WORTH A WALTZ
mesa-shaped hills, the endless valleys and the sun on the spinifex, especially in the early morning or late evening, will stay with you forever.
Check your map for a different route back to the ’ville. If you are pressed for time go back via Hughenden, but if time is something you have plenty of, consider making your way across to Muttaburra and up to Torrens Creek on the Flinders Highway, or go across to Aramac, head up to Lake Dunn and out to the
Gregory Development Road 200km south of Charters Towers. This is all dry country and there is a lot of dirt road. Carry water and basic supplies and top up the fuel tank at every opportunity.
Parents’ nightmare
DOG Act of the Week. The Brisbane hospital that refused to let the mother and father of a newborn critically ill baby see their child. The baby was medically evacuated by helicopter from Lismore to Brisbane on A August 14 14. Th The parents Gl Glen and d Chantelle Northfield were told that because they were from NSW (and the border is closed) they would have to quarantine for two weeks before seeing their newborn. The distraught mother said she didn’t know what could happen to her baby while they were in quarantine. Besides, Lismore, just over the border is COVID-FREE.
Postscript: The Northfields were reunited with their baby Harvey after he was flown back to Lismore on Wednesday.
Bordering on despair
IT’S not difficult to understand why there is so much frustration about the t Queensland-nsw border closure. People are asking with good reason why the border can’t be opened to people from NSW who live outside the postcodes of
Sydney’s COVID-19 hotspots. Show your licence at Check Point Charlie at the Tweed, or wherever along the border, and either get the green light to freedom in the sunny north or the red light back to Sydney.
Meanwhile, will we be able to get together with loved ones from Victoria and NSW over Christmas? It’s not looking good. Grandparents now goo-gooing infant grandchildren on Facetime thinking they might be able to physically connect at Christmas might have to keep up with these virtual “hello sweetie” chats for some time yet. And how are these screen-time babies going to react when they actually see their Grandpas and Grandmas in the flesh? They’ll probably go, “Yikes,
I’m outa here.”
Smugglers’ tradition
THE overloaded plane that crashed on takeoff in PNG with 500kg of cocaine on board late last month had originally taken off from Mareeba. The drug haul was worth around $80m. PNG Prime Minister James Marape was outraged that criminals were using his country as some sort of staging point for drug smugglers. Mr Marape would be probably be just as surprised if someone told him the tooth fairy doesn’t exist. “We are not a banana republic,” he said. Hmmm, well, that’s debatable. Maybe a coconut republic, then?
PNG has been a staging point for drug smugglers for decades. It was common knowledge in the 1980s that light planes were flying marijuana — PNG Gold — grown and harvested by slash-and-burn Papuan tribespeople to isolated airstrips on Cape York Peninsula. In some cases, the drugs were then transported across mountainous country in the peninsula by packhorses led by blokes who knew what they were doing. They were met at rendezvous points by 4WD vehicles which then took on the final transport leg to selling centres. Some found its way to the Australian mainland by dinghy via the Torres Strait islands. Often these drugs were hidden inside dead dugongs and turtles while being transported by small boats through the islanddotted ocean waters separating Queensland and Australia’s northernmost point from PNG’S low mangrove coast 150km to the north. Both dugong and turtle can be legally taken by Indigenous people.
Close-run thing
IN the 1980s, a pilot mate was involved in the search for three windsurfers missing in Torres Strait waters. There were light planes and helicopters flying grid patterns trying to eyeball the sailboarders. All of a sudden a single-engine Cessna heading south came through the pack. The police plane in the search radioed it to identify. Silence. That little Cessna, which was most likely on a regular drug run, just ploughed on through and disappeared into cloud as it neared the tip of Cape York Peninsula. My mate reckoned the bloke flying it must have nearly had a heart attack when he realised he’d flown straight into the middle of a police-led aerial search.
WDr Joshua Francis arrived in East Timor in March as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking off around the world he was bracing for “disaster”.
The tiny nation was not set up for COVID testing, its hospitals fall short of essentials including PPE for clinical staff, beds and ventilators. Some facilities don’t even have running water and soap at times. Yet, East Timor has surprisingly gone on to become one of the world’s success stories with the COVID-19 figures at 25 confirmed cases, 24 recovered and zero deaths (as at August 19).
Dr Francis, a Queenslander based at the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, leads a team working with Timor-leste’s health system to improve its response to infectious diseases.
The 37-year-old says the result in East Timor was made possible because they were able to get COVID-19 PCR testing up and running before the virus spread into the community.
The PCR testing was largely the work of Menzies Health in collaboration with the Ministry of Health’s National Health Laboratory and support from the World Health Organisation.
“It’s an amazing result, it really is, I came anticipating disaster to be honest,” Dr Francis, a paediatrician and infectious diseases expert, told The Saturday Telegraph from the capital Dili. “But the public health response here in terms of managing quarantine, controlling the borders and really crucially getting that testing up and running I think has protected the country so far from a massive outbreak. It’s nearly impossible to do that without testing.”
But even success stories don’t come without ongoing challenges in the COVID-ERA. The scale of testing in East Timor is nowhere near Australia’s and the borders with Indonesia and West Timor pose a significant threat of reigniting the spread of the virus.
Malnutrition and Tuberculosis (TB) were already a huge burden on the country and now the pandemic has resulted in a slowdown in immunisations and routine health checks.
Dr Francis says Australia has played a really important role supporting East Timor over the past six months but needed to keep it up through this unprecedented time. “Sometimes we can be very focused on what is going on in our own backyard and lose sight of how tough it is for places very close to home. It’s just an hour’s flight from my home in Darwin but the differences couldn’t be more stark.”
PAPUA NEW GUINEA: REDUCING STIGMA
CONCERNS are growing in
Papua New Guinea where the number of COVID-19 cases has jumped in recent weeks to at least 347 confirmed, 110 recovered, and three deaths.
With most people living in rural areas, access to health services is a huge challenge.
Jack O’shea, 29, from Melbourne, travels to the most remote areas of West New Britain Province as a program manager for Australian Doctors International (ADI) helping to protect health workers and educate locals about hygiene and social distancing. The COVID-19 pandemic has put further stress on PNG’S already frail healthcare system.
O’shea says early on it has been the health workers of PNG that have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, prompting an emergency shipment of 80,000 individual pieces of PPE for frontline health workers.
“These health workers already have significant workloads, dealing with other infectious diseases like malaria and TB and maternal health within a fragile health system,” he said.
O’shea works closely with the PNG National Department of Health and the provincial level COVID-19 Task forces to help reduce stigma and fear around COVID-19 in “culturally sensitive” ways including answering to a chain of command within villages.
O’shea urges the Australian Government to keep supporting health workers in PNG to protect their vulnerable communities.
“What this shows is that COVID-19 won’t end for anyone until it ends for everyone. The continued support of essential aid programs must be mandatory during these times as organisations, such as ADI, assist our close neighbours when in need.”