DAYS

This is the end of Volume One of Days

2008-02-27T06:16:00.004+11:00

This is the end of Volume One of Days.

Some technical difficulties, including pictures disappearing off this blog, have encouraged me to start a new volume.

Always loved a fresh start. Thanks to everyone for their interest in this often haphazard collection of material on whatever crosses my mind on a daily basis. It's been great fun and occasionally great therapy to do and I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it. I've also learnt a lot on the path. When this blog began I had no idea how to upload pictures and had never blogged before. It's been a fascinating adventure; and equally fascinating to watch the remarkable development of the blogosphere worldwide. I'm proud to be a part of it.

My story continues at:

http://daysvolumetwo.blogspot.com/

Get A Proper Job, Dog, he said to the parking cop

2008-02-26T05:06:00.009+11:00

http://freshwilliam.blogspot.com/

Get A Proper Job, Dog, he said the parking cop

"I leave the bar feeling confident and excited by the prospect of checking into rehab. Back in my apartment, I strip off my clothes, change into some sweats, crack open an ale and drink it quickly. I play early Blondie on the stereo. The more I think about it the more I like the idea of this rehab thing. There's no telling who I might see there. And Jim's right, it is the sort of story you can laugh about for years."
Augusten Burroughs, Dry.

There were shadows he wanted to box against, shadows from a chaotic life which he fought back by simple routine, a rising tide of darkness. There wasn't going to be any straight answers. He dreamt of retiring; and that first Sunday, he always worked Sundays, going to the office, begging: I've made a terrible mistake. How am I going to survive? How am I going to feed the kids? What was I thinking? Why did I ever say I would leave? I need freelance work immediately. These were moments, these were days, of uncertainty, of chaos, of tragedy. Suzy was out the front of the house last night, crying in the car, worried that she will have to move and that the real estate agent won't sign a new lease. Borrowing money off Sammy. For once it wasn't just her, that's Sydney these days, pressure everywhere, difficult to survive, high, read outrageous, rents.

A city divided into haves and have no ts. Those who have their own homes and those who do not. The wages of a normal job just gets you absolutely nowhere. The mortgage belt is struggling to cope. They talk of a two-tier economy; and they're right. There's spectacular amounts of wealth; enormous stone piles perched around the harbour, luxury coating every bay, inlet and alcove. And then there's the 20 kilometres of featureless suburbs to the west, where people build their lives off from the freeways, sheltering from the choking traffic; in dead ends and forgettable streets nobody has ever loved; and mortgage payments have become impossible. The city has become more and more difficult to live in. Which is one reason, I guess, why I have a pathological hatred of parking cops.

They are everywhere in this town, vicious parasites out to get every cent they can. Over the last few years the signs restricting parking have spread further and further. The ticket only; which means you have to pay, signs have also spread everywhere. Essentially there's nowhere to park and a parking policeman, or dog as he thought of them, on every corner, waiting to pounce; lurking in back streets, watching, waiting. Their eternal vigilance made working in the inner-city almost an impossibility financially. When he finally left Sydney there was a string of fines which kept filtering in for weeks. His final job had been so demanding that he would often forget to move his car every two hours; meaning that the $80 he incurred in fines for the day made going to work barely worth the effort.
There's no way back to any semblance of normality. A tidal wave of anger whooshes over him, instant fury.

Get a proper job, dog, he snarls as he walks past one of the uniformed bastards.
Often they pretend not to hear. But although they are trained not to respond to abuse from the public it usually works; they usually bite.
He had, after all, years of experience at working out what actually got under their skin.
It is a proper job, they puff, feebly.
Only a dog would do that job, he snarls. You'd have to be a complete creep. Why don't you do something that serves some useful purpose, instead of going around ruining everybody's day. You must have terrible karma.
May this curse follow you all the days of your life.
And if the children are nearby, he loudly instructs them: whatever you do in life, don't become one of them, a parking parasite. He spits out the words; he doesn't care how irrational his anger.

It's sad, it's vicious and it's pointless. But equally pointless is the mayor lauching an army of parasites onto the citizenry, zooming around in their white ranger cars, puffed up with their unifroms; lurking around corners waiting for you to stop for a minute in a Stop sign.

Every taxi driver tells stories of getting a $200 fine for stopping to pick up someone in a wheelchair. Or for helping to unload someone who is injured or disabled.

His hatred, too, stemmed from the chaos they had created in his life. When Sammy came home from hospital we used to park out the front of the house; and get tickets all the time because we didn't have a residents sticker. When we went to get a sticker
we were told that wasn't possible unless we paid all the back fines; which of course were enormous. So on and on it went; and it didn't matter how we remonstrated with the parking cops, he she or it, they'd stand there writing the tickets; their arrogant passivity projecting contempt. It's a miracle no one has gone out and shot a few of these bastards. If it was America they would have. You see it all over Sydney; people arguing with them, hopelessly, because it's always too late, they've already started writing the ticket and there's nothing they can do; they say. The fines are vastly out of proportion to the working wage, you can easily wipe out a day or two's efforts if you get caught. I got one for $435 once; a disabled parking zone I admittedly parked in for about half an hour because it was pouring rain, I was feeling sick and it was after ten at night. Bang, got you. Dogs, they're all dogs. And my part in all this? Forget it. They're dogs.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/article.aspx?id=219365

Thousands of spectators lined the Sydney Harbour foreshore to farewell the QE2 ocean liner for the final time.

Sky News Reporter Terry Gallaway is a passenger aboard the QE2 and has shared moments of the majestical departure.

'I'm looking forward to a fabulous voyage and a fabulous departure from this city. It's the only city in the world that you can park a 84,000 tonne ship in the middle of the CBD,' Gallaway exclaimed.

'The QE2 is the last of the ocean liners. She's not a floating hotel like the others..... But she's a very capable ship. She's capable of 32 knots and cruises at 28 knots..., and is holding 1,800 guests,' he added.

First class passengers aboard the ship paid up to $250,000 for a ticket.

But as Gallaway revealed, first class passengers and 'sewage' passengers are both served the same food!

'Believe it or not, the menu is exactly the same,' confides Gallaway.

Earlier the 40 year old QE2 and its much younger royal sister, the Queen Victoria, made a historic passing of each other in Sydney Harbour.

The two giant ships saluted each other as they passed either side of Fort Denison with a sounding of their horns as Queen Victoria made her departure from the iconic harbour, and the QE2 took her place in Circular Quay.

It was a historic salute marking the two month old Queen Victoria's maiden visit to Sydney on her first around the world voyage and the final visit of the QE2, which made her first grand entrance into Sydney 30 years ago.

The historic passing comes almost a year to the day since the QE2 and the Queen Mary 2 passed each other in Sydney Harbour, sparking traffic chaos.

Queen Victoria's next stop is Brisbane, while the QE2 will head to Hobart and then Perth.

She will be decommissioned in November and will become a lavish floating hotel in Dubai.

Sleight of Hand Sleight of Fate

2008-02-25T04:40:00.006+11:00

Wollongong Beach at dawn; near The Table of Knowledge.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham

"It is certainly in al-Qaeda's interest to keep American troops pinned down in Iraq, where their presence and their behaviour serve to radicalise people throughout the Arabic and the broader Islamic world: American soldiers have long been al-Qaeda's best recruiters."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.

There was the murky slides, the almost impossibly good-looking young men, the thump of disco music, the smell of sweat. I couldn't stand the self-exposure, he said. There's a new blog every eight seconds, I replied, no one pays the slightest attention. It's therapeutic; I've got that sort of head; a million tales, some perfectly well plotted, swirling around. Better to get it out. Better to tell the story. Exactly as: there's no use carrying a resentment if someone else can carry it for you. We were compromised, totally. The cruelty of it all, that is what he sought to expose. There were criminals lurking in the shadows. They used to score speed down the Kings Road in Chelsea. Richard used to help us. Handsome Richard we were all in love with. Conquest far off, everything paled. We really could dance. Bitter Lemons. The Alexandria Quartet. This life on the other side of the planet, far from where we were born.

It was the dancing, more than anything, that brought them close. His soul could have been repaired, but instead he coated it with alcohol. Comrades in arms, dancing till dawn. The buildings dark, too drunk to have even planned an escape route. The speed kept coursing through our veins; either torrents of thought or just one long thought. We were in love with each other, with London's dark streets, with the mysterious alcoves; with life itself. Never had we felt so exultant, so adventurous, so determinedly happy. The drinks flowed in fashionable bars. Richard was always getting a job as a barman in some fashionable place. When it came to mixing drinks he knew exactly what he was doing; he could run a bar like no other. We all loved him. We all got dressed up and went to filch free drinks. We all wanted to go there, but friendship would suffice.

Oh pretty boy, why hast thou forsaken me? That was the cruelty, the dog tired cruelty, as the gritty bad speed ground out our teeth and we stayed awake for days; too afraid to go to sleep. We might dream. We might come face to face with ourselves. We might realise that our disaster prone lives were but just a flicker, our expat lives barely breaking the surface of an indifferent, ancient city. But at least we could stand at the back of the crowd at the packed bar, one of many through the "it" nightclub of the moment, we could catch Richard's eye and our drinks would be swirled into our hands while the mere plebs grew more and more exasperated.

That was the era of the giant dancefloor; cavernous clubs; massive mirror balls; "Don't you want me baby?" and the elgant twists as we danced and danced, our bodies lost. Boy George gave a concert and was always in the news. We followed all the eighties bands, a cynical twist, a drop wrist. It never occurred to us that there could be someone who didn't want to sleep with us. We were fabulous, as fabulous as you can get when you're from Australia; and we danced and we danced. I just wanted everything to merge together; the music, the cavernous club, the clothes, the cuties, most of all the music. There was nowhere else to be, nowhere else one could want to be. We smoked and we drank and danced till we dropped; and kept on dancing. It wasn't just the speed; it was the age, the moment, the place, the times. I wanted to be subtle, a fine interlink, but through all these nights the one thing I sought was oblivion, so that the black bourbon and cokes and my spooked, alcohol charged consciouness became at one with the club.

Later on there were the awkward grapplings. Everyone worth having was had. There was no doubt, just adventure. The lack of confidence, even libido, which crept across his old age had not appeared. That's what I ordered while I was waiitng for you, he said. This is history, our history, the best of times. The windy smell of rotting oranges. The clammy ecstasy which made us different to the masses. Nothing was legal. All was hidden, dark. I wanted it to last forever; but everyting fades, the lock clicks, we're done. He shrugged off the importance of the moment, the spooky buildings creaking in the early hours, Richard always up and welcoming, the only person I knew you could visit easily at two, three in the mornig and be guaranteed a welcome.

The news of his death was the saddest day. It was London I thought of, those giant clubs, his glistening dark brown eyes, the wild, appreciative laugh. I didn't want him to die, to follow addiction to its logical conclusion. He had gone back to Adelaide and lived with his mother in the final months, rarely coming out of his darkened room, always stoned. He didn't want to grow old with the rest of us, he couldn't think of anything worse. So there's nothing but fragmentary memories; a handsome face in a crowded bar, white shirt and black bow tie showing off his perfect features. He kissed me affectionately each time we met. I miss him. That's life now, missing people who didn't stay the course; hanging out with another generation entirely. I wish you could have come with me, I wish you were still here.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=acd5VTd9qeD8&refer=asia

Turkey Says 127 Dead in Iraq Battles; U.S. Urges Calm (Update1)

By Ken Fireman and Mark Bentley

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Turkey said the death toll in three days of battles with Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq reached 127, as the U.S. urged an end to the incursion.

The Turkish armed forces have killed 112 militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, including 33 today, the military said on its Web site. Fifteen Turkish soldiers have also died in the conflict, it said.

``We will continue the operation with the same determination and heroism until planned targets are reached,'' the military said, adding that jets, artillery and helicopters had hit 63 suspected PKK targets in mountainous northern Iraq since troops went over the border on Feb. 21.

The U.S., the United Nations and Germany have called on Turkey to show restraint in dealing with the threat of the PKK from northern Iraq. The Kurdish-controlled region has remained relatively peaceful since the U.S.-led invasion five years ago, and the U.S. military is relying on Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers to help battle insurgents in and around Baghdad.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Turkish army should wrap up the campaign, adding Turkey won't be able to solve the problem of cross-border Kurdish raids through purely military means.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/travel/city-bows-to-dancing-queens/2008/02/24/1203788147682.html

GIANT ships waltzed on the water, footballers tapdanced through a grand final, and on stage Billy Elliot learned the finer points of ballet. And as a month of Sundays were jammed into one, Sydneysiders were led on the merriest dance of all if they wanted to do the lot.

Fancy footwork was required, keeping time and dodging collisions in a traffic jam of hot, harried but eager pedestrians. The McLaughlin family, from Avoca Beach, set themselves the challenge, and barely missed a beat as they skipped from harbour to theatre to football stadium under a perfect sky. Others favoured a rhythm less frenetic, a simple jig in the one spot.

For many, that meant a quickstep alongside a dazzling harbour, where the foreshores were packed with spectators drawn by the historic rendezvous of the cruise liners Queen Elizabeth 2 and Queen Victoria, the one visiting for the 29th and last time, the other for the first time.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Recent events
Saturday 23 February: 20 dead

Baghdad: roadside bomb kills 1, Beirut Square; 3 bodies.

Anbar
Al-Shiha: suicide bombers kill tribal chief and 2 policemen.
Saqlawiya: gunmen attack police stations, kill 6 policemen.

Ninewa
Mosul: roadside bomb kills lorry driver; gunmen kill man in drive-by shooting; a child is killed during shoot-out between US forces and gunmen.

Salahuddin
Baiji: roadside bomb kills wife and son of Baiji Council member.
Samarra: roadside bomb kills 2 policemen.

25 unidentified bodies are buried in Baquba.

My mother in the 1940s.

Got a cigarette, brother?

2008-02-24T04:44:00.010+11:00

"The political scandal over Wollongong Council exposes a culture deeply ingrained in the Labor Party, from its grassroots to the very top. It is a demonstration of how Labor's longstanding network of mates can go wrong when combined with the toxic mix of power and large sums of money."
Sulusinszky and Norrington

"We are returning to the pre-Howard era where logic and reason and facts are discarded as totally inappropriate and racist."
Janet Albrechtsen

"If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell.

"Got a cigarette, brother?" they ask as I walk past.
"Sorry mate," I reply in almost a single word, sorrymate, as after the official apology everybody says sorry now. People, standing in the cold at 6am waiting for the crowded bus to take them to their rotten day in a lousy factory, are fed up with paying taxes to support all the nonsense, fed up with the abuse, fed up with the privileging of sections of the community based purely on skin colour. They're sorry alright. As in, I'm sorry you keep dealing so close to our house. I'm sorry you've trashed all the houses down the blocks; 30 years ago all the neighbourhood used to come and stare at all the beautiful houses the government was building for the aborigines, now they've all been vandalised, almost all of them destroyed.

I'm sorry you keep calling us white cunts when we walk past. I'm sorry you keep robbing the tiny little Asian girls, dragging them along the street by their handbags. I'm sorry you don't go out and get a job and stop living off everybody else, because I know it's not good for you. And I'm sorry you've developed a sense of grievance and hatred fostered by white lefties, the Left Green, the Socialist Left, becasue I know it does you more harm than good. I'm sorry so many taxpayers are fed up with getting up and going to work to pay taxes to support and entirely tax payer funded lifestyle, all in the name of commmunal living and indigenous pride.

None of it makes sense anymore. I feel like giving them a lecture. You should give up cigarettes, they're not good for you. Instead of bumming fags in the street you should stand up proud; the cigs will only blacken your lungs and make you feel sick, leave you smelling of stale tobacco and contribute to an early death. In no other era would multinationals be allowed to addict millions of ordinary people to their poisonous chemicals, making them sick and leading to their early death, all for the almighty dollar. But threats of an early death, promise of a longer life, means nothing here.

And the politicians bend over to help the multinationals; spending hundreds of millions of dollars chasing down heroin importers while cowtowing to the tobacco industry. All for the taxes; greed and immorality. But instead of the lecture I just walk past, "sorrymate".

I've finally done it. My son Sam is desperately trying to get his hours up before he goes for his driving test. He's only got to get up 50 hours of supervised driving, he's almost there, over 45 anyway; but the law has just been changed to make it 120 so they're not going to be too inmpressed if it ticks over 50 on the way to the test. So we drove out to Newport; and went and checked out the house where I grew up all those years ago. My father paid 150 pound for the block, which was once a rubbish dump; and built the house. Now it's been completely renovated and turned into a double story dwelling. My father sold just before the property boom for $135,000. The new people said they paid something like eight times that. She was there, Susan, the new owners, and they were very welcoming, as my brother Warren had reported.

Much of the ground floor was open plan; it was all very smart, resembled nothing like the house I used to know. All around the same thing had happened, wave after wave of money and reconstruction had left few remnants of the way it used to be. The Macs house was still there, small, wooden, the ones who used to give us glasses of milk and biscuits and where we used to love to hang around because they were nice to us and we loved their cage full of budgerigards. The steep concrete driveway which had seemed so totally enormous when we raced our carts down it; was barely longer or steeper than an average drive. Joan's house was still there. I had a terrible crush on a girl who lived here, 40 years ago, I said to someone as they got out of their car. He laughed. I wasn't laughing at the time, I was mooning around terrified, wondering what on earth to do.

The glooming terror that I felt in confronting the place was gone; wealthy houses were jammed along the hillside; the bush where we used to roam now gone. The valleys used to be full of palm trees; allowing my greatest moment as a child, when I set the entire valley alight; fire engines everywhere, houses under threat. In terrible trouble; again. Beaten black and blue, again. But it was worth the thrashing, I loved that moment, the fire engines everywhere, the flames leaping from one tree to the next, the smoke, the chaos, the danger. They knew I existed that day.

Things were so much better then, the thought came unbidden, the whole of life was before him and he wasn't old.

I grew up in a silent war, I said again, this time to the new owners. I never heard my parents laugh, I never heard them cry, I never heard them argue. There was just this terrible silence. The huge besa block shed my father built, as big in those days as the house itself, was still there, but repainted and even it renovated. It doesn't sound like you have very good memories of the house, the owner said. As in: we love it here, we've just paid more than a million dollars for it, this is our family home and we never want to leave. It was all to do with my parents, I always liked the house, I lied. I didn't get on very well with my father, and I remember walking down this road crying just days after my 16th birthday. I never came back, not in all these years.

And now I've been there, and some terrible cycle has ended. Thank the lord; the cosmos, the passing of time.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/i-did-nothing-wrong/2008/02/23/1203467451888.html

Tripodi: I did nothing wrong

PORTS and Waterways Minister Joe Tripodi hit back at his critics yesterday, saying he played no role in securing a $200,000 government job for his Labor mate Joe Scimone.

But he admitted he felt the "weight of responsibility" for the crisis in which the NSW Government now finds itself.

Mr Tripodi said he hoped any investigation into Mr Scimone's appointment would be concluded quickly.

"There have been media reports that this could be resolved as early as this week and I sincerely hope this is the case," he told The Sun-Herald.

"Of course I feel bad the Government is in this position but I maintain I did absolutely nothing wrong. I had no role to play in his appointment and it would have been improper for me to do so."

Mr Tripodi said NSW Maritime, which appointed Mr Scimone to the job, had confirmed that he had played no role in the appointment, even though NSW Maritime falls under his portfolio.

Mr Tripodi said he had been unaware of the Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation affecting Mr Scimone at the time he was appointed.

On Friday, Premier Morris Iemma said he had asked ICAC whether it should conduct an independent investigation into the appointment.

Mr Iemma said Mr Tripodi "insists" he had nothing to do with the process and his gut feeling was that he was telling the truth. If Mr Tripodi wasn't he would be sacked immediately, the Premier said.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/the-early-word-hard-times-for-hillary-clinton/

The Early Word: Hard Times for Hillary Clinton

By Sarah Wheaton

Friday was a rough day for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought to dispel speculation that her closing debate remarks amounted to a concession amid the death of a police officer escorting her campaign – all while Senator Barack Obama was stumping around South Texas, one of her strongholds in the state.

The Times’s Michael Luo reports on others who are suffering from her campaign’s troubles – small vendors in the New York area worried that their fees will go unpaid.

At The Chicago Tribune, Jim Tankersley writes that Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio could be her “last, best hope” there. The Boston Globe’s Susan Milligan looks at Mrs. Clinton’s firewall of working-class voters in Ohio, “who say they don’t want to hear fancy words about changing Washington; they want to know exactly how the next president is going to bring jobs to their struggling communities and make sure their children have health care.”

The Chicago Tribune analyzes Mr. Obama’s stump speeches and finds, among the platitudes, just as much policy as the other candidates have, and Nedra Pickler of The Associated Press previews possible Republican attacks against him if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

James.

Corrugated Iron Roofs

2008-02-23T05:49:00.006+11:00

"Morris Iemma has failed the leadership test today by not sacking the factional hacks and mates from his cabinet. We have too many of Morris' friends, too many of those he is indebted to, sitting in key portfolios, and too many problems across the state for Morris to have left them alone today. This is a bloke who displays inertia and a lack of energy even when the stench of corruption starts to hang over his government. If he is serious about ending the stench of corruption that hangs over the state's development industry, he should put in place a system that limits the amount of power that planning ministers have. We have a state that over the last couple of terms power has been centralised into the hands of the planning minister. Morris Iemma needs to commit to planning reforms to reduce the minister's powers, and he needs to commit to finance campaign reforms that cap expenditures on what parties and candidates can spend."
NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell as scandal subsumes the NSW government.

There were spasms of love at inappropriate times, moments of unrequited love so rare he had no idea how to cope; then an old age without love. The middle years were a slow, settling decline. The myths he had built up about his earlier life meant nothing to anyone else; they just added coherence to his story telling. I never had sex except for money until I was well into my twenties, the man said. The words gay sex went unsaid. It screwed me up, really screwed me up, he said; after he had finished saying how most of his friends from the old days were dead, overdoses or AIDS. He felt like a spy in a foreign country, a visitor in a strange land called the future, the sole survivor of a holocaust. But in reality it hadn't screwed him up at all; he gave little and was always drunk; and the cars, the money, the apartments he got in return were the part of the bargain he cared about.

There were people who had been screwed up, desperately screwed up, by what they remembered as the tendrils of evil crawling out from the Rex Hotel, in those far off days, 40 years ago. My gang hung around the fountain, before the park was renovated and for a long time the mysterious, muffled mystery of the place was filled with crains and piles of paving bricks. To the astonishment of us locals, trees were brought fully grown and planted. The barmaid Judy ruled us all with a rod of iron. If any of us misbehaved we were thrown out on our ears. We were only 16. I now have teenage children the same age as I was when all these things happened. The brand new two-tone commodore I was briefly driving, with its sheep skin covered seats and it's flecked gold burnished exterior, made me briefly the envy of my fellows, who never quite got it together to service a sugar daddy.

In contrast to the beautiful apartment I had, and which I often invited friends to during the day when there was no chance of us being sprung or compromised, the flash, rotating cars as I fell in or out with one or the other, the trail of I love you wreckage I left behind whenever they got too serious, the casual cruelty I adopted to survive the persona I had adopted, the confusing blasts of other words that swamped through what I almost regarded as an idyllic life; all these things had been established for protection. I remember to this day the crumbed concrete ceiling of the apartment in the Cross, crumbed concrete being big in those days. It was the height of sheak as far as I was concerned, exactly where I wanted to be. Except for the sugar daddy bit, and the things they wanted. I lay there. I wouldn't lift a finger. That would have made me gay; and was against our code. I lay there drunk and they did what they did, gobble gobble, and I just wanted the sticky moments to be over so I could go back to being fabulous at their expense.

In retrospect the sugar daddies I exploited so mercilessly, so intentionally, weren't that old themselves, unattractive men in their 20s, 30s, sometimes 40s, men prepared to pay for youth. Hugh, the old queen who always bought us drinks when we were short, he was the kindest of them. He was in his 70s and was a retired doctor or judge, it's become cconfused now in my head; but a retired professional man nonetheless. He'd always buy us drinks and was always kind, as he sat in the Rex sipping his scotch and water. Once we offered, me and Alan and Jack, to do something for him if he ever wanted. Free, we said; in exchange for being so nice to us all the time. Oh no dear, oh no, he said. You're all too beautiful. I would have a heart attack.

We all laughed and the day, the moment, the bar dissolved. History has solved everything. Time has swept away not just those people, but the bar itself. I remember vividly, years later, in a self-help group, some bloke talking about how damaging, how evil the Rex had been, how he had been in therapy for years to recover from what happened there, how evil seeped from the walls into the fabric of the place, the ancient gargoyle queens perched on the barstools, bringing out their wallets, the terrible exploitation, the terrible abuse. It wasn't like that for me. I just regarded it as a great adventure; a welcome change from the dreary suburb in which I had grown up, the nightmare silence of my family's home. Anything was welcome after that; and a bunch of drunken queens who would always buy you a drink and who all, seemingly without exception, wanted to sleep with you, that was adventure. The alcohol did more damage than the sexual transactions. It was a shrug, I didn't care, as long as they paid. We've always been welcome here in the future, we just didn't know it. My own kids are so straight, so nerdish, so willing to stay at home and not go out, that the contrast between them and what I got up to at the same age is almost total. We were compromised, our hearts were stained, there was a price to pay for being paid, there was moral compromise at the heat of every transaction; and he didn't care, not even now. How deep was the compromise, how soiled his soul, were all things he would take to his grave. Rent boy.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-games-up-premier-admits-rotten-donations-culture-must-end/2008/02/22/1203467390079.html

THE night before the federal election, four of NSW's most senior ministers starred at a Labor fund-raiser attended by a developer and a former Wollongong council manager who have emerged as key suspects in the corruption scandal engulfing the Iemma Government.

The Treasurer, Michael Costa, the Minister for Roads, Eric Roozendaal, the Minister for Health, Reba Meagher, and the Minister for Ports and Waterways, Joe Tripodi, all attended the champagne-and-canapes function with Labor apparatchik Joe Scimone and property developer Glen Tabak.

At the same event the year before, Lou Tasich - a developer later found to be corrupt by the Independent Commission Against Corruption - sat at a table with Mr Roozendaal. Six months later, on May 2, 2007, Mr Tasich tried to bribe a Wollongong council officer during a discussion about his proposal to buy a piece of council-owned land. He passed the officer a hand-written note: "30K 4 U."

These events offer a powerful illustration why the Premier, Morris Iemma, was forced to act yesterday. He pledged to reform laws governing political donations - including introducing possible bans on donations by property developers - in the wake of the Wollongong sex-for-development affair.

Developer donations to the NSW Government totalled $13,180,793 between 1998-2007, while developers gave the Liberal Party $8.2 million over the same period. But Mr Iemma said "change needs to happen" and promised it would occur well before the end of the year.

He also said Mr Tripodi could be stood down next week. If the commission found there should be an investigation into NSW Maritime's appointment of Mr Scimone, Mr Tripodi's mate, to a $200,000-a year job, then Mr Tripodi would be stood down. If the commission made an adverse finding against Mr Tripodi, Mr Iemma said he would be sacked.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/22/1203467342250.html

Senator Hillary Clinton – desperate to claw back ground after losing 10 primaries to Senator Barack Obama – today received a standing ovation to top off her debate with her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The gloves came off in the 90-minute Texas debate between the pair, with the New York Senator lambasting her Illinois opponent’s reliance on words — which she accuses him of plagiarising.

Senator Obama won the draw and elected to go second in the 90-minute CNN debate at the University of Texas.

Before the rapturous finale, he seemed to have won the majority of applause, while Senator Clinton landed the first real blow in the debate.

The March 4 primaries in Texas and Hawaii are seen as make or break for Senator Clinton, who lost contests in Wisconsin and Hawaii this week to Senator Obama.

Asked about the competition between her and her opponent, Senator Clinton took a swipe at his much-lauded oratorial skills and emphasis on the importance of words — a line her campaign team has accused him of plagiarising.

"Words are important and words matter, but actions speak louder than words," Senator Clinton said.

The CNN moderator then asked Senator Obama directly about plagiarism claims over several lines, which he has repeated in recent speeches, that bear a striking similarity to those first uttered by his friend and ally, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

Obama defends borrowed words

"There are two lines in speeches I've been giving for two weeks," Senator Obama said. "I've been campaigning for two years."

"The notion I had plagiarised from someone who is one of my national co-chairs, who gave me the line and suggested I use it, I think is silly.

"This is where we get into (the) silly season in politics and people start getting discouraged about it."

Henrietta with her Aunt Penny in Lismore

My First Ever Front Page

2008-02-22T04:37:00.009+11:00

The Farm.

"A new breed of missionaries is trying to convert the world. Evangelists of unbelief say religion is a relic left over from the past and stands in the way of human progress. Once the world is rid of religion, immemorial evils such as war and tyranny can be overcome, and humanity will be able to fashion a new life for itself better than any known in history. Such is the creed of anti-religious missionaries such as Richard Dawkins. While the myths of religion express enduring human realities, the myths of secular humanism serve only to conceal them. It may be a dim sense of the unreality of their beliefs makes militant atheists so vehement and dogmatic. One searches in vain in the company of militant unbelievers for signs of the creative doubt that has energgised many religious thinkers. While theologians have interrogated their beliefs for millenia, secular hmanists have yet to question their simple creed. Evangelical atheism is the mirror image of the faith it attacks - without that faith's redeeming douibts."
John Gray.

Everything comes out of the torrents of the past; always disturbed, always flung to the four winds, good times non-existent. The world was a flat, monochromatic place, leaden grey. A terrifying place. There was no coherent, single personality. The leaden grey was all that he knew, all that he had known for years. Comfort came from the familiarity of despairing routines. If he sought wealth, it was purely to fritter away. He had no belief in a brighter future, such an idea would have been laughable, if it had ever occurred to him. The cringing, sad person that he had become evolved over years, decades. The chaos arose from a doomed lifestyle. He wore his depression like a cloak, a protective armour; leaves blown on soggy ground, swirls of dark colours, orange sludge, the despair of the landscape, reaching up to melancholy. That was about the range. He wandered into the job out of these doom laden winds with no ambition, no hope of a career, just a sad determination to see our promises made a long time ago.

Somehow, out of sheer persistance, he began getting the occasional shift at the city's leading newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. He was perfectly happy to work Sundays, it wasn't as if anything else was going on in his life, no happy family, no picnics with friends, clothes dank with addiction sweat. The story would not normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. I was doing casual shifts in the wan hope of fulfilling a dream of becoming a journalist. Through the kindness of strangers, basically, secret comrades in arms, sharing inner defects and fatal flaws, I was doing casual shifts at the paper. It was working Sundays that did it. Sooner or later they noticed that I kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't too badly written. In those days there was always a scrabbling desperation to know what was in the paper the next day, a lot of pages to fill and really, in a city the size of Sydney, not that much going on.

There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs, the chief of staff said. Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more of everybody elses money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet. Anyway, we're desperate for tomorrow, see what you can get. We're desperate for a pic story; try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke. So I headed off to the meeting in inner-city Surry Hills with Steve, the most foul mouthed and crude of all the photographers.

Soon enough we find ourselves sitting in the middle of a room jam packed full of extremely butch looking women; we're virtually the only blokes. We didn't slot right in. I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. Before the corruption and bias of our family law system ruined my naive university-derived belief in feminism. There was nowhere to sit in the jam packed crowd, the air full of righteousness and the muggy smell of 200 women crammed into a small space. Eventually they cleared a spot for us; and we sat cross legged; completely surrounded. We were late, as always, and a woman was up the front pounding on about the injustice of the government's failure to continue the funding their directory of women in unorthdox jobs, yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep women in the kitchen.

"There's no picture here," Steve whispered, loudly enough that at least 20 of the sisters around us could hear everywhere. "They're as ugly as sin. I'm out of here, I'm going to find something else. There's just not a shot here."
"I've got to stay and listen to this," I said.
"Well I don't, I'm gone," he said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd.

On and on the speaker went. In those days, before my head had cleared, I took copious notes on everything, the colour of the walls, everyting the speaker said, spontaneous thoughts on the atmosphere. I was always afraid I would forget something important.

By the time I got back to the office I had extensive notes from the speakers and various people I had interviewed, a woman carpenter, a plumber, an electrician; they were nice, although I wasn't so sure about their separatist plea, a woman wants a woman, they don't want men in their house. How is that not sexist?

Back in the office, I wrote up the story on the anitquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as my fingers rattled across the keyboard that the sorry would never get a run. It might have been important to the people involved, but it wasn't earth shattering. Journalists are always being targetted by groups whose funding has run out; noble cause after noble cause.

Next day the story was on the front page, my very first front page story. It was the picture that did it, of course, and I learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging an otherwise nondescript story onto the front or higher in the book. A large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop dead georgeous young woman, maybe 23, adorned the page. She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background. Her white overalls were stained delicately with paint; the uppper flats just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city; nothing short of an absolute spunk. Can I help you carry that? a hundred thousand voices asked. Can I lick the paint off your breasts. Can I see what's under those overalls, the delicate tracings of signs of labour.

I never got a thank you from the organisers of the Women In Unorthodox Jobs Directory; funnily enough. But later that day the chief of staff leant across the desk and shook my hand; congratulations, you've got the job, he said. I was a full time journalist. It was one of the proudest days of my life.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.newstatesman.com/200802210016

News that Cuba's Fidel Castro is stepping down brings an end to the longest, and most controversial, presidency in the world.

The 81-year-old leader, who has been ill for some years, said in a letter published on a state newspaper's website: "It would be a betrayal of my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer."

The final words of his message promised "I will be careful", possibly a wry reference to the more than 600 assassination attempts he has survived since becoming president.

Fidel Castro Ruz has ruled Cuba for 49 years, despite unrelenting efforts by the US to kill or overthrow him, and has outlived most of those who led the Cuban revolution with him.

His legacy is fiercely disputed: clearly a man of charisma and courage, he has always understood getting and retaining power better than the art of government. Having led a nationalist revolution against a brutal dictatorship, he instituted a more effective one of his own.

Castro seized power in 1959 in a country that had one of the highest per capita incomes in the Americas. Today it lags behind most of the hemisphere. But he has left it with a rate of infant mortality lower than that of the US, and health and education systems that support a long-lived and literate population, albeit one restricted in what it is allowed to read.

As a student in the 1950s, Castro shared the widespread discontent with the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the army officer who had dominated Cuban politics since the 1930s, first as kingmaker and then as millionaire dictator and mafia henchman. Fidel thought of standing for parliament, but became convinced that anything short of armed struggle was futile.

His claim to be a hero of the revolution is based on two disastrous revolutionary expeditions. The first was the assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago on 26 July 1953. Fidel and his brother Raú led 160 rebels in a misconceived and bungled attack that even lost the element of surprise when Castro crashed one of the cars in the convoy: 61 rebels were killed and most of the others, including Fidel, were captured. Many were summarily executed.

