Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Camp of the Saints
(By Jean Raspail) (1973) [Trigger Warning] Western self-loathing has been increasingly documented, with the focus rarely on shame (the healthy recognition of past cultural excesses and infamies) but more particularly on Guilt and Submission. And white people have had their anti-racism homework set. Despite and perhaps because of this, we’ve seen, in recent decades, an elitist multi-cultural rejection of assimilation, an undocumented invasion of the West, run by an unholy trinity of criminal networks, corrupt NGOs and cynical governments (on the supply side, sending away not-their-best; on the demand side, pursuing a growth mirage and co-opting a furtive voting demographic)….
Continue Reading →The Road
(By Cormac McCarthy, 2006) [It is timely to comment on this book, as we read a report in The Weekend Australian newspaper (24/1/26) that Federal Treasurer, Dr. Jim Chalmers, planned to read it over the summer break. Appropriate, for a man under whose stewardship Australia, economically, feels like it is circling the drain.] This dystopian, post-apocalyptic fable won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, so we were duly warned. Evocative? Perhaps. Repetitious? Certainly. Dully and deliberately so. Fatuous? ‘Okay.’ Day after day – gray, ash, cold. Gather wood, light a fire, drink water, eat from cans, walk down a…
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 →107 Days
(By Kamala Harris, 2025) Prologue On 15 November, 2022, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to run for the Presidential election in November 2024. In April 2023, indictments on Trump started revving-up, and in the same month, President Biden announced that he would run for re-election. On 5 February 2024, the Robert Hur report was released, effectively concluding that Joe Biden broke the law on classified documents but that there was no point in charging him because he was, effectively, off his rocker. By 12 March 2024, both Biden and Trump had become the presumptive nominees for President by…
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