You can probably surmise that I am a fan of Tolkien.

Nature-wise, 2020 has been a good year for sighting native animals in my street. I saw a kookaburra across the road in August, and in autumn I sighted an owl in my gum tree on two separate nights. There have been various sightings of marbled geckos, mostly around the BBQ.

And on the weekend, I spotted a lizard, probably a blue tongue, darting into the pile of wood propped up against one side of my house (a recently dismantled fence which I am keeping for BBQ fuel).

It is gratifying that, even as suburbia grows further and further out, there are still native animals in the confines of my backyard.

Is it too much to wish for a koala to take up residence in my gum tree?

During the current trade crisis with Communist China, I have been reading a lot about Chinese ownership of various Australian interests.

Aside from wineries (an issue very close to my heart), Chinese Communist interests own Ansell, Swisse, Bellamys, Altinta Energy, and Energy Australia.

Landbridge, a Chinese company closely aligned to the communist regime, has a 99 year lease on the Port of Darwin. This was approved in 2015 by then cabinet minister the Hon. Andrew Robb, much to the chagrin of our friends and allies, the Americans. A year later, Mr Robb, in retiring from politics, accepted a $880,000 per year consultancy with Landbridge immediately upon his departure from Federal Parliament.

He resigned from this consultancy in February 2019, just as laws were being tightened on lobbying and foreign interests.

But in being reminded of this ‘consultancy’ and the circumstances under which it was entered into today, I cannot help but wonder about some of our elected officials and what their motives are. It is a bad look, and casts doubt on the probity of the process which led, a year before the consultancy, to a decision potentially prejudicial to our national security being made.

Our politicians are, compared to the rest of the population, generously paid. They are also given generous provision for their retirement. All we really expect that they should be honest and act in the best interests of the nation. There should be limits on their ability to profit in their retirements from their political careers in ways which could benefit foreign interests.

Let me start by saying that I like the wines made at Kilikanoon. A few years ago, I had a half dozen wines delivered to me by the then Wine Society (a cooperative which tries to save money for its members by bulk buying wines at deep discounts to the recommended retail price and on selling at cost to its members).

The Kilikanoon wines in that box were a bit unusual, in that they were made from French grapes by Kilikanoon. But I liked them, and I was happy that I did not pay full price for them.

The escalating trade crisis which Communist China has inflicted on most Australian exports in recent wines has led to calls to boycott Chinese products, and most recently a list of 41 Australian wineries has circulated in the past week which are apparently owned by Chinese interests. The suggestion is that Australians should boycott those wineries.

I think it is important, when thinking about boycotting anything, as to whether you are hurting yourself, or people whom you do not want to hurt by participating in a boycott.

After all, Communist China is not doing itself any favours by placing bans on Australian coal, meat, wine or barley, to just name a few products. Their main other source of coal is Mongolia, and there has been disruption to their industry from switching Australian coal off. Similarly Chinese beer, minus Australian barley, is going to be a whole lot more expensive.

And refusing to accept Australian meat and wine is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. Why would you deny yourself such great quality food and drink?

Of course, the Communist regime which rules China does not care about Chinese people per se. The Great Leap Forward, as even Homer Simpson knows, killed perhaps 60 million people.

Before boycotting those 41 wineries which are purportedly Chinese owned, we should think about a few things.

One is that a lot of Australians are employed by such wineries, and that their continued viability is important for preserving those jobs.

Another is that wineries in a lot of regions are interdependent to some degree, as fostering the local wine tourism. Kill off one winery, or perhaps three or four in an emerging wine region, and the cellar door sales for all might plummet as wine tours become less viable. That can have knock on effects on hotels, cafes, restaurants and niche retail in small towns.

And a third is that if someone happens to be ethnically Chinese, or even born in mainland China, but now an Australian citizen committed to their new country and to making a life here, they should be treated the same as any other Australian. After all, I think anyone in their right mind would rather live in Australia than in a highly polluted communist dictatorship.

So boycotting Chinese owned Australian wineries becomes a much more complex issue than would appear at first. The problem becomes more one as to whether we can identify wineries owned by individuals and entities closely connected with or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime, and if so, what would be the local economic impacts of having those wineries suffer from a boycott?

As an aside, I have seen the list of 41 wineries, and I must say, there are only five which I know anything about. Aside from Kilikanoon, there is Burge Family Wines (which does not mention Chinese ownership on its website, and is a separate entity from the Grant Burge Wines of which I am very fond), Chateau Yaldara, Ferngrove, and Cimicky Wines (a friend of mine is a huge fan of the latter).