Fidel escaped the death sentence and was sentenced instead to 15 years in prison. Amnestied 15 months later, Fidel and his younger brother Raú went to Mexico where they met the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara and plotted their return. This was his second disastrous military expedition. Castro and 81 followers crammed into a motor yacht, now enshrined in a large glass case in Havana as one of the world's more unusual revolutionary monuments, and sailed for Cuba with the aim of starting an armed uprising. Within days, 70 of the band were killed, wounded or captured. The survivors, who included Fidel, Guevara, Raú and Camilo Cienfuegos, made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains where, with the support of existing peasant movements, they finally succeeded in launching a guerrilla campaign.

Castro's guerrillas never numbered more than 1,000, but he appropriated credit for a revolution made by many hands: socialists, social democrats, trade unionists, students and democratic liberals - a coalition so broad that, in 1958, the US recognised the hopelessness of the Batista regime and withdrew military support. On 1 January 1959, Batista fled. Castro's moment had arrived. By February, he had been sworn in as prime minister.

Maxine McKew before she unseated the Prime Minister.

Out The Window

2008-02-21T03:41:00.004+11:00

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.
- John F. Kennedy

An email doing the rounds:

When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard.

"Heavenly Father, We come before you today To ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good," but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called
it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of speech and expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

"Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!'

"The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest."

Can't imagine why this email caused so much fuss.

When we're there, peering out the window during the long struggle, skating out from beneath threatening waves, clinging to fragments of knowledge and self-defnition that had long been eroded, these were the fragile times, not just when nothing was of comfort but when we could know no other path. The catastrophe was deep and immediate. The pain seemed eternal, the depth charges barely touching the ocean of lead, the deep floor on which he scuttled, trying to survive in the leadan atmosphere of the planet. There was nothing he could do but hope for a brief consciousness. There was certainly no way to live a normal, happy life. Sex was distorted, everything was distorted. See yourself as God sees you, went the instructions, and all there were were flimsy souls on the surface of a toxic planet. We were only suh forms of intelligence.

These despairing thoughts were his bread and butter, the soul he had made in a self-destructive life, a glimmering of distorted consciousness that was so quasar like in its rapidity and short-life, its scientific mystery, its obscure beauty and its fleeting smallness against a giant cosmos; these things were so fragmentary that even now he found it hard to gather strength, to marshal the forces, to survive.

If anything, the renewed efforts to be a fuller self were failing. There was little that could be said. There still seemed no way out. He was still expecting calamity. The brutality of it all was just as unkind. The size of things was just as out of proportion, the giant skidding thoughts, the complex plot lines, the screaching well of discontent; all were insignificant in the face of a broader truth.

He scuttled along the surface. The houses had been washed away. He instinctively sought somewhere to hide, as he had always done, but there was nowhere. He was being crushed by the weight of the atmosphere. He needed a protecting shell but it had been blasted away in a previous storm. He cried out for help but the sound would not carry through the leaden atmosphere. His consciousness flickered, he dashed around in the search for shelter, he tried to survive; and then, promptly, he was gone, disappearing as rapidly as he had been born.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/politics/20cnd-campaign.html?hp

Senator Barack Obama decisively beat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucuses on Tuesday night, accelerating his momentum ahead of crucial primaries in Ohio and Texas and cutting into Mrs. Clinton’s support among women and union members.

With the two rivals now battling state by state over margins of victory and allotment of delegates, surveys of voters leaving the Wisconsin polls showed Mr. Obama, of Illinois, making new inroads with those two groups as well as middle-age voters and continuing to win support from white men and younger voters — a performance that yielded grim tidings for Mrs. Clinton, of New York.

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington State. All but assured of his party’s nomination, Mr. McCain immediately went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding “eloquent but empty” calls for change.

For Mr. Obama, Hawaii was his 10th consecutive victory, a streak in which he has not only run up big margins in many states but also pulled votes from once-stalwart supporters of Mrs. Clinton, like low- and middle-income people and women.

Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher line against Mr. Obama — a recognition, her advisers said, that she must act to alter the course of the campaign and define Mr. Obama on her terms.

My brother Warren visiting Sydney University after being away from Australia for 17 years.

Virulent Warning

2008-02-20T04:51:00.006+11:00

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
- Nora Ephron

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
- Gracie Allen

"The savage looting that swept Baghdad after the fall of Saddam was a measure of how angry and alienated working-class Shias were: totally impoverished, jobless, and alternately patronised and neglected by the Shia political and religious establishment. They didn't trust the religious hierarchy in Najaf, they didn't trust the exiles coming back to rebuild the Shia religious parties, and they certainly didn't trust the Americans."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.

The remnants of the last government hung over us like a shroud; we were caught exposed in instances of our own making. My brother is now staying down with our mother for a couple of days, jamming everything they can into a fleeting visit. A jam packed life. It would be great if you could come over. He laughed; ideas falling over each other in his brimming brain. Those dark images of deteriorated drunks skulking in the cities corners kept clutching at his eyeballs; as if assaulting him with memory, confronted by what could have been. It was always the dark side that clawed away at him; the wealthy houses, the other side, was now so remote a possibility they did not even offer a reproach. He resented the rich; that was it. Flat, unproductive emotions, if they could even be called that. He leapt back through time to the origins; confused it with Origin in Star Trek, Ian woke up sweating from a nightmare that his son had died; his subconscious clear that his boy was in danger. Beware. They are watching. The world closing in; those haunted fragments flailing in a dank wind.

We were taught that the world was going to end in 1972, then when that didn't happen, oops, we got it wrong, just slightly, that it would end later in the 1970s. No wonder he had grown up with a sense of calamity; that all was going to end. That he would never grow old. That there was no point planning for the future, because it would be so different, so harsh, that the end time of judgement was just around the corner. Prepare to meet your maker, literally. I was crushed by this overwhelming sense of doom. We stored bottles of water in the cupboard, waiting for disaster to strike. We urged control and got chaos, an absolute abandonment. He'd get that click in his head, beyond which there was no memory and a good time was had by all. Bourbon and coke; the black drink. And the night would end in chaos, in someone's bed, somewhere.

Not much comforted him for years, decades to be truthful. Signposts were everywhere and he paid heed to not one. There were warning messages lining each side of the highway and he couldn't read any of them; the words indistinct, his eyes playing up. Ahead he could see the giant open floor, his feet crunching on the broken glass, the discarded syringes. Above the vacant sky. He kept moving forward, bnt even here, he wasn't sure why. His life had been so shrouded, so full of misery, his heart cloaked, his spirit exhausted, clutcing his sense of calamity, impending doom, the certainty of disaster, moving step by step as if nothing could stop him, compelled, forced, one step at a time, towards the light.

These chimaeras hasd dominated his life; gloom lasden but stoic, doom laden but heroic. He had never expected to live long enough for his body to fail him. He had been crunching through the broken glass, sadly determined to make it through this time, when he spotted a waterfall of colour cascading from one of the low, featureless clouds. He headed towards it automatically, fascinated by this outbreak of activity on a featureless plain. His mood shifted into exultation, step by step, as he moved towards it. Flashes of coloured light streaked past him on either side; and as he moved closer he could hear the noise from the torrent of light. He could see the portals that were opening up inside it; each leading to a happier future. He could feel the forces behind and the lures in front. He was frightened, always frightened, but still he moved forward. He thought he caught glimpses of other souls, just beyond eye's reach; and he was increasingly scared witless.

If only we had known there were these ways out, if only we hadn't wasted so many years. If only the alternatives had presented themselves earlier, before his bones began to creak. Step into the light, a cornball voice said, and he laughed as he walked directly into the waterfall of colour and streaming light; and saw the portal open up into a different, happier life. Almost unconsciously, barely thinking at all, he crossed over into a solid room, green fields and open sky, his memory of how he got here being deliberately erased. He woke up startled, looked up through freshly innocent eyes, smiled in gratitude at having been saved from so much self-imposed tragedy. And reached out a hand in a new world, laughing with delight. Come with me, a new voice said, you will be happy.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23244904-662,00.html

The farce of our state government continues:

A CLOSE friend of NSW Government minister Joe Tripodi who is facing corruption allegations before the ICAC was given a $200,000 a year job in the minister's department just four weeks ago, despite a cloud hanging over his character for the past 18 months.

Joe Scimone, a senior NSW ALP official, is facing allegations that last year he paid $30,000 to conmen posing as ICAC officers offering to destroy evidence against him.

A delegate to the ALP National Conference in April last year, Mr Scimone was appointed to a senior public service job managing property within NSW Maritime on January 14 this year.

He is believed to have been under investigation for more than a year. Mr Tripodi yesterday admitted that Mr Scimone, who narrowly missed out on being selected as the federal Labor candidate for Cunningham in 2002, was a friend whom he had known for a long time.

He denied he knew of the allegations against Mr Scimone when he was appointed as an executive director of NSW Maritime's property division.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23243426-662,00.html

THE Coalition has performed a stunning about-face on Australian Workplace Agreements, ending its support for the controversial Howard-era contracts.

Opposition MPs yesterday agreed to pass legislation to axe AWAs in the House of Representatives, dumping the last vestige of WorkChoices from Coalition policy.

The move represents a humiliating backdown for Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson and his deputy, Julie Bishop, who wanted to keep AWAs.

The capitulation came as Dr Nelson made history with a record-low 9 per cent approval rating in the latest Newspoll. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd enjoyed a record-high 70 per cent rating as preferred PM.

Ms Bishop, the workplace relations spokeswoman, had argued hard, with Dr Nelson's backing, for the Coalition to retain support for AWAs, but colleagues rolled them.

Mr Rudd had threatened a double dissolution election if the Opposition blocked Labor's dismantling of WorkChoices, but Ms Bishop said this had not influenced the decision.

"That is irrelevant to our considerations," she said.

Sam with his friends Bill and Tom

Gnomes In Dark Reaches

2008-02-19T04:42:00.006+11:00

"At root PC is an attempt to bring about a political goal by pretending that it is already a fait accompli - the ultimate elision of 'ought' and 'is'. It involves lying about what pertains in the present in order to bring about what is supposed to be inevitable... A liberal heresy whereby an argument is put forward not for its rationality but for its appeal to emotion (especially the feeling of virtue of those making the argument); it's at its strongest when this involves the suppression of any opionion that is at odds with PC. In a nutshell; it's the 'dictatorship of virtue'. This would be bad enough if the virtue was real, but...the supposed virtue PC promotes is itself far worse than a vice. The picture PC paints of disadvantage and oppression is not merely false; but regarding the sub-group that PC most despises (men) it's the diametric opposite of the reality."
Steve Moxon.

There were glimpses in the corners of other lives, the what ifs, the sad melodramas that encroached upon our own sanity; the shifting sands of what was in the end all too short a life. Suddenly they were old. We visited my uncle Barry last night; my mother's brother, the one member of my mother's family who had done well in life. Multi-millionaire was the term, or used to be. His three story house with its white arches and balconies overlooking a bend in the Georges River, the giant gums reaching up to the swimming pool perched on the side of the cliff; this by now almost old fashioned wealth in sharp contrast to Redfern where we live. I picked my brother, visiting form America, up from the Four Seasons Hotel at the bottom of George Street, overlooking Circular Quay. In the eighties, when it was first built, considered Sydney's best hotel. The status didn't hold. We craved darkness and we could see the gnomes hiding under the overpasses; sleeping in the sides of building, the smell of urine strong.

I picked him up and we spent the day, which I had off from work, looking over Sydney university, where he studied. I gave a lecture here, he said, standing in one empty lecture hall, it's much smaller than I remember. I had just come back from Adelaide and was meant to encourage them. We found an old lab attendant, sitting quietly in his alcove, preparing for the onslaught of students next month. They swapped notes on who was around back in the eighties; the man with the high voice who always wore his academic robes, a cloud of chalk coming off him if you went near. People do go on to have careers from here, my brother said. I've made tens of millions of dollars. My daughter, who had taken time out from school for the day to be with her cousin from America, as she boasted on the phone to a friend, pricked up her ears. Like all girls her age, she's 15, she wants to be rich and famous but doesn't quite know how to achieve it. She'll get there, she's a very determined miss.

After lunch at the pub, the cheapest place for a decent feed around these parts, and a trip to the bottle shop to get something to take for the evening, even though most of us don't drink anymore, just so as not to show up empty handed, we drove out to pick up my son from school. The kids were left back at my house playing on the computer, my 15-year-old daughter and his 14-year-old son. And then, as we waited in the carpark for school to end, he told me the problems he was having with his son, one of the main reasons behind the trip. His smarks have plummetted. He's been hanging around with a bad crowd. He's been smoking dope. He thinks we're all a bunch of fuddy duddys and we don't understand. We're just straight and useless. I don't know if you've got any advice, he asked.

There aren't any happy endings, I said. What's clear now, which wasn't in my day, was the parabolic arc of addiction, the rise and the fall, the path from intitial exultation to the plateau, to the final slide into jails, institutions and death. I've never met anyone who knows so many dead people, someone said to me recently, and I relayed this to him. We all thought we were going to change the world, every puff was a step towards revolution, and instead the world changed us. And so many of my friends died. So many. Fourteen is young to be starting out; but typical for an addict or alcholic. It's quite possible he has the alcoholic gene, I said. At least one of our grandfathers was alcoholic. He said he was worried about the meth, speed, which was also apparently at the school. They age ten years in a matter of months, I said, we see them all the time around where I work. The new stuff, the ice, shaboo in Thailand, I don't know what they call it in America, the new stuff drives them crazy real fast. Then there will be trouble with the law. And everything will slide.

He's grown up with everything, there's no shortage of anything at our house, possessions. His mother wants to move the whole family to Austin, Texas, to get away from it all. But I went for a walk down the music section, the nightclubs, and there are probably drugs everywhere there, too. Everywhere, I confirmed. There's no point doing geographicals. He'll find it if he wants to. I wish he could hear this conversation, he said, just put a tape on what you've been saying for the last ten minutes and play it to him. Maybe the kind old souls in AA or NA could help him, or at least show him the future. There's twelve step programs for young people now; typically they're the ones that bottom out early, 17, 18, 19, and go on to get their lives back together. Is there any way to halt the slide, to step off the path before it kills you?

There they were, the dark gnomes, hiding in the shade of buildings, a different species of man. They may once have been like normal men, many of them had, but the cool darkness that had gripped our sliding souls, the flimsy link with any normal life path, the sad sad look that grips their faces, a far off gaze, that haunted look, the tears rolling spontaneously down their cheeks as they take another swig, everything that had happened in the tumult of their lives, the simple inability to say no as they slid into alcoholism and addiction, a normal happy life a far off thing they could never reach, these crippling impacts which left them diseased sub-humans in the shadows; there wasn't any way to reach out. It's all in front of you, he thought, catching that sad little look for a fleeting second; it's all in front of you and you're unlikely to survive. Few of us do. I don't know what to say to you, I don't know how to transmit any message; except to say what you cannot see, that those people begging for money, in their ragged clothes and smelling of urine, they were once exactly like you: a young boy from a nice family, with the whole world in front of them. If only you hadn't chosen the path to derelection and despair, to a chaotic and unhappy life; or if only the path hadn't chosen you.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSB4868

Feb 18 (Reuters) - A suicide bomber targeting a foreign military convoy in Afghanistan killed 37 civilians in an attack near the Pakistan border on Monday, the interior ministry said.

Some 11,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan in the last 18 months.

Here is a chronology of major bomb attacks mounted by suspected Taliban or allied militants in Afghanistan since 2002:

Sept. 5, 2002 - A car bomb explodes near Kabul's Information Ministry killing at least 26 and injuring 150 in the worst bombing since the Western-supported government came to power.

June 13, 2005 - A suicide bomber wearing a police uniform kills 20 people, including a police chief, in an attack on a mosque in the southern city of Kandahar, as mourners gathered to pay respects to an assassinated anti-Taliban cleric.

Jan. 17, 2006 - Taliban suicide bombers kill at least 20 people in the town of Spin Boldak, bordering Pakistan.

Aug. 3, 2006 - A suicide car bomb attack aimed at a convoy of NATO troops in Kandahar kills at least 21 people.

June 17, 2007 - A Taliban suicide bomber blows up a police bus in Kabul killing 24 and wounding dozens.

Sept. 29, 2007 - A suicide bomb attack on an army bus kills 28 Afghan troops and two civilians in Kabul.

Nov. 6, 2007 - More than 70 people, including at least five Afghan lawmakers and many school children, die in a suicide raid and suspected gunfire by police in the northern town of Baghlan. The Taliban insurgents said they were not behind it.

Feb. 17, 2008 - A suicide bomber kills more than 100 people in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. The Taliban distanced themselves from this attack.

Feb. 18, 2008 - A suicide bomber targeting a foreign military convoy kills 37 civilians in an attack near the Pakistan border.

Source: Reuters; (Writing by Nagesh Narayana)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/world/asia/19pstan.html?ref=world

LAHORE, Pakistan — Fearful of violence and deterred by confusion at polling stations, Pakistanis voted Monday in parliamentary elections that may fail to produce clear winners and could result in protracted post-election political skirmishing.

A number of clashes among polling officials and voters resulted in 10 people killed and 70 injured, according to Pakistani television channels.

Voter turnout was low; in the North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the lawless tribal areas, turnout was only 20 percent, according to election officials. In Peshawar, the provincial capital, Islamic militants prevented many women from voting. Election officials estimated that only 523 of 6,431 registered female voters at six polling stations cast ballots.

In Lahore, the political capital of Punjab province, lines were thin, and many voters complained they could not find their names on the voting lists.

But as the polls closed at 5 p.m. local time, election officials said that nationwide voting had been relatively calm compared with past elections.

Me and Joyce down at Broadway.

Backlash

2008-02-18T04:42:00.007+11:00

"Proud to be a white Australian:

There are Aboriginals, Torres Strait Islanders, Kiwi Australians,
Lebanese Australians, Asian Australians, Arab Australians and boat
People from all over the place.

And then there are just Australians. White Australians, ordinary
Australians, who love their country. Australians who don't really care
About the skin colour of others - until they find themselves on the
Wrong end of abuse because they happen to be white Australians.

You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You call me
'Australian Dog', 'White boy', 'Cracker', 'Honky', 'Whitey', 'Caveman'.
And that's OK. But when I call you, Blackfella, Kike, Towelhead,
Sand-Nigger, Sheep Shagger, Camel Jockey, Gook or Chink, you call me a racist.

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the
Aboriginal suburbs such as Redfern and Muslim and Asian suburbs such as
Lakemba, Bankstown and Cabramatta the most dangerous places to live?

You have Invasion Day. You Have Yom Hashoah You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi.

But if we had a 'White Pride' Day, you would call us racists.

You want us to study Aboriginal history and indoctrinate us to believe
That we are ruthless invaders. You want us to say sorry for something we
Did not do. But, because we want to teach history as it happened, we are racists.

If we had an organisation for only whites to 'advance' OUR lives. We'd be racists.

If we had a university fund that only gave white students scholarships, we'd be racists

There are many indigenous organisations that are only open to
Aboriginals. Are there any organisations that are restricted to whites
Only? Of course not, because if there were, we would be called racists.

Australia has a flag that represents everybody. Aboriginals have a flag
That represents only them, but they don't think that's racist. However
If white Australians dared to have a flag that only represented white
Australians and white athletes who won an Olympic event ran around
Draped in such a flag, they would be condemned as racists.

If you are not white, you can march for your race and rights. If we
Marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists.

You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you're not
Afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.

You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police
Officer shoots a Muslim gang member or beats up a Lebanese drug dealer
Running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist.

I am proud. But you call me a racist. Why is it that only whites can be racists?"

An email now doing the rounds.

For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. We get called white cunts round here all the time; car windows smashed, robbed. Every single window in this house has a grill on it. It's impregnable. We had never been robbed until I left the backdoor open one night a few months back, the first time in the years I've been here, I got home from work, had a cigarette on the back step and bang, wallet keys phone gone, play stations gone, my son's wallet, gone. They're like cockroaches, someone said, when I started talking about how even though I had left the back door open the place was very difficult to get into anyway; a large back fence, a narrow side path.

They're very light fingered. Another said: they used to wander round this country picking up things and they're still doing the same thing. But nobody apologies to us. There's a bit of white in me and I apologise for that, I heard one of them say when addressing a rally a few months back. There are convoluted contradictions in the apology which will play out in the next few months in no doubt odd and interesting ways. I was on a radio panel with an indigenous government minister recently; and I felt like saying, or thought about saying afterwards: you're a member of a government that has proudly increased the rate of removal of children from troubled families, all in the name of child protection and that most dishonest of all phrases, the child's best interest. You don't bother working with these families and all they have to do is have a disagreement with a DOCS officer to lose their kids.

That leftwing icon the Family Court removes kids from a parent, usually the father, every day of the week. After leaving that court half those kids won't see their dad more than once a year. Yet it was the left which championed the apology to indigenous people and so effectively wedged the Liberals on the issue. And now that it's happened, now that we have passed through the sound barrier, the apology barrier, what next? People dedicate their lives to these issues, these noble social justice causes, finding a noble victim and campaigning for them for decades on end, caught in the intense emotional drama, railing against the racist whities infesting our land, those that are left after decades of multiculturalism has deconstructed the mainstream culture as best it can.

They're like cockroaches scuttling away from beneath a lifted board, afraid of the light, the proponents of noble causes who now don't know where to go. Talkback has run hot; with caller after caller claiming there was no such thing as the stolen generation and condemning the public displays of hysteria and self-flagellation. Soon there will be nowhere to hide. Everyone knows the chaos going on in remote aboriginal communities now. The Liberals, after ignoring what was going on for a decade, decided foolishly to take action in an election year and make it an election issue, hoping to gain votes. It was the wrong thing to do on so many levels, but to do nothing following the Little Chidlren Are Sacred report was also impossible.

My brother Warren has been in Sydney for a few days from near San Diego where he lives with his family. He left here decades ago to make his fortune in silicon valley, and would never have done very well if he had stayed here. There's just not the same opportunities. And here, multiple layers of government parasites and crippling multiple layers of laws and regulation make progress impossible for all but the fortunate view; who prosper astonishingly. The rest of us are left working week to week. He went out to Newport, to the house where we grew up, an act I've been putting up for years; reluctant to confront the emotional chaos of the past. We're crimnals, we're scooting on the edge, we're dark shadows in the city's night bars and nothing can rescue us, nothing can make the cruel past go away, nothing can stop the festering of past pain which had so distorted his life.

You wouldn't recognise the place, it's double story now, and some new people have just moved in. I bowled up and said: this might seem strange but I grew up here, and they were very welcoming. I live an hour and a half away; and I'm yet to do that simple act: confrontation; those terrible beatings. No wonder I don't want to go there.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Police Media:

Nine arrested following fights in Sydney CBD

2008-02-16 14:31:45

Police have arrested nine people after two fights in central Sydney this
morning.

Police from The Rocks and City Central Local Area Commands and the
Public Order and Riot Squad (PORS) responded to numerous calls to
'Triple Zero' reporting a brawl involving 15-20 men at King Street
Wharf, in the Darling Harbour precinct, about 12.15am today.

A PORS officer used a Taser stun gun during the arrest of a 19-year-old
Willmot man who was allegedly pinning a male officer to the ground.

The decision to use the Taser was based on the extreme violence
displayed and the probability of injuries inflicted upon the officer.

The man was arrested and taken to City Central Police Station where he
was examined by NSW Ambulance officers before being charged.

As a result of inquiries:

* A 19-year-old man from Willmot was charged with
affray, resisting police, resisting arrest, and assaulting police. He
was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail Court today.

* A 19-year-old man from Bidwill was charged with
resisting police, refusing to comply with a police direction, and
offensive language. He was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail
court today.

* A 19-year-old woman from Bidwill was charged with
resisting police, refusing to comply with a direction, and offensive
behaviour. She was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail Court
today.

* A 19-year-old man from Blackett was charged with
two counts of resisting police, and one count each of affray and
assaulting police. He was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail
court today.

* A 19-year-old woman from Rooty Hill was charged
with affray and resisting police. She was refused bail to Parramatta
Bail Court today.

* A 20-year-old woman from Whalan was charged with
affray and assaulting police. She was also refused bail to Parramatta
Bail Court today.

* A 16-year-old Tregear youth was charged with
affray and resisting police. He was granted conditional bail and is due
to appear in Bidura Children's Court on March 10.

* A 17-year-old youth from Tregear has been charged
with two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and one count
of affray. He was granted conditional bail to appear in Bidura
Children's Court on 10 March.

A female police officer suffered facial injuries after allegedly being
elbowed in the face during the scuffle, while the male officer suffered
a wrist injury. They were treated at the scene by ambulance officers.

Two men were taken to St Vincent's Hospital suffering head injuries
after allegedly being assaulted by the group. Police are still to
interview the two injured men.

Police have also charged a youth following an unrelated assault in
George Street, in central Sydney, this morning.

The incident happened about 3am, when an 18-year-old Merrylands man went
to the aid of two other people being assaulted. Police will allege he in
turn was attacked, suffering facial injuries.

A 17-year-old youth from Dharruk has been charged with one count each of
assault occasioning actual bodily harm and affray.

He was granted conditional bail and is due to appear in Bidura
Children's Court on 10 March.

Police are waiting to interview the victim of the original incident.
That person was taken to hospital suffering serious eye injuries.

Inquiries are continuing.

The neighbours.

A Frothing Exultation

2008-02-17T04:41:00.005+11:00

"I followed him to a room on a floor I didn't know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.

"The thinner man drew out a small new radio, said something into it, and straightened his stiff jacket over his traditional shirt. I didn't need to see the shoulder holster. I had already guessed they were members of the Security Service. They did not care what I said or what I thought of them. They had watched people through hidden cameras in bedrooms, in torture cells, and on execution grounds. They knew that, however I presented myself, I could be reduced. But why had they decided to question me? In the silence, I heard a car reversing in the courtyard and then the first notes of the call to prayer."
The Places In Between, Rory Stewart.

There was a great turning of the page; change the Prime Minister and you change the country, went the saying, first coined, if memory serves correctly, by former PM Paul Keating. John Howard used the expression once during the last election, and then immediately shut his mouth on that particular topic. Because everyone went: yes, yes, yes. Everything changed overnight. The openly lesbian, Chinese origin Penny Wong, taking her partner to Kyoto for the signing and the talk-fest. A woman, Julia Gillard, as Deputy Prime Minister and already on a number of occasions acting Prime Minister. A former rock singer, Peter Garrett, as environment minister. Perhaps it will all end in tears. All impossible under the previous "conservative" government; conservative in quotes because most of his social ideas were stolen from Labor as he gazzumped every policy they dreamed up, a demonic helicopter buzzing over them, hoovering up everything they came up with. During his time government control over our lives spread ever and ever deeper; and privacy legislation has shrouded many things in even greater secrecy.

There's some spectacular talent gaps; Simon Crean as trade minister, Steven Smith as foreign, Jenny Macklin as indigenous affairs, but things have moved on, the bolts have clicked, and Australia is a different place.

He felt, in some strange way, a frothy exultaiton he could not explain. Was it happiness? With his brother visiting from America, there seemed even greater emphasis on that far off house common to their past, that far off place that neither of them had seen for many years, but still held some terrible sway over their imaginations. Unprompted he said he wanted to go out to see it; and couldn't find the time. There was so much to confront. Perhaps it was the only way through.

Just as the nation has officially apologised there has been a police crack down on anti-social behaviour in the street, and suddenly everywhere you look the police are hassling street drunks and making life difficult for the vulnerable exposed on the streets and drinking in the parks; those who don't have penthouse walls and mansion gates to hide the world's prying eyes; to prevent exposure in their final decline; the drinking, the dereliction, the bad behaviour, the shouting, the dealing. And of course it's our indigenous brothers who are most affected by any crackdown; and those linked together by the alcoholic gene; their diseased frames and halting gates everywhere in this city; what happens to you if you keep on drinking.

In the end you're not a nice person, no matter who you are, no matter what the talents, how good the motivations were at the beginning of the cylce. They all end in the same place, become the same person. He marched thoroughly through the darkness. He made mistakes, oh so many mistakes. He remembered those great exculting moments of his childhood, when he managed to set the whole valley alight and the sheer beautiful chaos of the screaming fire engines, the spectacularly beautiful leap of flames, the wonderful sense of event and confirmation, it all made the belting afterwards worthwhile. He would endure almost anything to hear the sound of the fire engines, see the panic in the face of the adults, see the flames leaping from one tree to the next, the smoke billowing across their neighbour's houses.

He called time repeatedly, but this wasn't the end. He might have been left a cormorant on a rock, watching a world that was no longer his, a world full of young people, vibrant, enthusiastic, kids who couldn't care less anymore what the adults thought, the aging adults. The baby boomers had finally passed the flame; age and time had got the better of them. They drifted now into retirement, washed away in an instant. There wasn't much to be said, in the end, for a time that had been so self-indulgent, beliefs that had been so radically wrong, creeping dogs who were gone now, their power bases exposed as flimsy, houses on bamboo stilts. The streets throbbed with a new life. No one's older than you, his brother ribbed, sitting on the internal balcony of the fading 80s hotel they were staying in; and everything marched forward in a great surge; a paradise of fresh hope, a truly magnificent fresh hope. It was an entirely new world. He could only be grateful, in his own hobbling way, to still be alive. And that is how he summed it up: At least I'm alive, he said. That's more than you can say for a lot of people I've known.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-rudd-identity/2008/02/15/1202760597274.html

The Rudd identity

Tony Wright
February 16, 2008

SELDOM has Australia witnessed a defter illustration of the political art. As Kevin Rudd wove his spell on Wednesday over the gathered peoples of the old land we inhabit, granting with finely crafted words a symbolic rebirth to the lost and the found, he tossed a rope to Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson.

It was, however, both an instrument of deliverance and a lasso.

Nelson had no choice but to sit there, nodding sagely, as Rudd proposed that he and the Opposition Leader jointly head a sort of war cabinet to tackle — as a start — the lack of housing in remote Aboriginal communities. Nelson had no clue that such a gift was coming his way, and thus could neither refuse it nor accept it. He was, in effect, rendered politically impotent.

Rudd's gesture, though, was so dexterously crafted, he could receive only plaudits. His stature growing by the minute as an inclusive prime minister catching the mood of the country, who would be so meanly disposed to detect a hidden motive, let alone criticise such apparent generosity of spirit?

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23221746-5007146,00.html

With respect, Rudd grasps the moment

By Laurie Oakes

February 16, 2008

IT'S an extraordinary start. Kevin Rudd becomes Prime Minister and, well within his first 100 days, walks straight into the history books. That is the truth about his parliamentary apology to the stolen generation.

And it is not only in Australia where the bipartisan "sorry" vote has made an impact.

The event was world news and Rudd got a flow of positive overseas feedback, including congratulatory text messages from high-level diplomatic contacts and a phone call from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Had John Howard delivered the apology in 1997, when it was first recommended in the Bringing Them Home report, the outpouring of feeling would not have been nearly as great.

Howard's decade of intransigence magnified the importance of the gesture. Rudd saw that and used it to put his own stamp on the prime ministership in spectacular fashion.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23226367-5000117,00.html

Worst of jobs for Libs leader
Sunday Herald Sun

Glenn Milne

February 17, 2008 12:00am

THE man who was most diminished by Wednesday's national apology to the "stolen generations" wasn't there.

While Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson were enhanced both as politicians and as human beings by their contributions, John Winston Howard refused an invitation to attend the event.

Before we deal with Howard, a word on Nelson and his role in this symbolic act of national reconciliation.

While there's been much made of people turning their backs on the Opposition Leader, the fact is there is an activist core on this issue that will never be satisfied with the Coalition's position on indigenous issues. And for that, Nelson has Howard to thank.

The truth is that at some of the outdoor broadcast venues on Wednesday spectators started turning their backs on Nelson before he opened his mouth. This is a display of political prejudice rather than a principled stand in support of an apology.

What people fail to appreciate is that Nelson represents the conservative half of Australia on this question. The new Opposition Leader's achievement, after more than a decade of Howard-led recalcitrance, was to get his party inside the apology tent.

The fact that he did is deserving of applause. All the rest is simply nitpicking.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/emphasis-on-the-truth/2008/02/16/1202760661102.html

Emphasis on the truth

Simon Webster
February 17, 2008

Kevin Rudd is treating the office of prime minister with contempt. Ignoring a noble tradition established by 25 previous prime ministers, Rudd is making a mockery of history and insulting the Australian public by doing what he said he would do.

"No, no, you don't understand, Kev," a senior adviser told Rudd last week. "All that stuff we said in November, we were just kidding. It was a joke. Bit of a chuckle. It was the beer talking. Once you're in, you're in. You don't actually have to do anything useful. Look at Morris up in Sydney."

A steely glint came to Rudd's eye. He turned to the window and gazed out over the manicured expanse of lawn at Parliament House. "My word is my bond," he said. "As it has been since my difficult upbringing as a fair dinkum dinky-di ridgy-didge Aussie battler with an accent that is a cross between Outer Hebridean and Punjabi. I shall do great things for this great nation. And I shall make important speeches that will make the great hairs on the great necks of our great people stand up, even if my emphasis is sometimes in the wrong place, and I sometimes mumbleoverbitsandfinishsentencestooquickly."

The adviser fired back: "But the tax cuts, Kev. Surely we don't have to go through with the tax cuts."

"Honesty is the best policy, my faithful adviser. Atleasthat'swhatmumalwayssaid."

A man at the Royal Easter Show.

Don't Worry Be Happy

2008-02-16T06:37:00.007+11:00

"Yet he cannot simply quit and walk away from Iraq without at least some fleeting semblance of success: too many Americans have died for him to admit that it was all a mistake and say he's sorry... They will have to stay so that he does not have to admit that the whole Iraq adventure was a blunder and a waste."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.

Like cockroaches scuttling away from the light after lifting an old portable fridge on a building site, the left are scattering away from the light after the national apology. They turned their back while Brendan Nelson gave his speach, although it was meant to be a moment of national unity. He said things they didn't want to hear; and will never want to hear. Perhaps he went too far, or could have chosen his timing better; a four year old drowned while being raped by a petrol sniffer; perhaps that went too far; although of course it was entirely true. Perhaps it is all healthy; stripping away the romanticism and hysteria of it all, moving beyond a blockage point. They were visionary moments; they showed great leadership; they showed a country shifting on its axis. Slowly we get used to the term: Prime Minister Rudd.

And I see the police harassing people; everywhere; make some flippant comment, we're little better than a police state, the great communist republic of Australia. Although sadly its true. Groaning under multiple layers of inept government and grotesque levels of taxation, we are trapped in a terrible, secretive, declining society feeding on itself. We rank 28th in the world for press freedom. The police are wearing gloves as they search through the belongings of a group of drunks that had gathered at the bus stop near the Newtown train station. I stare in concern, bewilderment, curiosity, trying to determine exactly what it is they are doing. There's been an announcement that police are cracking down on anti-social behaviour and I want to watch. Coming so close on the apology, it is redolent with irony. For of course it is our indigenous brothers who will suffer the most from any street crackdown. The ones that we see are little more than street alcoholics, dealing right under the nose of the police, thumbing their nose at, or oblivious to, the ever omniscient cameras.

