined. His compelling story is punctuated by many detailed stories about how individuals did that and how bureaucracies responded. It paints a wonderfully more nuanced condition than that of a binary “foundation celebration/genocide” one.

That simply goes to show that history, including literary history, really does still matter.

If you even think about doubting that, then you must read Pip Williams simply wonderful The Dictionary of Lost Words. Briefly, it traces the fictionalised life of the daughter of one of the lexicographers who created the Oxford English Dictionary. The kid grows up under the table in the dictionary project’s work room, and begins collecting word slips that fall on the floor. As she grows, that leads her to investigate all the important “women’s words” that the OED males deem unnecessary for inclusion. And that, of course, leads her to Mrs Pankhurst and the Suffragettes, and the idea that words are, indeed, hugely important in their use and abuse.

That theme is underlined tremendously in Tim Parks’ most recent book, Italian Life. Regulars here know that Parks is one of my favourite writers so when I suggest this is one of his very best it sets a very high bar indeed. He lays this out as an account of how an outsider may approach becoming an Italian, not just by being resident but by “thinking” as an Italian. His conclusion is that the latter stage is almost unattainable. The story unfolds on several layers, as always in his work, but essentially follows the story of how an Englishman tries over several years to construct a career in an Italian university. Along the way, Parks illuminates the challenges and obstacles by way of reference to characters and typologies of behaviour found in Italian literature ranging from fables through to the great crime novels of Leonardo Sciascia.

Again, the use of words and language is central to how superiors exert their wills and subordinates try to counter.

As well as being a great writer Sciascia was also an Italian leftist politician, and that reminds us of the power of language in directing national policies and agendas. Among other things, Sandi and I have been binge watching The West Wing. It is hard to imagine that it ran from 1999-2006 because, like Yes Minister, it retains a currency that is hard to imagine. The imaginary President Jed Bartlett is a polymath nerd economist who has won a Nobel Prize and berates his staff with a range of abstract knowledge. Contrast that with what America has just had for the past four years, and the difference is stark. That same contrast runs through the show: my favourite here would be press spokeswoman CJ Cregg (immortalised by Allison Janney) whose eloquence and smartness have been contrasted so spectacularly by people like Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and, most recently Kayleigh McEnany. The number of times they all “misspoke” is legion, beginning with Spicer’s claim that Trump’s inauguration was the “biggest” ever – that set of a chain of “greatest ever” claims.

We also watched the much-vaunted David Hare-written Roadkill starring Hugh Laurie, but I have to say I found it way less impressive than Hare’s earlier Collateral starring Carey Mulligan. The story and dialogue (that is, the language) in the latter was infinitely more nuanced.

It is a penetrating insight into the obvious to say that the quality of the language helps determine the quality of a work, but it is a great reminder – in one West Wing episode communications maven Sam Seaborn (played by Rob Lowe) wants to recall an issued communique because he had not written it well enough. Oh, we all feel like that sometimes, as the show’s main writer Aaron Sorkin would know only too well.

But when we think about it more, language and words are the makers or breakers, which takes us back to the world of academia. An academic journal reviewer once reported that a submission of mine “read so well that I immediately became suspicious.” The piece never appeared so say no more. But I was reminded of that reading Anne Gerritsen’s The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World which charts the rise and decline of the kiln city of Jingdezhen in Jianxi province. Her story is how its white then blue and white porcelain became central to global demand and so stimulated all sorts of trade and commerce patterns that put China on its modern path.

The story is a marvellous one in which I have a strong interest because of my addiction to the polychrome Peranakan porcelain (from the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore) that was all made in and around Jingdezhen through the later nineteenth century. And in my cruise lectures (remember them?) I frequently talked about the Chinoiserie phases that swept the early modern world and why all that came about.

Anne Gerritsen starts and ends with a contemporary visit to the shard market in Jingdezhen to show why the subject is important, and that is what a novelist or a screenwriter might do. But in between she has to follow the “academic” language and custom that has restricted us all, to the detriment of the story. (Sujit Sivasundaram avoids a lot more of that, to his credit). So I began to imagine how a Pip Williams or a Tim Parks might have written that story of Chinese porcelain, and how much bigger the readership might have been.

