Category Archive: HISTORY
“A Vast Scene of Confusion”
"the tide of popular fury returned..."
On the eve of the ides of September 2015, Monday 14th, the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, was assassinated in the Liberal Party room and his usurper, Malcolm Turnbull, assumed the imperial purple. One hopes this will end a strained period in the nation’s body politic – over the last 6 and a half years, there has been blood in the corridors of power, and 3 serving Prime Ministers elected by the people have been boned. 1/12/2009 – Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, is defeated by Tony Abbott by one vote. Mr Abbott becomes leader of the Coalition opposition….
Continue Reading →The Holt Report
Open water
(by John Larkin and Geoffrey Barker) (1968) Yes, Americans can joke about President Taft being eaten by wolves (particularly greedy wolves) but only in Australia could a serving Prime Minister be taken by a shark. On Sunday 17 December 1967, Prime Minister Holt went for a swim near his beach house at Cheviot, near the Heads leading from Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, into the Bass Strait, and was never seen again. Though a shark is The Varnished Culture’s preferred theory (and after all this time, chances of finding traces are approximately nil) there are a number of other possible solutions; kelp…
Continue Reading →Bastille Day
Bastille in trouble: La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition, by Hubert Robert
14 July: La fête nationale On this day in 1789, a bunch of disaffected Parisians gathered at Number 232 rue Sainte-Antoine, address of that pygmy-monolith, the Bastille, formerly a fort, now a prison for marginal types. They wanted a symbolic victory and eventually, the Governor, M. de Launay, would hand it over: a paper surrendering control, on the basis of clemency. This mercy was promised, and then ratted-on, in a piece of barbarity that would sum up the French Revolution in general. De Launay’s head was soon off his neck and sat atop a pike. As Carlyle recounts in his superb…
Continue Reading →The Stones of Venice
(John Ruskin) (3 volumes, 1851-3) Ruskin, high priest of fine art and architecture, wrote these 3 volumes based on a deep well of learning and meticulous research, including a Pevsner-like mountain of sketches and using the new technique of daguerreotype, a revolution in architectural appreciation and review. It will be read from cover to cover now only by art historicists, not architects, for on aesthetics Ruskin (like Carlyle) is a man out of time: “art is valuable or otherwise , only as it expresses the personality, activity, and living perception of a good and great human soul; …it may express and…
Continue Reading →The Coldest Winter
(David Halberstam) (2007) Through the noise of Vietnam and Iraq, we fail to hear and heed the still reverberating conflict in Korea, under armistice since 1953 but technically open. David Halberstam, in his last book, brilliantly recounts the manoeuvres and ideologies at play, and beyond the recounting of the bloody and appalling battles, informed by a decade’s worth of interviews of the high and the low, and supplemented by excellent maps, shows the political shadows cast by the conflict on American policy, such as the stance vis-á-vis China, only corrected after a generation of isolationism, and the consignment to irrelevance, for almost a…
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