Category Archive: AUSTRALIANIA
Our Smoking Ruin
"Wasteland with Elephant" (image by Topangahomeboy)
South Australia – a Looper’s Paradise If you’re unlucky enough to live in (or almost as bad, be passing through) Australia’s benighted State, the coalmine canary of the Commonwealth, cheer yourself up by logging-on that superb website, SA Great [http://www.sagreat.com.au/]. You’ll be treated to a hard-to-navigate map and several invitations to submit an event, a business, a restaurant, a job, or a coupon (but not a complaint, not an idea). Adelaide closes down for a couple of months every year to host a stock car race (that ‘climaxes’ today), a pallid homage to the Formula-1 Grand Prix that we used to hold (annoyingly)…
Continue Reading →Newton’s Law
“Newton’s Law” TV series, ABC, premiere 9 February 2017 The Varnished Culture viewed the first episode of this pilot series about a passionate, caring, fast-talking, salt-of-the-earth, working mother who drives a pristine, beautifully restored, maroon Valiant Charger (why?) and is either a fearless suburban solicitor or a high-flying barrister – it’s hard to tell. In considering this wafer-thin yet impenetrable show, we had recourse to Newton’s famous physical laws. Newton’s Third Law of Motion: A body exerting force on another meets a simultaneous force of equal magnitude. Josephine Newton (a reasonably engaging Claudia Karvan) briefs a drunk for a bail application,…
Continue Reading →O Happy Day
(image by Kaoz69)
January 26 – Australia Day Invasion Day, Survival Day, Moor-Your-Boat Day – an arbitrary dot on time’s spectrum was chosen as lucky little Australia’s modern, Gregorian, anniversary date. That’s when HMS Supply moored in Sydney Cove one choppy morning in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip and a small crew rowed ashore, and claimed the continent in the name of Mad King George III. There are roughly three camps who pitch their tents on our National Day – those who hold 26/1/1788 sacred; those who hold it as profane, and the great silent majority who view it through the lens of beer and barbeques. The genuine and perhaps…
Continue Reading →John Olsen
(National Gallery of Victoria @ Federation Square, December 2016) Ah, yes, abstract expressionism…when it comes to Australia, one thinks of John Olsen (born 21 January 1928). His retrospective (“The You Beaut Country”) at the NGV (Federation Square locus) drew derision, at first, then vague resentment, then grudging concession at the lovely use of colour, then a kind of appreciation (TVC might be doctrinaire but we are not obdurate). Olsen has duly passed through his Picasso, Kandinsky and Pollock phases… … coming out to forge a truly Australian mix of light and colour, with a cartographer’s skill thrown in. He has an otherworldly,…
Continue Reading →Water, water every where, nor any chance to Think
Section 18C of the Australian Commonwealth’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975 makes it unlawful to publically say, write or draw anything that is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of a certain race, colour or national or ethnic origin. You only have to read that sentence carefully to see the potential problems with it. (There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding protection in the federal sex or disability discrimination legislation.) In 2009, columnist Andrew Bolt produced articles in the Herald Sun newspaper on what he thought was an important social issue: the subjective self-identification of…
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