This does suggest, when you look at the various giants who own most of the wine industry in Australia (I do own 1000 Treasury Wine Estate shares, so I do have a dog in this fight), that Chinese interests are pretty little.

But that is not to say that Australian wine exporters are not going to suffer. Perhaps it is our patriotic duty to redouble our purchases of Penfolds wines now that China does not want them (and perhaps Treasury can lower the price of Bin 28 or Bin 389 to something more reasonable). We drink a lot of domestic wine already – maybe we should become better informed as to who owns the various labels of which we are so fond before we buy them.

I would hope that there is a silver lining, that the wine exporters who have been shipping premium beverage to China focus instead on our local market, and lower their price to something which makes it better value for money.

As for Kilikanoon? Chinese owned or not, if one of the wine discounters I regularly buy from phones me and offers me a case of their wines at a deep discount to the regular recommended retail price, who am I to say no?

A couple of years ago, in an unexpected display of Walkey Award-worthy investigative journalism, the writers of gossip magazine New Idea (commonly called ‘No Idea’ by those who do not read it) ended the political career of National Party MP Andrew Broad.

Mr Broad, it transpired, had been trying to pick up women (whilst married) on a sugar baby website. One of those women decided, given that she had not profited from meeting him, to sell her story to New Idea.

That is probably the most truthful and accurate piece of reporting printed in New Idea in recent times. But it did meet the criterion of tittilating gossip, which is what the readers (if you can call them that) of New Idea and similar magazines buy it for.

Which segues me to the title of this post. Jennifer Aniston is one of the long standing cover girls of these gossip magazines, given her beauty, succession of handsome boyfriends and husbands, and the general drama of her personal life (which would delight the readership as they indulge in a spot of schadenfreude). For a long while, New Idea would run cover stories announcing either her pregnancy or (after she reached an age where this was no longer likely) her adoption plans.

If half of the reports about Jennifer Aniston’s supposed pregnancy were true, she indeed would have as many children as the proverbial old woman who lived in a shoe.

What has caused me to go on this rant about gossip magazines this morning (at a time when Australian Army war crimes and the activities of communist China are far more pressing), is that last week’s cover story for New Idea combined the mix of editorial malice and superficiality which is innate to the gossip magazines.

The cover featured a picture of the former Home and Away starlet known then as Bec Cartwright and now as Bec Hewitt, wife of a former leading tennis champion. The heading to the story was ‘Dumped’.

Of course, it did not relate to what first comes to mind (ie the end of the Hewitt marriage), but rather to something to do with Bec Hewitt’s now somewhat superfluous acting career.

Cover stories featuring the insinuation that the long married Hewitts have broken up are one of the staples of New Idea, along with Jennifer Aniston’s personal life and the supposed activities of various younger Royals. You can see why – rich, good looking, famous. The bored housewife pushing her trolley down the supermarket aisle is going to get her fix of schadenfreude from the cover story, and buy the gossip magazine.

I am not sure how long this has generally been the formula followed by gossip magazines, but it does offend me for several reasons. One is the blatant dishonesty of the cover stories. Another is that these stories are, aside from untrue, pretty shallow. But the most serious is that they represent a degree of thinly veiled malice.

Over the past few years, just about all of the so called Lads’ Magazines such as FHM, Ralph, Loaded and Zoo have closed down. They were accused of promoting ‘rape culture’. At the very least, they were sexist and silly, focusing on images of artificially big breasted young women, alcohol abuse, fast cars and other toys for boys. The public outgrew those sorts of silly publications.

Is it not time that the public outgrew New Idea and Women’s Day? I wish it were so.

Have you ever seen a real dead body? Relatively few people do, and hopefully very rarely. I have only three times – just after my father died, at the open casket rosary reading for an uncle, and at an open casket funeral for the father of a close colleague. It is not something you really want to see, and you should never trivialise it, as the body is all that is left of someone who in life was loved by others.

About two or three years ago, an exhibition toured Australia which was called ‘Real Bodies’. It featured the corpses of various dead people, stripped down to their muscles and organs, and preserved using a process called ‘plasticisation’ or some such. These bodies were often posed in such a way as if they were undertaking actions in real life, like running or kicking a soccer ball. I was sickened to the stomach when I read of it.

These bodies all originated from Communist China, and they all seemed to be of young people. Young people are statistically less likely to die of natural causes, which makes me wonder how exactly these bodies were sourced. I have grave suspicions that, in a country where involuntary organ transplants occur from dissidents and political prisoners, those bodies were the remnants of lives which had been violently cut short by the regime.

Definitely not something to view for one’s own amusement.

I was thinking of this exhibition this week when I was reading about the Chinese government’s inflammatory tweet about Australian war crimes, featuring a doctored photo.

