Book Review: Leading on the Edge by Rachel Robertson

Rachel Robertson’s "Leading on the Edge" is far more than a memoir of managing a team through a long Antarctic winter; it is a clinical yet deeply human study in risk management under conditions of absolute isolation. While the book expertly covers the complexities of leadership and team dynamics, its most profound takeaway is the stark, inescapable reality of the single pre-Winter season shipment. This annual, make-or-break logistical moment encapsulates every conceivable organisational risk, transforming the Antarctic base into a pressurised crucible for months to come.

The successful arrival of that single ship—the last touchpoint with the outside world before the ice solidifies—determines the inherent risk for the entire overwintering period. If a critical piece of equipment fails to arrive, the team doesn’t simply wait for a replacement; they must engineer a solution with what they have, or the mission, and potentially lives, are jeopardised. This creates a cascade of financial, operational, and safety risks that are locked in the moment the ship departs. There is no “residual risk” to manage here, only the inability to mitigate.

The book forces the reader to confront the psychological toll of this non-negotiable isolation. If a team member develops a severe medical condition or suffers a mental health crisis, the infrastructure for rescue is simply gone. The medical risk shifts from treatable to potentially catastrophic, placing an immense burden on the station doctor, whose consequence rating on any given incident instantly jumps to 'Critical.' This absolute lack of a safety net means that minor interpersonal conflicts, which would be an annoyance elsewhere, morph into high-consequence Reputation and Operational risks, capable of undermining morale and mission success for the remaining ten months.

Robertson shines a light on how this logistics risk elevates the importance of every single control. Inventory management stops being a clerical task and becomes a survival imperative; every gasket, every spare part, and every food ration must be accounted for, as there is no opportunity for correction. "Leading on the Edge" is a compelling reminder that the true nature of risk is defined not just by what might go wrong, but by the options—or lack thereof—available when it does. It is essential reading not only for adventurers but for any leader who understands that effective management is fundamentally about anticipating and controlling the worst-case scenario.

Shalom,

Ozhamada

Note: this page links from my Goodreads account.

Urgent Penalty Notice

Someone close to me has slowly read a library book.

On the occasion of the third renewal of the borrowing period I arranged for them to get a surprise. This was delivered to them on library letterhead. 

There was shock and then laughter.

= = = = = =  

 

Subject: Urgent Penalty Notice: Mandatory Public Address - Re-borrowing of The Hiding Place

Dear [insert name]

This letter serves as a formal notification regarding your persistent and excessive re-borrowing of the book, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom (940.53482.TEN).

While we appreciate your dedication to this inspiring work, your repeated renewals have prevented numerous other patrons from accessing it, disrupting the fundamental principle of shared community resources at the Randwick Library.

Therefore, as per the little-known but strictly enforced "Three-Strike Renewal Rule" (effective only for books on the Holocaust/WWII and books about cats), you are required to serve a mandatory penalty.

---

The Penalty: Mandatory Book Review and Public Talk

You are hereby required to attend, prepare, and conduct a public talk reviewing The Hiding Place.

• Date and Time: Wednesday, November 20^th 2025 at 9:30 AM sharp.
• Location: Randwick Library
• Address: 35 Anzac Pde, Maroubra, NSW 2033.
• Reporting: Upon arrival, you must report immediately to the Head Librarian, Mrs. Gertrude Reader, at the Information Desk. She will escort you to the auditorium.

---

Talk Requirements and Analysis

The talk is scheduled to be one hour in duration (inclusive of a 15-minute question and answer period) to an anticipated audience of 100 local high school students and members of the Senior Book Club.

