Tuesday 24 November 2015

Statues and volunteering

Hi everyone,

Catch-up post while I have a moment.  Herein the problem with actually being busy during the day: almost to tired to write anything in the evening!

It's been a reasonably intense couple of days.  Monday I finished off collating and redacting the subpoena documents that I've mentioned previously.  It was a tedious job and frankly I was glad to be rid of it.  The finish of the job, though, had the perk of driving down to Bendigo Magistrates Court to deliver the material to the court registry there.
 
 

The Court is in the same cluster of late-Victorian buildings as the City offices.  I rather liked the design of the lamps in the area outside of it, where the bulb is supported by the design of a gryphon.  It was the first time in well over a year that I'd set foot in a courthouse, which was rather a strange feeling.  I found I could identify the intense look of the lawyers much more than I think I would have done before.  And somehow I found that there was a tension that seemed to hang in the air that I'd been aware of before but not really noticed as much.  Standing there, once again I thought that I couldn't see myself going back to legal practice.


The documents delivered, I took a little time to stretch my legs before driving back to Tatura.  The area around the Bendigo court can best be described as 'stately'.  There's a monument to the soldiers from the area who served in the South African War, and so naturally I photographed that. 
 
 

There were also a couple of statues of long-dead local worthies, and a rather run-down looking statue of Queen Victoria.


I drove back to Tatura, dropped off the company's car, and then drove out to the farm.

Monday evening at about 10:45pm my pager went off to advise of a bad road accident the far-northern end of my SES unit's area.  I was the duty officer, so I acknowledged the page and sent out a message asking all available members to respond.  The farm was a solid hour from the scene, so I had to advise that I couldn't respond, and in any case about 25 minutes after the initial message a standdown was sent out from the crew leader on scene: tragically, the accident was a fatality and further crewmembers couldn't add value.  I hope the crew that attended is faring OK: it's the second bad accident in less than a week.  In truth, I felt a bit guilty about not attending.  The unit are my closest friends, and I hate the thought of them having bad experiences without me being there to at least share the burden.

On a related note, I've been looking at more emergency jobs that are coming up.  I looked at the recruitment campaign for police custody officers that Victoria Police are currently running.  It'd be interesting work, but the nearest postings are a solid couple of hours from here, so they're not really an option.  I also made a phone call yesterday about quasi-volunteer work as an Ambulance Community Officer which looks intriguing too.  We'll see.  I even started looking at whether foreigners can apply to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary or the Solomon Islands Police Force until the little voice in my head told me that I might perhaps be getting carried away!
 
RSIPF.png  Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary logo.jpg
Images from here and here

The volunteering theme continued yesterday evening at the legal centre.  It was a reasonably standard night: a messy family law matter and two collisions between uninsured motorists.  I'll keep volunteering there, but I'm less and less convinced that what we do has any real value.  With matters like the family law case last night, by the time people come to seek legal advice (especially from a free legal centre), the problems are so advanced that the help we can give feels a little like offering suncream lotion to treat third-degree burns.


At the moment at work I'm wading through the backlog that built up while I was attending to the document redaction.  I can tell you it feels good to be busy again.

More later - I have a couple of good posts in mind.

Hope your days are going well!

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