Tempus Fugit, as Mork from Ork might say. Almost half a lifetime ago, I spent 7 months living in Canberra. Despite being bored and frozen and probably not doing my career any favours from that adventure, I do not regret it for three reasons. The first is making two close friends who are still amongst my closest friends. The second is that living in a strange city (and Canberra is pretty strange) outside of my comfort zone is the sort of experience everyone should have every now and then.

And the third reason was that I learned a lot about wine during that time, which I would not have done so quickly if I had been in my normal haunts. Partly this was from listening to and drinking with a number of colleagues who knew a fair bit about wine. Partly this was from browsing bottle shops and buying a lot of wine in escalating quality from Rosemount Diamond Label Shiraz Cabernet right up to Penfolds Grange (I do not dare open the 1994 vintage which is sitting in the bottom of the esky in the spare room – it is way too valuable to drink). And partly it was because I bought and read a lot of wine books to pass the time, when the only things worth watching on TV at night were Ally McBeal and the AFL.

I still have a few of those wine books on my shelf. The Oz Clarke 1997 Wine Advisor, which I bought on discount (it was outdated by then) and the 19th Edition of Australian Wine Vintages for example. Some of the others I bought then or a few years later I then replaced with updated versions, giving the older versions away to friends who were less methodical about wine. (For example, I only ever bother owning one edition of Halliday or the Penfolds Rewards of Patience.)

But I still have most of the editions of what was commonly called The Penguin Good Australian Wine Guide which I bought annually for many years, until the authorship changed and the new writer took to picking obscure and inaccessible wines which I had not heard of or ever seen in a bottle shop.

I have not seen this wine guide in a long time, and nor have I seen Jeremy Oliver’s wine guide in a while.

Which does get me wondering, as to how many wine guides are widely published in Australia now? 20 years ago, there would have been about 5 or so that I can name off the top of my head, which were published annually or close enough: Jeremy Oliver, Halliday, The Penguin, Langton’s, and Australian Wine Vintages. I don’t think I see any of these, aside from Halliday, in bookstores anymore.

Even a quick peak inside my cover of The Rewards of Patience indicates that it is a 2004, and if I had held onto all my 2004 Penfolds vintages, they would make mighty fine drinking right now.

I was once told by someone who worked in a bookshop that in the suburbs, the main books that sold were cook books (and by extension books about alcohol), vampire romances (eg Anne Rice and now Twilight and who knows what next), and mummy porn (ie 50 Shades of Grey etc). So I cannot see why there would not be a market for more Australian wine guides, particularly ones addressing current vintages.

Of course, I have some tips for whoever would write such a book:

1. Most of your readers are only going to set foot in a Liquorland, BWS, Bottlemart, Thirsty Camel, Cellarbrations, Duncans, or Dan Murphy (are you impressed that I can reel off so many names of common bottle shops so quickly?). Focus on ensuring that at least 50% of your wines are those which are readily available in those shops.
2. Sadly, most wines in common bottle shops are from vintages which are not yet toddlers, ie you are lucky to find vintages older than 2019. Cover these, as most wine which is bought is drank immediately.
3. A lot of people buy from online clubs like Vinomofo or The Wine Collective or Naked Wines these days. (I buy in bulk on discounts from those a lot more than I did.). It would be smart to see what those places are selling.
4. There is some room for including older vintages and more prestigious wines. Some of us who read about wine do have class (sometimes anyway!).
5. Leave out too much detail about wineries and their histories. This is what makes the Halliday almost as heavy as a phone book, and not comfy for me to read whilst laying about on the couch.

And my final suggestion to a potential author is to get cracking. Whilst we flicker in and out of covid caused lockdowns, we need our wine a whole lot more than ever before, and the 2017 edition of Halliday is both too out of date and too cumbersome to guide me.

What the hell does ATAGI stand for anyway? I don’t mean what it is short for (Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation). I mean what it represents and what values drive the experts who sit on this body and tell our political leaders and the rest of us whether or not a vaccine should be taken.

I sit here in my study on a Saturday night during yet another tiresome lockdown. As a Gen Xer, staying home on a cold and rainy Saturday night is pretty normal, although I would like to be able to have a civilised bottle of red with a meal at my local Thai or Vietnamese restaurant down the road, as is my custom.