And I immediately thought of someone I have written about before in these blogs: Elmore Leonard, the absolute master. I put my sister-in-law onto Elmore recently and she promptly downloaded the whole collection, but also found me an early paper edition of the short story collection, When the Women Come Out to Dance. That collection includes “Fire in The Hole” that sparked the creation of one of the greatest television series ever, Justified.

The opening to that short story is simple, and magnificent:

                        They had dug coal together as young men and then lost touch

 over the years. Now it looked like they’d be

                        meeting again, this time as lawman and felon, Raylan

                        Givens and Boyd Crowder.

And the setup is equally neat:

                        The day the Marshals Service assigned Raylan to

                        a Special Operations Group and transferred him

                        from Florida to Harlan County, Kentucky, Boyd

                        Crowder was on his way to Cincinnati to blow

                        up the IRS office in the federal building.

Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing are, if anything, even better than those from Stephen King that are perhaps better known.

If only they could be circulated more widely among the university presses. It is tempting to think that if that happened, then in Australia government would understand the work of the universities way better and that would remove the current impasse as to the future of tertiary education.

So if Chaucer does have to go, replace him with Elmore Leonard, we will all benefit.

A couple of days ago the cruise ship Magnifica had the dubious distinction of being the last such vessel in the world to dock following the onset of COVID-19. https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/health-safety/coronavirus-last-cruise-ship-on-earth-finally-allowed-to-dock/news-story/f8ae4a3f71ef6939efc01bd767d27b04

It was a remarkable journey for its more than 1700 guests: they were last allowed ashore in far-off New Zealand on 19 March, and since then had been roaming the seas looking for a port that would have them. That included a couple of days in my hometown of Fremantle in Western Australia where they were not allowed ashore. It is odd to think that Sandi and I cycled past them here yet they would not set foot on land until France. That is a lot of sea days, in cruising parlance, and especially so when there was not one virus infection notified. https://www.cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/22819-last-cruise-ship-at-sea-returns-to-port-with-msc-magnifica-back-in-marseille.html

Magnifica is owned by MSC Cruises, part of the Mediterranean Shipping Company that more broadly is the second largest container shipping company in the world. The cruise division is the fourth largest in the world (behind Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian) but the largest to be privately owned. It was founded in Naples but, ironically for a cruise company, headquartered in Geneva.

Its executives, like all the others in the industry, will now be figuring out what happens next, with most options looking ugly. Where publicly traded, cruise industry shares have been smashed. https://www.cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/22565-black-monday-for-cruise-line-stocks.html

Some dire predictions see the end of the industry, period. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-13/coronavirus-spells-the-end-of-the-line-for-cruise-ships/12141140 That is probably fanciful, even though the immediate prospect of a boatload of individual and class legal actions is daunting in scale, time and magnitude as well as complexity. https://oklahoman.com/article/5659242/centuries-old-laws-may-shield-the-cruise-industry-from-huge-payouts-in-coronavirus-suits

Meanwhile the human cost of the past three months continues for passengers and crew. http://www.cruisejunkie.com/events.html https://www.cruiselawnews.com/

What this all points to, though, is the impact the virus has had on mass tourism globally. In countries like Australia and New Zealand, where tourism invariably appears among the top three or four export income earners, the impact has been massive. In New Zealand, the budget impact is palpable, a major contribution to what is being imagined as a massive recession. https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/tourisms-collapse-will-leave-a-pretty-big-hole-in-the-economy-economist/ar-BB11y9iS

My “other” hometown of Queenstown is a case in point, having gone from boom to bust in a moment. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/travel/2020/04/coronavirus-plans-to-cut-hundreds-of-tourism-jobs-a-horror-story-queenstown-mayor.html Locals are reporting major social issues and the need for food support for families and foreign workers as major tourism companies close up shop.

The knock-on effects are clear. In recent times Queenstown has averaged over three million visitors a year. That is why a town of about 16,000 people had hosted four or five major supermarkets, three major hardware chain outlets (with a fourth planned) and a slew of bars, restaurants, cafes and coffee shops to service all the takers for bungy jumping, mountain biking, hiking, skydiving, paragliding, jet boating and all the rest.

That is why this small town, immediately before the virus hit, had New Zealand’s highest accommodation rental rate (and a median house price sale level that has only just retreated below the $NZ1 million mark). That rental market collapsed because of two things: demand vanished, and a raftload of AirBnB short term rentals returned to long term ones. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12317667

This is replicated around the world.

