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 …
Author Archives: Ernest Zanatta
Support your local vandals…
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, …
Coronavirus can kill you, but so too can cigarettes
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 …
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Atticus Finch she ain’t: the bizarre tragedy of Nicola Gobbo
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 …
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Reason and its discontents: The Problem with Anne McCaffrey
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 …
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Huzzah for Muscle Cars!
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 …
Melbourne – from Marvellous to Megacity
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 …
Coronavirus, Ice Nine and the End of the World
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. …
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Music for the Conservatively Minded (or not) – How not to be a Killjoy
I was doing coffee yesterday with two of my colleagues, and somehow the topic got onto music. One of my colleagues, being a Western Australian by upbringing, once owned a rare busker tape by the dreadlocked John Butler, which he sold for a handsome sum. He also owns two copies of some rare vinyl pressing …
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Why I am a Cleveland Browns Fan…
I know very little about gridiron, that sport which Americans call football, and which seems to be a version of Rugby where they wear helmets and throw the ball forward instead of backward. But I recently decided to adopt an NFL team of my very own, the Cleveland Browns. I discovered them whilst reading Existential …
Lost For Words! 