So, with time on my hands and possibly gifted with a little more ability to express myself in the written form than later generations (ie those who have forgotten the proper uses of the apostrophe), I can sit here and write for a non-existent readership in the manner of Flavius Josephus about whatever is on my mind.

Hence I can tell you what I think about ATAGI and what it stands for.

Firstly, it represents the latest phase in the degeneration of Australian society and public life into technocracy, that is, the rule by experts.

All the people on ATAGI are at the top of their fields in the medical profession, which means that they are even smarter and better qualified than the physicians you normally encounter. This also means that they are probably even insufferable than the grumpy or tactless GP with the awful bedside manner whom you are used to having treat you.

GPs are not always the best communicators, and I doubt the good doctors of ATAGI are any better. But ATAGI has a role, as experts, to advise the government on whether vaccines are safe or not, and if so, to what degree.

Politicians are pretty driven and clever people for the most part, and very good at persuading sufficient members of their own parties and then the public to vote for them. But most of them went to law school, which meant whilst they are very clever indeed, that they did not have to buckle down the way that med students do to get their degrees. There was still time and opportunity for them to party on at the pub or wherever.

As society gets more and more complex, political leaders need to be advised by more and more highly qualified experts on the implementation of policies. Sometimes, it is very hard to understand what the science or mechanics is behind something, and getting the experts to tell you what to do is tempting.

Which is why the batch of technocrats at ATAGI are so appealing to the government. Governments like to be reelected, and they like to have someone to shift the blame to, although the mess around the world in many places is such that some countries are just giving up and appointing experts to tell their parliaments what to do. We are getting to that point here.

Secondly, the ATAGI is about cowardice. This cowardice is short hand for several unappealing qualities.

One is the blame shifting which the politicians are doing with the ATAGI and the vaccine roll out debacle (none of the current crop have the moral courage of a farm boy like Harry Truman, who had no professional education beyond knowing when to tell men to fire a cannon, but which sufficed for when greatness was thrust upon him, and who owned leadership through the quote on his desk ‘The buck stops here’).

Another is the risk aversion which has come from the way that the ATAGI has messaged the risks attached to Astra Zeneca, which has fed into the fears of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists (didn’t they all used to be nutty new age hippy types in the Dandenongs?), and caused even more sensible people to hesitate about getting vaccinated.

I suspect that this risk aversion stems from the fact that doctors all pay high premiums in malpractice insurance, such that they are not always going to know anymore how to take a calculated risk. Medical rocket scientists on the ATAGI are not going to be much different in their conditioning from the somewhat grumpy GP who tut-tuts you for drinking too much – both will be conditioned to be risk averse.

And a third and possibly more appalling part of the cowardice which the ATAGI represents is its prevarication. Whilst Year 12 maths is a prerequisite for entering med school, it does not appear that the understanding of probabilities has remained high in the memories of the members of the ATAGI.

This has probably contributed to their risk aversion. Simple maths is that we have many millions of doses of Astra Zeneca, and very few doses of the Pfizer, and that the infectiousness of strains like Delta or Lambda means that we should not wait many months to try and get everyone vaccinated. Simple maths also means that it is easy to calculate that COVID could at most kill about 520,000 people, whilst dosing everyone with Astra Zeneca would kill about 26 people.

The current wave of COIVD cases means that the ATAGI has yet again equivocally changed its recommendations about Astra Zeneca to suggesting that under 40s (or is it under 50s or under 60s?) ask their GP as to whether they should take the one in a million risk and get the Astra Zeneca dose.

Honourable mention to Dr Jeanette Young, Chief Health Officer for Queensland (and its next Governor), even though she is not on the ATAGI. Her recent public utterances about how she would not want any 18 year old to die from Astra Zeneca are going to do more to ensure that people do not get vaccinated and that some people get very very ill as a result, including young people.

And now to be flippant. Whilst ATAGI has proven to be pretty useless during this plague, the long defunct ATARI of the video game boom of the early 1980s would come in quite handy right now during this latest COVID plague lockdown. I do wish I had an ATARI 2600 games console right now. Shooting space aliens in some classic game like Space Invaders or Galaga or Galaxians or Defender would be very therapeutic.

Saw two kookaburras this morning on the way to the bus stop.