You're going to spend the night in a cell, I hear a young policeman say to a drunk elderly, well older, man they are forcefully escorting across the road towards the police station. The traffic moves on and I can't catch the rest of the drama, but one thing I do know, it could easily have been me. He arches back, resisting, weak, futile, very drunk. What did I do? he asks plaintifully, I didn't do anything. Then he calls them a bunch of effing c...s and the traffic rolls me away into a life of chores and duty.

My youngest brother, who has been in America, in silicon valley, since he was poached by an American computer company as a young man, arrived in Australia last night. It's been 17 years since he was last in Australia and I haven't seen much of him his entire adult life. He had degrees in pure maths, computer science and electrical engineering by the time he was 23 and made his fortune developing the computer chips or whatever they are for the central processing unit in computers. After building a super computer that could fit in a box, used for instance by giant finance companies on the hedge market to beat the competition by seconds, he tells me things I don't really understand about how there will be 1600 engineers working on the next project, the next stage in computer design, the place he has spent his entire professional life at.

Where will it end? I ask at the City Extra 24 hour cafe at Circular Quay; and he says it will never end. He's spent his entire life working on the "what next" area of computers; and there will always be something more. Thuey're just now shipping millions of computers he helped design, using technology he developed ten years ago. It's all amazing stuff. Offers he can't refuse. Millions of dollars I will never see, millions he would never have seen if he had stayed here. Australia is at the end of the known universe, we are far far away from the heart of things. He would never have succeeded if he had stayed here, there simply aren't the opportunities.

And I, the eldest brother, I stayed here. I've been kidnapped by an old man, he joked to our mother on the phone. For I've got grey hair and grown old, now a man in his 50s, since we last saw each other. His 14-yar-old boy Brian was trailing after him; skinny with long hair, playing constantly with his phone, ear phones in his head even walking through the airport in a new country; and my own kids welcome their cousin they had never seen, although it's well past their bedtime. And we say one thing now, after all that has happened: Don't Worry Be Happy. You're not that man being dragged across the street to he police cells. Some days you really are happy. Some days couldn't be better than they already are.

THE BIGGER STORY:

n a mother's loss, Kenya's agony
By Jeffrey Gettleman The New York Times
Friday, February 15, 2008

It did not take many people to carry the coffins of Wycliffe and Cynthia Awino.

They were 7 and 9 years old.

The brother and sister were burned to death by a mob last month in Kenya in the explosion of post-election violence. And if there ever was a woman alone, it was their mother, Millicent Awino, who stood by herself at the foot of two freshly dug graves on Thursday, blotting out reality with her hands over her face, as her only children disappeared into the ground.

"I only wish to have kids again," she said, staring at the caskets.

Awino is a 23-year-old single mother who was at work packing roses for the equivalent of $2 a day when her children were killed. A mob surrounded the house where they were hiding with 17 other people, barricaded the doors and soaked the walls with gasoline. No one inside had a chance.

Everyone died, including 11 children. It was one of the most disturbing episodes in the bloodletting that convulsed Kenya since a disputed election in December. The incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging.

Since then, more than 1,000 people have been killed in vicious fighting between supporters of the two politicians, fighting that followed mostly ethnic lines but broke all rules. Old men were chopped in the head with axes. Mothers were stabbed to death in front of screaming babies.

The killings seem to have subsided for now as Kenya's rival politicians continue to negotiate. On Thursday, officials said that government and opposition leaders had agreed to the idea of joining together in a coalition government but remained bitterly divided over how much power the opposition would have. Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, is headed to Kenya next week to coax along the politicians. While they haggle, there are open wounds almost everywhere.

Katito, where Awino now lives, is a small town about an hour's drive from Kisumu, an industrial city on Lake Victoria. About all that is left of Kisumu's once vibrant Kikuyu community, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, are a string of scorched shops picked clean by looters. Kibaki is a Kikuyu and opposition supporters have vented their outrage about the election toward members of his ethnic group, who have been methodically hunted down across the country.

The Kikuyus have taken revenge, massacring Luos, Odinga's community. The Awinos are Luos. They lived in Naivasha, an ethnically mixed town in the Rift Valley that used to be known for its nature walks, fancy hotels and flower farms.

Around 7 a.m., Sunday, Jan. 27, Awino left for work. She was one of the many migrant workers who had flocked to Naivasha for jobs in the flower farms, neatly packing beautiful roses by day and returning to their iron-roofed shanties at night. Two dollars a day is considered a decent wage here, especially for a woman who dropped out of 8th grade to have her first baby at age 14.

Wycliffe and Cynthia were sent to a neighbor's house. Wycliffe seemed especially caring for a 7-year-old.

"Whenever I came home from work, he'd take one look at me and say, 'Mommy, you're tired,"' Awino said.

Cynthia helped raise him, boiling tea in the morning and cooking rice. The only picture the family has of them shows the children sitting on the grass, Wycliffe with a freshly shaved head, Cynthia wearing a lemon-colored dress.

Awino rushed back to her neighborhood that Sunday afternoon when her boss told her that Kikuyu gangs were killings Luos. She found her house in ashes. When she reached her neighbors, she collapsed. The bodies of Wycliffe and Cynthia were found huddled with the others in a back room, burned almost beyond recognition.

On Thursday morning, Awino brought the bodies home, two wooden coffins trimmed with lace strapped atop a minibus.

Home is now a shack with plastic sheeting for walls, built on the edge of a farm belonging to her ex-husband's father. The people here are strangers to Awino. Even though she split up with her husband seven years ago, custom has it that she still should live on his family's land.

About 20 people came to the funeral. The refreshments were simple, warm Coca-Colas and slices of white bread.

Members of the local church tapped metal rings that rang like bells. The smell of fresh manure wafted up from the fields.

The speeches were short. Awino told the story of how her children were killed. Their father, Morris Okoth, then shared a few words.

"There is no need for payback," he said.

Wycliffe went first. Before his three-foot coffin was lowered into its hole, one woman threw herself on it.

"Wycliffe! Wycliffe!" she wailed. "Where are you?"

Cynthia's coffin was then covered by shovelfuls of earth.

There was no comforting message at the end. There seemed to be nothing to say. Most people walked away with their heads down. The only sounds were soft sobbing and birds chirping.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/15/africa/15funeral.php

Stephen and Danny.

Blackberry Bushes Down A Winding Road

2008-02-15T04:37:00.005+11:00

—I move:

That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future. Our nation, Australia, has reached such a time. And that is why the parliament is today here assembled: to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and, in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.
Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister.

Constellations kept creeping in, down telesocped tunnels to remote places, remote times, happy days really, before his first suicide attempt, when collecting bottles down the road in our go-kart was a great adventure. In those days the beer bottles had dates stamped on their bottoms, and we made a collection dating back through the fifities, the forties, even ealier. There was a lot of good reason to be there, fronting up in our own lives. Children only, after all. My parents had built the house on an old reclaimed rubbish dump, because the land was cheap. The bush was overgrown with blackberries, and each season we collected them. Things bothered us, but much of the time the old man was away and we spent our time down at the dead end, our little gang, giggling, racing our carts down a steep concrete drive someone had started to build to their dream home, but had never finished.

The mysterious Mr Nobody, for that's who he insisted he was, and sometimes we even believed that really was his name, the mysterious Mr Nobody came out regularly to build his home in the bush; and we used to hang around and watch him, nothing better to do. And stand on top of the great sand stone rocks that lay scattered through the bush, shouting "I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascle". And exploring the mysterious sandstone caves etched out in the side of the hill. And one day running around with our pants down, which we thought was very daring but we didn't know why.

But mostly, because we either got no pocket money or 25 cents a week, meaning it took me, I remember so clearly, three and a half months to save to get a light on my bike. The bottles were a great source of income. Me and my brother Doug would trundle our cart up and down that winding, remote street, in those days the very edge of suburbia, knocking on people's doors and collecting bottles. Sometimes there would be just such excellent finds. People would have a whole collection of bottles at their back door, because they didn't know what to do with them, and we would pile them up and take them back to the house, and pile them up into huge piles in the front yard, before our father, when he was back from some trip, would take us down to the bottle depot and for a little while we would have real money in our pockets.

The sun shone and the kookaburras chortled in the high trees. The neighbours bred budgerigars in a huge cage and often they would go next door to watch them, to hang around. They gave us milk and biscuits; their own children had grown up and gone away. We spent a lot of time there. Our own parents didn't like pets and we loved the birds and the friendly words.

For a while I was in love with Barbara Mason, who lived right at the start of our winding street, down the bottom of the hill. Each Sunday our mother sent us to a different church, Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, until one day she found Herbert W
Armstrong on the radio and we became fundamentalists. Short skirts and rock music were direct paths to hell. Far far off the sixties were happening. Every time I refused to get my hair cut I got belted. But that was all later, when I walked along the beach hearing my name echoing out of the waves, waiting to die from an overdose of pills.

Before that, in the good times, there had been the go cart and the piles of beer bottles, the huge clumps of blackberry bushes and a tiny hope that life would turn out to be interesting after all; that the strange almost pioneer families who had built their homes along Wallamutta Road held secrets that would help me escape into a greater profundity; a creative life. And that the eiry sad silence which enveloped our house, I never heard my parents laugh, I never heard them cry, I never heard them argue, I never heard them shout at each other; that this strange silent war in which I grew up would end and we could escape down that winding road, no longer picking our way carefully through the prickles to get to the staining, mushy fruit but sneaking down to the bus stop to escape into the city, another world, another life.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The Age:

South Australia has moved to double the deposit on drink bottles, cans and cartons in a move Clean Up Australia has hailed a model for the rest of the country.

Premier Mike Rann said on Tuesday the current five cent deposit on drink containers, which had been in place since 1977, would be doubled to 10 cents later this year.

He said the increase would provide a greater incentive to recycle empty containers and cut into the 185 million still going to landfill each year.

"It will ensure even more containers are recycled, as well as reducing litter and increasing the amount of money community groups can generate from the return of containers," Mr Rann said.

In recent years, the return rate for drink containers had dropped from about 84 per cent to 70 per cent, suggesting, the premier said, the time was right to increase the deposit.

Clean Up Australia chairman Ian Kiernan said doubling the refund for recycling drink bottles and cans was the most effective way to boost recycling rates and SA's lead should be followed by other states.

He said a poll conducted last year indicated 82 per cent of people across Australia supported the idea of a national 10 cent refund.

"It's a no-brainer," Mr Kiernan said.
"The community, government and industry all have a role to play and a shared responsibility to make recycling an effective solution to waste.

"A financial incentive to recycle is a compelling reason not to dump bottles and cans in the environment."
Mr Rann said South Australia's aim was to have every container carrying the deposit returned for recycling.
He said the government would consult with the beverage industry and container collectors to ensure the transition to a 10 cent deposit was carefully planned.

Coca-Cola Amatil said the increase in the container deposit would just hurt families by increasing the cost of packaged alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.

"We are of the view that an increased container deposit levy will effectively be a tax on the majority of South Australians who do the right thing when it comes to litter," said managing director Warwick White.

"Container deposit levies are an old fashioned and inefficient response to the waste problem.
"Improved recovery is better addressed by investing in more efficient kerbside and public place recycling systems, as well as better public education."

Phillip at Tanbar Springs.

History

2008-02-14T05:38:00.006+11:00

"But who will be able to move on after (the) apology? Most white
Australians will be able to move on (with the warm inner glow that
will come from having said sorry), but I doubt indigenous Australians
will. Those people stolen from their families who feel entitled to
compensation will never be able to move on.
"Too many will be condemned to harbour a sense of injustice for the
rest of their lives. Far from moving on, these people -- whose lives
have been much consumed by this issue -- will die with a sense of
unresolved justice.
"One of my misgivings about the apology has been my belief that nothing
good will come from viewing ourselves, and making our case on the
basis of our status, as victims.
"We have been -- and the people who lost their families certainly were
-- victimised in history, but we must stop the politics of victimhood.
"We lose power when we adopt this psychology. Whatever moral power we
might gain over white Australia from presenting ourselves as victims,
we lose in ourselves."
Noel Pearson.

Wherever you're from, agree or disagree, yesterday was an historic moment in Australian life; the formal aplogy to the indigenous people. It will mean different things to different people, and hard truths will not be confronted. Our own happy days, far off, mean nothing in the clamour of competing woes. There are multiple ironies. The courts and the child protection authorities went about their corrupt, dishonest business, behind closed doors, in secrecy, proudly removing parents and pretending they're acting in the best interests of children, while now politically acceptable victims around the country make the front pages; all day, everywhere. It was an occasion and the country stopped. There were giant screens set up in Redfern, in Martin Place, and around the country. Almost everyone watched it on television. Almost everyone was moved. They turned their backs on Brendan Nelson, perhaps because it was the wrong time for uncomfortable truths. And history has been written in terms of the victors of the culture wars, the left now ascendant from one side of tHe country to the other; the conservatives in shambles while John Howard retreats to his two million dollar residence in Wollstonecraft.

"A comfortable, established suburb", one site describes it as. Where everything is established, eveyrthing is comfortable, untouched by the public pain of so many. There was much to be gained by resisting the fashionable shibboliths of the day; but those days have passed and the conservatives were utterly hopeless at explaining their objections. They sat on the fence, and were cut to ribbons. Again. As they did on so many other issues. Parliament has opened with a new Prime Minister, with the sounds of didgeridoos, and the consequences of yesterday wil be unknown for a very long time. I'd love to telescope forward five years, even ten, and see how the debate stands now. Will they still be dying in custody at higher rates than anybody else. Will there still be more aborigines in jail than any other ethnic group. Will life expectancy have got worse. Will it all have proven to be a mass charade; or did we really see history being made.

It is the left's policies that have left such chaos in the remote indigenous settlements, cut off from the mainstream, with no obligation to work; essentially bands of practising alcoholics, with nothing to do, no reason to be, isolated from all the benefits of modern life. They were meant to be places where an ancient culture would be protected from the corrupting influence of modern Western life. That's not what happened. Will the cynicism, if not resentment, of the toiling poor be even greater, and relationships even more troubled? Or will, for once, things go right; and the day really represent a step forward, all those fine words really be a breakthrough in the poisonous, curdled debate.

We get up and go to work and pay taxes for circuses. We pay taxes to support an already wealthy political caste; paying them many times the average wage. Cruelty was subborned inside. Magnificent gestures writ large. It was a day we knew was history, that would be much referred to in years to come, as a high water mark, as the breaking of a dam, as the day we began to hold hands and walk confidentally into the future. Or the day when style over substance peaked; and the nation believed there was hope, there was a future. A new prime minister and a new country has changed the landscape totally. There is boundless optimism as a new generation takes up the batton. Everyone in the street looks young, untroubled, healthy, happy, they chat cheerfully on their phones as if maintaining friendships was important, and they move confidently as if the world was theirs. We were once like that, we were once in the day, we once felt that our actions, our beliefs, were the core of the culture, would advance our society, were important.

It's not like that now. Core beliefs get blown away, fragile in the new winds. We were never optimistic, but yet here they all are, happy, shouting to each other, brave, all convinced with the certainty of their set of beliefs, the confidence that the past was wrong and they are right; confident that the versions of history they have been told were correct, never questioning, never inflicted with existential guilt or even so much as a doubt. Handsome, beyond handsome, physically attractive, warm in the flesh and warm in their approaches, they grasp the world we gave them as if it was rightfully theirs, never even thinking that someone went before. The nation said sorry and we're all going to move on. But only history will be able to tell what it all really meant.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23209842-661,00.html

KEVIN Rudd opened a new era in Aboriginal reconciliation with a historic apology to the stolen generation yesterday.

The Prime Minister vowed to put indigenous affairs beyond politics, inviting Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson to co-chair a commission to tackle key problems facing Aboriginal people.

Mr Rudd ended more than a decade of waiting by Aborigines by saying sorry for the pain and suffering inflicted on tens of thousands of indigenous people taken from their families.

Aborigines in Federal Parliament's public gallery wept as he delivered the formal apology -- the first official business of the new Labor Government.

It was followed by a standing ovation.

In city squares and parks across the country, and on the lawns outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australians cheered, applauded, hugged and cried after the apology was delivered.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/apology-flashes-around-the-globe/2008/02/13/1202760398990.html

THE Government's apology to the stolen generations has made news around the world, with The New York Times heralding "a new chapter in Australia's tortured relations with its indigenous peoples".

The article called the apology "comprehensive and moving" and recorded Kevin Rudd's "call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia's Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders".

In Britain, all the main dailies previewed the event, focusing on the traditional welcome to country included for the first time in Tuesday's opening of the new Parliament.

"The didgeridoo took precedence over the mace yesterday when Aboriginal customs melded with British political tradition on the eve of Australia's apology to the 'stolen generations'," The Times wrote.

The Daily Telegraph said: "A century of Westminster-style pageantry and pomp took a back seat in Australia's capital, Canberra, as Aborigines smeared with white body paint and playing didgeridoos opened Parliament for the first time."

In an editorial titled "The Courage to Right a Historic Wrong", The Independent praised Mr Rudd for "bringing a liberating breath of fresh air into Australian politics".

"Politicians who match their words to their deeds are hardly 10 a penny these days," the editorial began. "And, even when they do appear on our horizon, their words and deeds are all too often designed to court cheap popularity. So it is heartening to find a recently elected leader who is so quickly and determinedly putting his campaign pledges into practice, even those that may not have appealed to every voter."

China's official English-language paper, China Daily, ran a photo of dancers from Galiwnku Island on its front page and promoted a page five story as "Australia to say sorry to its Aborigines". In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post headed its story "Day of atonement arrives for Stolen Generation" and profiled a surviving member of the stolen generations.

In the United States, the cable news channels were pre-occupied with the three latest primary races in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC. But most of the network and newspaper websites were carrying wire reports.

The CNN International, BBC World and Al-Jazeera cable news channels all covered the story. Indian and Canadian newspaper websites carried wire reports of the apology.

In New Zealand, The Dominion Post took a more parochial approach to the moment, talking to a Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira, who was in Canberra listening to the Prime Minister. "It was a very emotional experience," Mr Harawira told the Post. "I'm bloody glad I'm here."

My son Sam

The Origin Of Words

2008-02-13T04:37:00.000+11:00

"I believe at the height of the coming storm—a time of great chaos and confusion—the eye [of the hurricane] will pass over humanity. Suddenly, there will be a great calm; the sky will open up, and we will see the Sun beaming down upon us. It’s rays of Mercy will illuminate our hearts, and we will all see ourselves the way God sees us. It will be a warning, as we will see our souls in their true condition. It will be more than a "wake-up call".
Trumpets of Warning, Part V.

"We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

"For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

"And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry."
The official apology, wording released yesterday.

It was hard, almost impossible, to break through the barrier, to search for things which had long ago been supressed. He was uncertain of his motivation, and fearful of the results. The layes of meaning and identity were well established. The dancer from the dance, the pretty boy, the man with the tragic destiny; the drinker, the drugger, the candlestick maker, the story teller, the gruff journalist; a quiet soul with an askance look. The previous world, established over decades, had totally collapsed; just like that, one day, the seven shields vanished and a frightened, skinless, utterly vulnerable, strange little atrophied creature had run around in circles as if it had been scolded with a bucket of hot water, shrieking and frantic as the daylight struck its vulnerable surface. And then it, too, disappeared; and the entire construct had just vanished, just like that.

The thoughts kept going on in an endless sequence, but he was a different person after that. The cruel savages that inhabited the planet no longer seemed to see him as a target. He settled in, a person amongst person, or some days some spirit pretending to be a person, and the times rolled by and he entered a different era, when he was no longer young and the torch had been passed.

There was that time when he had flown around Australia with his family, his father, a pilot, on a busman's holiday, flying the plane with his family in tow. He didn't speak to him the entire trip; while showing his younger brother how to fly the plane. That was part of it. He had already been in repeated trouble for coming home on Friday's, changing out of his uniform and coming back on Monday mornings, his father always in the kitchen, the belt laid out on the table. Waiting. He would come home for the belting and his hatred would deepen further and further at the sheer unncessary cruel brutality of it all. His father put a private detective on him to find out where he went; and as a result a relatively well known radio broadcaster fled the city and began a new career in Perth, thousands of miles away on the west coast of the country. And the shame and the fear and the abuse, the hatred, it all built up to impossible levels. There was no other way to escape his daily life than in books and in words, to retreat inwards, to build a fantasy world. He was not loved.

Much to his father's horror he played the piano and wrote and wrote; poetry, short stories, a young man picking his way across an apocalyptic landscape. He wrote stories in poetry about the gibber deserts and the astonishing sights of central Australia; he wrote a novella about a fantasy world; hooked into some intense lyricism he didn't understand, all later lost when he left them in the shed and they were thrown out. And he was beaten and he was beaten. And trapped, the only ways to escape was internally; behind the shields. He had never wanted to feel anything because to feel anything was to be hurt. So the walls went up, bang bang bang, swish swish swish; and he learnt to view the world through multiple constructs. Nobody could get to him, nobody. Not the parents who were meant to protect him and instead abused him, not the men who poured over his youthful body, not the friends he hung out with around the fountain. No one.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/13/2161097.htm?section=australia

Rudd to make 'healing' apology

Eleven years after the Human Rights Commission said the Federal Parliament should apologise to Indigenous Australians, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will this morning say sorry.

The Federal Parliament and its surrounds will be bulging with people this morning as people crowd in to witness the historic moment.

The text of the apology was tabled in the House yesterday, and it revealed Mr Rudd will say sorry three times during his apology.

Mr Rudd says the apology will be a crucial part of the healing of the nation.

While for 11 years the Coalition has rejected the Human Rights Commission's call for an apology, there will be bipartisan support for Mr Rudd's words today.

Opposition spokesman on Indigenous affairs Tony Abbott says the Coalition has agreed to the text - which will apologise for the indignity and degradation inflicted on a proud culture - in its entirety.

"We are not going to ruin the day by quibbling over the terminology," he said.

Mr Abbott says the apology must be just a first step, and says the Government can not ignore that Indigenous people also want compensation and need concrete assistance.

"The compensation question is something that the Government has got to address," he said.

"There is an enormous problem in Indigenous Australia that is not going to be solved by this apology."

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, says money will be spent lifting Indigenous life expectancy rather than compensation.

"If we're going to improve the chances of an Aboriginal child born today they need to have the same level of health services as any other Australian," she said.

Hundreds of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people will be in Canberra and in cities across the nation to witness the address today, and all living former Prime Ministers except John Howard will also be in Parliament to hear the apology.

Paul Bowles

2008-02-12T05:24:00.000+11:00

"The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider's house, if they but knew."
Koran.

"He watched her. For her the Moroccans were backward onlookers standing on the sidelines of the parade of progress; they must be exhorted to join, if necessary pulled by force into the march. Hers was the attitude of the missionary, but whereas the missionary offered a complete if unusable code of thought and behavior, the modernizer offered nothing at all, save a place in the ranks. And the Moslems, who with their blind intuitive wisdom had triumphantly withstood the missionaries' cajoleries, now were going to be duped into joining the senseless march of universal brotherhood; for the privilege each man would have to give up only a small part of himself--just enough to make him incomplete, so that instead of looking into his own heart, to Allah, for reassurance, he would have to look to the others. The new world would be a triumph of frustration, where all humanity would be lifting itself by its own bootstraps--the equality of the damned. No wonder the religious leaders of Islam identified Western culture with the works of Satan: they had seen the truth and were expressing it in the simplest terms."
The Spider's House, Paul Bowles

For many years he counted his life as begining at 14, when \he began to think for myself and buck against the suffocating constrants of my family. There was no happy chldhood. There was nowhere we could be taken to find peace. Deliberately blanked out; it was as if those days had never existed; he had sprung half grown into the world. They couldnt' have been more shadowy. If he thought of those times at all it was in terms of snaking belts and the agony of the dense, brick green bush; the pain of the Australian landscape. He never went unmasked. He was cruel in his indifference to his earlier self; that was not who he was meant to be.

For years he had adored Paul Bowles, his mentor, his artisitic hero. He read The Sheltering Sky several times; once trekking across Morrocco, wreathed in hash, the desert mountains dissolving in visual tableaus before him. The boyfriend would be gone, sooner or later, but the obsession with Bowles would last much of his life.

It was natural, when he was in Tangiers, to track him down, look him up. There was a bookshop which sold English language books, and on the advice of one of the ever-prsent boys that's where he went. He is a friend of mine, the owner declared, after some delays, and I will check for you. Eventually we were taken to the rundown, modern by Tangier standards but rundown nonetheless, apartment where he lived. We went up in some creaking lift, and were greeted at the door. It was his afternoon salon time, four to six, the only time of the day when visitors were welcome. I would have cheerfully dumped Martin about this point; this wasn't his destiny, it was mine. He wasn't the one with the great love of Paul's books; with the utter fascination for the milieu of which Paul had been a part. Bowles had met, for God's sake he had known, William Burroughs in his addict days in Tangiers. He had known Tennessee Williams and the kindness of strangers. Jane Bowles really had been his friend and wife. He had been a part of the great tradition of letters which spilled down the decades to this point.

I, well we, were from Australia and the great rivers of literary tradition didn't exactly embrace Australia. There was Patrick White and Voss and the Nobel Prize, but none of these people had met him. He didn't hang out with William Burroughs; he wasn't part of the tradition that I then adored, the ticket that exploded, the dusky smell of rotting oranges, fish boys ejaculating on silver streams. Scaffolds of the dying. An overwhelming sense of decay. Paul Bowles was part of history and there couldn't have been anywhere more I wanted to be.

We sat around in a circle, in his rundown apartment, outside his driver and his rundown car. He might have been world famous but he lived simply. I caught a glimpse of his single bed in the alcove, the medicine bottles lined up alongside it. I had expected some sumptuous middle eastern fantasy; something redolent of another age, as extravagantly beautiful a house as his writing. But it wasn't like that, not for a moment. There was a circle of us, some woman visiting from Britain he obviously knew well, the young Morroccan men he spnsored, the Moroccan author he translated into English, handsome of course. He smoked kif constantly, and the pipe went round and round. He was frail, even then, ethereal almost, as if the world was too vivid a place for him, which was why he sheltered in this apartment, away from it all.

Years later, when Sam was one year old, there are pictures of him somewhere on the balcony of the hotel in Tangier, where he had his birthday, years later I returned with a son perched in a backpack on my back and the boyfriend no longer in tow. I looked Bowles up again, I wanted him to meet my son, and at first he confused me with some journalist he was expecting from Australia, there was always a steady stream of journalists visiting him. But then he invited me in, and we got talking once again, and Sammy crawled around on the floor of the famous writer, and I tried to tell hm everything that had happened since last I had seen him, as if he was a great uncle or something. He was kind, he was always kind, but tales of dumping the boyfriend and emerging from detox and finding myself going out with a girl I had met, of suddenly having children after a lifetime sitting on the bar stool, I'm not sure that it made much sense to him.

We walked down the hill together to get his mail, in those far off days when people actually wrote letters.

Will you write another novel? I asked.
You have to have something to say, he said.

As if life had already happened aad these were the unexpected days, when he had outlived everybody.

The last time I saw him he was sick, increasingly frail, the line of various medications beside his bed even longer than before.

I was back in Australia working as a journalist when he died in the 1990s. I wrote a story about him for the literary pages of the paper, talking about the connection I had always felt, as if I was his emissary in a far off land. But it was dismissed, what would I know? A humble hack on the highways of print. How could I possibly have known one of the all time greats; the shambolic, alcoholic chaos that I had become, clinging to a job but barely. But I had known him, by simple stint of knocking on his door, but I had always loved him, the person that he was, the days undiscovered when greatness was granted only to a few. He was like a tourist site, he told me once, people felt compelled, entitled, to go and have a look. He didn't mind, as long as it was during his salon hours between four and six, but thank God the sixties were over, he said. Brash Americans would arrive, barely knowing who he was, dumping their backpacks at his feet and drawling: "Mind if I crash here maaan?"

I walked down the Tangier hill with him, slowly, he was so frail, and we talked as if there was everything to be fitted into a single afternoon; we talked of far off Australia and the creative muse; and I told him my dreams in a way I had never told anybody else; the bewildered pact a young child made to dedicate himself to the crative life. The desperate struggle to make sense of it all. The encroaching sense of failure, as if greatness was already passing him by. The yearning hope that one day one of his books would succeed, the huge fascination he held for this exotic country. And Paul, from an entirely different world, talked of the work he did for the American national library collecting origal Morrocan music, the work he did translating local authors; of his absolute determination not to return to the America of his birth. This was his life now, the chaotic Tangier streets, the dust, the donkeys, the crowds of boys running in the streets. He wasn't writing then; he had been compiling a collection of correspondence, published years later, and had struck such a lonely figure, sorting through decades old correspondence. He had always been a great letter writer, that lost art. This day, we collected his correspondence from the central post office, an impressive swag of interesting looking letters; and we said goodbye and I went back out into the great world. And a few years later, I heard the news that he had died; and felt as sad as if a close friend had died. I'm still out in the great world; and many friends have died now. What a different place the future is.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The American man has watched the young boy get up from his table where he was drinking tea and go out into a small courtyard where there was a pool of water. The American man ignores the woman and follows the boy as he goes out and sits by the edge of the pool.

...The boy had taken off his shoes and was wading in the pool, a sight which, because of his state of mind, did not at once strike him as peculiar. When he saw him bend over and fish a large, bedraggled insect out of the water, he became interested. Now the boy held his hand very close to his face, studying his prey, smiling at it' he even moved his lips a few times, as though he were talking to it.

"What is it? What are you staring at?" she asked.

"Trying to make out what that kid's doing out there, standing in the middle of the water."

Suddenly the insect had flown away. The boy stood looking after it, his face expressing satisfaction rather than the disappointment Stenham [the American dude's name] had expected to see. He climbed out of the pool and sat down at its edge where he had been before.

Stenham shook his head. "Now, that was a strange bit of behavior. The boy made a special trip into the water just to pull out some kind of insect."

"Well, he's kind-hearted."

"I know, but they're not. That's the whole point. In all my time here I've never seen anyone do a thing like that."

He looked at the boy's round face, heavy, regular features, and curly black hair.

"He could be a Sicilian, or a Greek," he said as if to himself. "If he's not a Moroccan, there's nothing surprising about his deed. But if he is, then I give up. Moroccans just don't do things like that."

..."You want another tea?"

"No," she said. "One's plenty. It's so sweet. But anyway, I don't believe you can make such hard and fast general rules about people."

"You can in this case. I've watched them for years. I know what they're like."

"That doesn't mean you know what each one is like individually, after all."

"But the whole point is, they're not individuals in the sense you mean," he said.

"You're on dangerous ground," she warned.

For fear that she might take exception to his words, he was quiet, did not attempt to explain to her how living among a less evolved people enabled him to see his own culture from the outside, and thus to understand it better. It was her express desire that all races and all individuals be "equal," and she would accept no demonstration which did not make use of that axiom. In truth, he decided, it was impossible to discuss anything at all with her, because instead of seeing each part of total reality as a complement to the other parts, with dogged insistence she forged ahead seeing only those things which she could twist into the semblance of an illustration for her beliefs.

...The boy came through the door, glanced shyly at them, and turned to sit down at his table. Stenham called out to him: "Qu'est-ce qui se passe dehors?" The boy stared at him, uncomprehending. So he was a Moroccan, after all. "Smalhi," Stenham said. "Chnou hadek el haraj?"

The other looked at him with wide eyes, clearly wondering how anyone could be so stupid. "That's people yelling," he said.

The Spider's House, Paul Bowles.

Steps Across Time

2008-02-11T06:41:00.000+11:00

As I grow older, I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me.
H. Rider Haggard

"These kids will grow up hating Americans, hating Shiites, hating Kurds, hating Sunnis and the first thing they will do when they have a problem is go to the gun before the table. These kids are throughout the book, whether they're carrying real guns or fake rocket-propelled grenades, or dressed up as Islamic militant leader al-Zarqawi pretending to cut off murdered American contracter Nick Berg's head. These are kids who are totally desensitised to violence. That is an entire generation that we have lost in that country. At the end of the day everyone in Iraq - the Shiites, the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Americans - all want exactly the same thing. That is, to sit down and enjoy dinner and enjoy their family and have a peaceful life. I wish I had something good to say about Iraq but I don't. There must be a solution but it's just a disaster. It couldn't have been planned to be worse."
Ashley Gilbertson, on his new book A Photographer's Chronbicle Of The Iraq War.

My old mate, the party boy from the seventies Colin, has had a heart attack. He's lying in the John Hunter Hospital covered in bruises. He's not sure exactly what happened but thinks he had a heart attack crossing the road just near his house; and fell badly. His voice sounds quite strong, which is odd after a heart attack, but they're not letting him out of hospital. He's dying of course, he's been dying for years, HIV, Hep C, actually they can't treat the Hep because of all the HIV treatments. It's a cruelty when you finally have to ask: what is the quality of life? He was always fun, I always enjoyed his company, even in those kaleidoscope days 30 years ago; when we thought our gang was the centre of the universe and we were going to change everything. How could it be? The rooster I kept in the backyard toilet crowed each morning, I picked across snoring bodies in the loungeroom each morning to go to work, the carpet was that cheap straw mat stuff that used to catch all the dust; and our ancient hearts, even then old before our time, our hearts were caught in bewildered embraces.

I was always up before everybody else; always there to watch the dawn pick its way across the terrace houses, coating the streets with colour, the dark lessening enough to see the neighbourhood cats going about their business. The Architect of Dreams I labelled some incomprehensible book, sticking up pages around the house so I could follow the thread of some byzantine story line. Disembodied entities floated across huge black and white chequered floor somewhere in some inter-dimnensional sky; we were caught in the poetry of sterility; it was all about the barrenness of modern life, the lack of soul. I wrote and I wrote, pounding away each morning and then heading off to work. Briefly I was the assistant manager of the Pacific Island Publishing company, a job I hated. This insane queen I worked for would greet me each morning with a cutting camp voice that would cut through concrete and could be heard from one end of the office to the other: You;re laaaate!! He would demand black coffee with three and a half sugars as my first assignment, happy, I always thought, to humiliate someone with a university degree.

If I bravely dared to vary the routine and put in three sugars instead of three and a half he could tell immediately, and would demand his coffee remade. Oh how I grew to hate that man. That was the era when there was plenty of hash in Australia; indeed so much that hash coffee in the morning was perfectly feasible, anything to make the day vague out and go away. I don't know where I thought I was going, but I loved the house, I loved the morning, and the chaotic evenings. Even then, 30 years ago, I was trying not to drink; but no one else was. The whole gang accrued in that house; in from Adelaide or Brisbane or wherever; all together putting on some play, creating music. And as someone who had only ever wanted to be creative, who had only ever dreamed of being a writer, I was caught up with the marvel of them all. Some of them I see still, although less so as the years pass, their faces popping up as actors in various Australian soap operas, comedy shows, bits and pieces. That's why I liked Heath Ledger so much. He was a little bit like we were.