In Australia the carnage is best demonstrated by the case of mass travel company, Flight Centre, a hitherto “good” story of how three entrepreneurial Aussies turned themselves into collective billionaires. A year or so ago the share price stood at $A61. It is now under $A10.

In Spain, where tourism accounts for 11% of GDP, the industry has collapsed. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-spanish-hotels-fear-tourists-will-take-a-long-time-to-return

And Barcelona, one of my favourite cities, is a lot like Queenstown. It had reached thirty million visitors a year, at least three million of those coming off cruise ships. That is all now gone. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/2020/04/coronavirus-barcelona-goes-from-overtourism-to-no-tourism/ As Isabelle Kliger points out, Barcelona is one of the places that has transformed immediately from over-touristed to non-touristed, and that is the Queenstown story.

That immediately questions the future. Take air travel, for example. Here in Australia Virgin has effectively gone bankrupt with the federal government pressured to bail it out simply to avoid a Qantas monopoly. The New Zealand government has already provided Air New Zealand with a loan, simply because there is no other airline. Between now and Christmas Air New Zealand will run a skeleton domestic schedule and the barest international one to Australia and islands in the South Pacific.

Notably, that domestic schedule at present does not include Queenstown which has gone from about thirty flights a day to…none. Not one. The tourist market drove the need. So how Queenstown reimagines itself will have a major impact on how it finds itself in the national framework – there is an obvious need to move away from mass to higher value tourism. https://www.freecen.org.uk/search_queries/5e9fdfce4325a65bdb66c85d?locale=en

But there is also a need to develop a much larger smart economy alternative that becomes a price-setter rather than a price-taker. Some Queenstown thinkers have been saying that for a few years now, and authorities might be wishing they had listened more closely if they look around the world. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/most-innovative-economies-global/

The chain reactions here obvious. To produce a smart economy means the need for a smart education system seen as an investment rather than a cost. And that does not mean transforming university systems into mass ones, as Australia has done (where over half the total number of students enrol in business courses). The investment itself needs to be strategically targeted.

And there is a hugely important point to be made here- that investment must not be totally and exclusively in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).
It has become a truism in recent weeks that the arts and culture industries globally have been massacred, at the very time vast numbers of people have survived the lockdowns in their countries by reading; watching live streamed music and theatre performances; binge-watching film and television programs; watching virtual displays and demonstrations from galleries and museums; or scouring online databases for family histories.

The inversion here is obvious.

Cost cutting in most economies has immediately victimised soft targets like art and culture at the very time their works are most needed. That cannot happen again, and countries should look to the likes of Germany and the UK for future investment patterns. https://www.artforum.com/news/uk-and-germany-launch-emergency-funds-for-the-arts-as-us-museums-call-for-aid-82557

And those arts and culture issues are not the only unexpected consequences of the virus sweeping the world. In that dreadful epicentre of New York City there are some surprising statistics that offset horrible ones like the 2,637% increase in unemployment. Air pollution has declined 25%. Trash in Manhattan has retreated 7%. Crime has declined 30%. Traffic congestion at the main bridges has gone down by 60%. And there have been 3000 applications to foster dogs. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-numbers-unemployment.html?referringSource=articleShare

A lot of that will disappear when economies are “opened” again, but the numbers are a reminder of what might be if we plan and develop carefully. In Delhi, for example, the air quality has been the best in years, and elsewhere across northern Indian people have seen mountains for the first time in ages as the haze disappears. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/11/positively-alpine-disbelief-air-pollution-falls-lockdown-coronavirus As we “recover”, it would be marvellous to plan to retain at least some of that.

And then there are all those reports about the return of the wildlife. https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/animals-return-humans-coronavirus-lockdown

Wild goats have moved into Llandudno in Wales. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/31/watch-wild-goats-take-deserted-welsh-town-coronavius-lockdown/
Orcas have bobbed up in Wellington harbour in New Zealand. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=orcas+in+wellington+harbour&&view=detail&mid=BE578D2BEAFC1BD97BC6BE578D2BEAFC1BD97BC6&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dorcas%2520in%2520wellington%2520harbour%26qs%3Dn%26form%3DQBVR%26sp%3D-1%26pq%3Dorcas%2520in%2520wellington%2520harbour%26sc%3D0-27%26sk%3D%26cvid%3D95B880F298C94C9BB09469CE48343D2D

But what about those “dolphins in Venice canals” stories? Regrettably, not true. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts/

Therein lies another pointer for future thinking, though – what do we learn about human behaviour from all this because, in the end, that behaviour determines whether or not we learn anything from what in too many world locations has been a ghastly tragedy.

