I was browsing today and saw this display of supposedly trendy clothing featuring Carlton Draught logos. It is by some clothing company called Nina and Pasadena. They use this branding to justify charging $79.95 for a t-shirt.

This sort of over charging for becoming a walking advertisement for a beer brand makes me wonder whether the world has gone made.

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 been drinking with a colleague who was to quickly become my closest friend (still is) at the slightly less feral Nu Hotel (which was our regular watering hole), and we decided to have one more for the road.

He saw some bloke he knew and remarked that he hadn’t seen him around for a while.

“I’ve been in gaol,” was the casual reply.

There also was a young lady, either a barmaid or a dancer, wearing only a g-string, wandering around the floor. I don’t remember too many of the details, as it had been a really crappy day, and I really had needed quite a few drinks more than usual to close off the week.

So anyway, the only part of the Southern Aurora which did not get to meet the business end of a bulldozer was the bottle shop, which is still there today when I visited Dandenong in a misguided fit of nostalgia for my misspent youth. As it was in the same style of architecture as rest of the Southern Aurora, you can get a fair idea of what the Southern Aurora might have looked like from the photo I have placed above.

Needless to say, that whilst there are many demolished pubs around greater Melbourne whom we might lament (the Menzies Hotel in the city being a prime but not exclusive example), the Southern Aurora is not one of them.

What caused me to pause today and take the above photo was the signage on the bottle shop. The top of the pole features the Melbourne Bitter logo, with Melbourne Bitter, Victoria Bitter, Fosters Lager, and Fosters Light Ice all making up the rest of the beers on offer.

The only thing missing from the traditional CUB offerings is Carlton Draught.

And this signage has probably stood there atop the bottle shop for the past 30 years, like a time capsule of what sort of beer was popular in the early 1990s.

Of course, I did not stop to look inside, but I do suspect that these beers are still the ones which are the most popular sold in Dandenong. It does not really seem to me to be the sort of place where craft beer would easily get a toe hold.

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 Doctor Who til all hours of the night. They dream of being astronauts without thinking of the sacrifices real astronauts would make.

Space tourism is a real thing now, with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos overtaking Richard Branson in the pioneering of this field. Within reason, anyone with sufficient wealth can stump up the cash for a ticket to the most expensive amusement park ride in history.

It is a bit like the Concorde’s regular transatlantic flights at Mach 2. You could sit in the comfort of First Class and follow the path first flown by Charles Lindbergh five decades earlier, at a speed first flown by Chuck Yeager three decades earlier.

Space tourism, whilst not so comfortable as Concorde, could make someone imagine that they are going where no man had gone before, not all that many years ago. You can follow brave pilots like Gagarin or Shepherd or Glenn into space.

But following those pioneers does not make one a hero, just a wealthy passenger. I do not think that my former friend realised that, nor that his morbidly obese BMI (somewhere over 50) would probably prevent his riding on anything smaller than a long retired Saturn V moon rocket, nor that he would never have the ready cash, regardless of the fantasy world where he believed so earnestly that he would that he briefly obtained a Jaguar on credit.

It was only last year that I finally listened in its entirely to David Bowie’s classic 1972 album Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, an early archetype of the concept album, themed around a musically gifted alien from space. Such is the miracle of streaming services that I have most albums ever recorded at my finger tips to play through my blue tooth speaker (as Adam Ant would say: The Devil take your stereo and your record collection).

Quite definitely, it was a mind blowing record, one of those examples where the sum (like Aeschylus’ extant Oresteian trilogy – the sole surviving entire trilogy of Greek Tragedies) is greater than the parts.

Last month, one idle evening whilst sipping wine with a friend, I put a similar but inferior album to the test for the first time – Babylon Zoo’s The Boy with the X-ray Eyes. Babylon Zoo are most famed for being a one hit wonder in the mid 1990s with the song Spaceman from that album, after which they sank without a trace.