But Ian Farr, who was central to the gang, has gone now. And Russel Keithal, famous at that time for destroying his career by falling off the Opera House stage in the middle of a production stoned on mandrax, I bump him by accident every couple of years. He's still getting acting work; a few of us are still working. But we certainly didn't change the world. We certainly didn't become the greatest artists of our era. We smashed up our lives and stumbled into chaos and dereliction; our friends died from overdoses or AIDS. And the cruelty of time arked over us; letting that bubble of time in a pre-computer era float away, barely remembered, the beauty of the morning rooftops dissolved. Nothing came back to haunt us. Fortune did not fill our coffers. And the focus shifted. A new generation, perhaps a better, certainly wiser, savvier generation, took over; and couldn't have cared less about the naive spirits that went before. We waved goodbye, that was all that could be done, and stepped quietly back on to our solitary path. There wasn't any other way.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/11/2159032.htm

Hundreds of Aboriginal people are making their way to Canberra to hear the Prime Minister officially apologise to the Stolen Generations, as calls are made for compensation from the Federal Government.

The area around Canberra's Aboriginal Tent Embassy is being prepared for the influx of people from around Australia expected to arrive ahead of the apology.

Many of those expected to travel to Canberra will also take part in a rally from the Tent Embassy to the federal Parliament on Tuesday in support of calls for compensation to the Stolen Generations.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ruled out compensation but many Aboriginal leaders who have travelled from across the nation to be in Canberra for the event are still arguing for reparations.

The Tent Embassy's Isabelle Coe says she thinks some form of compensation is inevitable.

"I don't think that this country can get out of paying it because a lot of Aboriginal people were affected by the Stolen Generations," she said.

"The mothers, the fathers, the grandparents, the aunties, the uncles, the cousins, and we had to run and hide when the welfare came to our mission."

Ms Coe says she is pleased the site is still a focus for Aboriginal protest.

"We've had to fight to stay here because we've been fire bombed, we've been petrol bombed," she said.

"They wrapped up our old demountable in black plastic and drove it off to somewhere we don't know, but we have fought to stay here for the last 36 years."

It is long-standing Labor Party policy to say sorry, and it will be the key word Mr Rudd utters on Wednesday.

But the rest of his speech is still being finalised, along with the plans on how many others will speak and whether an Indigenous Australian will respond.

The apology is set to overshadow the other key political event this week - the introduction of a bill to scrap WorkChoices.

Criminals In Power

2008-02-10T15:10:00.000+11:00

"There were approximately ten domonstrators near a tank. We heard a shot in the distance and started shooting at them. They all died except for one. We left the bodies there... The survivor was hiding behind a column about 150 metres away from us. I pointed at him and waived my weapon to tell him to get away. Half of his foot had been cut off. He went away dragging his foot. We were all laughing and cheering."
Staff Seargent Jimmy Massey

"The occupation of Iraq was the most spectacularly incompetent and corrupt operation carried out by the government of any developed country in many decades, and it turned the high probability of a major insurgency in Iraq after the invasion into the certainty of countrywide violence, despair and anarchy."
Gwynne Dyer, The Mess They Made.

We've just driven back from the shack; the final hour or more caught in the twisting chaos of Sydney's toll ways. At some points its impossible to tell if you're on one, which one you're on, and being cash free it's impossible to ask anyone. I rang a number provided on some bill board and they couldn't tell where I was and whether I had ventured on to a toll way or not. "It sounds like you might have been on the M7 for a short period," some woman said, proceeding to put me through to someone who could "help you with your inquiry". Which of course they didn't. "For this we pay taxes," I ended up snapping, clicking the off button; one of the beauties of mobiles. You don't even have to slam the receiver down anymore. Click. Although whether your annoyance is conveyed as effectively by a click as a slam is no doubt a moot point.

The chaos of the road system; and the expense of it all, is just mind blowing. Our appalling Labor state government long ago cosied up to the developers of all these hated tollways; which have added immeasurably to the cost of getting around Sydney, and the RTA, hand in glove with the developrs, set out deliberately, indeed as part of the contracts, to narrow the public roads to force people on to the tollways. All done by Labor politicians who are supposedly representing the working class. Bob Carr, reading the polls on just how unpopular he was, wandered out of his job, supposedly because he wanted to spend more time with his wife, oh sure, and immediately snapped up a $500,000 position with Macquarie Bank and has lived apparently happily ever after, preening himself at various functions where he won't be confronted about anything and weathering the storm over such infrastructure debacles as the Cross City Tunnel; a multi multi million fiasco which, surely not, but assuredly yes, was one of his credentials for the half a million dollar a year job.

While the rest of us pay and pay and pay; sitting in traffic jams as petrol prices soar; paying taxes at every move. The richer have become richer and the poor have become very angry. The left are entirely in ascendance around the country; but they're the gucci socialist rich, all of them multi millionaires who have benefited enormously from their connections, from the way things are. I sit in this traffic, in this chaos, and despair. My son is trying to get up his 50 hours to get from his L plates as a learner driver to his P plates as a provisional. He turns 17 in seven days, at which point he cna get his own licence. And drive without his parents; as he is so clearly aware. I remember at his age; the brand new glinting holden I drove, the property of a sugar daddy. The planes I would catch out west to his property. The times that we had, not all bad by any means. He was not very demanding. But it was a different life, a much more disturbed life; while he's just a "typical teenager"; well not really, he's very well adjusted, and happy. And excited at normal things, like getting his licence. While I flail at phantoms; and despair at the world.

It will never be over; things will always be lost. The torrents of images will never end; cloaked in sadness and triiumph from a golden but chaotic past; ribbons of despair and over-arching melancholy; and the eternal, ancient bliss that coursed through our bodies; that merged the beauty of the landscape into the universe at large, ripping away the veil to the core of darkness; that appalling beast, the descendants of monkeys; corrupt to the core, politicians of which we should all be ashamed, who have shamed us all with their blatant greed, with the arrogance of their utter dishonesty. We've all been taken for a ride.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says next week's parliamentary apology to the stolen generations will remove a "blight on the nation's soul'' and has the overwhelming support of Australians.

Mr Rudd today announced the government would bring more than 100 members of the stolen generations to Canberra for the national apology, to be delivered in parliament on Wednesday.

Among the guests will be first generation survivors, selected by the Stolen Generations Alliance and the National Sorry Day Committee to best represent their fellow survivors.

Mr Rudd said he believed there was an "overwhelming desire'' among most Australians for the apology, the wording of which is still being finalised just three days out from the historic event.

"It's never going to be a unity ticket, a whole lot of people out there have raised objections and concerns,'' Mr Rudd told the Nine Network.

"But I think this is a blight on the nation's soul, I think we need to act.''

Mr Rudd revealed he yesterday met with an elderly member of the stolen generations and spent about an hour and a half just listening to her story.

"I wanted to do that before sitting down and framing my own speech to the parliament this week,'' he said.

"I wanted to speak directly to someone who had been through those experiences, in her case in the early 1930s, when as a young child she was taken, stolen, from her family and her community.''

Excruciating Moments

2008-02-09T07:19:00.000+11:00

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosphy?
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow, as it ersewhile made
The under-person'd Lamia melt into the shade.

John Keats

I'm in the Blue Mountains; it's misty in the beauty of the trees, and cold, for the first time in a long time, the hint of the end of summer. But it's the constant drizzling rain everyone talks about. The mystical shapes of the gums; the retreated, quiet houses isolated in the bush; the mist and the drizzle coating everything with atmosphere. It's been years and years since it's rained like this. El Nino has turned to La Nina, the city's dams, once hitting crisis point at 30%, have now doubled; and the hapless hopeless moronic Morris Iemma, Premier God knows why of NSW, has declared there will be no cuts in water restrictions. Partly, of course, because he has to justify spending billions, literally billions, on a desalination plant which everyone thinks will benefit his cronies at Macquarie Bank more than it will benefit the people of the state. Where the truth lies no one knows, because like everything this hopeless government does, it is shrouded in secrecy.

Australia is veering towards saying sorry; and whether it will be an historic moment in Australia, hugely, hugely significant as I said on radio the other day, an unblocking of the pipes and a great step forward towards reconciliation between mainstream and indigenous Australia, only time will tell. But so much policy has been an abject failure. So much of the country is an absolute mess. The conservatives, as ever utterly hopeless communicators and utterly inept in their ability to express themselves and their standpoints, look old, racist, colonialist; just abject fools. Howard left them all lurching in their own vomit; choking on their own greed, surrounded by wealth and utterly unable to even understand what is happening on the ground. Five minutes ago they were denying there was even such a thing as mortgage stress; that it was something made up by that evil Labor government. Five minutes ago they wouldn't say sorry.

And there are logical reasons to query the whole sorry business; not now, it's a steamroller, symbolism is important and it has become a force, a magnificently expensive tax payer funded force, based on a one sided and biased Bringing Them Home report which didn't interview both sides of the story; and many of the present problems are due to the problems in that report, which indeed first recommended the national apology. But when the nation was on the move, campaigning for reconciliation and there was good will right across the land to fix past wrongs and to move on together, Howard refused to say sorry. Instead, in a way which deepened even further the Left's loathing of him, he expressed deep regret. Deep regret wouldn't do it, and more ammunition was handed to the other side.

And now, now Brendan Nelson has come out, finally, ineptly, and said the Liberals will support an apology. It's reluctant, it's half hearted, and it makes them look terrible. When there's a tsunami on the way, get out of the way. There were reasons to object, and they could have carried the country with them, but by sitting on the fence, as they did with so many other issues, including family law and child support reform, they've been cut to ribbons. I have no sympathy, except for all those people they've screwed, all those people who put their faith in them. It will be a long time now before a conservative government is back in power. It was let leaked that after two weeks debate, in their party room meeting, Brendan Nelson showed real leadership. Oh really. The story had to be leaked because Malcolm Turnbull, an unstoppable force of nature, is at his heels, ready and waiting, the natural alternative to resurrect them and move forward.

Instead, hapless and hopeless. But at least not as hopeless as Labor's Morris Iemma at state level. Wherever you go, from taxi drivers to smart little professional parties, the diagnosis is the same: Iemma's useless, completely useless. Yet he stays on. He makes another fool himself in front of another television camera, his minders grimace because even they can see how bad he's coming across; and we pay tax and we pay tax; to support multiple layers of idiocy.

For a minute it looked like Kevin Rudd might believe in good governance. Already the gloss is starting to wane, the slickness peeling off, "picfacs" only; as they manipulate the press to make themselves look good. And will all be lost; or the will turn; a new and triumphant nation, a new and triumphant people, will look with hope on a new era. Not today they won't.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The Archbishop of Canterbury is said to be overwhelmed by the "hostility of the response" after his call for parts of Sharia law to be recognised in the UK.
Friends of Dr Rowan Williams say he is in a state of shock and cannot believe the criticism from his own Church.

All the main political parties, secular groups and some senior Muslims have expressed dismay at his comments.

However, the Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, criticised the "disgraceful" treatment of Dr Williams.

Legal code

The BBC understands from sources who work on Christian-Muslim interfaith issues that Dr Williams has faced a barrage of criticism from within the Church and has been genuinely taken aback by how his words were received.

He's not fit to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he doesn't seem to know what his own business is

Islamic Sharia law is a legal and social code designed to help Muslims live their daily lives, but it has proved controversial in the West for the extreme nature of some of its punishments.

BBC News religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott says both traditionalists and liberals in the Church have their own reasons for criticising Dr Williams.

Traditionalists maintain that English law is based on Biblical values and that no parallel system could be tolerated in the UK.

Liberal Anglicans believe giving Sharia legal status would be to the detriment of women and gay people.

Resignation call

Among those critical of the archbishop is the chairman of evangelical Church group Reform, the Reverend Rod Thomas.

SHARIA LAW
Sharia law is Islam's legal system
It is derived from the Koran and the life of the prophet Mohammed
Sharia rulings help Muslims understand how they should lead their lives
A formal legal ruling is called a fatwa
In the West, Sharia courts deal mainly with family and business issues
English law recognises religious courts as a means of arbitration

"The Church at the moment, and the country, needs a clear lead. The country is itself in a debate about its own sense of identity," he said.

"The moral values that we pursue are ones that we need to know are clearly grounded, and it would be most helpful for the leader of the Church to be able to explain to people how the values we cherish stem from our Christian tradition."

UKIP MEP Gerard Batten said it would be the "thin end of the wedge" and called on the archbishop to resign.

He said: "I think he's shown he is totally unfit for the role he undertakes. He's not fit to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he doesn't seem to know what his own business is, and he's not fit to sit in the House of Lords. I think he should go."

'Hysterical misrepresentations'

However, there has been some support for Dr Williams.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said it was grateful for the archbishop's "thoughtful intervention".

The organisation added that it was saddened by the "hysterical misrepresentations" of his speech, which would only "drive a wedge between British people".

There is, and should only be, one law which covers all people and to suggest it can be otherwise is to seriously damage our rights
Patricia London, UK
Send us your commentsMuhammed Abdul Bari, Secretary-General of the MCB, said: "The archbishop is not advocating implementation of the Islamic penal system in Britain.

"His recommendation is confined to the civil system of Sharia law, and only in accordance with English law and agreeable to established notions of human rights."

The archbishop had been "ridiculed" and "lampooned" by some people, according to Bishop Lowe.

"We have probably one of the greatest and the brightest Archbishops of Canterbury we have had for many a long day," he said.

Catherine Heseltine, from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, said some people might be getting the wrong end of the stick.

"I'm concerned this debate is getting out of control because people hear the word Sharia and instantly scary images of beheadings," she said.

Dr Williams told BBC Radio 4 on Thursday that he believed the adoption of some Sharia law in the UK seemed "unavoidable".

In an interview with BBC correspondent Christopher Landau, Dr Williams said Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".

After Clicking Done

2008-02-08T04:55:00.000+11:00

"The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb tide."
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.

Already it's hard to imagine the pre-computer age in which I grew up; that our partying to dawn went unrecorded and uncrecognised; that the trails from the ancient past we thought we had moved beyond was not the beginning of an era but the end. There was a group of us in the 1980s, expats living in London, embarked on what we thought was a marvellous adventure; exploring the home country, everyting we did tinged with history. In Australia everything was new. Ancient history was 200 years ago with Captain Cook and the First Fleet. In those days there wasn't the same compulsory welcome to country, the same fascination or obsession with indigenous culture and indigenous politics; now the conservatives have lost the debate over saying sorry. Inept and incompetent as always, the conservatives have failed to communicate their many doubts, indeed perfectly justifiable doubts, on saying sorry; and instead look tired and old and racist; colonialists of the modern era. It wasn't like that then; we basically just didn't think about it. Aboriginal history was not taught in schools, and in the mono-culture suburbs of the 1950s in which we grew up; before multi-culturalism became the state religion and transformed the country, all our history was English, or European.

Lonely as, in that room I felt so tiny and awkward in, with the bank spreading up the steep hill outside the window, there, when my family bought the Britannica Great Books and the Brittanica Encyclopaedia, like so many other families of the era, suddenly there was a library of the world's greats I had to consume. Prior to that the only book in the house had been Gone With The Wind, which I read three times. Ashley, Ashley. Tomorrow is another day. The movie consumed us, and in a transgender moment Vivienne Leigh was everything I wanted to be, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful, the rustle of skirts and the fabulous mannerisms, and myself and my brother sharing the same bedroom, as was also normal in those days; we reached back to what really was ancient history.

My adventures, my great life adventure, was always related to alcohol and other things; the dancer from the dance in a tawdry time, blurring speach as we leached into each other, tiny gatherings of expats in rundown terraces in Vauxhaul, while outside the wind wept and the snow piled in corners, where the cold seeped into every bone in our bodies and we, from a far warmer place on the other side of the world, could never get warm. There was the endless struggle for money, five pound, fifteen pound, and as soon as we had the money in our hands, the next step in the dance. It was cosy. We were friends. We all came from the same place in a city which couldn't care less whether we lived or died, which would never give credit to Australians, which we could never crack. We partied and partied, our familiar accents, and talked about the Tate or whatever it was that we had done or explored that day, but most of all it was about survival, about not wanting to go home, about trying to build lives away from our homeland.

I was often comforted by friendship, faces I can barely remember now; there was Richard and Steven of course; but others too; Tim, who overdosed decades later in odd
circumstance; Kim the dyke I fancied like hell and who's friendship I held close, popping around during the day and talking and talking, it's hard to remember about what, now. Except the London streets, the Vauxhaul squats, the others in our gang, our desperate need for money, the things we were going to do with our lives; the great writer, the great artist, the great composer. We automatically assumed our destiny was greatness; that these rundown terraces between which we darted, sheltering from the filthy weather, the rundown cars we occasionally acquired, the depths of our feeling, we assumed that all this was for a purpose, all this experience specifically designed to augment, add depth, propel our destinies as artists.

A quarter of a century or more later; and I'm getting ready for work in Sydney, Australia. My son has just called me in to the loungeroom to watch the live broadcast of the shuttle heading towards the space station. It looked amazing; and that's the era we live in now; instantaneous communication, an astonishing age.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/evidence-challenges-japans-humane-whale-killing/2008/02/07/1202234066496.html

HE minke's back arches as gracefully as a dolphin's, but it is not about to make a free dive. Instead it is the last struggle of a whale on the end of a Japanese harpoon line.

The Australian Government has released evidence challenging Japan's claims that its hunt is the most efficient and humane possible. The images show "scientific research" that needed multiple rifle shots to finish off the mammal.

The Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, said there would be a diplomatic push to end what he said was the charade of scientific whaling, starting at an intersessional meeting of the International Whaling Commission next month.

As the customs ship Oceanic Viking's mission to gather evidence against whaling is extended in the Antarctic, the Government is being urged to fulfil its threat to take legal action against Japan.

A sequence of images taken by customs officers was released yesterday showing harpooned minkes, including two hauled up the stern ramp of the factory ship, Nisshin Maru.

Media claims that they showed a mother and calf were denied by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which said they were randomly taken sizes. "Both whales were female, and both were not lactating," it said.

But the images also showed a whale struggling on the end of a harpoon line under the bow of the catcher boat Yushin Maru, and then the same animal lifeless.

Its head clearly showed entry wounds in a hunt where a high powered rifle is used to finish minkes that are still alive after being hit by an explosive-tipped harpoon.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/stolen-not-sorry-the-hardest-word/2008/02/07/1202234066361.html

SHADOW indigenous affairs minister Tony Abbott urged his colleagues to demonstrate leadership on the apology to the stolen generations, telling them "sometimes we need to be better than our constituents".

But the remark, made to the Coalition party room meeting on Wednesday as he wrapped up the debate on the issue, jarred with several MPs.

Mr Abbott last night brushed aside concerns over his choice of words, explaining his intent was not to dismiss the views of the electorate.

"I was appealing to us to be our best selves," he told The Age. "To harken to our best values, not to give in to our doubts, fears and prejudices."

But despite the decision by the Coalition parties to back the apology, several Opposition MPs harbour deep misgivings.

West Australian Liberal MP Don Randall said it was hard to sign up to a contract without knowing what commitments it would make. Asked if he backed the decision of support in principle, he replied: "Um, yeah, I'm getting there."

Another Liberal from the West, Dennis Jensen, insisted that he shared the concerns of Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson about using the word "stolen". "I think separated is probably a better word than stolen, personally," he said.

Recovering Instincts

2008-02-07T04:46:00.000+11:00

Henrietta with her cousin in Lismore and me with the one of Penny's kids Adam.

"Midlife is perhaps the lsat opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it, a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived because you can still, though only just, try to live them, a time when you can still become what you might have been. Equally, it's the last time when you are troubled by a pretty face - another path not taken - before you can look on pretty faces with equanimity, not as bearing a diret message to you, but to other, younger folk.

"Midlife is a last chance to keep your word with the 10-year-old you once were, who looked forward at life and made a pact with the future. You wake up in middle age to feel you have drifted. Amid a solid family, spouse and job, you might feel a kind of awakening, though possibly a delusional one fueled by chemistry. The feeling might haunt you into one last eruptive attempt at realighnment.

"What, then, would be the right road?"

Melik Kaylan.

There were so many adventures, the trickling currents; and now, with two teenagers in the house, his origins were masked and the life he had lived, the trauma he had experienced at the same age, kept coming back to him. He had not been warned of the consequence, of the path taken, and faces kept looming, or popping, out of memory. Andrew McSwann, yesterday, who overdosed and woke up dead, or more precisely she, woke up dead next to him. What was that about? It was only a moment when they lost control; when the perfect life they had built for themselves; the multiple partners, the long wild nights, the best of everyting, it wasn't so long since they were here, and I went to visit them, even after I had started to sober up. I thought they were my friends, and they vanished off the face of the planet. She followed him within a matter of months. Nobody was surprised. I last saw him, lurking with intent, at the public phone boxes near the Newtown post office; the scurrying damp wind at our feet.

His professional life became more chaotic in the final years; as happened to us all. Places would take him on, he was a wonderfully talented man, and within months he would be at loggerheads with the management over style, or money, or shifts; and he would storm off self-righteously. Although they were both gay, or both, anyway, slept around, they had married, a full traditional ceremony, they owned their cute little terrace in Camperdown together, and it was always stylish and clean. She left work after she had an affair with one of the girl security guards, beautiful, intense, the girls together, made for each other with their short hair and jagged but beautiful faces, boyish, kind of, but together they had that look, made for each other. The universe had colluded to bring them together. And then something went haywire with the secuirty guard, they were caught making love in the library, whether by the security guards or cameras I could never quite ascertain, and things began to spiral out of control. The security guard suicided and my friend, she who dared to be different, who would show up for work with multi-coloured hair and stare everyone in the face, was heartbroken. And Andrew, long suffering Andrew who had stood by her through everything, got back into the gear and his job was in jeopardy.

And then one day, they were down in Melbourne for some reason, escaping Sydney I presume, our crowd was always going somewhere to escape Sydney, she told him she was leaving him. After all they had been through together. Those wonderful nights when they would stock up with all the right chemicals and party through to dawn in the famous gay parties of the era, the dance clubs, the dance parties, the primal nights when they combined with the infinite, when the music was everything and there was wild drug fuelled sex in the heart of it all, when everything worked and the time, the land, the zeitgeist, it was all theirs. And then it wasn't. She threatened to leave, she couldn't have meant it, she couldn't have survived without him, and she woke up with him dead next to her, a letter, I can't live without you, and an overpowering grief that meant she was never the same again. They went to a twelve step meeting once, sneered at the God stuff, and were gone, wreathed in rationalisation and non-understanding.

The ignominious nature of their death meant there was no funeral. The only trace they left were accidental memories. I walked past the neat little terrace they used to own the other day; I had always liked it, with its aura of exclusion and taste, and now it, too, has become someone elses memory. It was sold in the downward spiral; and the traces are so rare. I met an old friend of theirs last year, during the election campaign, she was working for a Labor politician, of course, and she reminded me we had met at their house, many years ago. And we both agreed, as everyone had agreed, on the tragedy of it all, the terrible waste of talent. They were my best friends, she said. I know, I said, I loved them. And that was it, gone in the pipes, entirely washed away; all for what, for nought. Some people just weren't meant to grow old.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5isOFwdbq0tsqatW6vJpkDRTI1gMgD8UKV1M80

AP

Obama Says GOP Will Have Dirt on Clinton

By NEDRA PICKLER

CHICAGO (AP) — Sen. Barack Obama predicted Wednesday that Republicans will have a dump truck full of dirt to unload on Hillary Rodham Clinton if the former first lady wins the Democratic presidential nomination, and said he offers the party its best hope of winning the White House this fall.

At a news conference on the morning after Super Tuesday, Obama offered some pointed advice to members of Congress and other party leaders who will attend the national convention this summer as delegates not chosen in primaries or caucuses.

He said that if he winds up winning more delegates in voting than the former first lady, they "would have to think long and hard about how they approach the nomination when the people they claim to represent have said, 'Obama's our guy,'" he said.

The Illinois senator won primaries and caucuses in 13 states on Tuesday, while Clinton won eight and American Samoa. Obama and Clinton were in a tight race in New Mexico.

Obama said he had won a majority of the 1,681 delegates at stake, although The Associated Press tally showed several hundred yet to be allocated.

Asked about Clinton's recent comment that she would not allow herself to be victimized by the type of Swift Boat-style attacks that were leveled against Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 race, Obama said he had been vetted by his opponent in the nominating campaign.

"I have to just respond by saying that the Clinton research operation is about as good as anybody's out there," he said.

"I assure you that having engaged in a contest against them for the last year that they've pulled out all the stops. And you know I think what is absolutely true is whoever the Democratic nominee is the Republicans will go after them. The notion that somehow Senator Clinton is going to be immune from attack or there's not a whole dump truck they can't back up in a match between her and John McCain is just not true."

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gicA0LgwJ45n5qhW8jCL17NriXWw

Obama, Clinton line up new battles after Super Tuesday

7 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The marathon White House race Wednesday headed to new battlegrounds, with Hillary Clinton's Democratic duel with Barack Obama wide open, and Republican John McCain coasting towards victory.

The Super Tuesday nationwide nominating showdown was once seen as the moment when party nominees would be crowned, yet, on the Democratic side at least it solved little, as Clinton and Obama slogged out a split decision.

Clinton, 60, won the three biggest prizes, California, her home state of New York and Massachusetts by handy margins, checking an Obama surge by capturing eight states, keeping alive her quest to be the first woman president.

But Senator Obama won more states, 13, including his own patch of Illinois, battlegrounds Connecticut and Missouri, and Georgia by a landslide. New Mexico was Wednesday still too close to call.

The rivals geared up for a grinding war of attrition in a flurry of looming nominating contests, for delegates doled out by states on a proportional basis.

The Clinton team even raised the possibility that the race could drag on until the party's nominating convention in August.

"It is likely that neither side will ever come out to a large lead in delegates," said campaign communications chief Howard Wolfson.

"And so for all of those who wish for a battle that goes to the convention, in terms of neither side definitively wrapping this up, you could be looking at that here," he said.

A Real Clear Politics running count had Clinton on 900 delegates, not yet half of the 2,025 she needs to capture the nomination. Obama, bidding to be the first black president, was close behind with 824.

Transcendant Fear

2008-02-06T05:32:00.000+11:00

"Buffaloes are held by cords, men by his words."
Malay Proverb.

"From the cowardice that dares not face new truths,
From the laziness that is content with half truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truths,
Good Lord, deliver me."
Kenyan Prayer

I stood with my 16-year-old son on the mudflats at Bayview and looked across the deep blue green water of PIttwater, across to the now very flash Newport Arms; my eye casting up to the hill where I had lived with my family 45 years ago. None of this was here 50 years ago, I said, pointing at the fleet of multi-million dollar yachts which dotted the bay. Floating islands of wealth, they were symbolic of a brash new Sydney that had passed me by. We had driven out here from inner-city Redfern because he's trying to get 60 hours up on his L plates drivers licence so he can apply for his P plates when he turns 17. And can drive places without his parents, as of course he's managed to work out. We were all 17 once, but they don't quite realise that. There are well-heeled looking families playing with their dogs and their children on the sandy mud flats where I used to play as a child. There weren't middle class people frolicking with their upper middle class dogs in those days; it was a remote suburb on the outskirts of the city and we as kids couldn't imagine why anyone would want to go there, it was in the middle of nowhere.

We didn't drive past the house where I grew up, we ran out of time and somehow I didn't want to confront all that. Looking at my old high school, Pittwater, which we all called Ditchwater and which I truly hated, was enough. Driving around the twisting roads that snaked around the hills, admiring the wealthy houses that now decorated the slopes, marvelling at the wealth that had poured into the area, that was enough. Lionel and I had gone to see Billy Graham give a speach when we were both 14 or so; and I remember still the stadium full of people and the power of those being pulled forward to the centre, to give themselves to God. Lionel went forward, much to our astonishment, or horror, and he wasn't the ame for months afterwards; got a serious dose of God. I guess they were nerdy little misfit friends on the whole; I certainly was, my head buried perpetually in a book. And we drove past Malcolm's house, who had died in his teens after huge problems; something to do with his head, there was huge drama with his parents one day when it was thought we might have given him a joint and he went completely off the rails.

And driving past that high school, I would never forget John Morone, who died in the middle of a school year, a flash of handsome legs, a perfectly formed face, all of a piece, athletic, always running on the field where we played touch at lunch time, here on the outskirts where our parents had chosen to live. One of my best friends was Chris Gosling, and we were utterly miserable together, though it's hard to remember now exactly why we were so miserable. It was the stifling conformity of the place, the late fifties, early sixties, in a remote suburb, was not the place for a bewildering variety of life.

None of this was here, I said, and my eye looked across the colour drenched scene, across the bobbing white boats in the marina, across the dogs playing in the shadow, across the deep green blue of the sheltered bay, up the green hill to that house where for me the unhappy pit I carried with me for so long was born, the streets that wound around to that sacred place, the place where I had been so desperately unhappy and my greatest childhood triumph had been setting the valley of palm trees alight; nearly burning down several of the neighbours houses and leaving the valley scarred with black for several years. The giant dead leaves built up under the crown of the palm, and they were so densely packed against each other that if you set one alight the flames would jump from one to the other.

I had been repeatedly in trouble for setting light to things; a childhood pyramaniac before the modern era when they have managed to cause milions of dollars worth of damage. In those days it was mostly just the bush and the paddocks around the various places where we lived. Even now I don't know why I did it; I just loved watching the flames, have always loved watching the flames. Even now I'm perfectly happy to sit and watch a fire for hours. But then it was all about the cataclysm, the choas, the sound of the fire engines, the utter disgrace, the inevitable belting. But at least in all the pain, as I was bashed around the house, at least I had achieved something: the flames. the smoke, the glorious sound of the fire engines, the chaos, the cataclysm. At least I had caused something.

It was a long long way in not just time since these incidents; and standing here while our own weird little inner-city dogs romped in the sand; my own perfectly happy well adjusted boy entering his last year of high school; it could have been another planet for all the connection it held.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.smh.com.au/nelson-unveil-stance-on-apology/20080206-1qdf.html

Nelson unveil stance on apology

February 5, 2008.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson is refusing to say publicly whether he will urge his party colleagues to support or oppose the Rudd government's formal apology to the indigenous stolen generations.

Despite mounting pressure, Dr Nelson is refusing to declare his hand publicly.

He says he will discuss his views on the apology directly with his coalition colleagues when Liberal and Nationals MPs meet in Canberra.

The meeting will follow a discussion between Dr Nelson and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, during which Mr Rudd will outline the terms of his proposed apology to be delivered to parliament on February 13.

Dr Nelson says he will tell his colleagues where he stands on the issue, but will not canvas his position beforehand.

"I will most certainly be telling them my view, and will strongly hint at what we need to do," he told ABC Television.

"That will be informed in part ... by Mr Rudd giving me some indication as to precisely what we're being asked to agree to.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23167966-23109,00.html

THE biggest day ever in US presidential nominating contests began overnight with Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a close fight and Republican John McCain aiming for a knockout blow against Mitt Romney.

Twenty-four of the 50 states hold nominating contests for one or both parties on "Super Tuesday", yielding a huge haul of delegates to this summer's nominating conventions to choose the candidates for the November presidential election.

Economic concerns - plunging housing values, rising energy and food prices, jittery financial markets and new data showing a big contraction in the service sector - have eclipsed the Iraq war as voters' top concern, opinion polls show.

Senator Clinton of New York tried to hold off a late surge by Senator Obama of Illinois who has cut into her once commanding leads in opinion polls nationally and in some states in the coast-to-coast voting.

"The fact that we've made so much progress I think indicates that we've got the right message," Senator Obama said on NBC's Today show.

Betrayal

2008-02-05T05:29:00.000+11:00

You deserve to be treated with respect by everyone, including yourself.

You have the right to end conversations and relationships with people who are hurtful and mean-spirited.

You HAVE to ask for or even demand what you need from others.

You cannot let people abuse your goodwill even one time. That is an invitation for them to continue.

You should avoid negative people with poisonous personalities.

You are capable and strong and you don’t need anyone else to tell you this; it just is.

You should make others re-earn your trust if they have broken it; it is not a gift you should give away easily.

You never, ever, ever have to validate your feelings or let someone tell you these feelings are unjustified.

You are responsible for your words and your actions, but you have no responsibility for the choices that others make.

You should trust your instincts and live accordingly.

You would be unwise to live in an idealistic world without recognizing reality.

You must love yourself before you can expect others to love you.

You can only be worth what you think you are worth; think of yourself as a diamond instead of a lump of coal!

From Watching Clouds:
http://watchingclouds.com/

My pet theory, which no one else seems to agree with, is that John Howard would have been better off being a true conservative; a true small government man who kept the ever spreading tentacles of government out of our lives. Instead during the eleven years of the Howard government bureaucrats came to control virtually everything we do. First there was the GST, which meant that not a single transaction of money doesn't pass without the government being there taking their slice. Then there was the endless and often insulting electoral bribes, which ultimately spread the power of Centrelink into the homes of almost every single Australian. You have to earn well over $100,000 - that is be in the top two per cent of incomes - in order not to be able to claim a government benefit for your children. There at birth, there at death. The so- called baby bonus - and I've never met a single conservative who thinks it is a good idea - has now risen to $5,000. That means that in effect I'm working so someone else can have a baby - and I really wish most of them wouldn't. There are reportedly now towns in Australia where every single girl under 18 is pregnant; and to these uneducated country kids $5,000 seems like an absolute fortune.

We were all betrayed; anyone who for a moment or for a lifetime put their faith in the Liberal Party of Australia. Everything went backwards; we lost control of our own lives. The gap between the average working wage and the fat cat public servants increased out of all reason; so that now there's barely a public servant in the country who doesn't earn at least twice the average wage. The legal caste are warmly blessed with wages six seven eight or even more times the average wage; not to mention the fabulous junkets they spend their lives on. I am free to do as I want, the voice said, but freedom in this country was very tight; and most people struggle financially. It was all over. The cruel indifference they had dispplayed came back to bite them; and they were tossed most emphatically out of government. Now the left is triumphant; and smug. All Rudd has to do is keep control of his own restive, preening, power mad crowd and he will survive. And the conservatives, the liberals, will be out of power for a very long time.

Not that I've ever been a great forecaster of political events in Australia. I remember firmly predicting that it would be the Kim and Cheryl show, as in Kim Beazley and Cheryl Kernot, and Howard would exit as the most unpopular prime minister in Australian history around the time of the introduction of the GST. Instead he want on to serve for more than 11 years, making him the second longest serving prime minister in Australian history while Kim and Cheryl are long gone. But the Liberals are now in a mess right across the country. The most senior liberal in Australia is the mayor of Brisbane; who's often described in insulting terms by other Liberals. They lied and lied and lied; that's what got me. The GST was meant to solve the funding problems. It did nothing of the kind. An extra $39 billion they ripped off us all last year and no one can see any benefit for it whatsoever. Instead Howard poured that money directly and without controls into the Labor states; and it promptly vanished in increased public service salaries. Nothing went to the people. Nothing.

