Veronika Wild

The Carillon, Canberra  Had an impromptu trip to Canberra last week. Although I had originally said no, because I still wasn't in great shape, I dragged myself out of bed at 4.30 a.m. and caught the 6.25 a.m. flight out of Hobart and arrived in Canberra just in time for morning tea on Grandparents' Day. While I was resting on a bench, another grandma doing the same remarked how shocked she was that the children weren't doing more writing exercises and rote learning of tables and so on, as we were doing in Grade 2 (does anyone remember getting pen licences?), and were instead building mini shelters and, in one granddaughter's case, writing about foxes. I tried to explain that many schools now teach through hands-on projects alongside the basics, on the assumption that children learn and remember more by doing and learn to write and research at the same time. In the course of her exposition about the fox, my littlest granddaughter had really come out of her shell too, ha...

-Image courtesy of Naturewatch Foundation By the time you read this, World Animal Day  may be over, but some events continue throughout October and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider some of the campaigns which are currently underway, or get ideas for next year. In fact, why wait? Let’s make every day World Animal Day as the Naturewatch Foundation would like us to do. The date chosen is for the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Animals. The first World Animal Day was organised by Heinrich Zimmermann in 1925. Since 2003 it has been hosted by UK-based Animal Welfare Organisation, Naturewatch Foundation, which has almost 100 ambassadors in 70 countries around the world and 50 million people who now celebrate or participate in World Animal Day. This year’s theme is about seeing the world through their eyes. Animals are in dire need all over the world, but many previous campaigns are starting to bear fruit. For instance, more and more countries are banning ...

Entrance to Freetown Christiana, Copenhagen -Image by  Neptuul , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons I must say I had quite a dim view of manufactured communities. After reading about and watching the videos about Prospera, I immediately thought of all the spectacular failures – those that have ended in gunfire and flames, fraud or mass suicide. Then those that kind of just whimpered away like New Australia in Paraguay or some of those noble alternative lifestyle experiments of the 1970s, but looking just a little more deeply some historic ones have been so successful that they have become part of the furniture. I am thinking here of the Amish in Pennsylvania, the Mormons in Salt Lake City in the USA and even the Exclusive Brethren, now the Plymouth Brethren, here in Tasmania. They aren’t all religious communities either. An older, secular forerunner belongs here too. The Kibbutz Movement  in what is now Israel, began in 1909 and was built on collective ownership, share...