South Wind

The experience of Robert Clifford, ferry master and shipbuilder extraordinaire, in the hours, days, weeks and years after the 1975 Tasman Bridge disaster says quite a lot about how Tasmania deals with evolving transport needs.

In a revealing interview with Sue Bailey for the Mercury’s 50th anniversary coverage of the disaster, Clifford spoke of how he made his two commuter ferries available for marine rescue on the night of the bridge collapse and then provided free services for the days immediately following.

As Bailey reported, Clifford’s two ferries ran on a hectic schedule. “We were exhausted working the long hours and of course at one am … when you’d try to get home to bed and there’s still another 50 or 100 people waiting at the wharf, you couldn’t just leave them there.”

Clifford said that when he resumed charging the 50 cent fare for the thousands of people crossing the Derwent on his ferries, the head of the then Transport Commission told him to cut it by half.

“I said ‘like bloody hell’,” recounted Clifford. “If that’s the case, we’ll stop at midnight. I rang the Mercury and said ‘we’re going to stop at midnight’. It was about 40 minutes later, and the premier [Eric Reece] was on the wharf when I got back [to Sullivans Cove] and said, ‘you can charge what you like; you’ve done a great job.’”

Clifford was a 31-year-old operating a small Derwent ferry business when the bridge went down. His 16-person team became 64, working on a 24-hour roster, as two ferries became four and then five, and he started planning faster, bigger ferries using a radical catamaran design. Today, with Clifford still actively involved at age 81, his company Incat makes massive electric ferries for international clients.

None of this is rocket science. It can readily be understood by anyone – business, government, you and me – who ponders personal needs and functioning communities. Businessman and citizen Clifford saw the need, addressed it, and continues to do so as times change. That’s what visionaries do.

Public officials can be visionary too, if they try. From the 1950s to the 1970s big new road systems – the Brooker Highway to the city’s north, the Tasman Bridge to the east and the Southern Outlet to Kingston – were built by government for a growing capital city.

During planning for the Southern Outlet Alan Knight, the Hydro Electric Commissioner and the engineer behind Hobart’s radical 1943 floating bridge, was looking at possible future uses for “the Mole”, the Robbins tunnel-boring machine that in the 1960s cut through hard rock at world record pace to create the 4.9 m wide, 7 km long head-race tunnel for the Poatina power station.

Knight envisaged the Mole being redeployed to Hobart to help create a new commuter rail system, tunnelling under Mount Nelson to link the then Hobart rail terminus with Kingston. But plans drawn up for the system, including an underground station under Hobart’s CBD, were rejected by the Reece government and the Mole was scrapped.

That’s something for 21st century drivers to think about sitting in their cars on a gridlocked Southern Outlet – or those fed up with city bottlenecks. Just as commuters in slow-moving Brooker traffic might dream about a northern suburbs rail service.

The elephant in the public transport room has to be Metro, which over many decades has served Hobart, Launceston, and North-West Coast centres. Stones thrown at buses in suburban areas are a perennial and increasing problem, but last month violence reached a new level when a Launceston driver was seriously injured by drunk, aggressive young passengers.

Much can be done to improve bus safety including promised but not yet delivered protective driver screens and safety officers on buses. But above all, the government needs to wake up to the fact that public transport is core business.

Investing in an integrated park-and-ride public transport system for all population centres, incorporating carparks and business hubs at suburban bus and ferry terminals, offers far better bang for the buck than a brand new bells-and-whistles stadium.

Port services and facilities are in the same pickle. An old Antarctic friend tells me a lot of disgruntled cruise passengers he spoke with at the weekend told him their ship could not go to Antarctica and Macquarie Island because our “Antarctic gateway” port can’t refuel it.

Tasmania is crying out for investment in essential public services. Transport, health, public education are all losing out while millions are spent on an expanding corps of advisers tasked with making political games look like responsible government. God help us.

In June 1979, on a warm and sunny morning in Washington, President Jimmy Carter stood with minders and media people on the roof of the White House to view what they imagined to be the future: 32 glass and metal panels supplying the White House with hot water heated by the sun.

This wasn’t an isolated event. At his 1977 inauguration in freezing January weather Carter had attempted, with limited success, to use heat from the sun to warm the reviewing stand where he stood reviewing the passing parade.

Later that year he lowered the White House winter-time thermostat and spoke about conserving energy. In 1978, drawing on his training as a nuclear engineer, he spoke of harnessing the fusion power of the sun, and went so far as to declare the third day of May in future years to be“Sun Day”. It didn’t stick.

In that 1979 rooftop event, he described his solar power adventure as “taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.”

The White House’s solar hot water system lasted just seven years, as did Carter’s tax credits for private homeowners to install similar systems on their own roofs. The panels, the tax credits and other energy-conservation initiatives of his presidency were abandoned by his successor, Ronald Reagan.

Jimmy Carter could not be described as a champion for climate action. He ignored warnings from his chief science advisor about the climate risk posed by using fossil fuels and directed most of his energy policy to meeting oil supply problems – his motive for boosting domestic coal production.

But he saw the damage inflicted on nature by human activity and sought to curb bad American habits. He abhorred wastefulness and inefficiency, especially with energy – part of his view of the universe centred on belief in God and respect for the natural world – God’s creation. He was inclined to preachiness in expressing those beliefs, but they were sincerely held.

When pragmatism was the order of the day he kept pushing the envelope. That sometimes went wrong, as in the case of the botched hostage rescue mission in Iran, the final nail in the coffin of his 1980 campaign against Reagan. But he could never be accused of not trying.