The vaccination rollout in Australia has appeared to me to be a debacle at all levels of government, where the technocrats ruling the states and the Commonwealth have all dropped the ball in various ways.

This was brought home to me particularly this morning when I looked more closely at the letter my elderly mother recently received from the Federal Health Department encouraging her to get vaccinated. Aside from the ineffectual health minister, it had two other signatures at the bottom, and struck me, on reading, as solely self-serving rather than actually giving constructive advice.

There were no links to web addresses where you could easily find local GPs or Chemists offering the COVID vaccine, nor a hotline which you could call.

Which strikes me as being yet another failing in the way that the vaccinations are being administered. After all, an elderly woman with or without limited English is going to have trouble standing in a queue at one of the public vaccination centres, and the ideal solution to find a local GP who (unlike her own) actually is offering the vaccine.

But this is not an isolated failing. Let’s take the Victorian Government’s vaccination hotline. When I called it 7 weeks ago to see whether I could book an appointment (this not being possible via the website), it offered me, after very many minutes of being on hold, the option of being called back. I did not get called back.

When a colleague rang it several weeks later to get his follow up vaccination shot of Pfizer, the script followed by the call centre agent falsely told him to wait a few more weeks in contradiction of the public advice on vaccination turnarounds for Pfizer. As it turned out, the state had run low on Pfizer supplies so it was discouraging people from trying to book appointments.

And then we have the mixed messaging about the risks of Astra Zeneca, especially through the equivocal and vacillating pronouncements by the Prime Minister and his various vaccine advisors (especially the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation). This has served to make people unnecessarily reluctant and hesitant, if not outright scared, about taking the Astra Zeneca vaccine.

Of course, whilst this is a rare marketing failure from ScoMo, it does not hold a candle to the messaging from the highly irresponsible Queensland Premier and her sidekick (and soon to be viceregal overseer) the Chief Health Officer, whose denunciations of the Astra Zeneca virus have verged on the downright tinfoil hat crazy.

Let’s face facts:

1. The sooner everyone is vaccinated, the sooner we are all a lot safer.

2. The risks from Astra Zeneca are very very very remote, particularly when put in the context of the risks from COVID. (So far 3 deaths from 4.5 million doses, compared to about 900 dead from COVID when we have no doses.)

3. Astra Zeneca may have some slightly higher risks (which are still remote) of serious side effects than Pfizer, but we will be waiting a while for enough supplies of Pfizer, whereas Astra Zeneca is easier to make and to store, which means we have it now.

The only intelligent voice in this entire matter is Dr Katie Allen, the Liberal MP for Higgins, who has recently spoken articulately about the comparative risks and shown rational judgement. If it were not that dumping dead weight ministers would be to show weakness and to possibly stir internal instability in the party room, the Prime Minister should dump missing-in-action health minister Greg Hunt and appoint Dr Allen in his place.

Which leads me to ‘Arm Yourself’, the new government vaccine campaign. Who came up with it? When I was first told about it this afternoon, I thought it was a joke by the Betoota Advocate or some similar satirical website.

I think ScoMo needs to channel his inner NSW Tourism Marketeer again, which gave us the ‘Australia: Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ ads with Lara Bingle in a bikini. Only this time, it could be ‘Vaccines” Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ (And I cannot take credit for this suggestion – it was one of my colleagues.)

youtube.com/watch

Even Dorothy knows it…

Let me put on record that I loathe Association Football (otherwise known as Soccer) and consider Australian Rules to be Real Football.

Given that, I do not usually get too excited about soccer tournaments and I do get a spot of malevolent glee when the Socceroos fall flat on their faces at the World Cup every few years.

But, just like with the World Cup 3 years ago, it’s hard for an Anglomorph like me not to get a little caught up in the hype when the Three Lions do really well in a tournament.

After all, with songs like Three Lions and World In Motion, you would have to concede that the English team always has had the best theme songs.

People reading my blog are going to surmise after a while that despite my libertarian convictions, I am pretty conservative on a lot of things, if not downright reactionary.

For example, as a property owner and a ratepayer, it appalls me that mere tenants are able to vote in local government elections. I consider this as ‘representation without taxation’, and I blame this to some extent for the appalling size of my council rates bill.