It occurred to me that Babylon Zoo had a very Ziggy Stardust feel to their music, and indeed when following up on this online found that I was not the first person to say this. Indeed, the past thirty years have had just about all of the few people who have commented (mostly unfavourably) about Babylon Zoo’s debut album have compared it to Ziggy Stardust.

I suppose, just like my former friend who wanted to follow Gagarin and Captain Kirk into space, Babylon Zoo wanted to burst into song on the soundwaves first ridden by Bowie. But at least Babylon Zoo gave us one fun song.

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 imposing Christianity on our Pagan ancestors 1600 years ago. If this graffiti author wanted to offend, he’s a millennium and a half late.

‘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 familiar with all the uniforms as to know what school they were, but as they were co-ed, I assume they were all Violet Crumbles (ie Wesley College) – reading aloud notes on an English text they were studying. It was either Orwell or Huxley, as the one doing the reading struggled so badly to pronounce the word ‘totalitarian’ that I could not but correct him.

And I reflected on what a good time it was to be a teenager in a country like Australia. The recent atrocity of 9/11 was not enough to shake my optimism – after all when I was a teenager, in the 1980s, during the Cold War, we lived under the shadow of the possibility of nuclear war, of what I frequently call ‘ultimate violence’. It coloured our daily lives greatly with a preoccupation that at any moment we could get wiped out if a sudden nuclear war broke out.

Popular culture was laden with the references, and not just dreadful poems in the various high school magazines we published. There was ‘War Games’, the film where a teenage hacker almost triggers Armageddon. ‘The Day After’, which starred Steve Gutenberg around the time he was making a name for himself with the deplorable Police Academy franchise, was a deeply pessimistic film which I saw on my 15th birthday, and which apparently alarmed Ronald Reagan sufficiently as to subtly change his views on the possible use of nuclear weapons. Sting made a song ‘The Russians’ about the possibility of such a war.

So the end of the Cold War, where I remember going to a German Reunification party at a uni friend’s home, brought a great sigh of relief that has lasted me for over three decades.

It was around 1984 at age 15 that I read ‘On The Beach’, Nevil Shute’s late 1950s novel warning about the dangers of nuclear war.

Shute’s novel also served as my introduction to the poetry of TS Eliot, with its quote at the start of the book from The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

     This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

‘On The Beach’ is probably Nevil Shute’s greatest novel, much as it is hard to endure a story which ends with everyone eventually dead. It definitely is his most important, as he wrote to warn the world about the very likely outcome of nuclear war, particularly if Cobalt bombs were to be used.

Cobalt bombs have been mentioned in popular culture since then. One of the original Planet of the Apes films ends with the detonation of a giant Cobalt bomb which wipes out all life.

Sombrely, the Cobalt bomb is a doomsday weapon, something which will create a highly radioactive cobalt isotope with a 5 year half life, which can wipe out all human life across a large area, and then leave that area inhabitable for mere decades.

With the Russians talking about developing a nuclear powered stealth torpedo which can carry a 100 megaton cobalt bomb which will create radioactive tsunamis, I think that my sigh of relief from the end of the Cold War has finally ceased.

Which is probably why it is a prescient time for ‘On The Beach’ to be adapted as a stage play.

Regrettably, it is being performed by the Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney. Presumably, the adaptation sets the story in Sydney, whereas the novel, the 1959 movie, and the 2000 miniseries (the latter was awful), were all set in Melbourne.

Ava Gardner, who starred as Moira in the original movie, was quoted (probably inaccurately) as saying that Melbourne was the right place to make a movie about the end of the world.

The scenes of empty lifeless Melbourne streets at the end of the movie are particularly haunting.

And whilst I welcome the adaptation, as I do any stage or screen revival of the works of Nevil Shute, I do wish that it was set in Melbourne as its author intended.

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 and wanting to learn more about of her untimely passing at an early age, I discovered that the cultural impact of her hit Gloria continues to resound.

