Category Archive: HISTORY
Venezuela Ripostes
There is much to ‘unpack’ regarding the recent arrest and indictment of Nicolás Maduro, a gentleman personating the President of Venezuela. Venezuela benighted The U.S. has long considered South and Latin America as its backyard. In an 1895 border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, then U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney warned Great Britain that “To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law.” And the CIA has had a presence in South America from before the agency was actually constituted in its present form. They were in Caracas in 1958 when Vice…
Continue Reading →Perth Mint
(November, 2025) Australia’s official bullion mint (est. 1899) is at 310 Hay Street (conveniently near the Grosvenor Hotel), built in a style known as Federation Romanesque. Established to handle the West’s gold rush by refining gold nuggets and producing gold sovereigns for the Empire, the Mint continues a roaring trade, as gold continues to out-perform tech stocks and U.S. Bonds. There is a venerable coin press, and visitors taking the organised tour can strike their own token: The Mint is the oldest still producing coins of legal tender, along with collection-pieces, such as the Australian Lunar Silver Series II (2010)…
Continue Reading →Australia: A History
Mr. Abbott at the launch
(By Tony Abbott) (2025) Many, many years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Australian history is .. picturesque; It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies & all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. Full of surprises, & adventures, & incongruities *& contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true!” Australia’s 28th Prime Minister has written a history of Australia, explaining that he did so to try, not to counter, but to balance-correct, the currently prevailing ‘black armband’ narrative of those determining that the ancient evil of colonisation can and should be redressed now,…
Continue Reading →Season of Life (Jeff Janoda, 2022)
"Hancock at Gettysburg" by Thure de Thulstrup, showing Pickett's Charge
Jeff Janoda is a Canadian teacher, historian and writer whose ability to research and vitalise historical events disparate in time and space is admirable. His terrific 2005 novel Saga takes us into the world of old Nordic stories. Sundog (2019) is a gripping yarn set in the last days of World War Two. His third novel, Season of Life pulls the reader into the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. The American Civil War was known to The Varnished Culture through that historical textbook, Gone With the Wind and a few episodes of an interminable, sepia-coloured documentary tv series. Now…
Continue Reading →Coonardoo (Katharine Susannah Prichard)
(First published 1929; 2013 edition published by Angus & Robertson) In two of the three forewords* to the 2013 A&R Australian Classics edition of “Coonardoo”, we are told that Prichard, in both her own (the third) foreword and the novel that follows, uses terms and makes assumptions that, while widespread in the nineteen-twenties, are not so popular now. Prichard is not criticised for that, nor should she be. Those were the words and the beliefs of the time. Some of them should be readopted by us, even in our woke wisdom. Naturally we should no longer tolerate the genital mutilation…
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