The betrayals are endless and deep. I'm fine, I'm fine, don't worry, Howard is reported to have said as his staff were packing up their offices. That's all very well, but what about us, we've all just lost our jobs, the informant said. If you were a separated dad and believed naively the governments promises to reform family law and child support, you were completely dudded. If you were anti the high levels of immigration in this country and the social dislocation it is causing, people naively thought Howard was their man. Instead he increased the rates of immigration yet further; and there are whole crowded chaotic suburbs in Sydney now where half the population was born somehwere else and the remnant anglo host population lives out their lives behind locked doors or long ago fled to the country. If you thought the public service was out of control and needed to be trimmed back, and thought Howard as a conservative would stand up to the bureaucracy, you were wrong.

And if you thought goivernment institutions had a clear and piercing oversight, that they were fiercely and efficiently doing the jobs they were set up to do, you were sadly let down. The bureaucracy had a field day while lazy and inept hands-off-the-wheel politicians looked the other way. There are a host of well paid bureaucrats whose sole job role is to manage other bureaucrats; and any productivity or interaction with the real world is purely accidental. And the result is a country which should have been great but isn't. The result is a country which once knew pride and now knows only envy; as the toiling masses, their voices unrecognised and unrepresented, continue to be completely ignored. Australia has become ever more grotesquely over-governed, local, state and federal bureaucracies feeding off the toil of fewer and fewer people. It has to stop. It is unsustainable. If things do not change, and that looks highly unlikely, the deepening misery that is our mainstream culture will ultimately implode, or explode. And the luvvies will once more wring their preening hands over the violence and unreasonableness of the common man. And all will be lost, a once great country, a once great future, a once great place down the drain.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/02/tossup_between.html

A new poll out this afternoon shows that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are statistically tied among likely Democratic voters heading into Tuesday's primary in Massachusetts.

On the Republican side, former Bay State governor holds a sizable lead over John McCain, according to the 7News/Suffolk University survey. However, 27 percent of Democratic voters and 24 percent of Republican voters say they may change their minds before Tuesday.

Obama has 46 percent to Clinton's 44 percent, while 7 percent of Democratic and independent voters likely to vote in the Democratic primary were undecided.

The endorsement last week by Senator Edward M. Kennedy for Obama is a key factor. Asked to size up the impact of three endorsements for Obama and Clinton, 43 percent of Democratic respondents cited Kennedy's endorsement as the most influential, followed by Bill Clinton's of his wife (23 percent) and Oprah Winfrey's of Obama (9 percent).

"The Bay State's senior senator Ted Kennedy clearly has more clout in Massachusetts than the popular former president, Bill Clinton," said David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University. "Add to that the backing of Senator Kerry and Governor Patrick, with the resonant message of change as well as the Kennedy call for 'a new generation of leadership' and you have the reason why what was once Clinton country has become an Obama opportunity – and a political choice between the nostalgic and the new."

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL1880448320080204

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - American troops accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians while hunting down al Qaeda militants, the U.S. military admitted on Monday, the latest in a series of mistakes in which innocent Iraqis have died.

The deaths south of Baghdad on Saturday, which Iraqi police said were caused by a helicopter air strike, were announced as Iraq said it would soon begin talks with U.S. officials on an agreement covering the role of U.S. forces after a U.N. Security Council mandate expires at the end of 2008.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2008/02/03/2003400082

AP, BAGHDAD
Sunday, Feb 03, 2008.

Militants strapped a pair of mentally retarded women with explosives and blew them up by remote control in two pet bazaars on Friday, killing at least 91 people in the deadliest day since Washington began pouring extra troops into the capital last spring.

Brigadier General Qassim al-Moussawi, Iraq's chief military spokesman in Baghdad, said the women had Down syndrome and may not have known they were on a suicide mission.

The tactic would support US claims that al-Qaeda in Iraq may be increasingly desperate and running short of able-bodied men willing or available for such missions.

As of early yesterday, Iraqi officials were unable to break down the higher death toll in the two bombings. The police and interior ministry officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said the bombings showed that a resilient al-Qaeda has "found a different, deadly way" to try to destabilize Iraq.

"There is nothing they won't do if they think it will work in creating carnage and the political fallout that comes from that," he said in an interview at the US State Department.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the bombing in Iraq proved al-Qaeda was "the most brutal and bankrupt of movements" and would strengthen Iraqi resolve to reject terrorism.

Earlier, officials had said the first bomber was detonated about 10:20am in the central al-Ghazl market.

Four police and hospital officials said at least 46 people were killed and more than 100 people were wounded.

Local police said the woman wearing the bomb sold cream in the mornings at the market and was known to locals as "the crazy lady."

The weekly pet bazaar had been bombed several times during the war; but with violence declining in the capital, the market had regained popularity as a shopping district and place to stroll on Fridays, the Muslim day of prayer.

But this Friday offered a scene of carnage straight out of the worst days of the conflict. Firefighters scooped up debris scattered among pools of blood, clothing and pigeon carcasses.

The attacks were the latest in a series of violent incidents that frayed a gossamer of Iraqi confidence in the permanence of recent security gains.

Bollinger Bolsheviks

2008-02-04T04:41:00.000+11:00

"There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds struggled over the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcasses of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some spectator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which - having sunks into the soil of their own weight in wet weather - they had the appearance of trying to hide themselves."
Charles Dickens

If these were cruel times, there was always the sneering of the left. Australia has been over-run by the politically correwct and intelligent debate is almost impossible. Their moral superiority is unbearable, their blind spots legion. We truly hope there will be more blessings; the idylls of the rich, the massive stone mansions, the staggering amounts of money in Sydney, barely able to count their millions while to the west lies kilometre after kilometre of the mortgage belt; where no one can make ends meet and hundreds of thousands, according to yesterday's papers, face eviction. The daily grind was so difficult that people had become snappy, unhappy, everyone felt a road rage incident coming on and more than a thousand peole feld the city every week to a better life, usually in North Queensland.

I was the last single person left alive from my group of friends, back there in the 70s when we thought our partying ways would change the nation's psyches and believed, fundamentally, that the world was changing on its access and we were part of that. Now the focus has shifted, the momentum is elsewhere, and the country is ruled by a pack mentality that is both immature and brainless. It's impossible to disagree with these people, or even debate these people, without being called either racist or right wing. It's hugely significant, they will tell you; as the country prepares to say sorry based, ultimately, on a biased and one sided report. But the momentum of the so-called culture wars has made it impossible to get out of the way; and the Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson looks old and out of date by even asking to see the wording of the apology before signing on.

Kevin Rudd our PM ridiculed Opposition leader Brendan Nelson yesterday for refusing to join up to the movment without seeing the words first. And that, probably, is fair enough. But pack mentality requires otherwise; and the wise and free flow of ideas has now long gone. Sterile chimpanzees parrot the things they've been taught. My son is about to finish high school having carefully avoided ever reading a single novel. And he's actually doing quite well. The English cannon is out of date; or at least out of fashion. Academics deconstruct everything; and there is nothing left. Sitting in their well paid jobs; none of them have actually done an ordinary day's work in their lives. And these pestulant idiots have taken over our entire intellectual and cultural life. And we are lost, truly lost, as we frog march in unison into a mindless future; a country wrapped in secrecy and conformism; the left at its worse, the right in disarray; intellectual ferment nothing but a sad joke. Halleluyah; protect us from the mindless. They are everywhere. The fools have won. The idiots have taken over the assylum. And the incompetent born to rule arrogant hopelessness of the right is as much to blame as the smothering conformity of the left.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/keating-monsters-mcguinness-on-eve-of-funeral/2008/01/31/1201714106728.html

The late Paddy McGuinness was "a liar and a fraud" with the journalistic "morals of an alley cat", former prime minister Paul Keating says.

In a stinging opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review today, Mr Keating accused McGuinness of having a "prejudiced, capricious and intellectually corrupt mind that was all over the shop depending on what suited his miserable purposes at the time".

Greg Lindsay, founder of think tank The Centre for Independent Studies and a friend of McGuinness, said the attack was "astonishing and unworthy".

"Keating said he doesn't normally speak ill of the dead, so he could have done it at some point in the future," said "It was obviously in bad taste, Paddy's funeral is tomorrow.

"No one should be immune from criticism but the body isn't even cold.

"I would have thought that when Paddy was alive and they could have just slugged it out in a Balmain bar.

"As for him being a liar and a fraud, that's astonishing. I find it astonishing and unworthy of Keating."

Mr Lindsay said he had had many debates, and disagreements, with McGuinness during their decades of friendship.

Not the easiest man

"Paddy was a friend of mine for 30 years, he wasn't the easiest man to be friends with but I admired his mind," he said.

"Paddy was a good economist and even Keating said that Paddy grudgingly said he did good work.''

Writer Keith Windschuttle, who wrote for Quadrant magazine while McGuinness was editor, also criticised Keating's timing and comments.

"Keating should have made his accusations when Paddy was alive and able to answer him back," Mr Windschuttle said.

"It is cowardly and dishonourable to make them now he is dead."

Herald columnist Paul Sheehan said that Keating and McGuinness actually have a lot in common.

"The irony is that Paul Keating has a great streak of Paddy McGuinness in him," Mr Sheehan said.

"Keating is a bilious public character, he is a head-kicker.

"He has dissipated his prestige as a former and successful prime minister by kicking the hell out of the people, particularly [former prime minister] John Howard for the last 10 years."

Gucci Socialist. Limousine Liberal.

Sorry

2008-02-03T06:11:00.000+11:00

SO let us apologise. Apologise for more than 30 years of monumental policy failures. For the pursuit of victim politics. For the delivery of unconditional welfare. For the embrace of collective rather than individual rights. And for the Stolen Generations report. It was a noxious exercise that spawned a cadre of bureaucrats too afraid to step in and remove small children from neglect and violence, creating a new generation of child victims.
Janet Albrechtsen

The nation wants to say sorry; and the responses vary enormously. It will be Rudd's first action when parliament resumes in February; and already the critics and the storm clouds are circling. Some see it as a necessary and long overdue unblocking of relations between indigenous and mainstream Australia. Others see it as an unnecessary stirring of the dark aspects of Australia which will do more harm than good. Many people in this country have grievances with the Federal government; as they no doubt have with your government. Just ask any separated dad. Does that justify a national apology for something that happened a century ago; that is by people who have long since passed on. The present generation, many of whom were born overseas, had no direct role to play in the policies of removal of usually half-caste aboriginal children.

And many aboriginal children who were "stolen" and brought up in loving European families do not see themselves as stolen, rather as being saved.

But the single word "sorry" has become so totemic in our culture that many see it as a necessary roadblock to undo so that we can get on with the real business of improving relationships and living conditions.

The fomrer so-called "conservative" Prime Minister John Howard was much reviled for the left for refusing to say sorry; and many assumed it was because such an apology could trigger monumental claims costing the taxpayer billions of dollars.

Our current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who made an election promise to say sorry and turned it into a virtual brnading or marketing exercise to differentiate hismelf from the then government, has already been derided by some aboriginal edlers and European activists for ruling out compensation as part of the "sorry" package with which he reportedly intends to open parliament.

But what has shocked and saddned many Australians in recent months is revelation after revelation of the appalling conditions in the remote aboriginal communities of Australia.

Reports which have really made many ordinary Australians wonder exactly what it is they are saying sorry for.

And this is clearly not just a matter of money. These people receive the same welfare benefits as the rest of the country; in fact often more generous. Most of these communities are entirely dependent on unemployment benefits; that is on the goodwill and hard work of the Australian taxpayer. Isolated from the real world and the many benefits it can bring by a so-called "permit" system which excludes almost everyone from vast tracts of inland Australia, our new government has been roundly criticised for its back to the future move of reinstalling the system recently abolished by the last government.

These isolated communities were the result of a Utopian, Roussean version of aboriginal life; the "noble savage" free to go about their ceremonies and their ancient way of life without the corruption of the western world.

Vast tracts of the country were gifted back to aboriginal tribal groups and billions of dollars have been poured into the desert sands over the past three decades.

Instead of flourishing and being a source of indigenous pride these communities have turned into chronically dysfunctional communities where alcoholism, petrol sniffing and drug abuse are almost universal; where people die young; where children are neglected and little children die in the desert sands while their drunken parents party nearby. Sexual abuse of children is rife. Their health is so poor it would not be tolerated anywhere else in Australia.

These isolated communities also benefit from millions upon millions of dollars in mining lease payments. But nonetheless, due to abject alcoholism and civic decay these communities are a mess. My neighbour has just returned from helping build a school in central Australia; at enormous expense; ready for the new year. That school was destroyed by the students themselves last year. It has cost millions to rebuild. Brand new cars most Australians cannot afford are gifted to these communities; and rarely last long; never serviced, abandoned if they break down; or torched within months.

Journalists and photographers who have been to Central Australia in recent months all report that these communities are worse than anything you will see in the third world because the people are entirely without hope. Most of the families in the slums of Calcutta proudly send their kids off to school in astonishing white shirts, proud, beaming and clean. In Central Australia many of the kids don't go to school at all; and many of them are sick and abused.

Part of the problem with the debate in modern Australia is that the Bringing Thiem Home report by Justice Wilson on which the whole stolen generation industry has been built was a left-wing political exercise which deliberately gave voice to only one side of the story - that was, the grief felt by aboriginal women who lost their children and by some of those children on the pain of separation from their families.

The voices of the police officers, the social workers and the family carers who dealt with those aboriginal children and who in many cases removed them from abusive alcoholic situations and from tribal groupings where half-castes were treated with contempt, who brought them up and provided them a far better start in life than they might otherwise have received, were deliberately excluded from the inquiry.

Even to question the notion of the stolen generation was derided by the left as immoral; and has led to a great deal of nonsense filtering into the mainstream culture as accepted fact.

Normally classified or derided as being on the right, some columnists have suggested the apparently radical solution: treat everyone the same.

Nowhere else in Australia would child rape or sexual molestation be hidden or excused. Nowhere else would entire communities be allowed to sit around on welfare benefits and not even try and get a job. Nowhere else would property damage, abuse and public drunkenness be tolerated nad excused. Perhaps the core of the problem is the specialist treatment of differing groups in the Australian community based on their ethnicity. Yes there were wrongs in the past. There are wrongs in the present. Children are routinely removed in this country by that left-wing feminist icon the Family Court; and while the fathers themselves almost invariably see these children as stolen, no one on the left has raised a single solitary voice of concern at the devestating impacts on parents and children alike. More than a dozen clients of our reviled bureaucratic nightmare the Child Support Agency are believed to die every day; and no one but the occasional maverik speaks out. Inept state governments and bloated Federal bureaucracies waste literally billions of dollars on projects we don't need; on massive bureaucratic infrastructures we don't need. And for every fat cat brueaucrat with a salary half a dozen times the average wage, or more, some poor bastard has had to work hard sweating it out in a factory all day all week paying this country's grotesque and crippling levels of taxation. These injustices are never spoken of; clearly for reasons of fashion.

Saying sorry may clear the blockages in the pipes that have poisoned relations between black and white Australia; it may stir poisons better left at the bottom of the pond and add yet further fuel to the burgeoning grievance industry which encourages people to see themselves as victims and to hate white people as cruel and indifferent oppressors. Standing on your own two feet, self-reliance and hard work, the values which made Australia a great country; have been eroded by special interest groups: by the mistake of not genuinely treating everyone as equals.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/536641/1567742

Members of the stolen generations have told the federal government they want their history taught to primary and secondary school students and all professionals who work with indigenous people.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will say sorry to the stolen generations when parliament resumes in February, more than 10 years after the Bringing Them Home human rights report recommended the federal government do so.

The government has been consulting with indigenous people and groups such as the Stolen Generations Alliance (SGA) since December about the form and wording of the apology.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23146173-662,00.html

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will use parliamentary privilege to avoid liability in compensation claims arising from an apology to members of Australia's stolen generation.

"If it is made in Parliament, there is an iron-clad certainty you can't be sued in respect to that apology," constitutional law expert George Williams told the Herald Sun yesterday.

"No liability can arise so long as it is done in Parliament. What is said in Parliament cannot be questioned in court."

A formal apology to Aboriginal members of the stolen generation will be made in Federal Parliament on February 13.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-word-that-makes-life-go-on/2008/02/01/1201801034953.html

We all tell children to say it, but a nation facing the inevitable is still shying from the consequences. Joel Gibson reports.

IT IS "something that every child knows", says Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary and Australia's unofficial keeper of the national vernacular.

"When you say you are sorry, life can go on. Your brother, sister, friend will drop the dispute, whatever it was, and enter into normal relations again. To withhold that 'sorry' utterance is to continue the war."

Like "Good morning" and "How are you?", she says, it is what linguists call a phatic expression; its meaning lies in its utterance, not necessarily in the content of its words.

But there is sorry, and there is sorry.

Ten years of culture wars about historical treatment of Australia's first people and a decade of government refusal to say it have made sorry more than a word, phatic or otherwise.

For this fortnight at least, sorry is the word, a litmus test for the psychological state of the nation and a clue to its sense of itself.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/longawaited-apology-should-be-seen-for-what-it-is/2008/02/01/1201801034956.html

In two weeks, the Federal Government risks disappointing most of the population, writes Wesley Aird.

We can now count down the days to the apology that will be the first item of business for the new Parliament. It will be easy for the Prime Minister to apologise to the stolen generation; all he has to do is stand up in Parliament and start talking. The difficult part is for everyone else with an interest in this apology to make sense of it.

As it turns out, the apology is to be from the Australian Government to the stolen generation. It is not going to be from all Australians, and it won't be intended for all indigenous people. By my reckoning, that would leave nearly 21 million people without a legitimate interest; in other words, it looks likely to exclude just about the entire population.

Like it or not, it will be an important occasion for the nation; for the rest of us, we should see it for what it is and think about what it means to us and what it will or won't achieve.

Sadly, it is unlikely to educate us and even less likely to bring indigenous and non-indigenous Australians closer together. In mainstream Australia some urban myths persist about Aborigines that are as tenacious as they are wrong. The myths just keep doing the rounds: native title will take backyards, cheap loans, special payments from the government, and so they go on. It is quirky that people do not take lightly the perception that someone or some group of people might be getting something they're not.

The apology runs the risk of being misunderstood and generating misguided jealousy.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23142573-662,00.html

By Peter Michael

February 01, 2008

LAWRENCE Springborg is all ears.

But as he "listens" to Queenslanders, he's also talking.

As he tours Yarrabah in north Queensland, the state's largest Aboriginal community, Mr Springborg says he is sorry.

He is sorry children and adults are still dying of abuse, neglect and violence in Aboriginal communities.

But he is even more sorry the political state of indigenous affairs has become bogged down in "cosmetic symbolism" of the wording of an apology.

Mr Springborg admitted the state Coalition had failed Aboriginal Queensland.

"It is clear there has been a disconnect between our side of politics and indigenous Queenslanders," he said.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23149571-5005374,00.html

Piers Akerman, writing in The Sunday Times

February 01, 2008

AUSTRALIANS were warned before the last election that the contest was not a beauty competition. Yet Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has exhibited all the hallmarks of a brainless beauty queen ever since, with his vacuous endorsement of the meaningless Kyoto Protocol and his gallop to claim moral superiority over the previous Australian government with a pledge to say sorry to the self-described stolen generation, in a yet-to-be revealed form of words on behalf of the current Government.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23149517-5005374,00.html

Glenn Milne:

LIKE John Howard before him, "sorry" seems to be the hardest word for Brendan Nelson to say.
But the internal Liberal imperatives surrounding the Opposition Leader – let alone the sheer moral pressure that has now built behind the issue – means he should learn how to say it . . . and quickly.

His very future as leader may depend on it. Nelson, through no fault of his own, is in an invidious position.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/01/2151864.htm

By Larissa Behrendt

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his Australia Day speech this year encouraged Australians to be proud of their past, but urged them to look forward. He listed as one of the challenges achieving effective reconciliation, so that we can all move forward together, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia.

When the curtain went down on the Howard years, it closed an era in which we had a Prime Minister who did not believe in saying "sorry" to the Stolen Generations, who had derailed the reconciliation process and ostracised any Indigenous leader who did not agree with him.

He used the decision in the Wik case to fuel an anti-Aboriginal election, he termed native title and the right to negotiate as un-Australian, dismantled the national Indigenous representative body and had repealed the application of the Racial Discrimination Act from applying to Aboriginal people three times: during the Hindmarsh Island bridge dispute, through the Native Title Amendment Act and in relation to the Northern Territory intervention.

Rudd's clear determination to approach Indigenous affairs differently has created a sense of optimism about new opportunities about the possibilities of a new era where policy will be more effective and the reconciliation process is renewed. His intention to apologise to the members of the Stolen Generations is perhaps the starkest indication of the fundamental shift.

While there is much optimism, Indigenous Australia is not assuming that the end of the Howard era is automatically the beginning of a golden era for Aboriginal people. Rudd in opposition supported, without any amendment, Howard's intervention in the Northern Territory including the aspects that repealed the Racial Discrimination Act, the abolition of the permit system and the compulsory quarantining of all welfare payments.

Ideology driven

The key problem under Howard was that throughout his time in office his decisions about Indigenous policy were directed by ideology. Whoever the Minister, whatever they called the policy, the direction was defined by the ideologies of mainstreaming, assimilation, mutual obligation, opening up access of Indigenous controlled land to non-Indigenous interests and the philosophy that the "real" Aboriginal people live in the north. Policy and resources were directed by these ideals.

Squirrelling Electronic Worms

2008-02-02T04:57:00.000+11:00

"For just a few seconds I stood by the window, staring out at the sea that was drawing closer all the time, at the grey sky that rocked gently against the grey water, the grey light falling in wide faint shafts. I could see how the wind was riffling the waves into the tightly corrugated patterns of squalls and how the sea-birds, a long way out, gathered in spiralling patterns around a lone fishing-boat, half shrouded in the faint mist."
Nicci French.

The fatal undertow was all that he felt; a keening sadness that stretched out across the marshlands and conflicted utterly with the bright brick colours that surrounded him. He didn't know why these echos kept coming back; why this brutal sadness had become his sole emotion, the grey, featureless flatlands of his inner-life. He trudged through work, which was invariably exotic, invariably took him into situations most people would regard as fascinating, and the worms that lept across the flat fields, withdrawal worms, hallucinatory, not really there; he embraced these chimera as his own dark lot; his sad destiny on the featureless plain.

He had always known he would die in Belmore Park, that rare stretch of open space next to Central Staiton through which thousands oi\f commuters marched everyday and where the city's crazies, infested with entities, gathered each day. The vision recurred repeatedly, that moment just after his death when his spirit was already retreating into the surrounding trees and into the skyscrapers that encircled it. He could see down to the Mission Beat man approaching him with the cup of tea. He knew it was his homeless status that provoked the tea; nit somehow he had established a rapport with the kind young man who brought it. He could see the concern, the resignation, as he approached his body. He could already hear the telescoped conversations, he used to be somebody, I'm told he used to be quite a well known jourenalist. He used to work close to hear, that's why he always stuck to this area. We haven't been able to find any family, although he told me once he had two children. He said he couldn't stop drinking, just couldn't stop; and used to tell me, in a cackling sort of way, beware the demon drink, it will get you in the end. I was sober for years, and I still ended up here.

The Mission Beat man was on his radio back to the office. We've got a sleeper, he was saying, better ring the cops and the ambos. Already passing the trees, drifting up the sides of the indifferent skyscrapers, he could see the small collection of people beginning to gather around his body. He hadn't changed his clothes in the last two weeks, during that last terminal binge, and knew he stank. He wished now he had showered, before the passing. In his old newspaper days it was as if he specialised in death; the paper always pulled him out for funerals and memorials. Tributes flowed in yesterday... The tiny coffins of the children breaking everyone's heart. The weeping parents, or the weeping relatives. He had always thought he would live forever, be a great, eccentric, wealthy success; but as the years rolled on those dreams and self-perceptions slowly disappeared, eaten away in the alcohol; the good stuff on the good days and the sting, the metho and orange juice, that was a lifsaver in his final days. He didn't know why he had poured scorn on sting in his younger days; it did the trick alright.

He saw the ambulance arive, his bloated body, his scraggly beard, his stinking clothes a far cry from the man he used to be. If only you had known...he wanted to scream down at them, if only you had known... But all his friends were gone now; anybody who would have known it hadn't always been sadness and decay and uncontrollable alcoholism, they had been relieved of this sad, inevitable end by younger deaths, in their prime deaths, when everyone wept at their funerals and their passing reverberated out through overlapping social sets. Now almost gone, the park returning to normal, he saw the ambulance officers and the police and his friend the Mission Beat man share a sad joke and the shake of a head, and he disappeared, as he had fought so long to do. Thanks, he said, telescoping the thought down to his friend, his last remaining friend, the only man who had been kind to him in his final derelict year. Thanks. And he was sure he saw, in those misty, distressed eyes, appreciation for the person he had been, the stories he had told, the days that had been his, and he telescoped the thought again, down from above the rooftops of the city buildings: thanks. And knew the message had got through.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/60-killed-as-female-suicide-bombers-strike-776881.html

Two women suicide bombers killed more than 60 people in separate attacks in Baghdad today.

The first came at the main pet market in the city centre where at least 46 people died and dozens were wounded in the deadliest bombing to strike the capital since the US "surge" of extra troops flooded into central Iraq last spring.

About 20 minutes later, a second woman struck another bird market in a predominantly Shiite area in south-eastern Baghdad. That blast killed as many as 18 people and wounded 25, police said.

The attacks shortly before the weekly Islamic call to prayer resounded across the capital were the latest in a series of violent incidents that have been chipping away at Iraqi confidence in the permanence of recent security gains.

The first blast occurred about 10.20 am when the woman detonated explosives hidden under her traditional black robe at the central al-Ghazl market. The pet bazaar had recently re-emerged as a popular shopping venue as Baghdad security improved and a ban on driving was lifted.

Police initially said the bomb was hidden in a box of birds but later realised it was a suicide attack after finding the woman's head.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/rudd-rules-out-compensation/2008/02/01/1201801035355.html

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has moved to ensure the Government's historic apology to the stolen generations is not misread as opening the way to compensation.

"We will not, under any circumstances, be establishing any compensation arrangements or any compensation fund. Absolutely blunt on that," he declared yesterday.

But Aboriginal leader Mick Dodson said compensation would stay on the agenda.

The apology remained a source of division in the Liberal Party, with shadow treasurer Malcolm Turnbull giving notice he would strongly urge his colleagues to support it.

While leader Brendan Nelson was waiting to see the Government's wording, Mr Turnbull said, "I do support an apology", adding that he would "have a lot to say with my colleagues next week" when the party room met.

A Man Called Mr Flowers

2008-02-01T05:16:00.001+11:00

When everyone in the house is crazy,
only the sane seem like fools. So it was
when the financial addiction spread
everywhere. Then everyone who was not taking
his daily dose of heroin or cocaine became
the fringe-dweller, the oddball, the brake
on progress, the party-pooper at the greatest
no-cash-down, how-to-spend-it shindig that
our planet has ever known. Debt piled on
debt everywhere: in households, corporations,
public finances and international deficits,
in magnitudes that had never been even
glimpsed in the most creative imaginations
before.
James Cumes.

There were so many troubled times and he had been so ashamed of some of the disasters
which had overtaken his life; that it was hard to remember that in fact many of the times were hysterically funny, that spilling out of clubs at dawn and perching on the top of buildings watching the sunrise had been fun. It was just that it ended so badly; and by badly he meant badly. The triumphant twists of story; the slow trudge of recovery; the flicker of naked flesh and the piercing of the mysteries; he meant good. He really had meant good. Richard had been the youngest, most handsome, most adorable of our crew; and he died before middle age had a chance to transform him. On the streets of London, behind towering solid buildings which held the secrets of centuries; here was our best time. We were all expat Australians, our little gang, partying in the bar at the London School of Economics; taking it for granted that we lived around the corner from the British museum and that we were essentially at the heart of the civilisation which had created our own country. At the heart physically, or geographically, perhaps, but not at the heart of the English: who couldn't have cared less whether we lived or died; not then, not now; as they clung to their little self-perceptions of superiority.

We didn't have working visas and worked out how to survive as best we could, picking up glasses; cleaning. It was working as a cleaner in London that forced on me the decision: I'm going to live or die by the typewriter; I'm not doing this shit anymore. I was already 30, a youthful 30, having never grown up; having embraced the role as eternal party boy and leader of the dance. If I had one regret when I sobered up it was that I hadn't been a better example to all those who joined us in the merry dance; always smashed, often drunk, feeling fabulous by midday and hanging by dusk, and they had pealed off one by one: dead. Brian Flowers as he claimed his name was this fabulously eccentric queen zipping around London in a bright red BMW convertable with his airdale sitting in the front seat.

We met through Blair; who had once been just another boy around the Cross but who had always been more ambitious, more determined to succeed, than the rest of us. For most of us: the tragic destiny was all we ever thought we would achieve; moments of drug fuelled intimacy in between the bouts in jail and the tragic ends; so many tragic ends. But Balir had gone to London and "married well"; and a little network of real estate queens meant the house and the boy Tony was very nice; and everything was substantial.

All I had was a beaten up typewriter and a trail of unpublished manuscripts and a long history of unpredictable chaos. And so it was that I came to meet Brian, who wore silver hair pieces and always had more money than made sense, flashing it around in the capital with no intention of returning home. I was looking for work and joined him in the schedule, dashing in and out of buildings spraying freshener furiously so the customers knew we had been and thought it had been cleaned, picking up the obvious and moving right along, block after block on a healthy contract. Somehow he had wangled the cleaning contract through Blair's network; and zipped around London with the buckets and mops poking out of the BMW's boot, the airdale imperial in the front seat, the roof down, even the subdued London light reflecting off his magnificent hair.

It was then, turning 30 with nothing to show for it but an unhappy relationship and volume after volume of unpublished probably unpublishable stories; the dream of being a writer in cruel ashes; with no property, no possessions beyond the clothes I was wearing, nothing in the bank account; that I decided the ignominy of these rotten jobs, in a culture which demeaned physical labour, was it, at an end. Too old for a sugar daddy, the rentboy days long gone; there was no other way forward but to pursue the written word, wherever it led. The freelance journalism escalated; and in some kind or unkind way that created its own path; the endless interviews, the deadlines; the jumbled chaos of selling onself, here at the moment when strange destinies turned on a point; here where life changed forever, for the better, he picked out a lower path beneath the failed dreams; for that most ancient of reasons, survival.

And Brian, who taught me all sorts of things in his mad queen way, was arrested and deported back to Australia, where he was wanted on robbery charges; and suddenly the reason for all that money became clear. I could never imagine him in Pentridge jail; and never saw him again; although I always expected he would reappear at some point. Various details filtered back to us: left to mop up the cleaning business. And everything fell to pieces. The red convertable BMW and the imperial airdale went to new homes. But what I wondered the most, more than anything, waking up in the middle of the night pestered by ridiculous thoughts, was: how the hell was he going to cope in jail with all those hairpieces; which one was he going to wear for which occassion, and would he rather be bashed than bald?

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/01/2151665.htm

The divisions in the federal Opposition over the planned formal apology to the Stolen Generations are intensifying.

When treasury spokesman Malcolm Turnbull was vying for the Liberal leadership last November, he was asked on ABC's Radio National his thoughts on apologising.

Mr Turnbull confirmed that he would support Labor in saying sorry and made his views clear about former prime minister John Howard's refusal to apologise.

"That was an error clearly, we should have said sorry then," he said. "Getting into semantics about regret versus sorry - that's a waste of time."

Now he says his position is unchanged and is canvassing it within the party.

"I'm talking to a lot of my colleagues about the issue, naturally, and we'll be having a further discussion about it next week," he said.

But Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson disagrees with him and is still refusing to support an apology, at least until he sees it in writing.

It is the wording of Labor's planned apology that has Dr Nelson and Indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott reluctant to support it.

The apology will be made on February 13 and the Liberal Party plans to discuss the issue next week.

Trapped In The Trees

2008-01-31T04:43:00.000+11:00

"Sometimes I still felt that I had fetched up on the edge of the world. The wintry light slanting on to the flat, colourless landscape; the moan of the wind, the shriek of sea-birds and the melancholy boom of the foghorn far out at sea all sent a shiver through me...it was all horizon: the level land, the mudflats, the miles of marshes, the saltings, the grey, wrinkled sea."
Nicci French.

It was all planned. The spot had been picked out; the canal that was the Cooks River, the city's most polluted waterway. The mudflats, the garbage strewn along its edges, the busy public toilets of alternate lives; the whites of the school sports teams playing in the afternoon, the aching loneliness that was imprinted in the trees along the bank. A long time ago, when we were all young couples making progress in our lives, steps into adulthood, buying our first homes, struggling and loving our first children, suddenly parents after a lifetime of ease. Bruce and Lindsay held birthday parties for their children just near there; and their backyard ran almost down to the water's edge. Desperate for human contact, what would happen if he knocked on that door, tried to explain that he had once known the house, had been to several parties there. Bruce and Lindsay. They would never have heard of them. There would have been half a dozen owners since; but he always wanted to knock on some stranger's door; seek help as if from the village priest. These dreadful psychic moments haunted him; it was all planned, a couple of grams of smack, the bottle of Black Douglass, the beers, the big fat joint, he would sit under the tree as the children played; and his end would come.

That was where he had got to. If it wasn't going to happen by accident, he would do it on purpose. The last overdose, they had to go next door to call the ambulance because the phone had been cut off. The children were crying in the lounge room, the ambulance officer slapping him around as he lay on the floor, he looking blearily up, the bloke saying: mate, you've got to get yourself together, you've got children. And he replied: they'd be better off with the life insurance. And then the ambulance officer said: ask your kids whether they want the money or their dad. And that heart breaking moment cut through to him in a way that nothing else had. He went back to meetings and his life slowly turned around; his sweat laden clothes stopped smelling of addiction sweat; and out of all the diseased chaos of his mind, things started to recover.

He had thought everything was his fault, if only he got things together then everything in their lives, their relationship, their children, the finances, everything would fall back together. But that wasn't the case. Getting clean was garlic to the vampire; the nest of entities that was her evil force reacted as if it had been scalded. And the disaster that was the core of his life shifted gear in every possible sense.