At least seven cruise ships are now off the Western Australian coast, retreating to who-knows-where as their future remains unclear following the COVID-19 carnage that has unfolded around them here and elsewhere around the world. WA premier Mark McGowan has maintained his hostility towards them with a “don’t bother stopping” message. https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/keep-on-going-premier-s-blunt-message-for-cruise-ships-rounding-wa-coast-20200409-p54ipg.html

For a good sense of what it is like aboard these ships, Captain Jonathan Mercer’s Amsterdam blog is excellent. The ship left Fremantle, crossed the Indian Ocean to Durban, disembarked South African crew there – then set off back across the Indian Ocean to Batam in Indonesia (just by Singapore) where more crew will leave. He now considers the Amsterdam as a “leper” ship, a sad thing for any Captain but especially so for him on his very last voyage. http://captainjonathan.com/10th-april-2/

There is one great human story amidst all this. A couple of posts or so ago I mentioned that the Magnifica had been here in Fremantle a few weeks ago but not allowed to land. It, too, set off across the Indian Ocean only to find a host of ports closing up. It originally was to land in Colombo in Sri Lanka but a ban appeared there, too. A Sri Lankan junior chef videoed a message to the President of the country and, lo and behold, as the ship passed Galle an armed forces vessel arrived to take said chef home. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/12/1124937/any-port-in-a-coronavirus-storm

The rest of the passengers and crew are, no doubt, hoping to find a similarly sympathetic ear somewhere else. I suspect a lot of videos are also being made.

Back in Australia, meanwhile, deaths among Ruby Princess passengers have reached at least seventeen, and positive VOVID-19 tests have now been recorded among North Americans who were on the ship. Authorities think there may be as many as nine hundred of them with just a fraction tested. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-13/coronavirus-concerns-for-international-ruby-princess-passengers/12143544

So the international cruise industry remains under extreme pressure (with class actions mounting), with company and peak body leaders struggling to maintain momentum. But if it is any consolation, they are not alone.

These on-going virus developments trace the impact being felt in unsuspected quarters, and one such has just appeared in a New York Times report about the collapse of the Dutch tulip market. Almost 150 million of them have been crushed as demand disappears because flower shops around the globe close in the face of cancelled celebrations. International Women’s Day, for example, is a huge day for flowers, but not this year.

The Dutch industry is worth around $US7 billion a year so many jobs have been lost and the future looks grim. https://www.statista.com/statistics/581482/value-of-the-import-and-export-of-tulip-bulbs-in-the-netherlands/

And one major supplier saw a direct cruise-related problem: a big client is Viking River Cruises who will have no American passengers this season, and that was worth about a million Euros. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/world/europe/netherlands-tulips-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare

Interestingly, the industry was already facing a challenge. The world-famous “floating” tulip market in Amsterdam had been accused of scamming tourists: bulbs did not bloom, fewer bulbs than advertised were in packets and reactions were poor. The cruise effect was again present – as Amsterdam banned the ships, numbers at the market were in decline anyway. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/15/amsterdam-tourists-tulip-scam

This is calamitous but not catastrophic as it was almost four hundred years ago in 1637 when the Amsterdam tulip price endured what was in many respects the world’s first future market collapse.

Tulips originated really in Persia, as it was, and reached Amsterdam via Vienna from Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1554, courtesy of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat on the Franco-Belgian border. He was the Holy Roman Empire’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, but also a trained botanist who had studied at the University of Leuven and several Italian ones.

Tulips became like the spices of the East Indies (Indonesia), much sought after in Europe with status and custom driving up the price. The Dutch discovered that their conditions were ideal for tulips, and experimentation mixed with market demand to produce new colours and styles, and escalated prices. By the time the mania peaked a single bulb might change hands in exchange for several acres of land, or for ten times the annual wage earned by a skilled artisan. It was true market mania driven as well by demand from the French, and it came to shuddering collapse in February 1637.