I also would like to see reform of the state upper house. It needs to return to representing the propertied classes, ie people like me who own their own homes and pay property taxes, rather than the Hoi Polloi. Home owners need constitutional protection from those who might tax the roof over my head out of existence.

Given that I think this way, you would not be surprised that I was quite disappointed when Tony Abbott was forced to back down on the reintroduction of knighthoods under the Order of Australia a few years ago. The Federal Government had abandoned imperial honours on the election of Hawke in 1983 and the last state based knighthoods went out the window with the election in Queensland of a Labor government in 1989.

Of course, I would go further than just conferrals under the Order of Australia. I would like to see knight bachelors awarded, and knighthoods under the Orders of the British Empire, the Bath, and St Michael and St George. Those are the sorts of imperial honours we used to give out.

Which is a way of segueing to my favourite local MP (well, what else can I say given that I put most of the others very low on my ballot), the Hon Bernie Finn, who has represented the Western Melbourne Region in the Victorian Upper House since 2006. He recently celebrated a cumulative total of 20 years in parliament, when you add in the 7 years he spent in the lower house as member for Tullamarine back in the 1990s.

He is more colourful and visible than most upper house MPs (he used to have an office in Sunshine next door to a bar I used to frequent, but this is a mere happy coincidence), and there are people out there who have chronicled his career with more detail than I can:

https://realfreedomnews.com/2021/05/19/bernie-finn-is-bonkers/

I believe that when Mr Finn retires from his seat, either from wearying of representing the 20% of people in the area who voted for him, or forcibly from being denied endorsement by misguided grassroots members of his own party to run for a fifth consecutive term, he requires suitable recognition.

As a precedent, I will cite what happened after his fellow Liberal, Clem Newton-Brown Esquire lost the lower house seat of Prahran several years ago after one term. Mr Newton-Brown was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in the Australia Day Honours for ‘Services to the Victorian Parliament’.

If a backbencher can get awarded the OAM for one single term in the Parliament (and there are many who have not gotten any honours at all), then what should someone get who has served for over twenty years and six terms in total?

I think a knighthood is in order. Of course, not an AK, as they are too prestigious and should be reserved for Governors-General, High Court Justices, and commanders of the defence forces. But a lower order knighthood, like a KBE or perhaps a Knight Bachelor (ie one without membership of a particular order), might be an appropriate recognition for his lengthy service. After all, we have the Newton-Brown precedent to abide by.

I have been reading the somewhat satirical Betoota Advocate a lot lately, which claims to be one of the oldest newspapers in Australia (it actually did not exist until its online edition was introduced a few years ago, in case you are inclined to take it seriously). Hence you might see a resemblance in the style of that masthead’s headlines to what I have used as the title of this post.

Back before the ‘reform’ of the Victorian Legislative Council in time for the 2006 State Election, it was easy to know who all your MPs were. You had your Federal MP (MHR as we used to call them), your State MP (MLA), and the 2 upper house state MPs (whom we called MLCs, and to whom were given the prenominal title of ‘The Honourable’ to mark the fact that the Legislative Council used to represent the Gentry’s interests). [Let’s not mention the 12 senators representing the whole state – that is far too much to remember.]

The MLCs used to be elected to a double term in Parliament, one per election, two in each upper house seat. The upper house seats were called ‘provinces’ and each covered 4 lower house seats. So they could sit and be complacent and colourless for up to 8 years, without being noticed by their constituents.

But there were only two of them, and they were there for a long time, rather than a good time, so you could, if you had more than a passing interest in politics or good citizenship, know who your local MPs all were.

That changed when the 22 Provinces were replaced by 8 Upper House ‘regions’ each covering 11 lower house seats, each with 5 MPs elected by proportional representation.

So much for the lesson in Victorian Constitutional Law.

When you have 5 MPs representing your local upper house area, plus your Federal MP and your lower house state MP, it is quite a lot to remember who all these civic minded individuals are. And because they are only there for 4 years at a time, as well as so many of them, it is very hard to memorise their names or what they do.

A quick look online tells me that my 5 upper house MPs comprise 3 Labor (Kaushalia Vaghela, Cesar Melhem, and Ingrid Stitt), 1 Liberal (Bernie Finn) and 1 Independent (Catherine Cumming).