You must rigorously analyse the text, addressing at least the following key thematic areas in your discussion:

1. The Resilience of Faith: Examine how Corrie's deep Calvinist faith sustained her, her family, and her fellow prisoners in the face of absolute evil. Discuss specific scriptural references used as coping mechanisms.
2. The Power of Forgiveness: Detail the famous post-war encounter between Corrie and one of her former prison guards, and analyse the theological and psychological complexity of her act of forgiveness.
3. Hiding in Plain Sight: Discuss the logistical brilliance and inevitable folly of hiding Jewish people in the Ten Boom home ("the Beje"). You must diagram the "secret room" from memory.
4. The Smallest Acts of Resistance: Go beyond the major acts and discuss the importance of tiny, morale-boosting gestures—like sharing a single vitamin or a smuggled deck of playing cards—within the concentration camp environment.
5. The Role of the Blue Sweater: Provide an in-depth literary analysis of Betsie Ten Boom's blue sweater as a symbol of hope, practicality, and ultimate surrender to the divine will. (Note: A poorly managed sweater discussion will be considered an immediate failure.)

Resources for Diagramming: To assist with the "secret room" diagram (Requirement #3), a large easel and a single, well-chewed piece of purple chalk will be provided. The Head Librarian insists on a vintage aesthetic.

 

Failure to attend or conduct a sufficiently engaging and scholarly presentation will result in a permanent, system-wide ban on all future book renewals and a mandatory assignment to re-catalogue all gardening books.

Be advised that the Senior Book Club is not for the faint of heart. Their members are voracious readers who meet weekly, not monthly, and approach every book with a forensic level of scrutiny. They have collectively read the entire Western Canon multiple times and will not tolerate superficial analysis, misplaced semicolons, or weak arguments about the function of secondary characters. They come prepared with indexed notes and are the primary reason the Q&A segment is usually extended.

 

We look forward to your illuminating presentation. Please confirm your receipt of this letter and your understanding of the penalty requirements by the end of this week.

Sincerely,

Collette Paige

Senior Circulation and Sanctions Officer

Randwick Library

 

Access and egress congestion

I keep a close eye on instances where a significant number of people are inconvenienced. Last Saturday, the public's attendance at a ticketed event in Sydney, NSW, was soured by poor transport planning. 

On Saturday attendees to the RAAF Richmond Airshow 2025 | Air Force found themselves on long traffic queues or stuck on trains. The organisers of the event possibly failed to consider the transport implications of bringing 40,000 people to a site that rarely handles such capacity.

 

Here is a summary of how the organisers may have thought through risk considerations:

The primary risk realised at the RAAF Richmond Airshow was Severe Access and Egress Congestion, leading to significant reputational damage and a degraded patron experience. This materialised as extensive traffic bottlenecks on approach roads (like Hawkesbury Valley Way) and critical failure of the public transport strategy. The specific hazards were inadequate road infrastructure capacity for the expected high volume of attendees, compounded by overwhelmed train services at Clarendon and ineffective on-site car park management, where patrons reported hour-long queues just to exit. Shuttle buses, intended as a key mitigation, also became stuck in the general gridlock.

Future mitigation must prioritise a holistic Transport Management Plan (TMP), developed in partnership with Transport for NSW. Key strategies include:

1. Integrated Capacity: Mandating integrated ticketing for free, high-frequency public transport (trains and dedicated express shuttles) to drastically reduce private vehicle dependency.
2. Infrastructure Coordination: Implementing temporary road closures and counter-flow systems on key arterial routes before 7:00 am and during the 4:00 pm egress peak.
3. Operational Control: Deploying dynamic traffic control with trained marshals to actively manage the car park exit flow and separating shuttle bus routes from private vehicle congestion.
4. Real-Time Communication: Utilising Live Traffic NSW and social media for immediate updates, guiding drivers toward less congested routes or advising them to use designated park-and-ride options.

Shalom,

Ozhamada

Type 2 productivity

Type 2 productivity is what Australia needs. Sadly, there is too much effort direct at type 1 productivity.

Type 2 productivity are innovations in business practice that are designed to give rise to a productivity gain to both the designer; which is typically an organisation, and the party that is transacting with that organisation. Type 2 productivity makes processes easier for all parties in the process. An example of Type 2 productivity is eBay that comprehensively simplifies both the purchaser and seller experience, allowing, for instance, a seller to print a prepaid mailing label.

