..
deliver words of wisdom, affection and good humour. I don’t know the BM
but the MoH, Una, will be sure to be formidably entertaining as she is, like
Elizabeth, a lawyer. Elizabeth specialises in contract law, which may mean that
the marriage Act will need to be rewritten, but Una usually appears for the
defence in criminal matters. In one sense she has already lost the case, as
her client and very best friend will already have been sentenced to life and
potential hard labour.
The two girls met in their teens at secondary school. Una, whose parents worked
in the highlands of West Papua, was a boarder. She was soon persuaded to move
in with us and the two worked together, with more than a modicum of healthy
competition, right through to their final International Baccalaureate exams.
Where fortunately, non-collusively and coincidentally they both got the same
total mark. But different marks in different subjects.
Although I haven’t been to a wedding for years, I do have recollections
of inappropriate jokes, pointless rambling anecdotes and several thousand ‘ums’
and ‘ahs’. I feel that I have to do a bit better as I also will
be representing my wife. My mother, 91, will also be in the audience and neither
will stand for any nonsense from me.
Unlike most people I don’t mind public speaking. Many years ago I was
a teacher in a northern suburb’s Technical School which should remain
anonymous but which for the sake of convenience I will call Lalor Tech. Maaaaaate.
The wind whistled across the bare basalt plains and unimpeded through the ears
of the students. Teaching creates the quite false idea that people want to listen
to you. We forget that the audience of thirty hormone-charged teenagers is largely
captive and would rather be somewhere else. Analysis would probably reveal that
their collective attentiveness would be comparable to the number of atoms present
in one cubic metre of the deep vacuum of outer space. Some amateur dramatics
also contributed to a faint sense of invincibility, though reflection again
counter-balances this with the realisation that the audience is largely composed
of friends and relatives who are well disposed to one’s thespian endeavours.
No matter how peculiar. Which they were.
My crucible of public speaking occurred whilst working for the Dark Side - namely
Telstra - where I became the reliable stand-in for one of the company’s
Directors of Strategy. I was called on when he thought the audience was unimportant
to the advancement of either his ego or career - or the that the audience such
as the National Farmers Federation might not be full of love for the omnipresent
and often uncaring gorilla of an organisation we both worked for.
Generally things went smoothly as, well prepared and armed with legally vetted
PowerPoints of singular beauty, I stood in one of my shiny suits in front of
a generally expectant audience. Over a couple of years I had a lot of practice
and thought myself quite good. But one time things did go more than a little
pear-shaped. I was about to deliver the standard “Network of the Future”
presentation, which was full of colour, light and movement but not too much
sound and fury. It probably signified very little, except that science fiction
lies at the heart of every geek’s dreams of the future. The audience was
the Government of the Northern Territory and it took place in the sprawling
metropolis of Tennant Creek, population 3,062 people and several billion flies.
Somewhere outside of the air-conditioned premises it was a baking forty degree
heat and Kites and Buzzards circled lazily in the cloudless blue sky looking
for road kill and other carrion. After the odd riot happened restricted drinking
hours were in force. You could have driven three semi-trailers side by side
down the main street and not hit anybody.
I will only say that it is impossible to give a highly technical presentation
when three minutes before you start the brand new, top-of-the-range borrowed
IBM laptop emits a mild farting sound, a puff of blue smoke and becomes sullenly
non-compliant about any request for useful activity. Inspired by a once-only
and never to be repeated trust in cutting edge technology I had not brought
the usual back-up in either electronic or hard-copy form.
Whilst I have no idea that the then Northern Territory government was as incompetent,
venal and shambolic as the current one is I was pretty sure that they would
need pictures so as to understand anything that had more than two syllables
and represented technology less than one hundred years old. Nevertheless I waved
my arms in front of a screen where occasionally a random bit of tracer ricocheted
and used all my oratorical skills .......but to little avail. I floundered,
arms waving, and drowned in a sea of incomprehension and indifference. I and
the company looked like prats, which in the grand scheme of things, mattered
little, except for the next hour or so.
There were confused and baffled looks from the front rows of the auditorium
where R M Williams boots were
de rigeur. I became more and more embarrassed
as the shuffling increased and the background murmur of indifference became
louder and so drew the curtain on my personal fiasco as quickly as I could.
With a red face I very prematurely shuffled back to my personal hell.
The shambolic conference which, as is the way of most conferences, was really
not going to change anything but the attendees waistlines and blood alcohol
readings, climaxed in a night-time entertainment where the local organisers
set fire to the bush with a pyrotechnics display carefully timed to take place
in the midst of gale-force winds in the tinder-dry bush. We were hurriedly evacuated
through the flames and acrid smoke under the hoses of the fire brigade.
At the time Northern Territory had around 200,000 people which was about the
same as the city of Geelong and about 1% of the country’s population.
And the government then, as now, only cared about Darwin. It is obvious that
the whole of the Northern Territory could be run by the competent city council
or just an administrator and not the over-paid, jumped-up bureaucracy of red-necked
time servers fattening themselves on the largesse of Canberra. Then, as now,
money ear-marked for remote and aboriginal communities was siphoned off to aid
the predominantly white capital city increase its social amenities. But as for
the conference? As they say the dogs barked and the caravan moved on
So after that anything should be a breeze. Even the tears.