As I have written recently in this blog, I am appalled by the revelation that some of our troops have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

But there is a big difference between those war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed in Communist China. Australian war crimes have been committed by individuals and units in violation of our laws, and where the only blame that can be laid at the feet of the Australian nation is that of a failure of leadership in the defence forces, rather than a condoning of such atrocities. These have not been covered up. They have been investigated and prosecutions are to follow. People will be held accountable.

The Communist Chinese state is totally different. Right now, aside from its involuntary organ donation program and its provision of freshly slain corpses for museum exhibits that trivialise the lives of those who have died, it continues to repress its Uyghur minority, with millions detained in what could be best described as concentration camps. It continues to repress the formerly independent nation of Tibet. It constantly ignores international law.

That the Communist Chinese state behaves in this way is not surprising – they are after all a totalitarian dictatorship which has, over its 70 year history, been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of their own people. The free people of Taiwan and the formerly free people of Hong Kong have great reason to be anxious, as they are the first at threat from this tyranny after the people on the mainland.

And we need to remember that there is a very big moral difference between our own nation and Communist China, for all that those inflammatory twitter images seek to present Australia as worse than they are. The Commonwealth of Australia does not condone war crimes or crimes against humanity by its agents. It punishes those who commit such crimes. The Peoples Republic of China, on the other hand, has a policy of committing crimes against humanity against its own people. That is a big difference.

Australians are not always good at picking their folk heroes. Ned Kelly is still seen by many, and not just by the bogan element, as a rebel against oppressive authority, rather than as a petty criminal from a family of petty criminals who turned into a cold blooded murderer and hostage taker.

Similarly, Breaker Morant, executed during the Boer War for murder, has been seen by many as a martyr and a scapegoat for the failings of British imperialism. Few look at the details of what he did, and what his legal defence was.

The accusations on which Morant was charged included the summary execution of a wounded prisoner of war, four other prisoners of war, and of the killing of at least four civilians. His defence did not centre on his innocence of the guilty deed, but that he was following orders to ‘take no prisoners’ issued by Lord Kitchener.

This defence, some five decades later, would become infamous as the Nuremberg Defence.

The trial of Breaker Morant and several of his fellow officers, for what effectively were war crimes, is one of the few times that any Australians have been accused and held to account for such abhorrent conduct. That he has, despite his deeds, been seen since that time as a scapegoat and a martyr rather than as a war criminal is indicative that there is a lesson in this episode that we have not learned.

This is a particularly salient point this week, on the release of the Brereton Report into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan which has found that at least 39 civilians or prisoners have been murdered by Australian special forces troops, and recommended that criminal charges be brought against 19 soldiers.

How could this happen? Australia has a great affection for its defence forces, and for the tradition of citizen soldiers who have volunteered for duty in defence of the nation in two world wars, a tradition which makes up a great part of the foundation history of the Australian nation. Our firm belief is that our soldiers fight fair, despite the brutality of war, and that we protect civilians.

When did we stop being the good guys?

The Brereton Report does not come as a major surprise. In recent years, various journalists have run stories, based on allegations made by former soldiers present, of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by various soldiers. One of those, the VC winner Ben Roberts-Smith, has taken court action for defamation against the Fairfax press on allegations made against him. He has in the past day announced that he has put his medals up as collateral to fund his legal defence, coming forward as one of the men likely to face charges as a result of this report.

There appear to have been some very significant shifts in culture within the special forces, as well as some serious failings in leadership that have led to this situation. Whilst patrol leaders (ie NCOs) appear to have been the ring leaders in the actual perpetration of those war crimes, such activities do not occur in a vacuum. The leadership of special forces, as anywhere else in the Army, lies with commissioned officers. What were squadron and regimental commanders doing whilst SAS patrols were systemically committing acts against unarmed civilians or helpless prisoners? At the very least, they were not sending the right messages, or setting the right tone, for the culture and the behavioural expectations of their units.

More worryingly perhaps, many of these former special forces officers have since progressed into the higher levels of command in the Army. Whilst they are not accused of complicity in war crimes, the failings in their leadership of the special forces is something for which they need to be held to account professionally.

This is perhaps where the issue of Breaker Morant comes right back at us. He committed war crimes, and the complicity of his senior officers, including Lord Kitchener, was never established, despite his attempt to argue that he was simply following orders. Whilst it goes without saying that officers of the Australian Army would never, in this day and age, give such unlawful orders, the failure of their leadership to prevent such behaviour from occurring, or to take action on it much sooner than has been the case, is a matter of grave concern. Whilst it is unlikely, given the findings of the Brereton Report do not accuse any officers of misconduct, that any unit commanders are going to face court over the actions of their subordinates, there is a need to admonish those commanders for those failings in leadership.

