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, …
Author Archives: Ernest Zanatta
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 …
What would John Galt do? Ayn Rand and all that.
I went through my Leo Tolstoy binge when I was about 24. I finally bit the bullet and read War And Peace, and then backed it up with Anna Karenina. I must say, whilst War And Peace is both epic on the grand scale and deeply moving closer to home, I think, as a novel, …
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