In 2019, the NHL team the St Louis Blues was having a very bad season. Then several of their players visited a Philadelphia bar, where during the commercial breaks for an NFL broadcast, the bar would, at the constant demand of the patrons, play Gloria.

When they next played, the St Louis Blues played Gloria in their changing room after they won, and it became their victory anthem for the 2019 season.

They played Gloria often that season – including in a record 11 game winning streak, and when they won the Stanley Cup at the end of the season – their first ever ice hockey championship.

And they sold many St Louis Blues jerseys featuring ‘Brannigan 82’ on them.

As a lover of the underdog sporting team (ie lifelong Western Bulldogs supporter in the AFL and recent adopter of the Cleveland Browns in the NFL), as well as someone who always loved Laura Brannigan and her music in my youth, how could I not choose to now adopt the St Louis Blues as my NHL team?

[After all, ice hockey is very much a sport with an underdog theme to it which would appeal to me. We have the supposed ‘miracle on ice’ (ie the 1980 Winter Olympic gold medal victory of the USA over the USSR), the Mighty Ducks, and (my very favourite) Sean William Scott’s enforcer character in the Goon series of films.]

Go St Louis!

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, the two 50 metre pools were to be removed, leaving the diving pool for the locals.

Can you consider the breath taking expense and waste of building two Olympic standard racing pools as temporary measures in some obscure regional town?

Obviously, the political motive, similar to what a corrupt US southern politician from TV shows like Sheriff Lobo or The Dukes of Hazzard would desire, would be obvious.

Which leaves me wondering. Did Chairman ‘Boss Hogg’ Dan actually intend to hold the 2026 Commonwealth Games, or did he offer it to marginal seats in regional areas as a major pork barrelling exercise?

It appears that he did not intend to actually hold those Games, unless he is so financially incompetent that he could not predict when he signed off on those Game 17 months ago (ie 9 months before an election) that he could not afford to hold such an extravagant spectacle.

In the latter case, it was an extremely financially incompetent decision – the first symptom of a nightmare we will be paying for many years into the future.

In the former case, it is even worse – it is a matter of a highly sophisticated electoral fraud undeserving of an anglophonic democracy.

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 systemic sexual assault, rather than merely serious violations of the persons of those women.

To this point in time, Qatar Airways has failed to compensate or apologise to those women, several of whom are litigating the airline for their involvement in this incident.

I note that the Qatari Government has made a public and unconvincing apology for the conduct of its minions, and insists that the matter is closed, but it has failed to address the issue of compensation, nor to formal apologise to those women.

Yet Qatar Airways, which is owned by the Qatar Government, has the temerity to be seeking to double the number of flights it offers to and from Australia.

The Transport Minister has recently claimed that the Doha Airport incident was not a motivating factor material to the decision to deny this request for further access to Australia to Qatar Airlines.

This is disappointing. Minister Catherine King had a golden opportunity to make a public stand on this issue, and to make it abundantly clear to the Qatari government and their vanity project airline that the abhorrent treatment of Australian citizens in the Doha Airport incident was unacceptable and unforgivable, and that real consequences follow from such conduct.

Instead, our elected representatives have chosen to hide behind pragmatism, when a stand on principle would have been extremely welcome to the vast majority of Australians.

Sadly, such pragmatism is not isolated to our politicians. The CEO of Flight Centre Australia, Graham Turner, spoke out last week about the decision to reject Qatar Airways’ proposal, calling it ridiculous. Obviously commercial considerations play a major role in such publicly stated opinions as his, but would it not have been commercially prudent to make public comments denouncing the conduct of the Qatari government and its airline? It would make customers feel more reassured that Flight Centre (my travel agency of choice) has their back and shares their values.

I will never fly on Qatar Airways. If the Australian government is not willing to ban them from Australia and and large travel agencies like Flight Centre are not willing to stop offering flights on that airline, then the best course of action is for individual consumers to boycott the airline.

If enough of us do so, that will remove Qatar Airways from Australia.

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. I have not been inside for quite a few years, and it has the annoying habit of not opening until 4pm.

