Category Archive: HISTORY
In a League of Its Own / Straight Through the Middle
An exhibition celebrating 140 years of the South Australian National Football League and SA Football (State Library, June – August 2017) The Varnished Culture staff set aside partisanship and went to these twin homages to local footy. An interesting congregation of photos, video, medallions, badges, guernseys, books, scrapbooks, committee minute-books and other memorabilia, we could have done with a bit more, but it was a piquant taste nonetheless. SA clubs at every level, several long defunct, featured in rich and diverse parade. In this winter of discontent, a little unbalanced reporting suffused with weary, wistful nostalgia for the Glenelg Tigers glory (or at least,…
Continue Reading →When Translation is Divine
The Varnished Culture loves linguistic error – see out travelogue of malapropisms, Bitings on a Complimentary Basis. But we just had to add this: a scholar, explaining the derivation of the English word ‘frown,’ pointed to his forehead and stated “I’m wrinkling my foreskin.”
Continue Reading →A Last Crusade
"Siege of Zadar" by Andrea Vicentino
Memo to Christians from a fellow-traveller, an unbelieving, yet sympathetic on-looker: You’re losing. You seem to be clueless (although at least not mute at last), about the Islam-O-Nuts. “Peace to all men” is not cutting it. “Turning the other cheek” simply tears you a new scar. And as George VI put it, wars can no longer be confined to the battlefield. There’s no use warning of the dangers of schism, or pooh-poohing fights over the prophet’s succession (H. G. Wells commented: “To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of Islam is like watching a case of softening of the brain.”*)…
Continue Reading →New Australians of the Year
The Council of The Wise has announced a new category of Australian of the Year. Those eligible for “New Australian of the Year” are those great men and women from foreign forebears or other shores, folks whose lives were the template for, and reflect, the current splendid diversity that forms the Australian nation. Nominees can be alive or dead and must embody a facet of the country’s contemporary essence. Categories were submitted to the 2020 Summit (April 2008, which was designed by Prime Minister Rudd to “help shape a long term strategy for the nation’s future.”) Since then, over the last 8 years,…
Continue Reading →The Man on a Donkey
Christ Walking on the Waters by Sergius von Klever
By H. F. M. Prescott (1952) David Foster Wallace started his speech “This is Water” with that old but salutary saw,“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” In 16th century Britain and Europe, the Christian religion was like water to fish. To doubt the existence of God would be…
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