Type 1 productivity are innovations in business practice that are designed to give rise to a productivity gain to the designer without any significant productivity gain to the party that is transacting with that designer organisation. Type 1 is seen where users are required to input data into poorly designed online forms. Such forms may be capturing data for the organisation, and making their own processes efficient, but poor design of the form has a cost upon the user.

Type 1 productivity is what I recently experienced in receiving an email from a water authority with an attachment. The attachment had an unreasonable size. The story of that email's attachment continues here in a post I put up on, and later updated on, a community Facebook page:

While I appreciate that this is a first world problem, can anyone please advise if the size in megabyte of XXXXX Council's water bill reached a mammoth size in the most recent mailing. Here I show a graph of the size of the most recent four bills (with 4 being the most recent). 11 Megabyte for an attachment is huge! Council seems to want to consume all my email provider's data capacity."

---

Update: I have had a response from Council:

 

“Hi Ozhamada,

 

Our mail house has identified the cause of the issue which had resulted in emailed account having such a large file size.

 

The file size issue was to do with the newsletter which they have now corrected.

 

Thank you for your enquiry which has helped identify and correct this issue.

 

Regards

 

 

Shalom,

Ozhamada

A tragedy of pride

Women preachers have featured in this blog; the scorecard is marked F. The one with the stray hermeneutics, the one who prepared a sermon in a shower the day before preaching in it, and the one who had four questions when there was to be one.

Then there was the recent sermon of Bishop Bonnie Perry.

The Bishop preached at a Dublin Pride Service as linked. A tragedy of “pride”.

 

I have summarised the sermon below. The summary – of a sermon which is absent of any direct exposition of Biblical text - concludes with: “The core message is that if it was right for Jesus's apostles to speak their truth with pride, it is equally right and necessary for the LGBTQIA+ community to do the same.”

And, it is in that summary that we see the failure of the sermon, that the apostle’s (Peter and John, [Acts 3]) were not speaking in pride, but in humility - indeed, the apostles were at threat of imprisonment [Acts 4]. They spoke filled with the Holy Spirit [Acts 2]. The apostles were not speaking in pride but instead in boldness and unapologetic first-person witness. They were humble men who had the un-measurable support and strength of Christ.

And speaking in boldness and unapologetic first-person witness, in the Spirit, and as representatives of Christ, is completely different from the LGBTQIA+ community's tendency to speak in pride. For that community's pride is regularly evidenced as arrogance, self-exaltation, and hubris.

Shalom,

Ozhamada 

-------------------------//----------------------- 

Summary of sermon

The speaker links the "pride" of Peter and John and the "pride" of the LGBTQIA+ community through the shared act of publicly speaking their truth and living authentically, even in the face of opposition from established authorities.

Here's how the link is made:

1.    Pride of Peter and John: The speaker describes Peter and John as being "too public in their preaching and healing in and around the temple," leading to a "movement fueled by love and filled with pride." When chastised by the religious authorities and told to "no longer speak their truth publicly," Peter and John refuse to be silenced. The speaker emphasizes, "But if you know who you are and how you are and you know that your life is changed that's not something you keep inside You have pride and you keep on telling your story." Their pride is their unwavering conviction and determination to share the Gospel despite threats.

 2.   Pride of the LGBTQIA+ Community: The speaker explicitly connects this to the experience of the queer community. They state that for decades, society and the church have told them "Stop speaking be silent Don't tell us Do not speak your truth." However, the speaker then directly counters this by urging, "I say to you speak your truth... as an out proud partnered lesbian I say to you speak your truth. We are made in God's image and likeness and fully embraced by Christ just as we are. We of the queer community are good enough. We are called to tell the stories of who and how we are and how God lives and moves and has God being in our lives."

The link is established by framing both instances as a courageous and divinely inspired refusal to be silent about a transformative truth. For Peter and John, it was the truth of Jesus's resurrection and love; for the LGBTQIA+ community, it is the truth of their God-given identity and the profound love they experience. Both are acts of defiant, faithful self-expression ("pride") against prevailing norms and oppressive religious or societal structures. 

