Lev Lafayette's journal

I have just arrived at the Australian Institute for Marine Science near Townsville for a week of teaching high performance computing and parallel programming. This is a genuine working holiday, having taken a week's leave from my usual place of employment and taking up a one-week stint here. AIMS is a curious place; if you want to produce an image of an isolated scientific research facility this is it, this is it. Apart from the fact they are never even remotely as well funded as they are portrayed in the movies - not even CERN. We have already received our due warnings about regular visits of crocodiles and snakes, so this is no beachside holiday. The week's teaching dovetails quite well with the two days of usual workshops I ran this week at UniMelb, and will follow up with even more the week after that for the master's course and the week after that for the usual HPC training.

I managed to squeeze a couple of social events in this week but the absolutely unexpected highlight, which I must describe in some detail, was the screening of "Grass" (1925) at The Astor, which I attended with Liana F. The silent film, considered the first ethnographic documentary, starts in Turkey, goes across Iraq, and into Persia where some 50,000 Bakhtiari people (and 500,000 animals) engage in stunning and extremely challenging migratory quest for better pastures, across the Karun River and over the Zard Kuh mountains. The cinematography was absolutely astounding, and the narration provided many moments of comic relief among the often mortal dangers. The screening was shared with a live musical performance by ZÖJ who provided a perfect score. Little wonder that at the end of the show, the near-capacity attendance broke out into thunderous applause. It was, quite honestly, one of the best screenings of any film I have ever had to pleasure to attend.

The third major event of the week was attending my first committee meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society (Victorian branch) and leaving the meeting as President of the group. An hour later I was putting finger-to-keyboard to compose my first President's report, which basically consisted of thanking the immediate past president, Anthony L., and secretary, Robin M., for their years of dedication as office-bearers, to highlight the need to get the organisation's membership and finances on a firmer footing, and thirdly (and most importantly) to reduce the poison of foolish bellicose voices in Australian public opinion. One can certainly express differences of political opinion, international and internal, without being a damn fool about it. Especially when one is discussing a nation that has extremely deep cultural and economic ties with our own, and especially when said nation will be absolutely pivotal when it comes to addressing the global matter of climate change; to think that even in this context, some lunatics seem bent on war? Obviously, my new position will do little to dampen my own political independence and opinion (for the record, Sun Yat-Sen is my favourite Chinese political theorist of the twentieth century, along with Chen Duxiu not far behind).