Caution: Children and some other readers may be grossed out on reading this. If this is the case, spare a thought for those of us who have always known that the animals that sustain us are a composite of the same sorts of bits and pieces as we are and so deserve to be treated with respect.
I’ve been feeling a bit of nostalgia for Australia these past couple of weeks – I think a looming birthday has got a lot to do with it – but it’s the way in which it has manifested itself that has me intrigued.
It has ...
I hated school – absolutely hated it – and almost from my very first day there couldn’t wait to get out. There were lots of reasons for my loathing and I’ll be first to admit that as my school years crawled by a lot of the things I hated were magnified by my own pig-headedness, but a lot weren’t; they were irritants engendered by a system still operating in the past and geared to deal only with privilege, the status quo and blind acceptance.
I’ll also concede that I started my academic non-career at a bad time. Early on many of ...
My relatives have always been a source of inspiration and wonder to me and as a child I was in awe of the exploits of uncles, aunts, grands and those great-grands who were still living. Old age visited on a few of of them behaviour that these days would see them at best drugged and at worst institutionalized, but was back then considered among the side effects of ageing requiring very little intervention, if also a little tolerance.
If I slip into that sort of senility, I want my family to tell the authorities about these among my antecedents, pointing out ...
Whether or not this is an appropriate venue to air this memory – whether, indeed, the USA is an appropriate venue – I’ll leave you to judge. If it’s not, then my defence might be that I still haven’t entirely come to grips with differences in national senses of humor. Be that as it may, it was Tom Poland’s Riding The Chitlin’ Circuit that brought the memory so vividly back.
It was the early 1960s and I’d not long been in the Eastern States trying my music out in a larger, more sophisticated market than in my native, allegedly backward Western Australia. ...
Australia’s an old place, so ancient that mountain ranges once as high as the Himalaya have been worn to nubs. At just under 7310 feet, Kosciuszko, the highest mainland peak, is a mere hillock by world standards while on the other, older side of the continent, in Western Australia’s Pilbara where there are rocks almost as old as time, Mt Meharry reaches to a mere 4100 feet, flattened by millennia and slumped under a sun so fierce as to be unimaginable to most folks in the northern hemisphere.
Ancient also is the culture of the people who occupied Australia’s mainland at ...
The teevee news industry loves a good bit of history – it makes for great attention-grabbers to lead the evening news. Unfortunately those who write the stories rarely bother to check their
facts, let alone reflect on what’s being written. No matter. If they use labels such as ‘the greatest’ or ‘the worst’, no-one, they hope, will notice that they don’t know all that much about the present, let alone the past.
The horror show being played out in the Gulf of Mexico and along the southern coasts is no exception. Now don’t misconstrue what I’m about to write – I’d hate ...
I don’t like whingers nearly as much as I don't like wowsers, especially when it’s me doing the whinging, but it’s been a rough few months. I’ve had a spell of weird episodes that for a
while made me think I was going to kark it but a battery of tests – CAT scan, MRIs an EEG and an angiogram – all came back saying nothing. In fact the angiogram insisted that my arteries are 30 years younger than I am. This, as I told the cardio-vascular youngster in charge, came as something of a shock, defying all logic and reason ...
They’re funny things, chooks – or chickens as we say here in the USA – the sort of thing that you never miss until you don’t have any, and when you’ve got them you curse every time you have to hunt them out of the garden or stumble like Captain Oates into the frosty night because you’ve forgotten to lock them up safe from cats, foxes, chuditches (in Australia) or raccoons, opossums, coyotes, et. al. (here in the US).
Chooks have long been part of the background to my lifescape (and pigeons, too, another of my lifelong infatuations but more of ...
It’s not easy, is it, to give someone a definition of your birth country straight off the bat. There’s no catch-all phrase or description, especially if you agree with me that part of what defines your country is in your own being, the way you see yourself, and another part is in a nationally shared state of mind. I’m going to try anyway, but I’m going to go at it widdershins – which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read anything of what I’ve previously written. Frustrating to some I know, but it’s the way I do things. Blame ...
I’ve been watching the antics surrounding the healthcare debate with what I can only describe as wide-eyed amazement and awe, tinged slightly with fear.
Does any in the congregation of this Church of Rip Van Winkle honestly believe that other people might see them as offering some viable alternative; that a government led by some latter day reincarnation of Tom o’ Bedlam might lead them out of the sea of bewildered confusion in which they find themselves? They’re like time-travellers desperately trying to get back to their version of 1950 and determined to take everyone with them. Teevee coverage of the Tea ...
I know that elections in Tasmania are of limited interest to Dewbies, and will affect their lives very little, but what I am about to write is in no small part encouraged by my concern at the increasingly loose interpretation of democracy by governments everywhere. Tasmania is a microcosm and may soon serve as yet another example of political folly.
Why am I so interested in Tasmania? Apart from the fact that I love the place, it still has so much going for it. It has often been described as "the last place in Australia that has a chance"; a chance ...
In my article about the forthcoming Tasmanian election I made reference to the role played by the Exclusive Brethren (EB) in past campaigns and to its hypocritical stance on politics. At the time I left Australia, its world head, Bruce D Hales, the "Elect Vessel," was a fellow citizen – though I use the term loosely and with regret – and this is one reason I follow the activities of this cultist sect. A worldwide organization, there are claims that the Exclusive Brethren also interfered in elections in New Zealand, where they have been accused of "threatening the government", and that ...
For those Dewers who’d like a change from US politics, may I offer up an alternative entertainment? The people of far-away Tasmania go to the polls next weekend when the fate of the incumbent Labor government will be decided. Australia’s island State is among the most beautiful places on earth but if you ever wish to see the consequences of unfettered corporate power, political hypocrisy and politico/religious bastardry, then Tasmania is the place to look at – though Western Australia looks set to soon be its equal in these attributes.
First, though, a bit of background. Tasmania, like the Federal Government ...
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