Should the AFL expand to 20 teams, and if so, where?

As a child, I think that the first ‘chapter books’ I read were Ruth Park’s Muddle Headed Wombat series. She was quite prolific and there were over a dozen of them in my primary school library. Close to a decade later, I also read her rather tragic adult novel, The Harp in the South, which …

Do Tasmanians Really Have Twice As Many Mouths To Feed? (And Other Reflections On AFL Expansion)

Given the title of this post, I had better address the Thylacine in the room first up. We do have many unkind jokes about Tasmanians, the nicest being that the small population results in limited genetic diversity and therefore leads to them all being two headed and red haired. That is now out of the …

Not In My Backyard – The Australian Dream Is Fast Becoming A Nightmare

20 years ago, when I moved into my home in Avondale Heights, I was surrounded by other homes on house blocks approximately 535sqm in size. My first week, I planted several citrus trees in my backyard, and a gum tree sapling 3m from the back fence. The orange trees are all about to fruit again, …

Are Disruptive Innovative FinTechs Today’s Equivalent of Video Rental Libraries?

Hipster girl band Camp Cope did a ballad entitled ‘Footscray Station’ a few years ago. Part love song, part protest anthem, it sums up what hipster types and Millennials see in Footscray, mostly from an angle different to my own, it being my childhood home town. For most of my adult life, first as a …

Treasury Wine and the many apparently defunct brands

A few weeks ago I discovered and then posted about the disappearance of some formerly highly popular brands owned by Treasury Wine Estate – namely Rosemount, Ingoldby, and Jamison’s Run. Since, then, I have retrospectively been doing my due diligence as an investor (I do, after all, own 1,000 shares in the company) to see …

Personal Finance and The Micawber Principle

I happen to like reading books about personal finance, although I doubt, at age 54 and with my roof, retirement, and share portfolio all long since sorted out, that I really need to do much more than plan out how to live long enough to spend what I have saved and what I will passively …

Seventeen Faceless People: My Thoughts on the Aston By-Election

A friend of mine came over yesterday for a couple of beers and to drop off some of his wine making equipment in anticipation that we will make wine again this year. He grew up in the far outer eastern suburbs which Aston encompasses. His view of the Liberal Party’s decision to parachute in an …