Category Archive: AUSTRALIANIA
Molly: The Real Thing
Not dead yet
Channel 7 followed up its two-part drama Molly (reviewed here) with a short, oddly premature obituary-feel documentary about Ian “Molly” Meldrum the following week. Molly’s brother Brian tells us that Molly loved music from day one. He moved in with Ronnie Burns’ family when his just wouldn’t do, he was a journalist at GO SET magazine, then on the television music shows The go Show, Kommotion (1966). Uptight (1968) and Happening 1971. Again, like Vivienne Westwood, Ian Meldrum was a young person with nothing but passion and a lot of nerve who blazed a trail through a wood that no-one…
Continue Reading →My History: A Memoir of Growing Up
Dragon School, Oxford. Not my alma mater.
(by Lady Antonia Fraser) It would be unfair for me to compare Lady Antonia Fraser’s first volume of memoirs with that of her cousin, Ferdinand Mount because in many aspects Fraser had the (early) life and has had the career that I wanted, whereas I felt only the vaguest envy for Mount’s connections and have never aspired to working for Margaret Thatcher. While growing up in the hideous new lower-middle-class outer suburb of Dust in South Australia, attending Dust Primary and High Schools, I knew that I really belonged in a large nook-filled house in Oxford, attending a private school, learning Latin and Greek in preparation for Oxford, in its turn a preparation…
Continue Reading →Un-Australian
(26 January, 2016) When you start a thing, who knows where it ends? Throw a party, prepare to make new friends. Make a nation, make your nation state From plasticine, so to shape its fate. I watch TV and see this once great land Has changed and absolutely nothing’s planned For me: I’m persona non grata; I’m packing, and leaving, to foreign laughter. I feel a stranger, right here, right now, I’m going, I’m gone, if you’ll allow. [Note, It is instructive to track the Australian of the Year Award, which has become an Australia Day feature since its inception in 1960. The first…
Continue Reading →Relax, Max
"Please redeem me, let me go..."
Mad Max Franchise (Dir. George Kennedy) These highly influential and popular films are, truth to tell, shite. Oh I know, they represent a definitive textbook for the Stunt Man; they give employment to a bunch of Aussies (yay!); in the case of the first film in the series, it justifies awakening the city of Clunes; they combine great visual beauty along with nauseating ugliness; they tell the world of the practical effect of the Greens’ energy policy, but excrement they remain. Listen! We blame no one. We’d rather watch these films than 97% of the cloacal mess showing at a cinema…
Continue Reading →A Million Windows
Photo of the author c/- the Sydney Morning Herald
(by Gerald Murnane) Murnane’s writing is the literary equivalent of a performance by the dance troupe Jailolo. As the dancers creep across a stage via barely discernable, repetitive, miniscule movements, so Murnane inches and tics his way from nowhere to somewhere word by word. His is a philisophy of obscurantism, distance and apprehension. “I recalled just now an earlier undertaking of mine to explain in the previous paragraph why this is not a self-referential work of fiction. The discerning reader should have found the promised explanation in the paragraph as it stands. For the sake of the undiscerning reader I shall repeat the simple fact…
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