By Catherine Watson

​LOOK at a photo of Neil Luke in action and you see the mastery of the man – and the mystery. A tiny human figure defying the superhuman forces of the ocean, he seems to barely touch the board as it slices through air and water.

An enigma, like the man himself. A kneeboarder in a surfing culture. A champion surfer and a top bloke.  A Jehovah’s witness who surfed. When he discovered surfing he put the church on hold but in later years found a way to embrace worlds, spending several years as a missionary in Nicaragua, which also happens to have great surfing.
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Neil’s old surfing mates gathered at Kitty Miller Bay on March 14 for a paddle-out. These days the hair is mostly white instead of sun-bleached blond, and the knees are stiff, but the stories are still about memorable days, the biggest breaks and how much fun it had all been. 

By Catherine Watson

TWENTY-five years ago I became an Australian citizen. These days you have to pass a test and prove you’re of good character but back then they took anyone.

 stood in the Richmond Town Hall with 63 people from 20 nationalities and took the oath. Then the mayor bestowed on us the symbols of citizenship: a wattle tree and a certificate with an emu and a kangaroo.

It was all a bit kitsch, except that to my great surprise I found myself on the verge of tears.

Pledging allegiance to a country is a strangely profound act. Like many Australians, I now have two countries in my heart. Sometimes “we” is Australia; sometimes it’s NZ. “We” when I approve; “They” when I don’t.

By Catherine Watson
 
A CROWD turned up this week to farewell Clive Dobson, a big bloke in many senses. It was a cheerful kind of funeral. He made it to 90, a miracle considering how hard he worked and how many accidents he had along the way.
 
Clive slashed our paddock for 10 years. It’s only a bit over an acre, no big deal, but there are trees everywhere and not a straight row between them. He had to steer round the new trees, hidden in the long grass, miss the asparagus patch, steer clear of the resident bees, which are enraged by diesel fumes, avoid the swampy area and mow a 20-degree slope without tipping over into the dam. A man in a hurry could come to grief in that paddock. ​

By Catherine Watson
 
To understand how Clare Le Serve and Michael Whelan changed our lives, I only have to listen to my friends and neighbours talk about the cataract operations, hip replacements, knee replacements, cancer treatment, shoulder reconstructions ... all done at our local hospital. 
 
My friend Mark no longer has to make the dreaded trip to Monash Hospital for life-saving infusions. He now drives five minutes to the Wonthaggi Hospital where he settles in for a few hours with a team who know him well and bring him coffee and sandwiches while he’s infused. 
 
I see the Bass Coast Secondary College’s senior students heading up McKenzie Street to a new campus with the specialist technology and art rooms, multimedia studios, and a massive indoor stadium. I drive past the new junior campus on Potters Hill Road and I still find it hard to believe.

Words by Catherine Watson

RECENTLY I came across this in a book of Kurt Vonnegut’s short stories:
“Hell, it’s about time somebody told about my friend EPICAC. After all, he cost the taxpayers $776,434,927.54 … I won’t go into details about how EPICAC worked (reasoned) except to say that you would feed numbers into him with a keyboard that looked something like a typewriter. It took EPICAC a split second to solve a problem fifty Einsteins couldn’t solve in a lifetime., And EPICAC can never forget any piece of information that was given to him.

​"Clickety, click, out came some ribbons and there you were …”
 
The story was written in 1950. And here we suddenly are. 

By Catherine Watson
 
WHEN someone suggests the dinosaur bones are calling to Melissa Lowery, she doesn’t disagree. Melissa sees things that no one else does. In the midst of one of Bass Coast’s many jumbled, multi-coloured, rocky sea shelves, she can pick out a tell-tale speck or splodge that might just be part of a creature that walked here 125 million years ago.
 
Her colleagues on Dinosaur Dreaming call her “the electron microscope”. Mike Cleeland (‘Mr Dinosaur’) says her tally of bones is closing in on 500 and she has found over 100 dinosaur footprints in the rocks. Prints that most of us would never notice, although once they’re pointed out you wonder how you could have missed them.
 
And here’s the funniest thing. Melissa is not a trained palaeontologist or geologist. She is a citizen scientist, part of an old tradition of an amateur making a major contribution to science.
 
Her extraordinary abilities have transformed the search for fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures along the stretch of coast between Inverloch and San Remo.

By Catherine Watson
 
WERNER Theinert is explaining the Coefficient of Performance of heat pumps to us. It’s like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. You put in one unit of energy and get back two to three units of cooling or heating.
 
Werner has written on the blackboard: THE ENERGY REVOLUTION IS HERE!  He loves this stuff. He's so excited he strides the width of the room with his pointer. I’m reminded of those old Energizer ads, which is apt since we are here at Bass Coast Adult Learning (BCAL) to learn about renewable energy as part of BCAL’s Sustainability Series.