I will say that I have not heard the names of two of those three Labor MPs before. They do not put anything in my letterbox and are probably busy congratulating themselves on their achievements. Cesar Melhem, on the other hand, has been in the media for a $20,000 fine over breach of rules of the Australian Workers’ Union a couple of years ago, which shows what a fine upstanding representative he is.

As for Bernie Finn, the sole Liberal, I refer you to the following recent link to see all the news unfit to print about this upstanding and devout practising Catholic:

https://realfreedomnews.com/2021/05/19/bernie-finn-is-bonkers/

The final joker in the pack is the former mayor of the City of Maribyrnong, Dr Catherine Cumming (the doctorate is in alternative medicine). She currently sits as an independent, having initially won her seat as a representative of the Deryn Hinch Justice Party in November 2018, and promptly resigning from that party as soon as the poll was declared.

This evening when I checked my letterbox, I found a fridge magnet from the aforementioned upper house MP.

I am delighted by this. None of my other upper house MPs have done anything about sending me fridge magnets (or giving any account of what they have done for the area), but I suppose that they have political parties backing them, and in any event, there are lower house MPs in the area to actually represent it (I think I regularly put newsletters and fridge magnets from Bill Shorten and Ben Carroll in the bin).

Of course, the state election is due in November 2022, and Dr Cumming would like to be re-elected. So now, some two and a half years since she started her term by resigning from the party under whose auspices she got elected, it is time for her to start campaigning.

To get her 16.68% quota to win a second term is going to need a lot of personal name recognition, particularly as one of the reasons she gave for falling out with Hinch was acrimony towards the Upper House numbers Svengali known as the ‘Preference Whisperer’, who has helped minor parties win many upper house seats right around Australia.

In recognition of this, I have not tossed out this fridge magnet like the others. Instead, I have hung it upside down on my fridge, in what is a universally recognised sign of distress.

Last year, I wryly noted in this blog that a future former friend (whose delusional tendencies border on the certifiable) had once caused me to make a spectacularly unsuccessful speculative investment. At that time, I wrote that the director of the company at the heart of that investment had already prepared a shopping list of luxury purchases for when the company took off and made everyone (including, possibly, me, but especially him) rich to varying degrees.

One of those luxuries was to buy a title of nobility from Italy’s former royal family, the House of Savoy.

That would-be noble is apparently dead now, so I will never get the chance to tell him that he was already 80% of a Count in my book, he merely needed to buy a vowel. A minor regret.

But I suppose, in the current context of nomenclature amongst the upper classes, it is fortunate indeed that the British use the title Earl instead of the continental equivalent of Count.

The breaking news that Prince Harry and his wife decided not to allow their son Archie the immediate usage of the Sussex subsidiary title Earl of Dumbarton not because they wanted him to have a normal life (well, as normal as you can have with the House of Windsor on one side, and a horde of grasping vulgarians from a trailer park on the other), but because that title contained the word ‘Dumb’ in it appears even more salient to me given my above brush with would-be nobility.

After all, imagine what a Count of Dumbarton would get called at prep school….

Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge supporter of the current constitutional monarchy in Australia and the rest of the former British Empire (may the sun never set on it!). In my mother’s eyes, Prince Harry, even now, can do no wrong. The 2019 Prince Harry calendar I bought her for a Christmas present still hangs on her wall in its plastic wrapping because it is too valuable to use.

But the delusions and pretensions and mixed messages emanating from the Sussex’s Californian Court in Self-Imposed Exile are starting to wear thin with me.

On the one hand, we are told that the Sussexes want to live a life away from the toxic media glare of the British press. And on the other, they are making a much larger media spectacle of themselves through their interviews with people such as Oprah, their special media deals (of course those based on their unique talents, rather than the fraying affiliation with the other descendants of William The Conqueror), and their pattern of leaking their side of their supposedly confidential interactions with Prince Harry’s family to their favourite royal correspondents, such as the oddly named Omid Scobie.

I use the word ‘correspondent’ rather than ‘journalist’ intentionally here, as I cannot consider someone who uncritically reports whatever crumbs are handed to them, regardless of whether they are true or contradicted by evidence to the contrary, as meriting the title ‘journalist’. Omid Scobie may have now become undeservedly rich on writing ‘Finding Freedom’ on behalf of the Sussexes, rather than in attempting other works of Science Fiction, but he has not earned the title of journalist, although perhaps we could confer on him the sort of variation on Count of Dumbarton which the Duchess of Sussex’s fecund imagination could easily come up with.