Maybe it is time that the Defence Forces stop valuing and rewarding service in the SAS so highly amongst its officers. Leadership of the Defence Forces needs to fall on the shoulders of those officers who are capable of leading in an honourable way, and of inspiring their troops to behave honourably, not upon those who turn a blind eye or deaf ear to a toxic culture.

I lost $50 last week. I bet with one of my friends that Trump would win the presidential election. The ‘enthusiasm gap’ between him and Biden (ie the number of crazy-scary people who would go to rallies to support Trump as compared to Biden), as well as the recent proof that opinion polls are about as good as calculating election results as a toss of a coin, convinced me that Trump was going to win.

And until his petulant display since the election result has clearly been in, I would say that his performance as president has not been, despite his perpetual tendency to behave like a 14 year old rather than a 74 year old, not too bad.

Now of course, the crassness (which readers of this blog would know I define as ‘rich people behaving badly’), mendaciousness, and general lack of dignity of his behaviour has me thinking that, despite my very conservative inclinations, Trump leaving the White House in 70 odd days time might be a good thing.

However, America has been through worse presidential election crises. 2020 is a ‘fake’ crisis, and even the one which people still might remember, the contested ballot in 2000 in Florida, was pretty much a storm in a tea cup, easily resolved.

For real crises, let’s look at 1800 for starters, when the villain of the musical Hamilton almost became president due to tying with his running mate, Thomas Jefferson. That was when the electoral college was not popularly elected in each state. Vice President Aaron Burr has always captured my imagination as the most interesting of America’s maverick senior statesmen.

Now of course, Trump probably is in the process of surpassing him.

Or let’s remember 1824. The election was split closely enough that it fell into the House of Representatives where Anthony Hopkins lookalike (remember Amistad) John Quincey Adams was elected president over Andrew Jackson.

[Adams fils might not have been the greatest of presidents, but he was a great man, and more importantly, a very decent man, one who spent his whole life, including a career in the House of Representatives after his presidency, defending individual liberty and opposing slavery.]

And there there is the Compromise of 1877, under which the contested election of 1876 was decided in a shady deal, where Republican Rutherford Hayes [you might remember he was mentioned in The Simpsons in the ‘We are the mediocre presidents’ song] was accepted as president by the House Democrats in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former confederacy. And so civil rights in the southern states was set back 80 years or so.

American democracy has always had its shaky moments, and this is an important thing to remember (Abraham Lincoln got elected despite not even being on the ballot as an option in most of the southern states, which his opponent Douglass saw as a matter of concern which caused him to campaign even harder there in vain in order to try to preserve the legitimacy of the system). I am a student of American history, and I know it better than most Americans do (I say so without any trace of arrogance, but a tinge of concern, being an outsider looking in).

[As a footnote – you would remember from such classic 1970s TV shows as The Dukes of Hazzard and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo that law enforcement and civic leadership in the rural south at least has been seen as a corrupt joke by Hollywood, although that has ignored the real problems in the great metropolises.]

I expect that America will get through the next 70 days OK, and that it will then seek to work on building a new aspect to the always changing consensus which keeps it going, but which is always at risk of falling over. What it needs to realise is that there is a problem with the Antifa and other violent illegal movements of the left, as much as there is of the Trumpist populist chauvinists of the right, and that there is a much bigger institutional problem (of which Biden as a lawmaker has long been a part) where a very large proportion of the population is unnecessarily criminalised and incarcerated.

America is not communist China. But it does need to stop imprisoning people severely and potentially unjustly, and it needs to stop militarising its police forces. Maybe then it can really become the Land of the Free that it sings that it is.

I have three hardback editions of the Complete Works Of Shakespeare – two identical (aside from the dust cover) from my teenage years (one was a present for my 14th birthday, and one was an academic prize at the end of year 10), and a nice leather-bound one I was given more recently for my 50th. All three have sentimental value, and have pride of place in the bookcase where I keep my books by and about the Bard.

But the fonts in those are rather small, so they are more for show than for reading. When, as I still do from time to time, I read Shakespeare, I prefer to reach for one of the paperbacks I have for each individual play.

However, at age 14, with all the hubris and naivety of a teenager, I did set out briefly to try and read all the plays, and to do so from my Complete Works volume. I was twice that age, when, with access to individual paperback editions and a much better appreciation for the beauty of the language, I finally did read all the plays.