Years later he flew over that exact same spot where he had planned to kill himself; a light aircraft, yet another assignment, and he looked down at the rich patterning of the Sydney suburbs; and he couldn't imagine, only a few years before, how desperately bad things had got, how desperately sad he had become, how the trains that featured at the end of their long slide in accommodation standards echoed so lonely through the giant nights, his spirit trapped in the trees and the end too close, his sick self. The waves had entered in his childhood, when all was adventure and discovery; but now, he had failed utterly in everything he touched and it was time to go. Born defective, there was nothing that could be done to fix his ailing psyche. He knew it was time, that ailing little thing couldn't last any longer; the sacred past had abandoned him long ago. But instead of death by the side of the canal, slumping as the smack took effect, another life altogether emerged from the ashes. And he could be grateful for one thing: in one form or another, he had survived the most vicious despair life had to offer. Not just survived, he had built a whole new life; and began once again to know success; and in recent times a frothing hysteria he suspected might actually be happiness.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1707857,00.html?imw=Y

Even as Kenya's President and main opposition leader launched negotiations aimed breaking their violent political impasse, the crisis reached a troubling new low with news that a recently elected member of parliament had been gunned down outside his home. At the same time, a new wave of ethnic violence has broken out across the country.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/kennedy-endorses-obama/2008/01/29/1201369072661.html

Senator Edward Kennedy has endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination as a "man with extraordinary gifts of leadership and character" and a worthy heir to his assassinated brother, John F Kennedy, who is still revered among Democrats.

"I feel change in the air," Kennedy said in prepared remarks salted with scarcely veiled criticism of Obama's chief rival for the nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as her husband, the former president.

The support of Kennedy pits two influential Democratic families - the Kennedys and the Clintons - against each other. It increases pressure on Clinton, building on Obama's decisive win over the former first lady in the South Carolina primary Saturday.

Christmas In A Sex Shop

2008-01-30T04:54:00.000+11:00

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."
Carl Yung

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
Mae West

AMONG the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I
am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.

Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.
Walt Whitman

The article he wrote, On Working In A Sex Shop, barely touched on the calamity which had had overtaken him at that time. A succession of journalists, all on their own usually alcohol fuelled downward spirals, had worked at that sex shop on Oxford Street, just near Taylor's Square. Prior to working in the sex shop, in an age before porn saturated the net and was everywhere in the culture, a click away, he had barely seen any. This was the mark of how far downhill he had gone, these tawdry environs reflecting how far his own dreams had decayed; how desperate he had become. Another journalist on the skids passed it on to him. That man, in by now a familiar pattern, had seen the light and was heading off to the country; to detox, to begin again, to find a love untainted by the corruption that coated every Sydney street. The traffic drove through his deepening despair. He sat above the cabinet full of dildos, a photograph existed somewhere still, pounding away at his portable typewriter, writing and writing as he always did. Even here, even now, he wrote his incomprehensible science fiction novellas and prayed to some filtered God of the derelict and the desolate. God is found more in extremity than in comfort, went the priest's line; even here, amongst the dildos.

He'd been awake for several days when the incident happened; scattered utterly to the four winds; hiding in dripping canyons of naked men, fat mountains lying in cubicles with white towels draped across their vast bellies; showers in the distance, the dripping of water that could be heard infinite miles away. Not just scattered to the four winds. Completely blind. Completely tortured. The dart like images snaking through his head; the grunt of ecstasy as men coupled in the gloom; he had known these places were there, even in childhood; the utter indifference of the coupling, the walls coated in slime. He'd hate to see this place in the daytime. And finally, even for them, the stop outs wired on the best speed in the country, it became time to go home. Well, if not home the sauna was shutting; the strays struggling out into the pre-dawn light. He said goodbye to whoever it was, and walked through his hallucinations. Not enough time to make his way down to Withering Heights and his favourite spot on the roof; instead he made his way through the Darlinghurst Streets, waiting for a cafe to open; his sweat drenched clothes hanging off him; the sadness snaking in between the washes of colour; oh if only it could end before things got even worse.

There had been so much hope, so much ambition; he had truly wanted to succeed. But now even that seemed a long time ago. Soon enough it was time to open up; and he made his way to Oxford Street sex shop; his only formal employ these days. Almost blind, he was hallucinating so badly, he struggled with the locks on the front door; and once through, bounded up the steps to turn off the alarm before it started, bringing unwanted attention to his shambolic state. He made it, turned the alarm off, and then turned to fix up the lights; and immediately there was someone behind. Startled, he jumped, and the man's smooth tones tried to calm him down. Just another punter. I have to fly back to New Guinea at lunchtime and I wanted to take something with me, he said.

He could never sell the blow up dolls, which were the most expensive item, or anything else really. His sale figures were always better than anybody elses for the simple reason that he ignored the customers completely. No one wanted an assistant disturbing their train of thought when they were making that difficult decision between Young Hung and Hunky and Barnyard Sex. The man wanted a dildo. Which do you recommend? He didn't recommend any of them; there was always plenty of the real thing.

He kept wishing he hadn't got himself into such a state; wondering if he could ever come back, wishing he had gone home for a shower at least. Finally, after considerable fuss, the punter picked out an enormous black dildo which would have to have satisfied the biggest slut on the planet. The man paid by credit card; and he struggled with the click clack machine; he could barely see; the colours swamping him, the cheap old magazines bearing down from the walls; merging into the cheap red carpet. Everything was so sordid. He couldn't believe he had ended up here. Finally the man, who after all had a plane to catch, took over for him, working the machine with far greater finesse than he could accomplish. Still, he could not see straight; everything kept shuddering down on him. And then the punter left, swinging the giant dildo over his shoulder, smiling happily as he went down the steep stairs: "I'll think of you when I use it," he shouted back up the stairwell.

And then the colours really did go into riot; and he tried to laugh at the insanity of it all, as he pottered around amongst the dusty crotches and insane gestures; the bestiality of what men found erotic destroying any mystical allure. The calamity of that job was over soon enough; and he wrote On Working In A Sex Shop to make light of the disaster that had overtaken him. But although he was to rally for a while, that shop was only one of the sign posts on a road to dereliction; and he could never have predicted the disasters that were to come. The abandonment of all hope.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/bush-refuses-to-call-a-slowdown/2008/01/29/1201369134566.html

The Age:

PRESIDENT George Bush has asked Congress to pass quickly his $US150 billion ($A170 billion) economic stimulus package and to make his controversial tax cuts — due to expire in three years — permanent, as he delivered his last State of the Union address.

The speech concentrated on the economy, Iraq and Mr Bush's efforts to forge a peace deal in the Middle East — the issues that will shape his legacy.

But it also signalled that even with less than 12 months to go Mr Bush is not giving up on his domestic agenda.

He still wants Congress to: extend his "no child left behind" schools program; deal with unfunded liabilities in the social security system; act on climate change and energy security; and come up with a humane approach to millions of illegal immigrants.

Mr Bush's approval rating is in the low 30s, the lowest in his seven years in office. Only Richard Nixon's rating was worse at this point in the presidential term.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/troops-out-by-midyear-but-more-aid-smith/2008/01/29/1201369135155.html

THE Government has agreed to increase the number of civilian aid workers and other professionals to help with reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, a move Australia hopes will demonstrate its commitment to the coalition effort as it withdraws its combat troops.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, made the commitment on Monday as he stood alongside the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during his first official visit to Washington.

Mr Smith also met the Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and yesterday was due to meet the Democrat majority leader of Congress, Steny Hoyer, and the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, Joseph Biden. Mr Smith attended the joint sessions of Congress to hear President George Bush's State of the Union address.

Those Vincent Moments

2008-01-29T04:42:00.001+11:00

This is me with Eddy, who I befriended in Pai when I was there for a few weeks last year. He was a very colourful character.

The path is narrow, therefore we must be careful. You know how others have arrived where we want to go, let us take that simple road too.

Ora et Labora, [Pray and work] let us do our daily work, whatever the hand finds to do, with all our strength and let us believe that God will give good gifts, a part that will not be taken away, to those who ask Him for it.

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new!” [2 Cor. v.17.]

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
Paris, 25 September 1875

Too many beautiful things have been done too unusually well for me to prefer one to the other systematically. And the changes which the moderns have made in art are not always for the better; not everything means progress - neither in the works nor in the artists themselves - and often it seems to me that many lose sight of the origin and the goal, or in other words, they do not stick to the point.

Your description of that night effect again struck me as very beautiful. It looks very different here today, but beautiful in its own way, for instance, the grounds near the Rhine railway station: in the foreground, the cinder path with the poplars, which are beginning to lose their leaves; then the ditch full of duckweed, with a high bank covered with faded grass and rushes; then the grey or brown-gray soil of spaded potato fields, or plots planted with greenish purple-red cabbage, here and there the very fresh green of newly sprouted autumn weeds above which rise bean stalks with faded stems and the reddish or green or black bean pods; behind this stretch of ground, the red-rusted or black rails in yellow sand; here and there stacks of old timber - heaps of coal - discarded railway carriages; higher up to the right, a few roofs and the freight depot - to the left a far-reaching view of the damp green meadows, shut off far away at the horizon by a greyish streak, in which one can still distinguish trees, red roofs and black factory chimneys. Above it, a somewhat yellowish yet grey sky, very chilly and wintry, hanging low; there are occasional bursts of rain, and many hungry crows are flying around. Still, a great deal of light falls on everything; It shows even more when a few little figures in blue or white smocks move over the ground, so that shoulders and heads catch the light.

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
The Hague, c. 10 October 1882

How cruel had been those insights; the long, gentle afternoons when I sat on the back veranda of our large, character-filled share house in Adelaide, in love in every possible sense; with the shape of the magnificent gums against the sky, the mysteries of the creek at the bottom of the property, the stale, difficult old man who lived in the granny flat in the back garden; not Eddy but the name springs to mind; we, the students in the front house, fascinated by the call girl who came every Saturday afternoon. I can still remember the day when he tried to get me to look at porn with him. Those sort of things were always happening to me, even at this time, when I was in my early 20s; experiencing some sort of love rather than exploitation for the first time and far from interested in the chaotic interactions which had dominated my life. Here, once gain, we were fleeing the cyclone of Sydney; the physical wreckage I had created from the times when we knew our own answers; a time when our young love was pure and every friendship an adventure; a time before the stifling sadness of middle age had settled in and I knew what I wanted; excited to be.

I sat on that veranda and read Vincent van Gogh's letters; all of them, the three volume set; he was as good a writer as he was a painter; marvelled at the drawings I had never seen scattered through the letters; smoked joints, read the messages to Theo, watched the high gums settle into night; the arrival of the raucous cockatoos each evening; and here, these moments that transcended all other moments, the ones where we knew fully our own doomed artistic journey, where we sacrificed ourselves for art and could have known no other way, when the tortured artist was the sole identity that made all the misery and suffering worthwhile; those tasnscluscent, transcendent moments when consciousness was unconfined, when we weren't some frightened thing behind the shields but another, more triumphant creature all together. It was these rare moments, when I could feel the whole aching beauty of the world, every drop of water, every muffled domestic thought, within a kilometre radius. When I left my body and flew across the neighbouring suburbs. And nothing was going to stop me. Our destiny was great.

But these moments were rare; and involved much torment to get there. I can remember most clearly the most miserable of moments; living with the kids and their mother next to a railway line; after we had lost our house and the money - of which there had been quite a bit by our standards - had entirely gone. The binges had always ended badly, but as I got older they ended even worse; a cruel and disconsolate longing for an ordinary life; that crumby run down house by the railway line; where I churned out hundreds of pages of angst now moldering at the bottom of a box; and I could hear everything in that neighbourhood, see the night cats perched on terrace roofs; see the people sleeping and almost hear their dreams; hear the trains that regularly shattered the place in my aching loneliness, sadder than I had ever been. There had to be a way out of the chaos we had created: here at the end of the binge. But I couldn't think of anything, full of tears; sad at my own complete and total failure; the drug fueled rampage burnt out, leaving nothing but wreckage. And my dearly beloved children asleep; those two angels I had never wanted to hurt.

In the end it was them that led me away from the death march; because they didn't deserve the chaos we had inflicted on ourselves. We were surrounded by narking little pedants and cruel diseases; we could hear everything, the trains coupling at the nearby station, the shouts of the station master, the stirring of the early risers. I wanted so much to be happy. I wanted just to be an ordinary person. I didn't care about writing anymore; it had come to nought. I didn't care about journalism, it was just another job. I cared about those kids I had been put on the earth to protect; and thus it was that I found myself seeking help; away from the acid trails and the ancient melancholy; away from the crushing despair which had gained supremacy, into a different era where he no longer drank and his clothes no longer hung off him with heavy, alcoholic sweat. Away from the cruel times which had been his lot; onto an entirely different path. Halleluyah, salute the brave! We rise up, we conquer the average day, we became, for once in our lives, normal; skating out from under the tidal wave of dereliction that had been about to engulf us; me and my family, sheltering in the alcove, watcing the powerful, dangerous black wave rush by.

THE BIGGER STORY:

I predict nothing but trouble:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23124056-661,00.html

THE Rudd Government has taken legal advice on possible financial claims arising from its planned apology to stolen generation Aborigines.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said yesterday she wanted the proposed apology to be above politics.

But this seemed unlikely: Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson declared the new Government's priorities should be hip-pocket issues such as petrol prices and interest rates.

The apology is expected to be the Government's first formal action when the new Parliament sits on February 12.

But indigenous groups plan to crash Mr Rudd's apology with a mass protest over his refusal to offer compensation.

Ms Macklin said an apology was imminent.

"We do want to make the apology as early as possible in the new parliament," she said.

She said legal advice sought by the Government gave it confidence that it would not be swamped with claims.

"All of the state governments have issued formal apologies in their parliaments, and there haven't been any legal ramifications as a result of those apologies," she said.

But up to 550 Aborigines are seeking legal advice, the Herald Sun has learned.

Lost Life And The Lives Of Others

2008-01-28T07:08:00.000+11:00

"Heath is, and always will be, an Australian. He adored his home. His last two weeks with us over Christmas in Perth were just bliss. Heath did not become an actor for the fame or fortune. He loved his craft and he loved helping his friends. He loved chess and skateboarding too. My image of Heath in New York is him with his skateboard, a canvas bag and his beanie. That was Heath to me."
Kim Ledger, Heath's father.

Australia took a different step; a wave of confidence, almost excitement, gripped the country with a new Prime Minister. Partly it was just astonishment, a holding of the breath, a hope that nothing would stuff up, surprise that they hadn't made total fools of themselves. They took the reins as if it had only been a mistake, an historic accident, that they hadn't been holding them all the time. But the cracks began early. The sight of Rudd handing the NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher, widely hated and regarded as a total incompetent overlooking a rundown system her government had neglected for more than ten years, handing her with that pert superior little mouth and the fuck you glasses, a cheque for $50 million. That was it for me. $50 million of our hard earnt taxes, to use a cliche; talk about rewarding someone for their incompetence. Hopeless. Hapless. Long may they rot.

I used to see them driving by, ordinary people in their flash cars, and envy them so much their ordinary, healthy lives, while my own addiction plagued frame, glued together with pain and sickness, fundamentally sick from a tortured longing for oblivion, all these things were free to us, the giofts of suffering, not the triumphant pressure is a gift but the opposite end of the misery spectrum, the gift of desperation to change our unchannelled, unfocussed psyches, to capture the lives of others we so desperately wanted, to possess the clean clothes and fresh white underclothes, to smell not like a man who hadn't washed for days; although surely it was oinly yesterday he had braved a bath, immersed rapidly aging flesh into soup white like fear water; down with the fag flag cry the crackpots; and all that in a moment, as the handsome driver flashed a smile at his girlfriend, hidden in the car's resources and of no interest except as a prop. It was him I was interested in, he I envied. I wanted to be just like him, wrapped in a $60,000 young man's car, unaddicted, uncomplicated, full of a lust for life.

Instead, of course, he had become the creeping shadow dependent on the energy of successful people just to survive. We draped ourselves in the lives of others so easily; whether it be in a book, or a movie, or on the street. Or as in this case, just someone driving by. He had become the Uriah Heep of the late 20th century; someone who couldn't stay warm except at someone elses hearth; someone who found it alarmingly easy to excise himself from the occassion; and report things as if he had never been there, never been a participant. He was ideally suited to his trade, he thought, because in the end he wasn't there; and what had been there had atrophied, that naked scared little rabbit creature hiding behind the seven shields. The moves were disastrous, the times weren't right. He had no choice but to keep on going, one leaden foot before the next, a comfort to no one, a stranger to all. It wasn't just a matter of a "stranger in a strange land"; it was a receded depth march into the shadows; a total retreat of self, an abnegation of everyting possible. It's a nice day if you like that sort of thing; that common saying, the glass half empty or half full. It was always half empty; in the most despairing of ways. He couldn't laugh about it yet. Too much of his life had been wasted feeling miserable; convinced he had been born defective and there was no way to recover. Or remedy the faults. Transform the diseased psyche.

And then one day, suddenly, the world changed from evil glue, the substance of things no longer echoed with some wierd psychic gloom; and he heard the thought most clearly: what a beautiful day. If only it had happened earlier in his life; if only so much time hadn't been wasted in doom filled rooms. If only he had been a better example, and all his friends hadn't died. But here in the present, in the chirpy, cheerful, otpimistic beauty of the day, he couldn't help but smile. He had been reborn; and the new version was cohered into a single whole; and most astonishing of all, the new version was happy. He had never been happy, never wanted to be happy; nice day if you like that sort of thing; happiness was something for morons and lobotomy patients; not for a supposedly tortured intellect like him. But there it was, the frothy exultation over nothing in particular but the fact he was still standing; a single coherent whole, happy!!

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/inquiries-cant-hide-flaws/2008/01/24/1201157559963.html

SMH

Andrew Clennell State Political Editor

THE Iemma Government is now officially in crisis.

There are special commissions of inquiry into both NSW Health and the Department of Community Services.

There is no confidence in either of the ministers running these portfolios, Reba Meagher and Kevin Greene, and Morris Iemma's tenure, not only as Premier but in his former role as health minister, is now under scrutiny.

This comes after the Tcard debacle, the constant announcement of reviews instead of action in key portfolio areas, continuing doubts about whether the crucial sale of the electricity industry will go ahead amid union opposition, continuing problems in transport, and the fallout over the Gibson-Koperberg affair.

Staff turnover in ministerial offices is high as aides flee to the Rudd Government in Canberra or jobs in the corporate sector, such is the dissatisfaction with the Government led by a man with a reputation as a ditherer.

For months last year in the wake of the Jana Horska affair at Royal North Shore Hospital, Meagher and Iemma trotted out the smug line in Parliament that there was a body that could look after the problems in the health system - the Health Care Complaints Commission.

There was no need for a more broad-ranging inquiry, they said.

Then they set up a bodgie inquiry into problems at the hospital headed by the Government-friendly Christian Democrat MP Fred Nile, who made sure the inquiry did not run too long. How silly those tactics look now.

It took one man - the deputy NSW coroner, Carl Milovanovich - to blow all of that out of the water with one sentence yesterday. When he delivered the words "It may be timely that the Department of Health and/or the responsible minister consider a full and open inquiry into the delivery of health services in NSW", the Government had been dragged kicking and screaming to an open inquiry by a 58-year-old who has obviously heard too much about the hospital system in his six years as a coroner.

Rituals Of The Tender Bar

2008-01-27T04:43:00.000+11:00

A picture of the Dads On The Air radio team at 2GLF

"Champions take risks and pressure is a privilege". Billy Jean King to Sharapova on the eve of her finals match at the Australian Open.

"Bravery is being the only one who knows you are afrraid". Franklin Jones.

"It may take great courage to speak up to a brow beater after a long life of passivity. To expres our honest feelings may make us break out in a cold sweat... We need to stop resenting where we are and start loving ourselves for the daily courage it takes to suit up and show up. We deserve a new start and we can have it if we stop looking backward."
Larsen & Hegarty

The rituals were precious, the darkest rides, the darkest tides; those fleeting descriptions of moss caked walls; in recent days washed away by the luxuriant beauty of the harbour, the savage notion of our own death; the frothing hysteria which he thought might be happiness, so glorious was his sweeping soul, so beautiful was the harbour, the foreshores dense green, the luxury yachts and the antique vessels beating up the waves; the cluttered, chaotic, boat-filled harbour, the dense beauty, I come to you. It was Australia Day yesterday; and I went to a party at McMahons point, around from the northern end of the Bridge, and we snaked in fine exultation; as he smiled graciously through his flawed teeth and the other guests, stern left wing women bearing noble clauses and loneliness like cloaks, their most valuable relationships each other because they slept with no one; and he smiled and he shook hands and despite himself there was lust for the tawdry flesh; Baghdad Iraq land mine expert UN headquarters explosion killing dozens of her colleagues Polly living comfortably ever since on a UN pension Polly, me, almost comfortably in sobreity for once, while she, as always, grew louder and drunker and more opinionated as the night war on, drunk on fancy white wine. No ordinary conversation was possible.

How many fireworks can we have? Henrietta asked, when I told her on the phone I was sitting on the foreshore waiting for the fireworks to go off, the harbour limpid in the after light of sunset, the boats moving up and down, the business and colour of Darling Harbour in the distance, the city skyline etched out in light; the ultimate shades of blue and beauty ours, as I embraced everything, soaring happiness, delight in landscape, God in the branches of the old fig trees twisting up the sides of the sandstone cliffs, the multi-million dollar apartments secure havens, not just of wealth and privilege, but of value and morality, comfort and security; with the wealth came safety.

I read a book called The Tender Bar in Pai in Thailand last year, sitting on the veranda of a bamboo hut, watching the river and the ever-staggering landscape; about a boy who grew up in a bar; frothing to the surface of the mainstream when he briefly worked as a copy boy for the New York Times; and those austere and reproachful voices, of which I was so nearly one; and the lost voices because there was never any reason to be there; and those bars we had loved so much; which had been everything to us. Just as the bar in this lost in time suburb of New York had been everything to the author; I'm writing about you, he told the legendary denizens; and I, too, had tried to write about the bar now gone, the front bar of the Rex Hotel in Kings Cross, which had been everything to me as a youth - a source of money, of entertainment, of friends, and most of all, of alcohol.

But the book I wrote now mouldering in a box somewhere came out as a strange science fiction tale of decaying corrupt filaments flowing from the roof and the diseased, alien denizens who could not find a life of their own, our sterile hearts, the awful consequence of the invaders. Years after these events, I put the large number of pages of confused streams of consciousness up around the house we all lived in in Paddington, and tried to string it into a single story; and instead we all sat around and smoked so much hash we could barely move, and populated another bar, this time the one next door; and no one knew how utterly vulnerable we had been, how close us boys had been to each other as we accepted our jail bait status; how occasionally someone would drive us out to a party in the suburbs, more bait, and we would perform just by being there; magnificently beautiful because we had something they could never have: youth.

And we really did rely then, on the fundamental rule, the kindness of strangers. And we really did care for each other; in a way our contemporaries, in school uniform in school yards a million miles from us; in those remote places where happy families lived and people had futures.

And we would have all died together, fuck the sugar daddies, if only we had been allowed; if only the fountain had stopped flowing; if only we had been barred for being under age rather than courted for the clients who followed us. Didn't any one care? The offers came thick and fast. Oh, they cared alright, they would have done anything to be able to boast to their ancient queen friends that they had "had" us. And I drank and drank and drank and the bar disappeared in a black paste; and the tendrils of corrupt hands, stroking my young skin; they slithered from the roof and rose from the floor, dank, moss covered, and I shivered at the thought: somewhere else there was sunshine, in some distant place lay happiness; a different, unabused life. And we raised the glass from the line of drinks at the table, I couldn't keep up with the drinks they bought, and in the end, because every end of that disconsolate, deathly marginalised group was sad, we raised another glass, of beer, of brandy, of bourbon and coke; and we disappeared too drunk to stand, much less provide a service.

THE BIGGER STORY:

ABC:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/27/2147375.htm

Paddy McGuinness dies, aged 69

Former journalist and editor of Quadrant magazine Paddy McGuinness has died in Sydney, aged 69.

Mr McGuinness died yesterday at his home in Balmain in Sydney's inner west.

Mr McGuinness was a former editor of the Australian Financial Review and a columnist for several leading newspapers.

He recently stood down from editing Quadrant after 10 years at the helm.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/ledgers-final-journey-home/2008/01/26/1201157739179.html

The Age:

FOR a man who in life was often at odds with the limelight, in death Heath Ledger found no reprieve yesterday.

In an anonymous pine crate, the Perth-born actor began his final journey home amid chaotic scenes, as photographers jostled with police outside a Manhattan funeral parlour.

Police were forced to hold back more than 50 members of the paparazzi and news crews as five employees from the Frank E. Campbell funeral home carefully loaded the crate into a black hearse. "Back up. Back up, please," a police officer yelled at swarming photographers.

Just hours earlier, Ledger's grieving parents Kim and Sally and older sister Kate arrived in New York from Perth to claim the body and attend a private memorial service. Ledger's former fiancee Michelle Williams, mother of his daughter Matilda, 2, also attended the service.

Yesterday the Ledger family and friends went public with their grief in death notices placed in The West Australian newspaper.

"My body aches for the sound of your voice, our chats, our laughs and our life and times together. Your truly varied artistic skills, insatiable desire to improve and eclectic abilities set you apart from any other person on the planet," his father wrote.

It is now five days since the Brokeback Mountain star, 28, was discovered by his masseuse lying unconscious face down on his bed in his Manhattan apartment surrounded by sleeping pills.

The mystery surrounding his death then deepened when the masseuse changed her story.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23112355-952,00.html?from=mostpop

News:

FAR away from the idolised lifestyle of a Hollywood star, tragic Australian actor Heath Ledger lived out his final days as a scruffy loner.

Drifting between acting gigs and fleeting visits from his beloved daughter Matilda, Ledger would wonder the Manhattan cobblestone streets alone, usually wearing ragged jeans, an old jacket and an unshaven chin.

When he returned to the SoHo apartment he rented for $26, 000 a month, a forlorn sight greeted him.

Apart from a few ornamental skateboards, the flat was more or less unfurnished.

Ledger slept on a mattress on the floor, sleeping pills beside his makeshift bed.

Calamity: The End of Days

2008-01-26T04:55:00.000+11:00

"Every day is a good day for a mediocre man. He is always at his best."
A variation off Somerset Maughan.

"People will defend their own mediocrity to the death."
A common saying.

Henry James has a mind - a sensibility -so fine that no mere idea could ever penetrate it.
T. S. Eliot on Henry James

He is a mediocre man - and knows it, or suspects it, which is worse; he will come to no good, and in the meantime he's treated rudely by waiters and is not really admired even by the middle-class dowagers.
Lytton Strachey on E. M. Forster

Virginia Woolf s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Dame Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf

Monsieur Zola is determined to show that if he has not genius he can at least be dull.
Oscar Wilde on Emile Zola

What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde

The stupid person's idea of the clever person.
Elizabeth Bowen in the Spectator (1936) on Aldous Huxley

... stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be dirty mind.
D. H. Lawrence on James Joyce

The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"
Bette Davis

The world was going to end in 1972. My mother kept the cupboards stocked in preparation for the end time. I grew up with an overwhelming sense of calamity; as if these truly were the end times. Work had me sitting in parks for a month meditating with the Falun Gong for a story on who they were, these funny little people sitting in parks all over the city. I said at the beginning: they're not going to run this, there's too much busines in China. No, no, we really want to know, they said; and thus it was that I came to understand their own notion that we really are living at The End of Days; that we will be enveloped in disaster and all will be nought. I remember 1972, a teenager but already well out of home; but waiting nonetheless for the end to come, partying literally in the belief that there would be no tomorrow. And if there was a tomorrow, it would resemble nothing like the days we had known.

Well so, in a sense, it came to pass. The present bears almost no resemblance to the past. Life prior to the computer is now almost impossible to imagine; and yet it's only been since the 1990s that it all really began to take off; and the world has been totally transformed. They will look back on this time just as we now look back on the Industrial Age, as a trans formative time. when the world and our social construction shifted on its axis, when things changed fundamentally for entire populations, where our understandings of who we are changed completely. Computers have done that. Social networking sites. The easy access to vast stores of information. Instant publication. Historic times. And back then, the musty water stored in bottles, get down on your knees and pray because the wrath of God is at hand; sinners, unbelievers, even the gay, the deviant, the wicked.

No wonder we sought some purity, there in the wicked light; the hippies dancing through ht e nights, whacked out on magic mushrooms. And I sat there with Henry at the tables in the main street, in the Nimbin which has changed from a tiny little picturesque dairy town on the north coast of NSW to the dope capital of Australia. And I said: I was here in 1972 for the Aquarius Festival; and he looked, interested, as if looking at a bit of history. That must have been amazing, he said; and I could remember, walking down those lanes with the mist crowding in all around, the magic mushrooms which everyone was taking adding depth and mystery to the clammy bush, the archaic tents, the little groups of gypsies and that ancient feel; that here, as we celebrated at the end of days, the world's psyche was moving into something else, becoming something else; here in Nimbin, which was one of those places like Goa and Pye and Zanzibar, I think, where all the lei lines are meant to meet and hippies come from all the world to be at.

And 30 years later, when the world hadn't ended and the calamity hadn't happened and instead we had grown into middle aged men, we sat thinking of coffee and watching the shenanigans in the street; the rapid street deals, the colourful shops; the tawdry breakdown of what had once been a universe of hope; and wondered now, what had it all meant, that festival of 1972 that was meant to change everything. For years I had been friends with one of the founding organisers Johnny Allen, and for years it really did seem as if we had changed something; as if it had all been worthwhile. I've lost touch with him, now, and sitting here, literally 35 years later, watching the tourists streaming in and out of the colourful shops, the rapid-fire deals, the plain clothes police watching events from further down the street, too clean cut to be anything else, and sitting here with Henry laughing at our own pasts, it was impossible to say we had achieved anything at all. My own kids thought hippies were some tragic stoned sub-species of losers; and as for the music of the era we had loved so much; you've got to be joking! So much for the profound legacy we had thought we were passing on.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nimbinweb.com.au/nimbin/history/history2.htm

In 1972 scouts from the Australian Union of Students came to the village and persuaded the Nimbin Progress Association to allow a festival to be held here. Johnny Allen, Graeme Dunstan and Paul Joseph organised a celebration of the dawning of the `Consciousness' and `Protest' movements in the heady days of the Vietnam war, free love and marijuana - a festival of discovery .... It lasted 10 days and marked a watershed in Australian popular culture. Many decided to stay and bought up the cheap land available, settling in to a new lifestyle.

Although it could be said that now Nimbin is "A Living Theatre" it remains an enigma, an energy, a process that some think could be outside the normal parameters of everyday living.

The new Settlers
After the Aquarius Festival of '73, the 'alternatives' had different problems to face but many common threads were there. Left with only a portion of the original forest, they were certainly much more careful with what remained! Twice they stood up to the Police and Authorities to save what was left at Terania Creek in 1979 and Mt. Nardi in 1982 and won out substantially.
A strong contingent of local 'Greenies' have been active ever since then, helping to save our heritage in other parts of the country - not without criticism and controversy.

However, it must be said that the population of Australia (and also overseas) are now much more aware of the issues at stake, partly due to these early protests and to the general lifestyle centred on Nimbin itself.

n early September in August 1972 Johnny Allen and I, two paid organisers for the Australian Union of Students, arrived at Main Arm valley, outside of Mullumbimby in northern NSW, to talk up and find a site for a festival in the region.

We had driven directly from the August conference of AUS in Melbourne where we had won approval for the idea of presenting the 1973 biennial intervarsity arts festival as a kind of counter cultural expo.

For six years the student movement had been protesting war and conscription and we knew what we were against. The 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival was to be a celebration of the possibilities of peace in the bush and far, far away from the campus and city symbols of authority, which we had been for so long in reaction.

The festival was to be in the May and for reasons of warmth, our search was directed northward but not so far north as to cross the border into Belkje land. We had heard of the nascent hippie settlements behind Mullumbimby and the surfie idylls of Byron. We expected interest and maybe sympathy with our project. Out of sense of fraternal respect, and because it was the only address we had, Upper Main Arm was our first port of call.

Cold was our reception at the late Colin Scattergood's house. We seemed to have walked into something at once proto hippie and feudal; hackles were raised and the drawbridge drawn. Yes folks, even then.

It was my first experience with that aspect of the rural counter culture that is about hiding amongst trees in very big back yards; that is about being invisible and anonymous, and growing cannabis to pay the bills and living with the paranoia, social isolation and dysfunction that goes along with all that.

The worldview of we Aquarians was diametrically opposed. One more flood of inspired passion in the perennial traditions of utopians, we were a band of dreamers setting out to build a city on a hill. We aimed to illuminate the counter culture of the times and we had come with the experience years of public place student theatre and protest organising to do it. We wanted not only to be visible to each other, but visible to the world.

Graeme Dunstan

In The Pines

2008-01-25T04:25:00.001+11:00

In the pines in the pines
Where the sun never shines
Where we go running when we want to hide
Away from the sky away from the light
Where the overgrown branches conceal what's inside
In the pines in the pines
Where I take my bride

No place is darker
And no place more still
We make love in the pines
In the shadow of the hill
I'm left with your name
I'm left with your form
Left with your scent
Even left with your moans
And I'm left in this fine and private place
In the pines in the pines
We meet face to face

In the pines in the pines
Where the sun never shines
Where we go running when we want to hide
Away from the sky away from the light
Where the overgrown branches conceal what's inside
In the pines in the pines
Where I take my bride.

www.thetriffids.com

In the pines, in the pines, where we make love all the time. A radical Christian group has said they will demonstrate outside Heath Ledger's apartment or his funeral; allegedly for his role in promoting homosexuality in Brokeback Mountain, a movie I particularly loved; and the group at believe it or not God Hates Fags dot com, have gone down like a lead balloon in Australia, where no one could care less who did what to whom. Australia has always been a free wheeling country, and while the left like to blather on endlessly about tolerance, in the end creating their own tyranny of diversity that has kept us captured locked down and free of independent thought, locked in the mines. Here in the Communist Republic of Australia, they would have been shut down long ago for vilification.

The Vilification laws have gone too far here, jailing Christian priests, for instance, who have dared to say that Islam is a violent religion, but the bile these people are putting out defies belief.

In the pines, love all the time, sun dappled on his long lean body, those afternoons at his parents house; and now, 30 years later, with our souls and our bodies falling apart from age; these fond memories replay like love poems, conscience gone and love lost; blond pubic hair and flat stomachs, the ache that was to settle into the heart of our being not even a glimmer on the horizon. Our craziness, those wonderful bars, his PhD on the Cactus Patch in Adelaide, The Glamour and the Grot: Towards an Ethnography of the Gay Bars of Adelaide; all the nights where we partied into the dawn and alcoholism hadn't even been thought of, when I went walking through the deserted nurseries in the Adelaide hills, picking daffodils and jonquils to sell around the office blocks, often alone, sometimes with a partner in crime. I was always thinking of ingenious ways to make money. I was always happy. Where I take my bride.

