I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
I consider myself as a personally conservative person, albeit someone who reluctantly describes himself as a libertarian (very reluctantly – I loathe the word). As such, I would have some guarded sympathy for the Liberal Party, albeit as someone who very much regards himself as an outsider looking in. As a responsible and engaged citizen, …
Continue reading “What would Elvis do? Reflections on a slow moving Liberal Party tram wreck…”
The decision by General Motors to retire the Holden brand and withdraw from the Australian car market entirely has disappointed and upset many people. There has long been a perception that Holden was an Australian company, and that Holdens are Australian cars. I expect that many people, never having reason to reflect on the matter, …
1986 was definitely not a great year in my life. Aside from my default from being 17 and facing that semi-adult rite of passage that involves finishing high school (at my local school, where the likelihood of successfully completing high school in six years, from when you started six years earlier, was about 12.5% at …
Sometime in the 18th Century, Bishop George Berkeley wrote his thoughts on empiricism. He could be credited, perhaps, with the ideas which underpin the question ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does the tree make a noise?’ I suppose the good bishop would, given his writings, …
I was thinking just now about former musical enfant terrible Ben Lee, who in his early album Breathing Tornadoes (back when he was quoted, whether in jest or hubristic earnestness I know not, as saying he was the best Australian singer-songwriter ever, or something like that) included a song titled ‘Cigarettes can kill you’. [Is …
Continue reading “Coronavirus can kill you, but so too can cigarettes”
Anyone, man, woman, boy, or girl, who loves their father and idolises him as a hero, cannot help but be moved to tears by the narrative of Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. It is a narrative of a ten year old girl, frustrated by having a father who is somewhat elderly compared to …
Continue reading “Atticus Finch she ain’t: the bizarre tragedy of Nicola Gobbo”
I think I was about 15 when I first started reading The Chronicles of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Teenagers have a very limited budget, so I mostly borrowed the books from either the local public library or the school library. I only ever bought one of them, the second book, Dragon Quest, which I was …
Continue reading “Reason and its discontents: The Problem with Anne McCaffrey”
For someone who has never bothered learning to drive (this is actually a very good thing for the safety of the world), I do have quite a thing for the aesthetics of muscle cars. Indeed, if I were to win a very large amount on the lottery, I would buy the old Stan Cash furniture …
On my hallway wall, I have a framed canvas map of Melbourne in 1956, the year we hosted the Olympics, and the year before my mother arrived in Australia. It’s a fascinating map. It is colour coded by municipality, according to the cities and shires which existed prior to the Kennett government’s council amalgamations of …
Where should I start when writing about the end of the world? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut is a good place to begin. You see, in the last decade of the Cold War, the 1980s, I was a teenager. One of my favourite cousins was an English teacher then, and hence influenced a lot of my reading. …
Continue reading “Coronavirus, Ice Nine and the End of the World”
Lost For Words!