The core message is that if it was right for Jesus's apostles to speak their truth with pride, it is equally right and necessary for the LGBTQIA+ community to do the same.

Transporting a bicycle on Mariyung 8 car set train - Hornsby to Newcastle Interchange

I was fortunate this to travel on one of NSW Transport's new Mariyung Fleet trains. I travelled as part of a couple and we both took bicycles. The following photographs illustrate the dedicated bicycle carrying space. Our journey was from Hornsby to Newcastle Interchange. 

On the eight car set train the bicycle carrying space is on cars 2 and 7. 

The experience was one of ease and convenience. 

The bicycle carriers will prove popular. 

There is no additional cost to take a bicycle on the train. Boarding at Hornsby, car 7 pulled up precisely at the elevator which is fantastic for anyone who has had to get their bicycle down on to the platform. At Newcastle Interchange, if required, you can immediately board the light rail and it too has a dedicated bicycle area.

Shalom,

Ozhamada

This clamp locks into position against the front bicycle wheel as the arm takes the weight of the bicycle.

The front wheel suspended on a padded pin and clamped

Two bicycles neatly fit next to each other. There is a quick release strap fitted to the rear wheel.

We sat in car 8 and had a clear view through to the bicycles in car 7. There is disabled seating opposite the bicycle carrying space. The transit door is accessible at all times during the journey. 

 

The in-car digital indicator switches between destination information and car information (see next photograph)

The cars that have bicycle carrying space are indicated. The indicator highlights that car 8 - the car that we sat in - is a quiet carriage. In a quiet carriage chatting is to be kept to a minimum and mobile telephone calls must be taken in another carriage.

Four questions when there is to be one

This blog has a run of reporting bad preaching. Even the Sydney Anglicans can sadly fail (as linked). I contemplated writing a post on the Budde sermon to the newly elected President Trump yet another captured my thoughts entirely (as linked).

St John’s Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane serves up many sermons. The Rev’d Dr Ann Solari on the 5th January 2025 preached a sermon titled: “Giving the Gifts away: The Epiphany of the Lord”. As is a feature of many sermons of that church, Solari concluded the sermon with a question to her audience. Let’s examine that question from the published sermon on the church’s website:

“This story of the wise ones does however raise an interesting question.

If Jesus was given these valuable gifts as a small child how come he did he end up with nothing?

Did Jesus do what he asked the rich young man to do?

Did Jesus give all that he had to the poor?

What does this say to us?

Amen”

Screenshot from St John's Anglican Cathedral website

On 5 January 2025 many may have still been recovering from Christmas and New Year hangover. Simple mathematic calculations are often difficult with a cloudy head. Yet, the “interesting question” was not one question but instead “interesting questions”. Where the count should be one, it is four. Very Monty Pythonesque!

Putting aside the grammar of the first question one’s head spins at the connection within the sermon between that first question and the wonderful words that were included in respect to the gift of myrrh. For the preacher correctly identified the myrrh as a pointer to Christ’s early death. So, counter to the question's notion that has the listener pondering why Jesus ended up with nothing, the gifts indicated that Jesus would end up with nothing.

The second question is a puzzle in that rich young man is not previously mentioned in the sermon. Does the preacher assume her audience to be telepathic? If it is a reference to the story in Matthew 19:16-22 one wonders how Jesus is to follow himself :“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

The sermon is a failure. It is a failure in that the preacher has asked questions that are either dubious or which will lead to ambiguous or inconsistent application by the listeners. It offers questions at a moment in the sermon where applications are expected. It is a failure of oratory form - awkward questions left hanging in the air - that cannot be concluded successfully away from the pulpit. The questions are absent solid answers and sound applications; they do not keep to the pattern of sound teaching (Paul's instruction to Timothy).

The only appropriate response of the discerning pewsitter is to robustly indicate that they had been short-changed; that they expect well-rounded sermons starting from the very next week.

Shalom,

Ozhamada