I didn't know, I had no idea, these would be the happiest days of my life. It was all about the future, the things that we would do, the books I would write, the careers we would build. In these days when everything was an adventure; when no one could resist, when the room gasped on entry and the attention was his due, when he went south looking for love; under the trees along the banks of the Torrens, when even the Christian boys who held back finally succumbed; when it was an easy, automatic thing, after the chaos and decay of Sydney, to retreat here to the City of Churches, Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, then even more isolated, afloat on a different island, than it is today. It was a 20 hour drive across the corner of the country, through the Riverina and the Hay plains, and there was always company, he was always wanted. And he was seeking love, there in the unsophisticated, uncorrupted south, where the boys had never sold themselves and the looks weren't those knowing, diseased, not well dear looks of the Sydney queens, but fresh faced and handsome, open in the dry heat; grasping pleasure he was happy to provide.

The Australia he knew was entirely different to the one that played out in the mainstream; and there could be nothing wrong with the honestness of our desire. Before he grew old, in the pines, in the pines.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Hard to believe:

www.godhatesfags.com

Established in 1955 by Pastor Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas still exists today as an Old School (or, Primitive) Baptist Church. We adhere to the teachings of the Bible, preach against all form of sin (e.g., fornication, adultery [including divorce and remarriage], sodomy), and insist that the sovereignty of God and the doctrines of grace be taught and expounded publicly to all men. These doctrines of grace were well summed up by John Calvin in his 5 points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints. Although these doctrines are almost universally hated today, they were once loved and believed. Even though the Arminian lies that "God loves everyone" and "Jesus died for everyone" are being taught from nearly every pulpit in this generation, this hasn't always been the case. If you are in a church that supposedly believes the Bible, and you are hearing these lies, then your church doesn't teach what the Bible teaches. If you care about your never-dying soul, you will carefully read every word of this web site, along with the entire Bible.

WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colorful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS, GOD GAVE FAGS UP, NO SPECIAL LAWS FOR FAGS, FAGS DOOM NATIONS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS, FAG TROOPS, GOD BLEW UP THE TROOPS, GOD HATES AMERICA, AMERICA IS DOOMED, THE WORLD IS DOOMED...

Perceiving the modern militant homosexual movement to pose a clear and present danger to the survival of America, exposing our nation to the wrath of God as in 1898 B.C. at Sodom and Gomorrah, WBC has conducted over 33,000 such demonstrations since June, 1991, at homosexual parades and other events, including funerals of impenitent sodomites (like Matthew Shepard) and over 200 military funerals of troops whom God has killed in Iraq/Afghanistan in righteous judgment against an evil nation. America crossed the line on June 26, 2003, when the Supreme Court (the conscience of the nation) ruled that we must respect sodomy. WBC teams have picketed all over the United States, and internationally (including Canada, Jordan and Iraq). The unique picketing ministry of Westboro Baptist Church has received international attention, and WBC believes this gospel message to be this world's last hope. .

Here's some of the stuff from their picketing of soldier's funerals:

St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church 100 Bishop Manogue Dr. St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church 100 Bishop Manogue Dr. This is for the funeral of Army Sgt. Sean M. Gaul. Buried with the burial of an ass, all of these soldiers are bowing down to the Sword because they have taken fire into their bosom and mixed gall- POISON- into the Cup of God's Fury, which they are drinking heavily (Jeremiah 25:15-16). You can't fight for a nation of fags and their enablers without the Wrath of God, without "knowing the Judgment of God" (Romans 1:32). Deuteronomy 29:18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood (POISON!); Deuteronomy 32:32 For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah: their grapes are grapes of gall (POISON!, their clusters are bitter: Job 20:11 His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust. 12 Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue; 13 Though he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it still within his mouth: 14 Yet his meat in his bowels is turned, it is the GALL of asps within him. 15 He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly. 16 He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay him. 17 He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. 18 That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow it down: according to his substance shall the restitution be, and he shall not rejoice therein. 19 Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not; 20 Surely he shall not feel quietness in his belly, he shall not save of that which he desired. 21 There shall none of his meat be left; therefore shall no man look for his goods. 22 In the fulness of his sufficiency he shall be in straits: every hand of the wicked shall come upon him. Psalms 140:3 They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips. Selah. Romans 3:13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: America is Doomed, for going the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, and it shall be worse for America than it will be for the Sodomites, to wit: Mark 6:11 And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. Amen.

01/26/2008 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Jacksonville, NC Camp Lejeune Lejeune Blvd & Hargett St. This nation is full of angry rebels against the Lord God of Hosts. These marines are a microcosm of those rebels. You kill, rape, commit adultery, serve every filthy lust, worship a rag-tag, bloody, fag-flag, and in the same breath demand God bless you. How arrogant are you! You are worse than Sodom and Gomorrah! You had them for an example, who were destroyed in flaming fire and "suffer[ed] the vengeance of eternal fire", and yet you continue in your stiffnecked persecution of God's Prophets, the humble servants of God at Westboro Baptist Church. God has given you the dead marine girl, and that rapist/murderer, and that other freak who is soliticing sex with a 16-year-old minor! There is nothing you freaks will not do! There is no moral compass, moral decency; it's all out the window, and because you have violently persecuted us, God is blowing you up with I.E.D.s. Praise God, for his mercies endureth forever. Amen.

The Seven Shields

2008-01-24T04:42:00.000+11:00

He burned the candle at both ends
so his years were few
But, of what a beautiful flame he made

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Heath Ledger has died and everyone is very sad. Brokeback Mountain was one of those movies you either loved or hated and I loved it; seeing it three times. His almost "father-in-law" Larry Williams, Michelle Williams father and grandfather to the two-year-old now fatherless Matilda, lives here in Sydney and is fighting extradition back to the US over some share trading charges. Larry's won the heart of journalists by being affable and forthcoming, rather than telling us all to get nicked; which is what a lot of these people do. F off you vultures. It's another funeral today, Trevor Drayton in the Hunter. He's been very critical of the media for their insensitivity to his family in their coverage; so it's going to be another wonderful day. Like the day the Bandidos buried one of their chapter leaders, and the media were strictly forbidden. Always good at getting into places where I wasn't meant to be, I sat quietly amongst some of the most fearsome bikies you're ever likely to see, all of them in full regalia in honour of their mate; and when I stood up at the end my reporter's pad clattered to the ground. I stooped down to pick it up, and was out of there before anyone had the chance to muscle up.

The snaking belts led to a trail through the years; severely distorted self-image and the shields behind which I lived. The theory was that if the first one collapsed, there was another behind; to a depth of seven. It was impossible to get to me. Have a shot, go on, have a shot. There was no one there. He had stepped behind another screen. The comfort of adventure, the comfort of words, the facade which faced the exterior world, it all worked so well. Shattered to the four winds, as I so often was, in the early dawn, the self-talk all about survival and the staggering beauty of the landscape, as I crouched on the top of city buildings and watched the sunrise light up the harbour, picking out Fort Dennison and the islands in the centre, illuminating the cascading richness of the coves and the extreme wealth of the houses. I used that phrase again recently; quoting Australian playwright David Williamson: no one in Sydney wastes time worrying about the meaning of life - it's to get a harbour view. And here I was, crouched in these alcoves only I knew how to find, watching the harbour change from night to day in a myriad of colours: and I used to wonder, why isn't anyone else up here?

And then one day it all collapsed; the shields which had protected me for so many decades. And behind the shields was a scared, atrophied little thing; a rabbit skinned alive, screaming and running around in circles after someone threw a bucket of hot water over it. And then it vanished; and the old self was no more, just like that. The modus operandi was gone; 44 for men and 40 for women, it often seems. The ways that we operated, the things that kept us going, our means of survival, of interacting with the world, for some reason that was the age beyond which they did not work anymore. You see it all the time; man, 44, bundled into back of police van after embezzling millions from the casino, woman, 40, arrested, screaming; man, 44, arrested, fighting, theft, lunacy. The patterns of addiction could only survive so long; the human form could only survive so long; and after that they either adapted and changed; or they died. Too many died.

All my friends died, well most of my friends died, often well before the 40/44 mark; and I was left alone to bear witness; that we had at least lived; that these times had been ours, the universe ours; those staggering views from the building we called Gotham City, or Withering Heights; that the great tumult, the almighty shout; the cosy embrace; the physical crush; the courting with insanity that was part of us, the group of mad young queens who were going to change the world and instead died young, clutching the shreds of careers and remnants of personalities, shivering in corners as the withdrawals kicked in; dear God be kind, just this once. And in those days, the shields were working perfectly; a pretty boy, a glittering heart. And in those mornings, the world lit up with shafts of acid light, I would take the lift to the top floor, climb past the blockades through on to the forbidden roof; and watch the night turn into day, and wonder, truly wonder, why isn't anyone else up here, why aren't there people like me on top of all the buildings, watching the sun rise above the sea? It was all so beautiful.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-na-heath24jan24,0,3236767.story?coll=la-home-center

It will be at least 10 days and perhaps two weeks before officials can determine what killed actor Heath Ledger, found in a Manhattan apartment on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the New York medical examiner's office said today.

An autopsy of the 28-year-old Australian actor was inconclusive, Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner, said in a telephone interview. The additional time is needed to perform toxicology and other tests, she said.

The body is likely to be released sometime today, she said.

Ledger, nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of a cowboy's tragic homosexual affair in "Brokeback Mountain," was found lying naked at the foot of his bed in a SoHo apartment that he was renting. Prescription sleeping pills were nearby, police said.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23095733-661,00.html?from=mostpop

A GALAXY of movie stars are mourning actor Heath Ledger, describing him as one of the best actors Australia has produced.

Acclaimed actor Geoffrey Rush paid tribute to Ledger's talent and sensitive side.

"This is such a sad event. I admired Heath enormously,'' said Rush, who starred with Ledger in the hard-edged Aussie flick Candy.

"He was such a sensitive and committed and daring actor. This is truly a tragedy. I send my condolences to his family and friends and colleagues."

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23099380-661,00.html

HEATH Ledger was battling drug addiction and depression in the lead-up to his tragic death yesterday.

The acclaimed actor was found naked and unconscious in his $26,000-a-month Manhattan apartment, surrounded by prescription anti-anxiety and sleeping pills.

Ledger's parents, Kim and Sally, and his sister, Kate, said his death was a terrible accident.

"He was a down-to-earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving and unselfish individual who was an inspiration to many," his father said outside the family home in Perth.

New York police sources said the signs pointed to either an accidental overdose or suicide.

Ledger, 28, reportedly spent several days at a drug rehabilitation clinic, battling an addiction to heroin, after his split from fiancee Michelle Williams in September.

The Belts Snaking Out

2008-01-23T05:12:00.000+11:00

"APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."

TS Elliot

Out of the dead past struggled many images; and always the most vivid of those, throughout life, were the belts snaking out towards me as I ran sobbing around the house, my parents, both of them at times but usually my father the cruelest, belting and belting and belting. I was a different child, my head perpetually buried in a book, and the belts, I guess, were a way of making me more normal, or a way of punishing me for being different, or smarter. My father rarely read anyting and my mother was buried in the bible. At fifteen I would come home on a Friday, change out of my school uniform and disappear into town, taking that long long bus ride from the isolated beach suburb where we lived into a world where at least I was wanted, jail bait. Often I would come home at three or four on a Monday morning before school; and there would be my father with the belt laid out on the kitchen table, waiting for me, the sadist, and I would be belted once again, with all the tears and distress. And my mother silent in the background; because he was boss. How I hated that man, how I wished him dead.

The worst of it was one day when they demanded that I say sorry over something or other that I had done. I think they wanted me to say sorry for being out without permission on the weekend. I wasn't sorry, and I wasn't going to lie for them, and I wasn't going to stand still for a belting, not this time. And so they chased me around with their belts, both my mother and father, trying to hit me, the belts snaking out as I ducked and weaved, and ran around the house, I'm not sorry, I'm not sorry, the belts flailing at me, until they cornered me, and they hit me and hit me and hit me, as I tried to cover my face and the belts rained down. And It went on and on and on, as they hit me and hit me and hit me, until I finally surrendered, desperate for it to stop, and said, alright, I'm, sorry, but I'm not really. And then the belting really started. And finally they were done; and I sobbed quietly in the corner. And that was it for me. I never trusted them again. I was never naive enough to love them again.

And throughout life, I never ever wanted to feel anything, because to feel something was to be hurt. And thus began the cruel road that was my destiny. I built in my mind the many walls that would protect me; shielded behind barriers so that no one, absolutely no one, could get to me. The minute I turned 16 and could legally leave, I was gone from that horrible house where I had been so dismally unhappy and been so badly treated. The school, being a public school, didn't even ask why one of their top students was leaving. I walked down that road which had wound around the hillside into my worst fears, crying, that day, distressed and sad and afraid, ignorant of how I would survive. Although as I soon discovered, 16-year-old boys can always survive.

The other day, early Saturday afternoon, I was running around doing a a few odd jobs, and thought I would duck back in via my house to pick up some sunglasses, and to incidentally check on my own 16-year-old son, who was having some friends over. They were sitting around the lounge room, playing Monopoly, laughing. And I looked at them, startled by the innocence of it all. They seemed so happy, so innocent; and so young; and yet that's the same age when I was already out of home; and by 1.30 on a Saturday afternoon, I was always drunk in the Rex Hotel in Kings Cross; drunk and sometimes maudlin, but always drunk.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23094705-952,00.html?from=mostpop

EMERALD'S Nogoa River was yesterday a swirling, churning inland sea hundreds of metres wide, with dozens of low-lying businesses and homes flooded in the Central Highlands town.
The river, which is swollen with the spillover from the Fairbairn Dam 16km away, did not quite reach the 15.5m peak expected, instead fluctuating between 15.2m and 15.4m.

Water continued flowing over the dam spillway at record heights, hitting 4.4m late in the afternoon, well above the previous record of 2.82m in 1984.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/an-ordinary-new-zealander-who-did-extraordinary-things/2008/01/22/1200764265337.html

IT WAS sombre, but not cripplingly sad. There were a few tears, but laughter as well.

Dignitaries sat shoulder to shoulder with monks, hearing about a national hero and a loved grandfather.

Sir Edmund Hillary's funeral in Auckland yesterday managed to span the breadth of who he was.

"An ordinary New Zealander who did extraordinary things" was how Dean of Christchurch Peter Beck described the perception of Hillary.

It neatly captured the spirit of a service that was a celebration of 88 years of a life lived to the full....

It was funny seeing Peter Hillary, his son, who I met in the Himalayas by coincidents more than 30 years ago, up on the television screens, now a middle aged man:

Peter Hillary talked of the "compulsory curriculum" of adventure that came with growing up in the Hillary clan, where pending school holidays meant "a growing apprehension — even fear — about where Dad was going to take us".

The grandchildren and step-grandchildren told of "Grandpa Ed", with 20-year-old Sam Mulgrew talking eloquently about the shared fun even up to the last few weeks, when Hillary was booked into hospital under the name of Vincent Stardust.

"Ed, it was an honour and a privilege to have known you so well. The many hours that we have spent together will remain with me for the rest of time," he said, his voice breaking with emotion.

Long-time friend Jim Wilson said that for Hillary life and adventure were effectively indivisible and he retained his "little boy enthusiasm" throughout his adult years.

The service also focused on Hillary's legacy. Miss Clark said few could emulate his strength but all could strive to match his humanity.

Peter Hillary said the death of his father was the moment to "keep the commitment and love alive" and fulfil his work for the Sherpa people.

Hillary's coffin was placed in a hearse, which was driven onto the streets of Parnell, where thousands had gathered to farewell Hillary. Quietly and then steadily, applause broke out among the crowd as Hillary made his final journey.

THE PRESS

Desperately Beaten Froth Hope

2008-01-22T05:51:00.000+11:00

Hey, when a man turns bad
it`s a well known fact
you don`t go giving him a bucket of compliments
behind his back
you don`t go laying traps for him
you cannot detect his scent
you cannot set your dogs on him
they won`t go where he went

Though his eyes may have been scored out
and his face is full of pits
He's bloodless, still rides for you
and he`s grating at the bit
Oh

When a man turns bad
you don`t want to know a thing
you can see it in the way that his hand shakes
as he pours himself a drink
he won`t take pleasure giving you the time of day
can`t walk in a straight line
just takes him a shot of bitumen
take a shot of turpentine
Oh

When a man turns bad
you can smell it on his breath
He has to fix himself up one in the morning
just to get him out of bed

When a man turns bad
it`s written on his wrists
gets a sudden fidgetty urge to kiss you baby
but he`s eating away at his lips

When a man turns bad
he don`t want no friendly advice
phone off the hook, not available for comment
better punch out the lights, sugar and spice, now

When a man turns bad
when a man turns bad
when a man turns bad
You can tell by his hair
he looks like he`s looking at a crack in the ceiling
or a nameless point somewhere
and in fact he`s seeing him a vision
in fact it`s a kingdom somewhere
where the lamb lies down with the rabid dog
and the dog don`t care

When a man turns bad
you can see it in his stare
looks like he`s looking at a crack in the ceiling
or just a nameless point in the air
in fact he`s seeing a vision
in the back of the kingdom somewhere
well the lamb lies down with the dog
and the dog doesn`t care

In fact he`s seeing a vision
in fact it`s a kingdom somewhere
where the lamb lies down with the rabid dog
and the rabid dog he don`t care

When a man turns bad
it`s a well known fact
you don`t go giving him a bucket of compliments
behind his back
you don`t go laying traps for him
you cannot detect his scent
you cannot set your dogs on him
they won`t go where he went
they won`t go where he went
they won`t go where he went

David McComb, The Triffids.

In the pines, in the pines, in the aftermath of our distant lives, a million miles from the froth that was Hollywood and ancient distances from the centre of things. We were so moved, it was such a splendid thing; and the compliments did flow and the world did turn on its axis. One of the city's most famous bars, Barons, has closed down; the days when our bodies could stand the pace and there was nowhere else to be but our bar, our cafe, our universe; and we draped our laughter and cynicism across the footpaths; you'd look pretty in a dress, the old drag queen said, trailing her fingers across my yet to be shaven face.

And the room I lived in, next to the incinerator, cheap because of the hole in the window, dark because I had painted the roof black with red splotches; the budgies living out there lives in the corner; the Frenchman, handsome I suppose, they all were, who came and had his way; and the evolving circumstance of everything: I couldn't stand it anymore. I misted up immediately at the first orchestral wave: this our lives, these our desperately loved songs; we were so moved; so much of our lives had passed unlived; our minds in neutral, the television always on in the corner, distracting us from any real thought. And at the end, we knew we were failures, we knew we were on the run, we knew that our lives operated not just outside the law, but outside decency. The only fruit was madness and too many had gone. I wanted desperately to be liked; and spoke to no one. How did that work?

The egg dribbled down his chin. This one's gone to God, we can only be kind. The full days, in the intervening years between the flash of youthful hope and the decay of middle years, and the death from liver disease, an old junkie in Calcutta. You used to be a journalist? the man asked, in disbelief. Generations of junkies had died here; they would say anything. They had all wanted to be something; they all made up stories of their past achievements, to illuminate their present decay, to pretend to have been something, someone. The French abandoned themselves on the subcontinent; the British, less often but often enough, the Americans never. He had driven through these very same streets on the back of a motorbike across the Calcutta's famous Howrah bridge, where we used to buy smoko from the vendors in the early hours; and this world was ours in this unique place. Of all the places he had been, he had chosen here to die; his head full of memories and his heart full of grief; and the smack not working as his body ceased to function. Those dawns, so long ago, he had never been happy, but, but... It had all been such an adventure. So much he had written, to so little end.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.boudist.com/archive/2007/10/24/last_drinks_at_barons.php

Last Drinks At Baron's

Like many of the character rich old joints in the Cross it's being demolished to make way for a new multi storey development.

I'm sure most Sydney drinkers would have some hazy memories of a night spent surfing the lounges of the dimly lit bar.

I remember being taken there as a 17 year old, sipping Midori Illusions with my workmates and trying to learn backgammon. On another night I recall being asked to leave once dawn hit after spending the night canoodling with my first girlfriend. This was before the times you needed to buy some garlic bread downstairs in order to drink upstairs.

Google News:

Rudd swamped by calls for cash
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 5 hours ago
KEVIN Rudd faces intensifying pressure from community groups for billions of dollars of new government spending, despite his promise of an austerity budget ...
PM's inflation scheme 'will hurt economy'
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KEVIN Rudd's plan to build the budget surplus to fight inflation has been criticised on the grounds that too much intervention could harm the national ...

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The Age, Australia - 6 hours ago
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan with gifts they received at a business breakfast in Perth. TRAFFIC congestion in Melbourne, ...

Surplus will not keep lid on rates
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 6 hours ago
KEVIN RUDD'S new target for the budget surplus is unlikely to stop the Reserve Bank raising interest rates next month should inflation figures due tomorrow ...
Fiscal symbolism has its place, but this isn't it
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 5 hours ago
KEVIN Rudd's fiscal hairychestedness has important symbolic resonance. Both internally, to the party. And externally, to the broader community. ...
Rudd's inflation plan
Sky News Australia, Australia - 5 hours ago
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has addressed a meeting of business leaders in Perth, outlining his five point plan to tackle inflation. Mr Rudd's plan includes: ...
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ALL election promises would be quarantined from the Rudd Government's razor gang, which is looking for up to $5 billion in additional spending cuts before ...
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By Malcolm Farr THE Government will create a national body that is designed to fight inflation by making Australia run more efficiently. ...
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Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has rejected Opposition claims his new plan to halt inflation will have little effect. Mr Rudd today unveiled a five-point plan to ...

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CNN International - 15 hours ago
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared Monday that inflation is the most pressing domestic challenge to Australia's economy and ...

A Vast And Intense Lyricism

2008-01-21T07:35:00.000+11:00

"I'll finish with some lines of poetry in memory of those heroes from the land of Hijaz, the land of faith, from Ghamid and Zahran, from Bani Shahr, from Harb, from Najd, and we pray to God to accept them all, and in memory of those who came from Holy Mecca, Salem and Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khaled al-Mihdhar, or those who came from Medina, the radiant, who left life and its comforts for the sake of 'There is no god but God'.

I testify that these men, as sharp as a sword,
Have persevered through all trials
How special they are who sold their souls to God
Who smiled at Death when his sword gazed ominously at them
Who willingly bared their chests as shields.
Though the clothes of darkness enveloped us and the poisoned tooth bit us,
Though our homes overflowed with blood and the assailant desecrated our land,
Though from the squares the shining of swords and horses vanished,
And sound of drums was growing
The fighters' winds blew, striking their towers and telling them:
We will not cease our raids until you will leave our fields.

Peace be with you and all God's mercy and blessings.

From Messages to the World
The Statements of Osama bin Laden.

This is, by any standards, an astonishing age; when so much is available, at the touch of a keyboard, on television, from the corner shop; when even this week for instance, I can watch some of the world's best tennis players at the Australian Open; the astonishing Roger Federer versus Janko Tipsarevic match which went to five sets and a tie break in the fifth and was probably the best tennis match I've ever seen; from that to American Gangster, a wonderful movie I absolutely loved; to last night, watching the reformed Triffids Concert, A Secret at the Heart of a Song. How haunting was that, how wonderful, many of the most famous names and talents in Australian music at the rundown Metro Theatre in George Street.

I had free tickets after a story I wrote; initially for last Friday. Stuck in the Hunter after an explosion in one of the vineyards in the Hunter which killed two men and left another with 80% burns in a serious condition in hospital; and had to after some fuss get them changed to Sunday. I rang Polly, the woman who was in the bomb blast at UN headquarters in Iraq and lives on a now very comfortable UN pension in New York but has acquired an apartment in Sydney, in the morning, waking her up, and with some sense of achievement told her I had managed to change the complimentary tickets for that night. $60 a ticket, definitely worth getting. Not to mention that this was a piece of history, one of the country's most magnificent bands reformed after the death of their lead singer David McComb; the series of concerts the first time they had played in Australia in 18 years.

But Polly, taking me back, wasn't that enthusiastic and decided in the end she didn't want to go out. You don't want to see The Triffids? That made no sense. And then Virginia Fay; someone I had first met 30 years ago; the saint in our crowd of amateur disasters, popped in to my head and suddenly everything clicked into place and it was all meant to be. She'd been playing their albums and wishing she could get a ticket and wishing she could go, lighting a candle in their memory; and when I rang out of the blue after not having spoken for two or three years; it was too good to be true. And it was such a great night, just absolutely wonderful. Started at eight and it was heading on to twelve when we left; the bar open and the 80s fans and people our age, who remembered and had loved them for real; we were all mixed up in the crumby, rotten Metro.

And here was genius.

I couldn't help remembering those days when I had loved them the most, when their masterwork, the album Born Sandy Devotional, was stuck permanently in the tape deck. When the ramshackle old maroon Triumph I loved so much, after I "borrowed" $30,000 cash in circumstances I once wrote a book about that no one seemed to find very interesting; and I clattered across the inland, through floods and across the gibber desert, with The Triffids blaring in a perfect echo of the Australian landscape. And love and life and adventure were all ours; and I was on the run, yet again, nine lives already up; but this was our time, our destiny, our music, ourselves; all in perfect sync with the wide wide world.

THE BIGGER STORY:

www.thetriffids.com

Well the drums rolled off in my forehead
And the guns went off in my chest
Remember carrying the baby just for you
Crying in the wilderness

I lost track of my friends, I lost my kin
I cut them off as limbs
I drove out over the flatlands
Hunting down you and him

The sky was big and empty
My chest filled to explode
I yelled my insides out at the sun
At the wide open road

It's a wide open road, it's a wide open road.....

How do you think it feels
Sleeping by yourself?
When the one you love, the one you love
Is with someone else

Then it's a wide open road
It's a wide open road
And now you can go any place
That you ever wanted to go

The Hunt for Happiness

2008-01-20T05:31:00.000+11:00

"Some of us have created a lot of awful messes through the years. We've committed some big juicy sins that fill us with remorse and regret. Others of us have stayed out of trouble and kept our noses clean. Our records aren't full of black spots, but then they're not very full of anything. We haven't done much because we haven't done much. Which of us is better off? There's no virtue or joy in being a spectator to the game of life. Better to risk a wrong turn than to sit out our lives."
Larsen & Hegarty

Saw American Gangster last night. Great movie.

What was there to prove? That happiness had always remained out of reach? That he wished he had enjoyed his life more? That the funks, the binges, the slow settling decay of the spirit, the thickening of the waist, that all of it should have been different? Days of crawling embarrassment, no laugh, no cry, the wispy phantasms, always just out of reach, disappearing into the corner of murkish, green auditoriums; that the truth, the single cohesive whole, was there to be grasped. But nothing was to be grasped. He had been born defective. Hope was for other people. Happiness was something that happened in the suburbs. Cosy family units, which he had been so briefly happy to belong to, all that disintegrated as soon as it appeared; and he didn't know anymore why he did what he did.

American gangster keeps playing in my head. We could be cruel but mostly we just held back. Sunshine gripped faces full of secrets only hinted at. The trains coming down across Thailand from the mountains with a police guard. The politics of heroin in south east Asia, by Alfred McCoy. The chaos on the streets of Harlem; and even here. The American military planes which flew the stuff into the US. That startled look; 100% pure. What an amazing movie. Cutting across our own lives. The Bangkok bars; now really just sex bars. The only thing that had ever made him feel normal, coherent, a single person. Otherwise, it was all scattered to the four winds. The pale faces of the drug lords. The moments of history we tried to make our own and were instead littered with the dead. I was crying for those motherless children, for all of us who danced the dance; and we ended here in a foreign country, the future.

And the bars, what stories he could tell, were just normal bars; and everything that was possible, the depravity of our past lives; the groups which had been so tight and then dissolved; after we had thought: every man's cafe is the centre of the universe; thank you Sartre; but it was only his micro universe. He had tried to climb out of the hole he had fallen into; only to realise there wasn't much use calling for help. The old friends who might drop by didn't even live in Sydney anymore. His ever evolving circle of acquaintances didn't share any of the same history, didn't know any of the same faces. And when a blast from the past did arrive; they were almost invariably dying, their disease and the limited number of their days making them even more eccentric than when they had been young. He didn't want to admit defeat; but defeat had claimed that old self a long time ago.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/protesters-turn-on-each-other-in-sea-hunt-for-whalers/2008/01/19/1200620274594.html

TWO anti-whaling groups harassing Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean turned on each other yesterday.

Sea Shepherd chief Paul Watson slammed Greenpeace for refusing to tell him where the Japanese whaling fleet is, even though the Greenpeace ship Esperanza is right on the tail of the whalers' mother ship.

The row blew up as the crew of the Sea Shepherd ship, the Steve Irwin, threw 10 butyric acid bottles at the Yushin Maru No. 2. The acid is harmless but smells like rancid butter.

Captain Watson said his ship then lost track of the Japanese whaler when it was forced on a 75-nautical-mile detour to collect two crew members who had been handed over by the whalers to the Australian customs ship Oceanic Viking.

"We were only a few miles away when they transferred the two crewmen, but the Oceanic Viking insisted we rendezvous 75 miles away," Captain Watson said.

"That allowed the Japanese whaler to get away. Now we don't know where the hunters are and Greenpeace refuses to give us the co-ordinates of the mother ship they are trailing.

"If whales begin to die within the next few days, I will hold Greenpeace and the Australian Government responsible. I understand Greenpeace needs kill footage and images of heroic eco-warriors buzzing about in inflatables, but that does not stop the harpoons."

A Haunting Laugh

2008-01-19T05:50:00.001+11:00

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Ben Hecht
US author & dramatist (1893 - 1964)

A haunting prayer, a diseased cackle; why live anywhere else except the centre.... But it was all best summed up by the author Andrew Holleran, who's Dancer from the Dance, a must read in the 1970s about gay life in New York. Later he wrote an achingly sad and lonely book called The Beauty of Men, which went on to detail the end game; the legions of talented young men dying of AIDS, the queens high in their lonely apartments, guarding their porn collections as they bounce in and out of hospital. He flees to some nothing Southern town to look after his dying mother; makes a fool of himself falling in love with a young bloke down the road; and finds his love moments in public toilets; glory holes the centre of his sex life. But back then the world was shifting on its axis, every dance, every club, every drug, every encounter, were blows for the revolution; for an assault on the smothering of the prevailing consciousness. We were going to change everything.

But there were other ways to preserve one's sanity. Instead of Southern towns there was Australia; and after the transforming nature of the London bars; reaching deep and instantly into some other culture, he cried fowl. Just like his cars his body betrayed him, falling apart when there was so much else to do. He had always sought the ultimate refuge; not just a place where he could be safe but the place where there would be enough time and security for him to write the books that were his destiny; the episodic narratives; the lyrical descriptions of personal pain, the stories that would capture a generation. It never happened. They would arrive at one beach on the south coast of Morocco, only to discover that the best beaches were further on; down past the Sahara, where the dunes met the sea.

And the transcendental moments; of love for his partner; of humiliating lust for the local lads; it all caved away as he pounded out masterworks that would never see the light of day. The times changed utterly; with the arrival of computers and wave after wave of younger, brighter, more intense people. If he couldn't be at the centre he wouldn't be anywhere; and his consciousness disintegrated under years of substance abuse. The clattering fall; the dying moment; the ecstatic shout as they pumped their hands in the air on the most central; most sophisticated dance floors he had ever been on; while outside the stolid blocks of the London buildings, the doors that allowed no entry; the ancient queens who carried with them the traditions of centuries, who lived in the high security, humble in reality bedsits; who's wit and self deprecation made them all laugh; as their eyes swept the bar; stripping every new comer before turning back to their gins and warm beers and stub filled ashtrays.

Appreciate it now, it won't last, someone tried to tell him through the alcoholic mist, and he laughed, a haunting laugh. He knew better. Of course it would last. Of course he would be fabulous, from here to eternity; of course it was destined for some to be gorgeous and for others to watch. And he would be the centre of the dance; and he would take the attention and the declarations as entirely his due; and the music would pound and he would lean over, whispering into the ear of the handsome young man from New York; this is the centre of everything, you are the centre of everything; and they laughed and they danced and embraced; as the sky outside lightened into dawn and workers picked their way through the ancient streets; on their ways to entirely different lives.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/holleran_a.html

Holleran's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, one of the first major breakthrough novels...chronicles the life of "that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff!" The novel documents the life of an enigmatic and beautiful man, Malone, who becomes subsumed by the frenetic gay social circuit of Manhattan and Fire Island.

Holleran is regularly lauded as a great prose stylist, and this somewhat trite plot line becomes an occasion for weaving a poetic myth of identity around and within the bars, discos, and house parties that typified a certain segment of the gay world in the late 1970s. This is a gay Great Gatsby, with East and West Egg replaced by Fire Island and the Pines....

Nights in Aruba was published in 1983, only two years after the New York Times published its first story about a mysterious cancer found in forty-one homosexuals. Yet the impact of AIDS is already felt strongly in the novel. At one point, the narrator tells us that "by this time I was wary of disease," and later laments that "celebrities of our sexual demimonde were dying of bizarre cancers."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/hostilities-resume-after-activists-released/2008/01/18/1200620211153.html

Andrew Darby in Hobart
January 19, 2008

THE Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru has fired up its water cannon as hostilities resume after the release of Sea Shepherd activists in the Antarctic.

The mother ship returned to its fleet yesterday as the crew tried to get their hunt back on track after the crisis sparked when activists boarded a catcher boat.

The Nisshin Maru was last night steaming towards the Sea Shepherd vessel, which had already attacked another of its ships, the Institute of Cetacean Research said. Activists had tried unsuccessfully to tangle the vessel's propellers with ropes.

When the Nisshin Maru stopped to refuel the Yushin Maru No.2, the boat at the centre of the detention crisis, they were buzzed by Greenpeace campaigners in small boats, and the high-powered water cannon were turned on. The expedition leader, Karli Thomas, said the campaigners trying to record the refuelling escaped a wetting.

Since it was tracked down last Saturday, the factory ship had tried to shake the Greenpeace ship, Esperanza, off its tail on a long run into the southern Indian Ocean. It turned back only when the Australian Benjamin Potts and Briton Giles Lane leapt over the rail onto the Yushin Maru No.2, left behind in the Antarctic.

Mr Potts, 28, said three of the whalers tried to heave him over the side and into the icy ocean, but he clung to a rail and the crew gradually calmed down.

Numbered Days At Work At Play

2008-01-18T05:06:00.000+11:00

"As it was I thought as little of it as I might. But my mind could not go by it and leave it, as my body did; and it usually awakened a long train of meditations. Coming before me on this particular evening that I mention, mingled with the childish recollections and later fancies, the ghosts of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows of disappointments dimly seen and understood, the blending of experience and imagination, incidental to the occupation with which my thoughts had been busy, it was more than commonly suggestive. I fell into a brown study..."
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.

We were closely linked, all those years, with a sudden blast of creature comforts and a startled consciousness wrapped up in the passing trees. I sped out of that forest at well over the 100 kilometre limit; but while often the thought formed these days; I'm never going to see that person again; that didn't happen here. All I wanted was to get out. The townships were all dead at that hour. This sadly repressed, chronically over-governed country, had served us all so poorly, we who were spinning out our lives here.

