Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
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…
Continue Reading →Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
(By Henry A. Kissinger, 1957) Kissinger spent most of his adult life dealing with a revelation and a revolution; the discovery of nuclear fission. He recognised that nuclear weapons changed how nations would conduct foreign policy. Ever the realist, Kissinger knew that nuclear weapons would slow but not stop war, and he grappled with the two-sides of the coin thereby tossed: that possession of nuclear weapons, no longer held in monopoly, would either prevent all war, or lead to global catastrophe. He also thought, presciently, that neither arms limitations agreements, exchanges of information such as sharing of flight plans or…
Continue Reading →Saltwater Μansions
(by David Whitehouse, 2025) It is not clear how long Whitehouse’s investigation into the disappearance of a woman he calls ‘Caroline Lane’ took, but it was not a quick process. Compare that with the short time it took reporter David Jones of the Daily Mail, upon publication of “Saltwater Mansions”, to discover and disclose the real name of the woman who disappeared, the actual block of flats in which she lived and the identity of her family (one of whom is falsely and titillatingly described by Whitehouse as “a former pop star” who received “an intense level of attention” as…
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