And there is a virus connection. The collapse started in Haarlem where no one turned up to an auction – as more or less has happened now – and that was partly due to a local outbreak of the bubonic plague. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp

The present Dutch collapse has been matched elsewhere. In India, for example, the lockdown has smashed the sale of flowers for weddings and for Hindu rituals. Anyone who has been near a Hindu temple will know they are surrounded by flower sellers, with the making of garlands a major industry. That has all gone and growers around the country are dumping millions of blooms to become part of the emerging economic problems now faced by Narendra Modi’s government. https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/farmers-destroy-millions-of-flowers-for-lack-of-demand/articleshow/74914792.cms

And the problem has extended to the far-flung reaches of New Zealand where entrepreneurial horticulturalists have also run into problems. In Southland, for example, one farming family grew and exported bulbs as an alternative to the traditional sheep, cattle and dairy enterprises. They are now hit both by the falling global demand and the rising domestic New Zealand quarantine requirements brought on by the battle against COVID-19. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/120704172/coronavirus-no-export-for-150-million-tulip-bulbs

Smaller businesses have been hit in New Zealand, too, with lily growers facing the loss of an annual income. https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/mowing-over-40k-worth-lillies-non-essential- flower-business-says-future-bleak  This has been just the latest aggravation for a New Zealand industry that has fallen steadily over the past ten years. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/opinion/97268072/brad-markham-the-growing-problem-with-new-zealands-floriculture-industry   It’s future growth will likely be stunted significantly.   https://www.statista.com/statistics/1008454/new-zealand-flower-plant-seed-export-value/

These knock-on effects of the virus keep emerging, and that alone should caution against any imagined immediate return to “normal”. The idea of normal will be much challenged in the times directly ahead of us.

Adam Tooze, the British historian now based at Columbia in New York, has just published an excellent contemporary world analysis in the London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/adam-tooze/shockwave A specialist in financial history and its impact upon social and political evolution, he skilfully traces interaction between the rise of COVID-19 and the financial/economic chaos it has generated so quickly: https://adamtooze.com/

It is a long-form read, but these days we do have the time, right?

The value of the piece is not just its clarity about the interaction of forces over the past twenty years or so that has brought us to this point, but it’s pointing up of how seemingly small consequences actually have a major bearing on international developments.

My recent posts, for example, have discussed the role of the now-reviled cruise ships in the spread of the virus. Since then, Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan has said publicly that he wants them to go away and not come back, forgetting that just a short time ago those ships and their passengers were considered a godsend for a state whose economic fortunes have slumped in recent years.

The focus for McGowan and a host of other journalists, podcasters, bloggers and tweeters has been on the passengers aboard and leaving those ships, with many of those commentators wishing for or confidently predicting those would be the last ever such passengers.

But I also spoke about the crew and, sadly, this week brought news of the COVID-19 death of an Indonesian crew member on the Zaandam that was for Americans what the Ruby Princess became for Australia.

That was Wiwit Widarto, a fifty years old Indonesian whose sad passing has attracted little detailed attention, another name in the growing list of victims that also points to a wider condition.

Indonesians and Filipinos have long made up the crew and service staff on the majority of cruise ships, and their discipline is amazing. Talk to most of them and they are away from home and families for several months at a stretch. As soon as a ship touches port and they can get away, they will be at the nearest internet site contacting home. They are the economic lifeline for their families, and this present situation is having a drastic impact there.

Inevitably, that work is drying up as ships remain idle for the foreseeable future and financially challenged companies try to keep afloat, literally. Staff and wage cuts are severe. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/leaked-memo-reveals-some-princess-cruise-and-holland-america-crew-members-will-take-pay-cuts-through-june-as-the-coronavirus-sends-shockwaves-through-the-cruise-industry/ar-BB12s08N

And there is the matter of the virus itself – during last week Indonesian authorities expressed concern about returning crew, noting that almost one hundred Indonesian crew worldwide had tested positive. https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/08/concerns-rise-over-importing-covid-19-as-hundreds-of-indonesian-crewmen-come-home.html

The Fremantle Shipping News broadens this crisis into one for maritime trade generally. https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2020/04/09/10964/ Somewhere around two million seafarers are responsible for shifting about ninety per cent of international cargo per year, and right now the virus has mauled all plans for crew change.