The end of his presidency was the start of a new, equally remarkable career. Carter and his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, led an international venture called Habitat for Humanity, in which they spent a week each year in volunteer workforces building houses for the poor. He had worked on over 4000 homes in 14 countries when he “retired” just five years ago.

He and Rosalynn battled for human rights and better public health, and led a highly successful effort to eliminate Guinea worm in Africa, initially afflicting over three million people a year but down to just seven detected cases last year.

Carter led election monitoring teams at crucial moments in the history of Panama and Nicaragua and mediated in regional conflicts on three continents. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”. He alone of the four American presidents who have won that prize received it for achievements after leaving office.

Carter’s candour, truthfulness and acceptance of personal responsibility were a breath of fresh air in 1976 when Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal was still fresh in voters’ memories. In today’s blame-shifting world they are even more so.

There could not be a starker contrast than between Carter and America’s once and future president, Donald Trump. In Trump’s early months in office Carter showed sympathy for the new president, taking his side against media critics, but that dissipated over Trump’s anti-migrant attitude and the trade war with China.

The January 2021 attack on Congress and ensuing court battles hardened Carter’s feelings about Trump. Just before his 100th birthday, in the final weeks of Trump’s election battle with Kamala Harris, his son Chip Carter asked him if the 100-year milestone was what kept him going. “He said, ‘No, I’m trying to live to vote for Kamala Harris.’”

Six days of national mourning for Carter, ending on Thursday with multiple ceremonies in Washington and his home state of Georgia, are celebrating a presidency that drew its strength from honesty, knowledge, respect for others and, above all, a sense of personal moral obligation to humanity and all of nature. It all seems a lot longer than half a century ago.

Wouldn’t live anywhere else, said the survivor of Cyclone Tracy to a television reporter in Darwin last week. Having lived through the terror of the storm that shredded the frontier city half a century ago, she’s going nowhere.

Darwin has endured many cyclones and its people are prepared to live with that risk. That’s despite its chequered history of frontier politics, stark social and racial divisions and heavy dependence on federal spending, raising questions about the city’s viability.

Fiercely defending its reputation, Darwin’s civic leaders are putting heart and soul into keeping it viable long into the future. In 2019, after Cyclone Marcus destroyed an estimated 10,000 trees that had been planted for shade, the city declared a climate emergency and embarked on an action plan.

Marcus wasn’t the only driver of that emergency declaration. As a tropical city Darwin is used to warm winters and hot summers, but the heat is starting to bite. In 2019 the city endured a record heatwave, and its council instigated an action plan to address the city’s rising temperatures.

Research by the Northern Territory-based Charles Darwin University has found that heat has joined remoteness and a high cost of living as a key factor driving people from the tropics to cooler southern states, with older people rating it as the main reason to leave the Territory. By 2030, average temperatures for the Top End along with Western Australia’s Kimberley and Pilbara regions are predicted to be between 1.5C and 2.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Projections are especially confronting for Darwin. Today the city gets on average around 12 days a year above the critical heat mark of 35C; by 2030 it can expect those days to number 43. Without drastic cuts in emissions globally, that figure is projected to rise to over 300 days a year by 2090. At which point Darwin will have become uninhabitable.

Darwin’s built-up commercial centre is a classic “heat island”, with the air next to hard, reflective surfaces warming to temperatures near 60C on hot days. The city has been warned that it will face a double economic and public health crisis if it is unable to mitigate the impact of extreme heat.

The city’s council is not sitting on its hands. It has had a shade structure built and nearly 20,000 trees planted in the city centre, double the number destroyed by Cyclone Marcus. Other mitigatory measures include pavements that don’t absorb heat, green roofs that make a measurable difference to buildings’ temperatures, and water fountains in the city mall.

Like many northern cities – and centres around Australia including Tasmania – Darwin has a climate action plan for net-zero council-controlled emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions across the whole community by 2040. But with the impact of global warming now starting to bite, it’s obvious that local action will not be enough.

The focus of local action tends to be on midday heat, but hardest to deal with will be night-time temperatures which normally allow bodies to recover from hot days. Darwin is now facing the prospect of minimum temperatures in the high 20s or even above 30C for long periods each summer. Eventually, that becomes deadly.

This is the bleak context of support by federal and state governments, along with respective Oppositions, for the massive corporate effort to extract from under our lands and seas every last skerrick of methane, a leading global warming agent, and sell it here and abroad. Ironically, most of this is happening in the tropics, mainly in waters off the Top End and northern WA.

Among those currently standing in the way of this government-supported smash-and-grab are a dozen marine scientists, artists and campaigners who are spending their New Year on a boat 300 km north of Broome. At Scott Reef, believed by marine scientists to be Australia’s last undamaged clear-water coral reef, they will investigate its exceptional biodiversity and Woodside’s gas activities there.

One of their number is acclaimed writer Tim Winton, whose most recent novel, Juice, imagines a future on a continent where “living” – if that’s the word for it – involves spending summers tending food plants underground and bringing them out in winter for some natural light. Increasingly Winton and visionaries like him, in close concert with scientists documenting climate, will be our guides in this very uncertain future.

It’s a New Year tradition to think hard about past, present and future. Maybe tonight, maybe just in the last minutes or seconds of this disappearing year, we’ll find it in us to abandon pretence, seize the moment and resolve to focus on what’s really important. Hold that thought.