Category Archive: Australian Politics
National Portrait Gallery
(Canberra, August 2017) Having breasted the paint-stripping wind blowing down the mountain and off Lake Burley Griffin, we wondered if this monument would rise to emblematise a great reference of images, or just amount to a pantheon of nonentities crowding Our Island Story? Actually, the galleries are small, but occasionally choice, and sometimes a laugh riot. Little hordes of schoolchildren swept through on the hour (Canberra’s array of free stuff means almost every week there’s opportunity for a teaching free day or two) and little lessons were delivered by earnest folks who knew not what they were saying. Fortunately, P was…
Continue Reading →Fetch a Rope!
Historical sex charges are problematic. These types of antique sexual allegations are awfully easy to make, awfully serious, and awfully hard to refute. There always are metaphorical torches carried in the streets (in the middle of the day) for those charged. People write with relish at the thought of a show trial; they say they have always known the truth about the accused, whom, while ladled with qualifications that “X denies the charges, which are yet to be proven,” nevertheless are pinned with labels such as “paedophile” and “monster.” These witch hunts (“Gee, a high-placed religioso is charged, so let’s throw him in a pond to see…
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 →Where We Are Now
Kylemorrison74: "the earth will be a wasteland of lava and charred rock, and covered with vortex' that are an eternity of pain and agony. in a nutshell hell will ascend and there is no safe place to hide except in religion"
The South Australian Circle of Hell, 2017 Our littoral is a burning shore – lit by a million candles. The water burns. The air burns. The wind is uncomfortably warm. The rain is as blood. Drones hover. Wind turbines whine uselessly. Our power-grid hangs on a fraying thread, all insulation melted away. Water bursts through the earth on the hour, coursing water, vermin and ordure into homes and shops. Infrastructure crumbles. Bridges fall. Black dust swirls and eddies about once pristine sands. Our old folks are bound, gagged, doused with turpentine and they scream with pain. We await the wintry day when the crippled and…
Continue Reading →The Hitler Club
(by Gary Gumpl and Richard Kleinig) (2007) It’s not easy being a Kraut. Hitler saw to that. He took more than two thousand years of German contributions to the world – legacies from sources such as Beethoven, Bonhoeffer, Brahms, Charlemagne, Marlene Dietrich, Dürer, Einstein, Friedrich, Goethe, Hesse, Hoffmann, Kant, Kleist, Liebniz, Luther, Mann, Mozart, Schiller, Schubert, and yes, Wagner (especially Wagner) – and sullied them, perhaps for ever. The ‘don’t mention the war’ running joke in that Fawlty Towers episode is closer to the truth than we care to admit. In modern Germany especially, the shadow cast by Nazism is long. Grotesque irony abounded in the Nazis’ world. For example, Himmler rattled around in a special train…
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