Remember: there are still cruise ships under quarantine with crew on board. That was the focus of a major operation in and around Sydney harbour recently. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/operation-nemesis-to-see-five-cruise-ships-restocked-and-moved-out-of-sydney-harbour

That it was named “Operation Nemesis” is a very clear indicator of the hostile attitudes that lay behind it. So it was understandable that the Maritime Union of Australia took a very dim view of the government’s actions and approach. https://www.mua.org.au/news/morrison-government-condemned-treatment-cruise-ship-crews

Yet that matter of crew change is even more vast in the commercial shipping world and is, obviously, a major economic and trade concern. https://www.ics-shipping.org/news/press-releases/view-article/2020/03/18/statement-from-guy-platten-re-covid-19 Unlike the cruise industry, this problem is being dealt with largely out of the public eye and is yet another indicator of how much change is being caused by the rise of this virus.

As Adam Tooze points out, handling all this requires a major change in governance and approach because all the old rules have gone.

The MUA, for example, has long been recognised as one of the most militant unions in Australia and is noticeable here in Fremantle, of course. It’s present office commands a view of the Port over the traffic bridge that crosses the Swan River, and down the road that conveys almost all container traffic to and from the loading sites.

That office is in Kwong Alley, almost certainly named for all the Chinese market gardeners who were in the area until the 1940s, but the MUA might also remember that at one stage there were hundreds of Chinese seamen working in Fremantle even during the White Australia period. The story of people like Boon Juat Lee deserve to be better known. https://www.sbs.com.au/language/english/unwanted-australians-boon-juat-lee

Right now in Fremantle, though, all that is hard to imagine because, as elsewhere, the place is like a ghost town. Ironically, there are now vastly greater numbers of people on the beaches and the bike/walking trails, apparently safe in their view that social distancing does not there apply .

Like everyone else, then, some of my escape has been binge-watching, except that oddly enough my programs of choice have also turned out to be questions of governance and “the system”.

The Capture is one of the best things I have seen for a while, and at least one critic thought the same. https://www.redbrick.me/review-the-capture/ A British soldier is under investigation for war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan with video from a helmet camera as the main evidence. Cleared on that following legal argument about the accuracy of the tape, he is then embroiled in a murder case where video evidence clearly suggests he is the perpetrator. The cop in charge of the case has her own problems but gradually believes the soldier to have been framed, and gets drawn into the world of video surveillance and manipulation.

It is written by Ben Chanan, one of those multi-talented writer/director/documentary maker whizzes whose earlier work included The Missing and makes it all look deceptively easy. His key trick is to take an unbelievable idea and make it believable, writing magic. There has been just one season of this so far and no firm word of a second, but do have a look.

Then there is Deep State.

The first season of this is very good. A retired British intelligence operative is reactivated out of his family and marriage in France to end up in Iran with his estranged son from a first marriage. Before going, he makes a tape to give himself some insurance, recording his part in some earlier skulduggery. It then all gets very complicated.

The second season is less convincing, focussed on the son who is now a private contractor caught up in the African badlands of official intelligence and its interactions with private contractors whose aim is making more money.

At the heart of all this is corruption in the system and the futility of the political process which is thwarted at every turn by the objectives of big business. The President of the United States goes through all this unnamed, but there is a reference to a President who “tweets like a teenaged girl”.

There are a few writers here, led by Matthew Parkhill who is another of the writer/producer/showrunner/novelist brigade (he is also married to Rachel Shelley who starred in Lagaan, one of my favourite Indian films). Steve Thompson (Sherlock), Simon Maxwell (American Odyssey), Chris Dunlop (Jericho) and Joshua St Johnson (Grantchester) wrote other episodes.

What have I been reading?

Paul M. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise is set as an Islamic history of the Crusades and has some intriguing sections, but I still prefer Amin Malouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is set in the LA music world, a madcap different “point of view” unravelling of the story in which an ageing agent struggles to meet the future while hanging on to the past.

Pascal Garnier’s Gallic Noir is a collection of his short novels, a refreshing reminder of the older schools of crime fiction where the story meanders rather than careers, and the stakes are not always high.

Lawrence Block I was lucky enough to meet a few years ago, one of the godfathers of American crime fiction and much more. Small Town is his “New York” novel with all the colour and movement New York had – it is sobering to think just how different it is now.

Diane Williams is acknowledged as one of America’s finest short story writers and her Collected Stories frequently but not always indicate why.

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is a refugee story about a couple escaping from the Middle East and gradually becoming estranged. The prose is spellbinding but the story less so.

After all, story is what it is all about, and I have been writing, screenplays.

We await the new normal, and reading Adam Tooze is good preparation.