Being methodical, I decided to start at the beginning of the volume. The Tempest being the first play in that version of the Complete Works, I read it, then skipped to Romeo and Juliet, and then gave up on the rest. Hence, The Tempest is one of the plays, being the first one that I ever read, to which I have a sentimental attachment (the others being: Macbeth, which we studied in Year 11 English; Henry V, which I saw in the cinemas at age 20, The Taming of the Shrew which is the first I saw performed live, and King Lear, which, when I saw it at age 36, taught me with its tragic pathos that live theatre done well has something more to it than words on a page).

Age 14 is also when, coincidentally, I read Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, which takes its name from a quote in The Tempest, the moment when the heroine, Miranda, exclaims: ‘O Brave New World that hath such creatures in it’.

Sadly, 14 year olds are rarely able, except literally, to put two and two together, and I did not really get the subtext of Aldous Huxley’s novel until much much later. [Nor did I understand then, despite being bilingual, that the word ‘brave’ in Shakespeare has a meaning closer to that of ‘bravo’ in Italian, meaning good or great or generally awesome, rather than courageous.]

The recently streamed and now cancelled TV series Brave New World, based loosely on Huxley’s novel, has provoked my thoughts to turn back to Huxley and his defining work for the first time in years.

There is much more that Brave New World and The Tempest have in common than just a quote, and that is what I feel like unpacking tonight.

The Tempest is set on an island off the coast of Italy, where the exiled sorcerer Prospero lives with his daughter Miranda, his enslaved monster Calliban, and the ethereal spirit Ariel. Miranda, having been brought to the island as an infant, has no knowledge of other people and the world outside the island. So imagine her delight when she meets the dashing Ferdinand and has the prospect of leaving the Island for the whole wide world.

So imagine what if Miranda lived happily never after? That is the retelling which Huxley offers us in Brave New World.

Instead of Miranda, the protagonist is John the Savage, born and raised on a reservation outside of the confines of the dominant civilisation in the novel. The world outside the reservation is totalitarian, where sexual promiscuity and recreational drug use are mandatory, monogamy is forbidden, and families are non-existent. Everyone is artificially conceived and raised, genetically altered and socially conditioned to fit within the various social classes.

John, as the inadvertent offspring of a woman abandoned in the savage lands by her lover, does not know what this world is like. All he knows is from reading Shakespeare. When he is discovered and brought back to civilisation, he is at first delighted. But his delight soon fades into horror as he realises that the outside world, with its twisted mores and social controls, is very different from the freedom to which he is accustomed, and bereft of the emotional ties he values.

This epilogue to The Tempest gives us a much better insight into what the world might offer. People and societies are not always quite as good, or as promising, as they seem. Sometimes it is safer to stay on the island than to go and live amongst the land sharks.

About a decade ago, I used to go to a Guy Fawkes night organised each year by a friend of a (now former) friend. They would burn an effigy each year – the Guy representing some annoying lefty or Islamic terrorist figure. As it burned, we would sing God Save The Queen, and Advance Australia Fair.

Readers of this blog would by now not be surprised that I would go to such an event.

As I had a falling out with the friend who knows the people who do that sort of thing, I haven’t been invited to the effigy burning in at least five years, and as it was held in the outer south eastern suburbs, I hadn’t bothered attending for several years before that. I wonder whether it will go ahead this year at all. (Not that I care – why should people I do not particularly like very much have fun like that?!?)

But this is the time of year when quaint occasions are celebrated. Guy Fawkes night is one of those things which has mostly been forgotten, but which used to, several generations ago, still be widely observed in Australia, although not quite with the same gusto as by the people I used to know.

Halloween on the other hand has been growing in popularity in recent years. Back in the late 1970s, it was only observed by bored primary school librarians, looking for something vaguely interesting to engage schoolchildren with. I guess that would be the first seed of what has since grown like a weed.

The other big catalyst for Halloween is that since 1990, each year the Simpsons does a special Halloween episode titled Treehouse of Terror. The Simpsons has become part of our popular culture, and with it, Halloween has become more and more engrained.

And the supermarkets are keen to jump on board, selling not just chocolate and other sugary products, but also decorations. I have noticed quite a lot of homes have really jumped on the Halloween theme this year. For the first time, people are actually decorating their houses for it. Look at this front yard above, in Gordon Street Maribyrnong, which I passed this morning. They have gotten into the Halloween spirit (sic) with great enthusiasm and fake gore.

At least this year, there are no trick or treaters – the pandemic has kept everyone inside. But in anticipation of trick or treaters, people do tend to buy some bags of lollies etc these days, which was not the case 20 years ago.

I do half wish that I was cynical enough to say ‘Ba Humbug’ or some such about it, but somehow I find that I cannot. It’s all just some harmless fun.