A number of apparently awful people on the Markle side of the family have tried to cash in on their family’s leading light’s rise to fame. The half-sister whose memoir is titled ‘The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister – Volume One’ springs to mind. Less well known is the TV producer ex-husband, Trevor Engelsson, who was working on trying to get a TV show off the ground about a man whose wife leaves him for a British prince. Thomas Markle, to his credit, seems to be playing Falstaff in this drama without any overt profit motive.

However, with every multi-million dollar deal, every mixed message about abandoning the privileges that come from being part of the Windsors, and every inherent contradiction about why their children do not have titles and whether or not or why they want or don’t want them to have them (FYI Lilibet, as daughter of a Duke, is entitled to be called Lady, and any further sons that may come along are entitled to the courtesy title Lord), the Meghan Markle show is starting to resemble not so much a Court in Exile as a circus, complete with tightrope walkers galore and a few clowns. I am just not too sure who is the ring master.

I once almost was a neighbour of the great Australian poet John Shaw Neilson. For the first seven years of my life, I lived in Gordon Street Footscray, number 156 to be precise, in a neighbourhood which was gobbled up in 1976 by the Footscray Hospital when the brutalist concrete psychiatric facility was constructed behind our homes.

The brutalist concrete building still stands there, ominously empty for many years, and the main entrance to the Footscray Hospital now runs through what was my childhood home.

To the south side of that entrance, there is a historical marker erected in the early 1990s, indicating that from 1927 to 1941, Footscray poet John Shaw Neilson lived at number 152 Gordon Street.

So I am separated by two doors and 28 years from being a neighbour with John Shaw Neilson.

I remember the family that lived there. Robert, the son, was a year older than me and we would play together in the muddy dunny can lane behind our homes. My parents would call the father of that family ‘professore’ because Italians call any teacher with a degree ‘professore’ (he actually was a phys. ed. teacher), just like Italians call anyone with a degree ‘dottore’ (with a small ‘d’).

Footscray has very few famous writers of its own aside from John Shaw Neilson. The playwright Ray Lawler, who wrote ‘Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’, was originally from Footscray, although he has long since left and hopefully is still alive, having turned 100 last month. We still claim the memoirist A.B. Facey as one of our own, and have named a laneway in Footscray West or Maidstone after him, despite his having moved to Western Australia as a child.

And then there is Ern Malley, who mentioned Footscray in two of his poems, and whom we might claim as one of our own except that he was (a) originally from Sydney, (b) living in a room in South Melbourne, and, most importantly (c) non-existent.

Ern Malley was the big literary hoax of the Australian literati of the mid 1940s, the fictional creation of two bored Sydney Uni graduates serving in Melbourne in the Army, which discredited the avant gard Angry Penguins with a hailstorm of derision.

But some, like me, would argue that Ern Malley’s talent as a poet still existed, even if he never did.

Take the following snippets from the purported Malley poem Documentary Film:

London:

Samson that great city, his anatomy on fire

Grasping with gnarled hands at the mad wasps

Yet while his bearded rage survives contriving

An entelechy of clouds and trumpets.

There have been interpolations, false syndromes

Like a river through the hand

Such deliberate suppressions of crisis as

Footscray:

The slant sun now descending

Upon the montage of the desecrate womb

Opened like a drain

The young men aspire

Like departing souls from leaking roofs

And fractured imploring windows to

(All must be synchronized, the jagged

Quartz of vision with the asphalt of human speech)

And what about the poignant words in Petit Testament, where Ern laments:

Where I have lived

The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach

Inhabits the crack and the careful spider

Spins his aphorisms in the corner.

I have heard them shout in the streets

The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich

And in the magazines I have read

The Popular Front-to-Back.

But where I have lived

Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray

Guernica is the ticking of the clock

The nightmare has become real, not as belief

But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

Ern Malley’s two ghost writers did what no other writers have done – they anchored the obscure industrial town of Footscray, then on the edges of the Melbourne metropolis, to the rest of the world, to great cities like London, and to major contemporary tragedies like Guernica.

‘Twere he was real.

