Quo Vadis, Australia?

About half of my time over the past three months, was spent back at the good old Parkes radio observatory. As you all know, I spent many a waking hour in that outpost of science, trying to push back the frontiers of human knowledge. It has been well over 18 months since my last visit, though, so I noticed an accumulated backlog of changes upon my return, several of which I found a bit silly and exaggerated, but more on that in a moment.

Upon my return home after my first recent trip, back in May, I filled in the observer's report, pointing out which recent changes were weird or just plain silly. However, as I generally do when asked to provide feedback, I wrote the feedback, proofread it and decided it wasn't worth the trouble, so it was scrapped before being brought to anyone's attention. Yet, this time, I wasn't getting away with it. Upon my return in June, I was kindly asked to put in an observer's report for my last trip -- which I clearly hadn't done. Once asked in such a clear and direct way, I couldn't help but bring the following to the attention of the Parkes (and general ATNF) staff and management:

I am a bit mystified by the increase in safety-related paranoia, though. In (European) cities I'm typically a fan of bike helmets but between the quarters and the tower? Really? That's just a bad joke. Also, I'm not quite sure why after all these years we have to switch to the impractical tiny plastic cups of spreads (Vegemite, Jams and peanut butter; in fact, ketchup as well) instead of the good old jars. Have people's immune systems really changed that much since the end of last century?

Normally, no matter how inflammatory your remarks are, you're hardly ever likely to get a response because either the comments are too lame to warrant response or they're too harsh to be taken seriously. Again, this time I wasn't getting away with it -- somehow, somewhere something resonated with some people, even though officially no one seemed to agree with me.


Now before we go on, let me clarify my point to those less acquainted with the Parkes observatory. It consists of the actual radio telescope (where you spend most of your time as an astronomer), with an administration and support building right beside it. Then there is a straight road of 1 km length, at the end of which is the quarters and the gate to the outside world:

The quarters are where a minority of the staff, as well as most (if not all) astronomers have their lunch; and it's where the astronomers spend the remaining part of their time. Given that the "Parkes Staff" sheet has 30 people on it and that most of these are brought to work in a minibus, it's easy to see that there really isn't much traffic on this straight road, especially if you discount the morning "rush" around 08:00 and the evening "rush" around 16:00. Now I admit this is not a broad road and at times (as in the picture) shadows worsen the seeing, but you have an entire kilometre to notice anything heading your way and to move aside (there's plenty of room on either side of the road to get to if you're really worried about getting hit). Moreover, even if something were to happen, you're always less than 500 m away from help. To me, who grew up riding without helmet less than two metres away from trucks doing 70km/h, this looks like something very close to the safest type of road you can get.

I know this in itself does not warrant a complaint -- which is partly why initially I didn't submit my report at all. But to me, it seems to fit in with a wider sociological shift that I do have problems with: the shift towards safety-related paranoia.

Within a week, I've had rather serious conversations with two different people in ATNF management, who happened to come through Parkes recently. Neither of them seemed to question the need for a bike helmet on a perfectly safe road in the least. They did take my comments seriously, though, because as one of them told me "I did propose [following your comments] to have big jars of Vegemite in the future. And I was a bit worried about us providing peanut butter because that stuff can kill people." (Or words to that effect.) So this is what my comments have come to: soon there will be no peanut butter on ATNF sites. While it is of course true that some fraction of people is hyper-allergic to peanuts and their derivatives, it is instructive to note that the Wikipedia section on prevalence of peanut allergy, uses the phrase "Mass Psychogenic Illness", continuing to point out that in the USA "about 150 people die annually from serious allergic food reactions. That’s the same number of people killed by bee stings and lightning strikes combined. About 10,000 children are hospitalized annually with traumatic brain injuries from sports, 2,000 children drown each year, and about 1,300 die in gun accidents" (This text originally comes from the New York Times and the original article can be found here.) Furthermore, the Wikipedia page links to an article in the British Medical Journal (nowadays BMJ), which states that: "Eight children younger than 16 died from food allergy between 1990 and 2000 in the UK [...] Milk caused four of the deaths and no child younger than 13 died from eating peanuts." (Original article here.)

What is particularly fascinating about this, is that while all these rules are put in place, the response to a big brown snake near the footpath leading away from the tower, was this:

Until a while later the local snake expert (a local technician, as it turns out), put his head down the hole in which the snake took refuge, saying "ah yeah, I can see it, it's right there", subsequently catching it (not bare-handed, luckily) and releasing it back into the wild a few hundred metres away. (You can see some of the catch on this Facebook video, though in admittedly low quality.)

Now, to be honest, as much as brown snakes (even little ones) are deadly and something us foreigners are typically not used to dealing with (while I know exactly what to do in case of a bike accident. After all, I've been there before.), I do think this sign is enough: it tells us there's a snake, so look out and don't do something stupid. Be careful. What more needs to be said? Yet, in a country speckled with flashy orange or fluorescent yellow signs warning us that the floor would be "slippery when wet", I wonder how long it will take for the safety-paranoia to reach its logical conclusion and label all doors with signs reminding us to "open door before attempting to walk through" (I'm not kidding you, someone actually walked through a glass door at the ATNF and had to spend a day in hospital to recover from all the glass cuts). Or even better: since we're so worried about the well-being of our staff and visitors, why don't we require them to wear diapers at all times, because they might -- God forbid -- wet themselves accidentally, which could cause a bad rash. Or safer still: why aren't we all put in straightjackets just to make sure we don't pick our nose?


My point is that you can take everything too far. When someone refuses to wear a seatbelt (in the back or elsewhere), I think they're being silly and irresponsible, but that doesn't mean we have to look out for every possible tiny little thing that might hurt us -- or someone, possibly, somehow, some day. Surely there's a middle ground and we can all just man up and be sensible. After all, we didn't use to be taken care of quite so much. Remember that not that much time has passed since Australia's population was mostly consistent of military and poor souls who were shipped here in the worst of conditions, in the dirty and disease-infested cargo holds of bulk transport ships; since the original Australian settlers went into the wild unattended, without really knowing what they were doing. Since the immigrant Westerners savagely fought and killed off the native Aborigines and lived a life in the bush, by himself, without believing in, or paying attention to, the government or its henchmen.

I don't mean we should go back to those days of high infant mortality and lawlessness, but I do find it striking that within a century the country has made such a dramatic shift which, in a way, seems immature and self-defeating to me. I don't claim Europe has all the answers -- I definitely don't claim that -- but at least we realise it's your own responsibility to realise a wet floor is a slippery floor. After all, winter doesn't warn us when it's about to give the roads that nice smooth coating of ice, either.