Hard Labour

September 3 is one date that always gives me a little frisson of ... what? Not nostalgia, but 72 years ago it was the date on which the world, even my schoolboy world, changed forever. I will never forget the quavery old man's voice of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain coming over the short wave radio that Sunday night as he told us, all over what was then the British Empire,that we were now at war with Germany. We were at the home of my Auntie Katie that evening, along with a balding Jewish refugee newly arrived in Australia from Europe, and I watched as tears ran down his face, the first time I ever saw a grown man cry. Later we drove that man part way home, to where he could get a tram into Adelaide. It was a cold night of scudding clouds that intermittently hid and revealed the sparkling Southern Hemisphere stars, jewels in the bright girdle of the Milky Way. I felt apprehensive that night as we all did I think, very unsure of what was to come, how long it would last, what would be the outcome. Nowadays this particular weekend signifies something else altogether: it's the Labor Day holiday weekend in USA and Canada, the transition from summer holidays to the start of the new year for schools, colleges, universities. Next week my diary is cluttered with welcoming events for new classes, most of which I can safely ignore, though I do want to attend a couple. For years I used this weekend for my private purpose of taking stock of what I had accomplished, what remained to be done before the end of the year. It's the same story this year I suppose. For months I was mourning Wendy, slowly emerged from that state around the middle of the year, began to pick up the pieces of my life and move on. My labours aren't done: I committed long ago to write 3 chapters in Public Health and Ecology, a new book to be published by Oxford University Press, that is a linear descendant from my solo effort, Public Health and Human Ecology. For the past few weeks I've been diligently pecking away at the first of my chapters, and today I began to work on the second of them, the chapter on philosophical, moral and ethical foundations of public health. This is actually the last chapter in the book, one I enjoy writing and talking about because it explains why we do what we do in public health practice, why it matters, what some of the moral and ethical challenges are, and how we can confront and respond to these challenges.