Three aspects of Peter

New Italy traditions

My great grandfather with his gang, 
making wine in the 1890s.
Click to enlarge images

First, I would like to tell you a it about my family's history, since my family gave me my last name, which you know is Filicietti. My family goes back a few generations in Australia, to when my great-grandparents left Italy in a group escaping the awful poverty and crushing abuse of traditional European monarchs in the late 19th century. The group poured all their savings into a venture led by an evil French nobleman, who dumped them to die on a barren island in the Pacific Ocean. Happily, Australia, still a British colony, agreed to help them move to Australia. After arriving in Sydney in the early 1880s, the group moved north to an undeveloped bush area, where their hard work formed a thriving community of small farms, which they called New Italy. (The link, in brown, is to the Google Maps' location.) I grew up on a farm about five kilometres from that original settlement.

After a great family meal, piling in to
go koala spotting on my brother's farm

Being Italians from a rural area in northern Italy, one of their most prized possessions on the long and dangerous boat trip to Australia were the cuttings from their grape vines. Almost the first thing that my ancestors did after cutting down the native bush, even before they built their small, simple homes, was plant grapes. What could be more important than making wine? Although educated and a successful businessman and local community leader, my father was also a farmer, who branched out into sugar cane, other crops, and dairy farming. Today, most of my brothers and sisters no longer farm, or they combine that with other careers. My youngest brother, for example, does graze a few cattle (I think about 50) on his property, which includes koalas and kangaroos competing with his beef cattle, but he also consults for businesses in the nearby country towns. When I make my annual visit to Australia to see my family and friends, I always stay at his home, which is about 25 km from where we grew up.

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New tools for old habits 

If you had not already suspected it,
this shot of my work area confirms
that messiness is another old habit.

Although I started this blog post using my laptop in our class this morning, when I'm at home, I usually write on my desktop computer — the monitor is seriously big. And if I want to brainstorm, I do what Bird was doing in class this morning: I use MS OneNote on my laptop or tablet. In our quick discussion after we concluded our class today, someone asked about reading on a Kindle like Kiki does, and I said that I had not bought a paper book for many years. These days I do almost all of my reading on devices: computers, tablets, or my phone. Paper? About the only time I use paper is when I do a brainstorming exercise in a class. Paper has a long history, and it's still popular, but I think it's on the way out, except for Thailand's Immigration Office. Once a year, AUA's government liaison officer gives me a pile of paper to sign. I used to have thousands of books on shelves, and although they looked cool, a few years ago, probably five or six years ago now, I got rid of most of them. I gave the impressive looking ones to my brother, who now displays them on his shelves to impress his guests, and most I just gave away to anyone who was interested in them. I kept a few in my much less cluttered home in Bangkok, but only ones that have sentimental value for me: my well-read copies of Plato, Homer and a few other classics from my university days, and equally well-read copies of favourite novels that bring back memories. A couple of these are books I've enjoyed for more than forty years now, including four copies of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that have fallen apart from being read so many times over the decades. The Kindle version is not subject to the same phyical deterioration. My reading and writing habits have not diminished, but I'm a big fan of the benefits that modern technology offers, as you might have noticed in our first class today.  
 

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Just for fun

What is fun for you? When I briefly introduced myself in class yesterday, I mentioned that I don't watch TV. In fact, I haven't watched TV for more than 40 years. But I do like some things that were initially produced for TV. For example, at the moment, I'm watching the American series The Big Bang Theory (TBBT), which is the story of the lives of some super-nerds who are physicists, and their friends. I loved physics in high school, but it was not seen as a "fun" activity by most of my classmates. Even weirder was my love of mathematics. When I wasn't reading novels, I read sciecne books on the 40-minute bus trips to and from my high school in the city 30km from my family's home. And when I got home, I would do mathematics for fun. But I also liked silly TV shows, and I guess I still do. I do not, however, like the restrictions of TV, or the extremely annoying advertisements on commercial TV. I much prefer to pay the small subscription to NetFlix so that I can watch what I want when I want to, without ads breaking up the fun. My fondness for mindless action films is also fed well by NetFlix, for example The Equalizer, Black Panther, and similar films. They are not great art, but they are fun, and sometimes being fun is enough. 

TBBT: Sheldon and friends are more fun in full