I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
Few people would have ever heard of the Southern Aurora Hotel. It was demolished in early 1993. It might have been the roughest pub in Greater Melbourne. It was located just next to Dandenong Railway Station. I visited it one Friday evening in May 1992, when I happened to be working in Dandenong. I had …
Continue reading “Welcome To Dandenong: Craft Beer Free Zone!”
A former friend of mine, as he descended deeper into a fantasy world which was either delusional or border personality disorder, once confided to a mutual friend that his intention was to go into space. This is the problem we will find with all those people who sit on the couch watching Star Trek or …
Continue reading “The Poor Man’s Ziggy Stardust – Some Belated Reflections On Babylon Zoo”
I just spotted this fresh graffiti in Footscray this morning. It makes a refreshing change from the illiterate and mostly untalented scribbles which have infested Melbourne in recent years. However, WTF? Whilst as an amateur classist I know that Artemis is a virgin goddess, but no one worships her anymore, thanks to the Emperor Theodosius …
Continue reading “First Articulate Graffiti Sighted In Years!”
‘Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World And that lions no longer need keepers? TS Eliot – “Choruses from the Rock” Around twenty years ago, I got on a crowded city bound train at Footscray Station. Standing close by me were a group of private school kids – I am not so …
Continue reading “A Stage Adaptation of On The Beach – with a subtle difference….”
Like many teen aged boys in the 1980s, I had a thing for Laura Branigan, she of the sequinned body suit and awesome wiggle who sang various hits, including the English language version cover of the Italian hit Gloria (with modified lyrics and addition of a post disco dance sound). Recently, when idly browsing Wikipedia …
Continue reading “Play Gloria! (In Which I Explain Why And Whom I Have Adopted As My NHL Team)”
The Age has written, since the cancellation of the 2026 Regional Commonwealth Games, about the intended Aquatic Centre in Armstrong Creek, a recently built suburb south of Geelong in a marginally held Labor seat. Apparently the plan was to build temporary stadia around two 50 metre racing pools, and one diving pool. After the Games, …
Continue reading “Armstrong Creek Aquatic Centre – Pork Barrelling or Electoral Fraud?”
For those who came in late, in early October 2020 a premature baby was found abandoned in a bathroom in Doha Airport in Qatar. The reaction of the airport authorities was to remove 13 Australian women from a Qatar Airways flight and subject 7 of them to invasive genital examinations. This could well be considered …
I was walking through Collingwood and Clifton Hill yesterday (as I did not grow up or ever live around there, I am not too sure where one stops and the other starts) and paused to admire the Bendigo Hotel in Johnston Street. This is quite a distinctive and ornate pub, on the outside at least. …
Many years ago, I read a book about the final collapse of the Cain-Kirner government. It was a collection of essays. by then-prominent journalists and academics. Essentially it was a laudatory panegyric by committed Keynesians who saw nothing wrong in the many fiscal and governance failures by Cain-Kirner and their ministers. Instead, they placed the …
Let’s face it, there is no political philosophy more obsessed with money and its possession (or lack thereof) than Communism (and its slightly watered down version – Socialism). Karl Marx did invent the term ‘Capitalism’ to describe the existing socio-economic status quo, and he was always obsessed with money – because he had little of …
Continue reading “My New Bookcases Used To Be Owned By A Communist!”
Lost For Words!