I quite like interesting and old school type pubs, and I intend to post more on them in future.

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 blame squarely on Paul Keating, the evil economic rationalist who, as Federal Treasurer, refused to bail out Victoria, and who used his leverage to block the sale of the State Savings Bank of Victoria to the Commonwealth Bank until the Victorian Labor Left were willing to support the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank in exchange.

It was not a great time to live in Victoria, the period from late 1989 through to late 1992. There was a recession and a number of major financial failures, at least two of whom (the Tricontinental merchant bank and VEDC) were due to serious shortcomings in governance by the state government.

The sale of the State Bank (and subsequent disappearance of its brand, subsumed into the Commonwealth Bank) is something which many of us felt deeply. I still miss it.

The sudden announcement today by the technocratic Andrews government that they were abandoning the 2026 Commonwealth Games due to cost overruns is only the tip of an iceberg which is starting to collide with SS Victoria.

The Andrews government, in its commitment to Keynesian policies, has been spending extravagantly for many years on its major infrastructure projects, collectively referred to as The Big Build. Lots of roads, railways and tunnels are either under construction or proposed.

Until very recent months, the Victorian Public Service has been considerably expanded in size and cost, and converted into an apparatus of the Premier’s office.

Small amounts of cash have been splashed out in handouts to the public – such as the annual payment to people who go online and do a half hearted comparison of energy prices to supposedly save on their bills. And there was the subsidy to people who chose to eat out in the city after the plague was aver.

At the same time as all that, he has found the funds to act as the white knight to the Karens at Netball Australia, buying the right to host their grand final for the next few years for a few million dollars. Similarly, the 2026 Commonwealth Games has been touted as a way of increasing tourism to regional centres and provided improved sporting infrastructure.

All of these things cost a lot of money, and there has been no abatement in the spending until this year. The figure of $180 billion dollars (ie $30,000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria) has been raised as the current debt.

This debt requires considerable austerity – both more responsible spending and the sudden recent introduction of higher property taxes which unfairly target those people who choose to own modest investment properties.

The only thing that surprises me about the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games is that they decided to actually make this hard decision, rather than continue on the high spending pathway and make less visible cuts elsewhere.

The implications of the decision to cancel the Commonwealth Games go a lot further than the possibility of tens of millions of dollars in compensation to the Commonwealth Games Federation.

The first implication is that of sovereign risk. When a government decides not to honour its word, it goes much further than the persons or organisations who have struck an agreement with that government – it means that other possible investors and stakeholders will think twice about doing business with that government or indeed operating in that jurisdiction. Because the Andrews government will not honour its word, it can not be trusted, and Victoria will be considered as a far less safe place to do business in than it was before.

The second implication is in the reputational damage to Victoria (and indeed Australia) in relation to prestigious events. Aside from the cancelled Commonwealth Games, Melbourne hosts the Australian F1 Grand Prix, and the Australian Tennis Open. And Chairman Dan’s Labor stablemate in Queensland is going to host the 2032 Olympic Games. The organisers of those events would be getting nervous indeed as a result.

Melbourne does not have the spectacular sights that Sydney has. It relies on being an events city – of being the sporting capital of Australia (and possibly the world) and on hosting other major non-sporting events to attract tourism (eg our highly woke Comedy Festival and the International Film Festival). This reputation has now been seriously shaken by this decision, and could take considerable time to recover.

The final implication that comes to mind is that the Andrews government has promised a lot to regional centres with the circus which is the Commonwealth Games. Supposedly, this is all much needed sporting infrastructure and tourism support for regional areas. Obviously the decision has been made the this is not so important after all.

But all of this, when you think about it, is about the money and about irresponsible behaviour. Spending the state into deep debt, year after year, is going to have consequences, just as it did in the late 1980s. Those consequences are now starting to manifest themselves, in the form of higher taxes and reduced services.

Expect even higher taxes and more reduced services for the foreseeable future. And reduced investment and business activity in Victoria.