Ern Malley was the first great hoax of Australian literature. We had to wait some 50 years for the next one, the literary prize winning sensation that was The Hand That Signed The Paper, a novel about an elderly Ukrainian living in Brisbane who had been identified as a Nazi war criminal.

The author was a 23 year old Queenslander of Ukrainian origin, Helen Demidenko, which lent great authenticity to this dark and confronting story.

Except that her real name was Helen Darville. She was about as Ukrainian as Ern Malley was.

Perhaps the Latin quoted on the dedication page was a sly hint: Vox et praeterea nihil – ‘voice and nothing more’, which we would probably translate less literally as ‘sound without substance’.

I am not sure that it stands the test of time as a great literary work, 27 years after publication and 26 years after the exposure of the hoax. But for a 23 year old to write something like that took both great talent as a writer and great imagination, and perhaps her accomplishment was all the greater because she was not of Ukrainian background and could not draw on any cultural capital from such origins.

Perhaps. But despite that, the lack of authenticity has been held against both the book and the author and it cannot be found in bookstores anymore, either under the name Demidenko or Darville. It has been cancelled, like its author.

I will detour for a moment away from overt or apparent hoaxes to mention Nino Culotta, the sometime pen name for John O’Grady, who was writing from the perspective of a Northern Italian migrant making his way in Australia in the 1950s and 60s. As Nino says in the opening to Cop This Lot, the first sequel to the beloved classic They’re a Weird Mob:

“Who the hell’s Nino Culotta? You will say this is an easy question to answer. Nino Culotta is John Patrick O’Grady. So I will ask another question. Who the hell is John Patrick O’Grady? And how can he be Nino Culotta when not even I, Nino Culotta, am Nino Culotta?

“It is true that my name is Nino, which comes from Giovannino, which comes from Giovanni. But it is not true that my name is Culotta. When I wrote the story of my troubles in Australia, I used the name Culotta so that Australians and Meridionali would not throw stones through my windows. I hope they are not throwing stones through this O’Grady’s windows.”

He does go on to say:

“I think that perhaps this John Patrick O’Grady is one of the Meridionali who is only pretending to be an Irishman so he can say he is me.”

He concludes:

“I would like to meet John Patrick O’Grady and bump him on the head.”

Which brings me to Dark Emu and its author, the purportedly indigenous Bruce Pascoe. This book is not fiction and it is not poetry. It is meant to be a history book re-examining the nature of indigenous civilisation in Australia pre 1788. It claims that there was more sophisticated agriculture and building construction prior to 1788 than commonly believed.

The conservative magazine Quadrant has, for some time, expressed considerable doubt about the authenticity of the claims in Dark Emu, and of the ancestry of its author, to the point where the Quadrant website prominently promotes a book published in 2019 rebutting Dark Emu, Bitter Harvest by Peter O’Brian.

[News commentator Andrew Bolt has also weighed into this discussion for quite some time, but as I find him dogmatic and unconvincing on most things, I do not pay attention to what he says.]

Now two academics, Peter Sutton (an anthropologist) and Keryn Walshe (an archaeologist) have weighed into the discussion with the publication of their book – Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. They have raised concerns with the nature of the research, the lack of sources for some of the material, and claim that it distorts and exaggerates many points, ignoring information which does not support the author’s opinions.

Some 7 years after it’s initial publication, it appears that Dark Emu may be exposed as somewhat of a hoax, given that the newly published academic rebuttal is gaining attention and discussion in the way that Bitter Harvest has not.

The question arises as to whether this matters? Is Dark Emu any different from our various literary hoaxes of the past century?

In the case of Ern Malley, much as I wish he were a real person writing about Footscray, the main significance was to discredit a Sydney literary movement which was essentially a one-man band.

The Helen Demidenko business, aside from causing various public intellectuals to turn viciously on the judges who had awarded her literary prizes, caused us to be denied further novels by someone who was, essentially, a talented and imaginative writer.

As for John O’Grady’s Italian avatar Nino Culotta, all that happened was that migrants were made to feel more accepted in Australia, and we all got to enjoy his books and the fantastic movie which was made of it.

History is a different matter entirely from literature. History is essentially the record of how humanity has developed since we started writing on cave walls (or were created by God 6000 years ago if you prefer). The writing and rewriting of History is a serious business, as it involves a deeper engagement with human nature and the past, and an attempt to arrive at the truth. History is often not what happened, but what we believe happened. And that is where authenticity will matter far more than in the expression of artistic license.

