Ted Lasso – Redemption Rather Than Tragedy

Some misguided people believe that Christopher Marlowe faked his death to avoid arrest by the Elizabethan authorities on blasphemy charges and went into hiding, becoming the actual author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. I doubt that anyone who has actually read Marlowe would see that as halfway plausible, given the much darker and more …

Should the AFL expand to 20 teams, and if so, where?

As a child, I think that the first ‘chapter books’ I read were Ruth Park’s Muddle Headed Wombat series. She was quite prolific and there were over a dozen of them in my primary school library. Close to a decade later, I also read her rather tragic adult novel, The Harp in the South, which …

Do Tasmanians Really Have Twice As Many Mouths To Feed? (And Other Reflections On AFL Expansion)

Given the title of this post, I had better address the Thylacine in the room first up. We do have many unkind jokes about Tasmanians, the nicest being that the small population results in limited genetic diversity and therefore leads to them all being two headed and red haired. That is now out of the …

Not In My Backyard – The Australian Dream Is Fast Becoming A Nightmare

20 years ago, when I moved into my home in Avondale Heights, I was surrounded by other homes on house blocks approximately 535sqm in size. My first week, I planted several citrus trees in my backyard, and a gum tree sapling 3m from the back fence. The orange trees are all about to fruit again, …

Are Disruptive Innovative FinTechs Today’s Equivalent of Video Rental Libraries?

Hipster girl band Camp Cope did a ballad entitled ‘Footscray Station’ a few years ago. Part love song, part protest anthem, it sums up what hipster types and Millennials see in Footscray, mostly from an angle different to my own, it being my childhood home town. For most of my adult life, first as a …

Treasury Wine and the many apparently defunct brands

A few weeks ago I discovered and then posted about the disappearance of some formerly highly popular brands owned by Treasury Wine Estate – namely Rosemount, Ingoldby, and Jamison’s Run. Since, then, I have retrospectively been doing my due diligence as an investor (I do, after all, own 1,000 shares in the company) to see …