I think, when I was younger, I had a rather blindly Manichaen view of the world (ie good versus evil and all that). Hopefully, I have outgrown such simplistic views as I have accumulated life experience.

Perhaps a remnant of that puerile Manichaenism is my love for villains. I greatly enjoy the Shakespearean villains (Iago, Richard III and Macbeth are my favourites) and of course the Bond super villains. You probably get that from reading my blog for long enough.

As your typical Victorian in the early 1980s, I was very resistant to the growth of the Victorian Football League into other cities and states. I wanted it to stay at the 12 Victorian teams that it had been since 1925. That the hugely mismanaged South Melbourne Football Club had been strong armed into moving to Sydney in order to survive was not something I or other Melbournians were prepared to accept.

And then the cash strapped Sydney Swans, as they now were, could no longer survive as a public club, but were to be sold off to a private owner. To me, this appeared to be an awful act of villainy by the VFL.

And the biggest villain of the whole sorry saga to the teenage version of yours truly was the fellow who was so ostentatious as to offer to buy the Sydney Swans, Dr Geoffrey Edelsten, who was some sort of medical entrepreneur (ie he figured out a way to get very rich very quickly on the newly introduced medicare bulk billing).

The ‘pink doctor’ as he was then called, lived a highly flamboyant life. He had a pink limo, a pink helicopter, and a trophy wife 20 years younger than himself. Myself and my teenage friends suspected that the wife was what we would now call a ‘beard’ to cover up for a gay lifestyle. [His subsequent history with two further and more showy wives has shown me to be probably wrong in this suspicion – he was a sleazy straight man in early middle age who moved onto be a sleazy straight man in his senior years, one with probably very shallow judgment in his choice of life partners.]

But it did seem very sinister to me the way that he went and bulldozed through the sentiments of the remaining Swans supporters and took control of the club. I wonder if he would have behaved that way if someone similar did likewise to Carlton, the club he really barracked for?

He did however, during his brief tenure of the ownership of the Sydney Swans, do some good for the promotion of Australian rules Football in Sydney. He injected money into attracting some stars and a decent coach and even got a cheerleader squad of pom-pom girls (sadly only for home games).

But then it all fell apart as his links to various crime figures came out, and he ended up spending some time in gaol for something or other nefarious.

So, by 1990, you might think that the comet of self-promotion that was Geoffrey Edelsten had disappeared into the void, never to appear again.

Wrong!

He was to reappear, unchastened, with a new fortune (which he lost yet again) and with a couple of colourful new wives, perhaps to match the colourful suits he would wear at high society events.

Whilst we in Australia have never had a show like Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I believe that Brynne, Mrs Edelsten number 2, did have some sort of show for quite some time on pay TV here.

I have occasionally reflected on this blog about how crassness is when rich people behave badly (probably vulgarly is a better description). And there always was something fascinatingly crass and vulgar about the conspicuous consumption on display when Dr Edelston was around, wife in tow.

For a very clever man who had both medicine and law degrees, and who had been able to make several fortunes, I do something wonder at how he was able to lose those fortunes on appallingly bad investments, to the point where he brazenly claimed that he had to rely on his elderly mother in a nursing home to fund his lifestyle (now that was a bit of what New Yorkers would call Chutzpah), as she did not want him to be sad (I think he had been smart enough to make sure he bankrupt proofed himself with a trust fund in mum’s name).

I suppose that the Achilles Heal to Dr Edelsten was not his cleverness, but his lack of a sense of shame and an urgent wish to be loved, and how he confused love with the attention of some beautiful women and regular appearances in the society pages. To achieve all that attention and those headlines, he was prepared to make some appallingly bad investments, starting with the Sydney Swans in 1985 and then continuing a long time later with at least one local film company – appearing at a movie premiere would be a very costly ticket.

I no longer think that Dr Edelsten was a villain. I think, a bit like Timon of Athens in the Shakespeare tragedy, he was a more tragic figure than that, more Quixotic clown than hero, and apparently abandoned Timon-like by his supposed friends when the money mostly ran out. And I will miss him and his public quest to party hard for as long as he could.