We were dancing, in the middle of the night, in a London bar; and like all those episodes, I formed liaisons against the craziest of backdrops. In earlier years I had ridden the London underground just to keep warm. Now, more sophisticated, or at least more cunning, I knew the bars to go to. I was always looked after. Someone was always lining up. And he was cute, they were all cute; and life was the ultimate adventure. He was from New York and I remember to this day him saying: New York is the centre of everything. And why would you want to live anywhere else but the centre?

Australians can never pretend we are at the centre of everything. The great socialist republic. A law against almost everything. All for the common good, of course. And cruel time passed, slowly, slowly. I wanted to see him there, pert faced upturned, legs in the air was always for late, when I was drunk and didn't know what I was doing anyway; and truly didn't care. Not anymore. Why live anywhere but the centre? But once again, just as always, my time would run out and I would be back on a plane, winging back to Australia and another life. The full international junky, John Bygate would call me. But JB, who was the person I wrote a story about which was the first money I ever made out of writing, co-winning the Adelaide Festival's short story competition in 1974, is gone from a brain hemorrhage, and his crazy laughter is remembered by almost no one; his legacy carried into the tide by dying friends.

Sylvia Platitude, he scrawled in graffiti on his own lounge room walls, during an obsessive episode where he clutched her poetry books for days; read us all verses. And he'd raise a glass of Southern Comfort, here's to Janis, Janis Joplin of course; his ultimate hero, the girl on the barstool; and they're all dead now, all of them. And I remain, a choppy spirit on a broken sea, calling out to a world that has changed utterly and completely. We can never be the same. We can never go back.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Canberra casts off whaling activists
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 4 hours ago
By Elizabeth Gosch and Mark Dodd THE Australian Government has condemned the actions of the rogue activists who boarded a Japanese whaling ship in the ...
Australian ship moves to pick up anti-whaling activists
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 4 hours ago
THE Australian Customs ship Oceanic Viking was last night standing by to collect protesters taken prisoner by the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern ...
Sea Shepherd on top in PR war
The Australian, Australia - 5 hours ago
THE heat between Japanese whalers and environmental activists reaches far beyond the icy Southern Ocean: it's in the cutting edge battle to harpoon public ...
High-Tech Supports High-Seas Drama
PC World - 4 hours ago
When protestors boarded a Japanese whaling ship, images flashed on TVs worldwide--images that are key to winning the global PR battle. ...
Protest ship sticks to the chase
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 6 hours ago
THE Australian patrol ship Oceanic Viking will deliver two detained activists from a Japanese vessel to their ship, Sea Shepherd - but their freedom could ...
Australia offers to pick up whale protesters
Guardian Unlimited, UK - 7 hours ago
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday January 17 2008. It was last updated at 11:18 on January 17 2008. ...
Whaling hostage deadlock
Courier Mail, Australia - 5 hours ago
THE whaling hostage impasse continued in the Southern Ocean yesterday as the Federal Opposition raised doubts about the seaworthiness of the ship sent to ...

The Home Paddock

2008-01-17T05:42:00.000+11:00

"Can today's Australians inhabit such landscape? Can we feel at home there? When you find yourself in a pale dune field at sunset, with the sky blush pink and deepest indigo, or when you look out from the crest of an inland mesa at the clouds in their indifferent race across the sky, such questions tend to dissolve, and patterns and thought chains separate from man's deliberate kingdom take hold. I have always felt, at such moments, on the verge of dissolution - close to death, as much as on the threshold of new revelations in the march of life - and rather than imposing my will on country, or on landscape, and prolonging the dictatorship of control and consciousness, I am overwhelmed. I am a creature of new rhythm, and the desert, and the inland, are writing me."
Nicholas Rothwell.

At last we arrived at the so-called main house block. It was a large almost flat area cleared out of the forest, perhaps 200 metres square; where I could imagine a large Queenslander, with verandas all around, providing comfort and television to those who sought isolation in this place. In its centre was a tiny caravan which appeared to have been abandoned some years ago. I sat outside, in a funk, while Henry banged around inside, clearing rubbish, supposedly so I could sleep on the floor. although I had no sleeping bag and no blankets. And right about now I started wondering, why the hell did you invite me here?

When the banging ceased for a moment, I looked inside the no doubt spider ridden interior. Why can't I just crash on your veranda, it would be much more comfortable? I asked; and he looked up startled with those huge blue psychotic eyes; and then kept on banging and moving things around. So I sat outside and watched the forest darken into night; until finally he emerged and said: you're right, I can't sleep here.

It's alright, I said, it's only a few hours drive to my place.

My place, with a shower and electricity, and which I had thought primitive because of its unfurnished state.

So we walked and walked, back to his shed; sat and talked for a while about God knows what; and then made our way back more kilometres through the bush; back to the neighbours. I tried to show a bit of interest in all the trees he had planted; but in the dark there was nothing to see but fear itself; and we kept on trudging until the car finally appeared out of my exhaustion. The man was eating the dinner of mince on toast his wife had just prepared; and she was on the way to bed when we arrived and didn't let us stop her, although having a guest out here must be the rarest of things. We talked about roads and signs and roundabouts; and finally I was on the way, poking my way down the narrow dirt road in the middle of the night; finally reaching the asphalt and civilisation.

Alone, the shadows chased me, the lights on high beam as the car raced through the frightening forest; my consciousness vaulted into the high reaches of the trees; speeding to escape a nightmare. High in the Great Dividing Range I pulled over and slept; first outside an unopened hotel, seeking human comfort even in a car park outside a building still under construction; and then in an alcove overlooking a valley. And had nothing to say. There was nothing to understand. Random nature had taken me here; and would take me further; not jails institutions and death as in the old days; but hospitals sickness and death; with tubes and nurses, white sheets and narrow, forlorn views out tiny windows. All of our futures make the present seem like paradise; to be valued despite the gripping, non-sensical nature of events. Despite the fear in the black black skies.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/no-retreat-in-antarctic-whaling-standoff/2008/01/16/1200419885261.html

A GRIM stand-off held firm last night over activists detained by Japanese whalers in the Antarctic.

Despite repeated demands by Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith for a speedy and safe return of the Sea Shepherd men, they were still confined on the whaling ship, Yushin Maru No. 2.

Attention was turning to the potential role of the Australian Government's patrol ship, Oceanic Viking, as an intermediary in the dispute.

Mr Smith said the Government had urged co-operation and restraint from both sides. "Neither captain involved should set conditions beyond those necessary to ensure the men's safe return," he said.

But the whalers required "full security" from protest for their research fleet in exchange for the Australian, Benjamin Potts, and Briton, Giles Lane, who clambered on to the Japanese ship on Tuesday.

A long record of dangerous protest by Sea Shepherd meant that the fleet was worried about its response during a handover, said Hideki Moronuki, the deputy director of the Fisheries Agency of Japan.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23059233-662,00.html

SECURITY at the Australian embassy in Afghanistan is under scrutiny after Taliban extremists attacked the Kabul hotel that houses the mission, killing at least seven people.

The gun, grenade and suicide bomb attack at the five-star Serena Hotel injured several others, but the Australians were said to be safe.

Officials are confident the embassy was not the target.

But Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised a review of security.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says protection for the embassy is provided by a private Australian security firm.

Mr Rudd has asked DFAT for an urgent assessment of its security needs in Afghanistan.

Reverse Regret

2008-01-16T05:49:00.000+11:00

"There is a landscape behind the landscape that we are always reaching for and seeking with our eyes and hearts. It is the landscape that is always there, and always receding, and that seems especially well evoked to the Aboriginal conceptual frame of the Tjukurrpa, which is the flash of the present moment and the echo, far off, from primary, long vanished events."
Nicholas Rothwell.

Stolen from the torrents, born defective, these days allowed for little introspection, shame guilt regret remorse he had chanted all those years ago, and more recently, deer caught in the headlights, he had chanted shame guilt remorse, forgetting the regret. They crowded around others, they didn't crowd around him. He was a thorough gentleman, and kept his own counsel. And everything was calm, in that eternal, unthinking way.

The light disappeared rapidly, the forest looming even more intensely over the shed he had so badly mistaken for a house. As if they were at a tourist resort, he had carried Charles Dickens' David Copperfield in with him. He had begun reading it in one of those "things to do before you die read the Western canon" moments and was now determined to finish the thousand plus pages. How infinitely sad were the gropings of his present. The city family he had acquired which were so much more important than his real family, they had passed on or disintegrated, years ago now. Their voices remained in his head, and he often talked to them there, but in reality they were long gone.

Time to get moving, it will be dark soon, Henry insisted. The mosquitoes will be out soon. They are in plague proportions.

I tried to ascertain how far it was; and he made it seem as if it was only a couple of hundred yards away. And with the light rapidly disappearing, and the screech of the cicadas having stepped up a notch, we walked and we walked and we walked, first via the car and then to the so-called "main house" block; which sounded grand but in reality was unlikely to ever hold anything; here in the aching isolation, in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

I couldn't understand the panic that seemed to be settling upon him; and realised he had never actually had a guest before. I was the first; and at this rate the last. He told me his dream of building some sort of creative writer's retreat; here where you could disappear from the modern world. But as the mosquitoes buzzed and another hallucinatory sound wave rose on the shriek of the cicadas, he couldn't think of anything worse. Call him old fashioned, but he liked a bath everyday, he liked human contact, even if it was just at the cafe every morning. He liked a coffee down the road and bumping people in the street. As lonely as he had often felt, he was not a social isolate.

THE BIGGER STORY:

SMH:

Inflation adds edge to Labor's budget axe

Mark Davis Political Correspondent
January 16, 2008

ALARMED by the inflationary pressures building in the economy, the Rudd Government will seek spending cuts well above the $10 billion targeted by Labor in last year's election campaign.

The Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner, said yesterday that to keep a lid on inflation and interest rates the Government would aim for a budget surplus higher than the latest estimate of $14.4 billion for the next financial year.

In an interview with the Herald, Mr Tanner said his department was leading a "razor gang" exercise to achieve the cuts.

While he did not identify any targets, the total spending cuts could exceed $1 billion for 2008-09, on top of the $10 billion previously promised for the next four years.

...

SMH:

Andrew Darby in Hobart and Alex Tibbitts
January 16, 2008

THE war between whalers and protesters has escalated dramatically, with an Australian man allegedly beaten and tied up aboard a Japanese vessel, hours after a court ruled the Antarctic whale hunt was illegal.

Benjamin Potts, 28, a helicopter assistant from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's vessel, the Steve Irwin, and Giles Lane, 35, a Briton, were detained yesterday after boarding the moving whaling catcher boat the Yushin Maru No. 2 in the icy Antarctic.

The leader of Sea Shepherd, Captain Paul Watson, said the incident happened after the group's vessel broke up the whaling fleet's attempt to resupply in the Southern Ocean.

The two men had boarded the whaling ship in an attempt to deliver a letter telling the whalers to leave the Antarctic, Captain Watson said. "First the whalers tried to throw them overboard, then they tied them to a bulkhead and were beating them," Captain Watson told the Herald. "We are asking the Australian Government to help with this."

A spokesman for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, said: "The Government is investigating the reports as a matter of priority."

From Ecstasy to Eternity

2008-01-15T04:48:00.000+11:00

"I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least";(1) and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it...

"After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."

Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.

The flying, the swooping and the fall, the front doors that lured us into cosy environs. He was gorgeous, laid out there in the Berlin of my youth, perfect; physically; handsome, beyond handsome, and in the random nature of those drunken nights, which in reality had begun so much earlier in the night, and we walked and walked, in search of the replay, trying to find that same doorway again, trying to find that apartment where surely I would be welcome, which I should never have left so blasely the next morning, after that superb night.

I knocked on the doors of people I had never met, surely it was this one, surely this, trying to explain in broken German who I was looking for, backing off embarrassed, but convinced, that behind one of these doors lay my future, my love, the answer to the emptiness which never went away. I would start by drinking some red liqueur which was popular in the city, kroust, I think it was pronounced, switch to beer, back to the red. I would search all the same bars; and found his car in the street once; and wrote a hello; saying which bar I was in. It was all hopeless and the money ran out; and when they got used to seeing me drunk every day the drinks that used to appear magically before me from all those eternal, faceless admirers, dried up and once more we were flying over the remote mountains of Iran and Afghanistan, peering down looking for signs of village life, other peoples lives, any life but mine.

The house, the warmth, the welcoming mat that I thought was Henry's was a chimera of the worst kind. I followed his shambolic, no doubt unregistered car, down the dirt tracks, deeper and deeper into the forest I had always feared. We pulled up at his neighbours, the only other people living in here, a big burly Aussie bloke working in his shed, and if this was his house it wasn't too bad; though he had emphasised the simple nature of his lodgings. But no, this wasn't it; this was just the neighbours; and from here we had to embark on foot. I was grandly told I would be sleeping in a caravan in the main house paddock, but first we should go to his place. And we walked and we walked, along a narrow barely marked track. We crossed a creek, where he proudly pointed out his rain forest plantings, the same ones I had heard about for years. They just looked like trees to me; green like everything else in this bloody place, as my exhaustion increased.

I could feel, now, the isolation of this shrieking place all around, the infinite, hallucinatory sound of the cicadas caught high in the eucalyptus; and we walked yet further until finally there was a roof in the distance.

But the house was not really a house; it was only the shed of a mad old man in the bush; and the glowing woods and the veranda overlooking the valley were nothing at all. His shed, which remarkably had a phone and electricity, and in the last week a fridge as well, even though we were miles from anyone else; faced on to a wall of trees. Henry started talking about nature, but at this point I couldn't have cared less. This wasn't home, this was despair, this was the alcove under the highway ramparts, this was the stinking mattress hidden in the city's tunnels, this was the insanity all men faced when left alone.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/14/world/main3709829.shtml

(AP) Children in Kenya trooped through traffic jams back to class Monday as public schools reopened after a weeklong delay, a sign of returning normalcy that belies the deep political and ethnic tensions unleashed after a disputed presidential vote.

The official death toll from the country's post-election violence rose to at least 612 as more bodies were found.

In Nairobi, Kenya's two rival political parties braced for a showdown in parliament, which opens Tuesday to decide who becomes speaker of the East African country's national assembly.

Rachel Arungah, who chairs a special government committee set up to coordinate aid, said at least 612 people have died in the crisis so far. The latest count - up from 575 - was based on bodies found at mortuaries, homes and other places previously too dangerous to reach.

Arungah said the number of people displaced had decreased from 250,000 to around 200,000 as people moved in with relatives or returned home.

Since last week's conflict, primary and secondary school grounds in rural areas have been used as sites for displaced people, while others were vandalized or burned down by rioting youth. On Monday, some remained closed, but figures on how many or what percentage of students showed up nationwide were unavailable.

Wistful At An Early Age

2008-01-12T20:05:00.000+11:00

"Sometimes it was as if his beauty created an invisible barrier between himself and the rest of the world, a window through which every admiring glance was somehow magnified, and viewed with a mixture of of gratitude and suspicion. Was it just his imagination, or did people look at him as if they were expecting to hate him, as if they were somehow torn between marvelling at his looks and resenting his good fortune at having been blessed with more than his fair share of them? And even when they were throwing themselves at him, was it him they really wanted, or just a taste of what it would be like to possess such rare physical gifts, preferably for a few hours and without sparing a thought for the person behind the perfectly formed image? It wasn't even as if he could rely on his looks for ever. He might only have been 23, but there were times when he feared that his days of being desired were rapidly running out."
Paul Burston.

I was the son of a pilot. Flying overhead, shrinking into seats, gazing silently out of windows, it was all part and parcel. Looking longingly down on remote, secret valleys no one could possibly find by foot, without roads, only donkey access, or in more recent cases, landing on remote Australian land strips, finding houses where we could live safely and unterrorised for the rest of our days. These places, other people's comfortable lives, the swooping of entry, outside eyes, this sort of remote but accessible comfort was what I had expected to find at Henry's.

When he told me of his house, I could see it glowing with all the polished rainforest woods of the area, the veranda on the side of the hill, the hippies up the road grinding their own bread and the perfect valley spread out below. So that it was impossible to imagine why the rest of the world didn't want to be here. There wasn't much room, he had warned me, so I imagined I would have to sleep on this very same veranda, and wake up to watch the mist clearing from the thick, rich green grass into the vivid greens of the lilli pillis. For a start, I got the location completely wrong. It wasn't 20 minutes out of Lismore at all; but what seemed like hours away, down towards Grafton.

I followed him and followed him; on that Casino Grafton road, notable for how flat and straight the road was; and how little was on it. Once past the first couple of settlements, imagine living there, my God you'd die of boredom, we drove and drove. Reluctant to let go of preconceptions, my spirits remained high. We'd become alone, as the years passed, but there was always company; and Henry was certainly that. Finally, 80 ks from the last signs of habitation, we pulled off the road, into that great brooding silence with nothing but the screech of the cicadas and the freakish gloom of the enveloping trees. There was no sign to mark the turnoff from the main highway; no sign of the friendly hippies up the road; indeed no sign of anything but the forest I had always driven through as fast as possible; afraid, if I stopped, that some forest evil would attack, and not just physically.

You couldn't come back from these sorts of landscapes. The evil that lived in them was unrelenting; unforgiving, cruel by it's very nature. This was a place I never even stopped for a quick piss by the side of the road, for fear of what would happen. And here I was, threading down the path, following Henry's clapped out car. At least it would be good to get to the house, I had assumed, even though he had warned me that the accommodation was basic.

THE BIGGER STORY:

I met Edmund Hillary's son once, on that ancient sadhu trek in the beautiful mountains north of Risshikesh; and there were intense conversations in that remote place; as we appeared equally delighted to meet someone who spoke English.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10486546

A mighty mountain of a man

It is a long-held mountaineering axiom that when you reach the summit you are only halfway there. Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, KBE, ONZ, KG, climber, humanitarian and national icon, reached the summit of Mt Everest on May 29, 1953, and spent the remainder of a remarkable life completing the climb.

As his biographer, Alexa Johnston, wrote, the 15 minutes that Hillary spent on the roof of the world became the defining moment of his life. He would never escape the effects of that particular dream coming true. Nor would he try to.

Hillary, with the understatement that marked his life and his greatness, would be the first to suggest he owed that moment to being in the right place at the right time.

He was never a technical mountaineer. His forte was formidable strength, energy, stamina and determination. His skills lay in forcing a route through snow and ice, skills forged mainly over a handful of years in the Mt Cook region on holidays snatched between the commitments of harvesting honey and often, of necessity, with a mountain guide as a climbing partner.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/the-first-man-on-everest-has-died-at-88/2008/01/11/1199988590405.html

Tributes flow for Edmund Hillary

John Henzell in Christchurch
January 12, 2008

ON A quiet and bitterly cold night in July 2003 Sir Edmund Hillary attended his own wake with a group of other climbers in the place where his mountaineering dream began.

The former New Zealand Alpine Club president Dave Bamford said the climbers knew Hillary's passing would become a global event, as it did yesterday after he died in Auckland City Hospital, aged 88. So they decided to hold their own remembrance ahead of time for the man who, with Tenzing Norgay, was the first to conquer Everest in 1953.

And if they were going to speak about Hillary's achievements, it seemed only fair that "the old bugger" was there to hear it. "Ed was quite matter-of-fact about it. He was very pragmatic."

Every mountaineering function involving Hillary in the past few years had been "one to savour and enjoy" rather than waiting for a respectful and crowded wake.

"Then it will be New Zealand and the world remembering

Ed, rather than a group of mountaineers who have a long history of time in the back country with him," Mr Bamford said.

And so it was yesterday. New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, called Hillary "a quintessential Kiwi".

"Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities," Miss Clark said. "In reality, he was a colossus. He was a heroic figure who not only 'knocked off' Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity. He is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived."

We Knew Before Anyone

2008-01-11T06:58:00.000+11:00

"Many in the West are polite and good people. The American media are inciting them against Muslims, but some of these good people are demonstrating against the American attacks because human nature is against cruelty and injustice... All my wives are Arabs...the kind of life I have chosen is ultimately not for personal gain."
Osama Bin Laden

We knew before anyone else but his inner cicrcle that the Prime Minister had lost the plot. The frantic whistle stops through shopping malls, touching a thousand hands, shaking, shaking, good to meet you, good to meet you, nice to meet you; had, this time around, an ethereal, distant air. He failed to connect with anybody or anything. The rock star status he had once had, much to the astonishment of the Howard haters, had disappeared. If anybody tried to tell him there were problems, he would barely listen, in his half deaf manner, before cutting his critic short: "Other people tell me different". And walk on. None of it touched him; nothing filtered through. These were the people he was suposed to represent; and he had lost them. He had forgotten the very source of his power.

We would land, in those long lost days, on the properties which had grown up on the flood plains. Water was all important and the politicians never listened. The ancient river meandered in elaborate curls across the flood plains, marked by the line of green beside the river channel. In the wet there was water as far as the eye could see; but in the dry, which was most of the time now, the plains were little better than desert. That anyone could eke a living out of this hostile environment was incredible, yet they did. And to me, urban to the core and sleazy from past and present addictions as we flew from one remote settlement to another, there was a cosiness and truth in the rambling houses; those magnificently large homes built by the squattocracy and the wealth that had come even to here; the last wave the sheep boom of the 1950s.

And then there was John Howard, who we had all hoped would lead us to the prommised land; a conservative in a fundamentally left wing country - a reaction, perhaps, to its convict heritage - and he was going to slap the country back into shape after all those excesses of the left; and in the end that was what made his betrayal even deeper. Small business thought he was on their side; and he wrapped them up in paperwork and the GST like never before. Separated dads thought he was on their side; and instead the populace was bombarded with domestic violence hysteria promoting the myth of the violent male; and the Family Court and the Child Support Agency and all the rest of the parasites remained as dysfunctional and dishonest as ever they were. The people who thought, like all good conservatives, that you should stand on your own two feet and a government's role was only to help you do that; they too were betrayed as welfare spread ever deeper into the middle classes. He bought himself out of trouble and spent and spent and spent. You now have to have an income of more than $100,000 before you escape the clutches of Centrelink.

And the festering bureacracy spread and spread. The world, the government, he created was a lawyer's picnic. A complete charade. Most of all, the true believers are left gasping for something to believe in; and it's all gone. And Howard will get a pension of something like $350,000 a year, seven times the average wage, for doing nothing but having been the Prime Minister. And all those excesses, the grotesquely high salaries of our hopeless judiciary, the ridiculously high and utterly unjustifiable wages of senior bureaucrats; it's all got worse. And once, we were naive enough to believe. And now; we have been betrayed at our core and can only look in other directions for the meaning and comfort we so desperately need.

THE BIGGER STORY:

EXTRACTS FROM PAMELA WILLIAMS series of articles in the Australian Financial Review:

Australian Financial Review

MON 15 OCT 2007.

A tough competitor to the bitter end - ELECTION 2007

By: Pamela Williams

The Prime Minister is the ultimate aspirational - he has spent much of
his political life either fighting to get the top job, or to hang on
to it, writes Pamela Williams, national correspondent.

In the casino of Australian politics John Howard is an obsessive
player. If it takes another poker hand, one more throw of the dice, or
a last spin of the bottle, the gambler is there. Addicted to the game,
the Prime Minister never folds his cards.
Through 33 years as a politician, Howard has bet on himself. Others
may have thought he lacked the nerve, but Howard has seen off many a
high-stakes player. Now he has placed his biggest wager since taking
the leadership of the Liberal Party in January 1995.

Whether it is finally one bet too many will be known on election day.

Howard thought carefully about his legacy last year when he briefly
considered quitting and handing over - Tony Blair-style - to Treasurer
Peter Costello. But it was a short flirtation and he has now bet both
the government and his own place in history on himself. His brief loss
of nerve last month when he asked cabinet members if they thought his
time was up was a mirage. Thirsty men and women, they turned towards
the oasis, but just as suddenly it vanished as Howard pleaded with
voters to give him one more turn.

...

Had he quit last year, Howard would have gone out a champion, much as
the great sports stars he so admires. If he wins this time, there will
be absolute jubilation in the Liberal ranks, but the victory will be
shaded by the notion that Howard never knows when to let go - and
fears that the next three years will be jinxed by Howard taunting
Costello, while toying with his own desire to go on for ever. If he
loses, Howard risks being pilloried for squandering the goodwill and
the loyalty, for never resisting the urge to play one more hand and
robbing the government of a chance for generational change.
...

Australian Financial Review
MON 26 NOV 2007.

Costello clocks off as Howard's flaws are exposed

By: Pamela Williams National correspondent

He told Howard of his decision not to
stand during a phone conversation on election night.
This spectacular finale to the decade-long contest between the two men
leaves the Liberal Party wounded to the core and removes Costello as a
juicy target for a resurgent Labor Party in government.

It was almost 9 o'clock on election night before Costello knew
officially what had been an open secret at Liberal campaign
headquarters for more than a week: the government of John Howard was
dead. With it died more than a decade of Costello's hopes to lead the
nation, lost in karmic retribution against a government that paid the
ultimate price for not listening to the electorate.

The Liberal prime ministerial transition plan - Howard's sleight of
hand to cling to power himself - was dead, too. It was a preposterous
plan designed by Howard to hold onto the leadership in the face of a
recommendation from most of his cabinet that it was time to go.

...

For Howard, who would risk anything to cling to power, the massive
election defeat should have come as no surprise. Lying in a drawer
somewhere was the secret Liberal Party dossier that almost a year ago
predicted the Prime Minister's demise, warning that the nation had
stopped listening to him.

The dossier, developed shortly after Rudd became opposition leader on
December 4 last year, showed voters had a string of grievances against
the government over broken promises and dishonesty and against Howard
in particular; voters had gravitated straight to the
pleasant-mannered, unthreatening Rudd. The government was seen as
arrogant and out of touch. There was an urgent need to reinvigorate
the Liberal team.
Howard was very quickly made aware of internal Liberal polling showing
a sharp fall for the government. This was no honeymoon season for
Rudd. This was the real thing. The secret document, prepared by
Liberal pollster Mark Textor, spelled doom for the government with
Howard at its head.
But Howard took the expedient course of a man obsessed with power and
personal conviction. He ignored all warnings...

The public polls that dogged Howard's steps for the next year after
Rudd's elevation to the Labor leadership, told Howard the same thing
his own pollster had told him: that it was time to go.

....
As Costello finally left the hall, flanked by a crush of fans,
security and media, he heard over his shoulder Howard's voice. He
turned back, pushing to the front of the hall with his family again
where they stood as a group, watching Howard's speech of concession.
Costello kept a smile on his face, while the man who he had already
told some time before that he would not stand as leader, declared that
the future of the party lay with Peter Costello.

...

Inside the Liberal campaign headquarters the Prime Minister's
inability to stick to the message - promoting the economic story and
bashing Labor over union connections - was bringing everyone down... Instead of sticking to the message on the economy, Howard decided to
give the media a lesson on how a leadership succession would occur.
"The incumbent leader goes to the meeting and says, 'I have decided to
resign' and then you know I make a little speech about various things
and thank the party for its support, understanding and loyalty and
then I say, 'Now we have a vacancy for the leadership'."
Those listening in Melbourne cringed. Crumpled paper was thrown. Worst
of all, it was another lost chance to push the message. Instead Howard
was back on his own theme, talking about himself.

...

After rates went up, Howard simply lost the plot, first saying sorry
to voters and then prolonging the agony the next day with a spurious
argument about whether saying sorry was an apology or a sorry.
Standing beside Howard, Costello, grim-faced, looked to be a man ready
to fasten his hands around the prime ministerial throat.

The worst day of the campaign, when things really went south, was the
day the entire message went to hell in a hand basket: the Liberal
campaign launch in Brisbane. Howard's rambling speech veered all over
the place. His spending, apparently pruned back by Costello, still
spiked up. There had been a campaign strategy drawn up for the speech,
but Howard decided to do his own speech - and focus on himself.
The speech blew out to double the time and culminated with a ramble on
why Howard wanted to continue as Prime Minister: "Let me tell you why
I want to be Prime Minister," he went on. "Let me tell you about my
hopes and dreams . . ." Twenty minutes later, he gave Costello a
tribute. Yet this was the man Howard was supposed to be pushing as the
next prime minister. It all had a tacky, stale feel to it. Howard's
strategy to spend, spend, spend, cut right across the campaign message
- a point Kevin Rudd leveraged to acclaim days later. Television
coverage of the Liberal campaign focused on Howard's pitch for himself
to remain as Prime Minister.
It could not have been more damaging.

Behind the scenes, Howard was said to take more account of the advice
of his wife Janette, his former chief of staff Grahame Morris, and his
friend, the former adman and now climate change campaigner Geoffrey
Cousins, than he did of the professionals at campaign headquarters.

For at least part of the campaign Howard was said to be reading
"Dickie's media briefing notes", as one disillusioned campaign adviser
described a media summary he claimed was often sent to Howard
overnight by his son Richard in the United States - where he had the
benefit of the time difference to read and assemble news from the
Australian newspaper websites. "It's almost Captain Wacky in reverse,"
muttered another adviser.

By the end of the campaign, senior strategists inside campaign
headquarters urged Liberal state directors to resist any pressure from
Howard's office to put his photograph on the party's how to vote
cards.

The ugly last-minute racist shenanigans in the seat of Lindsay were
perhaps the last defining imagery of Howard's era. Brochures intended
to provoke racism in the electorate were designed by the husbands of
Howard pet Jackie Kelly, who was quitting, and her successor, Karen
Chijoff. In what seemed a breakthrough for men's rights, both women
claimed to know nothing of their husband's activities.

+++++++++++++++++

Australian Financial Review
FRI 30 NOV 2007, Page 1

It's my party: the day John Howard refused to go

By: Pamela Williams

The PM's ministers begged him to step down. But, as national
correspondent Pamela Williams reveals, his response was a
Machiavellian plot to cling to power.

The windows of Alexander Downer's suite at the cushy Quay Grand hotel
framed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The tinkle of ice suggested a
cocktail party in full swing. Just across the water was the ultimate
political trophy, the prime minister's residence at Kirribilli.
Sydney was abuzz. It was Thursday evening, September 6, and
international leaders, great and small, were gathering for the APEC
summit. For those present, Downer's little gathering would make
history too, because it was here at the Quay Grand that some of the
most senior members of John Howard's government assembled to ponder
the future of their ageing and increasingly unpopular leader.
After hours of debate they agreed on a plan. But what they saw as its
strength, the Machiavellian Howard would quickly exploit as its
weakness.
Never mind that Howard had asked for this meeting. Within days he
would reject them completely, clinging to the leadership and, as they
feared, leading them to humiliating electoral defeat last weekend.
Distilled from the knowledge that disunity is death, his ministers'
strategy was to ask Howard to do the right thing by the party that had
given him absolute loyalty since he was elected leader in 1995. They
could not confront him, but they would ask Howard to stand aside and
hand over to his deputy, Peter Costello, both for the sake of the
party and Howard's own legacy.
But Howard would outfox them all.
...

On Wednesday, September 12, Howard recorded an interview with the
ABC's Kerry O'Brien. It would be a desperate plea to stay in power and
it would be the first that his party room had heard of his definitive
promise to retire in the next term if he won the election. It was a
preposterous promise. Howard, with a beseeching look, said he would
seek re-election and would then retire after a period, and hand over
to Peter Costello.
It was the Liberal Party's kamikaze moment.

Australian Financial Review
TUE 11 DEC 2007, Page 1

A right royal mess: how Howard led Libs into chaos

By: Pamela Williams

His rule of the Liberal Party was absolute, writes national
correspondent Pamela Williams. Now it must repair its internal
structures and restore its battered finances.

From the prime ministerial suite in the white-angled splendour of
Parliament House, and from the gabled elegance of Kirribilli House in
Sydney, John Howard ran both the country and the Liberal Party.
It was an unrivalled grip on power. By the time of the 2007 election
campaign, Howard, his wife Janette and a tiny coterie of close family
and friends were nicknamed the "Royal Family" by some Liberal insiders
due to their influence over party and over campaign matters both large
and small.
Now, as the family leaves behind the prestige of Kirribilli and
Howard's shattered aura of invincible power, his role in sidelining
the Liberal organisation is also coming under the spotlight.
Like a house of cards, everything has collapsed, leaving the party
structurally and financially vulnerable.
The Liberals' fortunes are teetering, caught between massive campaign
spending costs and seriously reduced fund-raising.
The situation is so fraught that one insider told The Australian
Financial Review the party was "unviable".
So much had been spent on the campaign that staff at the federal
directorate faced a slash and burn, he said, before adding a
devastating assessment of the organisation John Howard professed to
love: "The party's broke. They're smashed up. And it's mayhem."

...

Over the years as Howard became the party's supreme commander, many of
the old practices broke down. The federal executive, once playing a
commanding role itself, was sidelined and largely ignored by Howard.
The federal election campaign, with Howard controlling the strategy,
was a revelation of the steady deterioration of the party organisation
over a long period of time. One insider said yesterday there had been
at best only one federal executive meeting in the past year.
"Increasingly this all became a Howard operation, with his small
coterie," said a party-machine man yesterday. "As a consequence, the
organisation was marginalised and the competitive tension between the
organisation and the parliamentary party was lost. There was no
counterbalance."

...

Howard's wife and closest confidant, Janette, had become so entrenched
in the campaign structure that few dared to challenge her opinions.
Her views were imposed in even minor matters such as lighting and the
colours in advertising brochures. One bitter campaign worker said last
week: "While the ALP was running a professional campaign, the Liberals
were doing Homebake."

In the end, Howard's old modus operandi ran out of steam too. Spending
his way back to power had been the hallmark of every election for this
veteran politician. But suddenly, spending was out of fashion. Former
treasurer and longtime leadership aspirant Peter Costello had tried
his best to tie up the money with a massive tax cut strategy, working
on the basic assumption that if you cut tax, you can't spend it.
But Howard then wanted a massive health policy on top of the tax cuts.
He planned to spend billions of dollars taking over district hospitals
across the country.
Costello fought and fought. Finally, with the coup of Rudd's tactical
announcement that big spending was out, and health minister Tony
Abbott's personal campaign implosion, Costello won.
He pared back Howard's plans for even more generous child-care
rebates. It was a constant war between the treasurer and the big
spenders led by Howard, the prime minister who believed that
ultimately only he could draw the ace. But in the end, Howard's
strength was proved ephemeral. The man who misplayed the electorate so
badly did not even have the membership ticket to vote for a new party
leader. The man who believed he could hold the vote around the whole
country could not even hold his own seat. And when he fell, he took
the party with him.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Australian Financial Review, Edition 1
FRI 21 DEC 2007, Page 29

Fall of the liberal empire

By: Pamela Williams National correspondent

There was more than one attempt to cut down an intransigent John
Howard before the great election loss that has left a divided Liberal
Party struggling to find a path out of oblivion.

The Prime Ministerial Boeing 737 is known in the RAAF as Air Force
One. It is the ultimate symbol of life at the top, with its privacy,
its pilots and crew, its club lounge chairs, beds, and its $10,000 an
hour running cost. Here in this exclusive sanctum John Howard really
knew he was boss.
It was here too that Howard ran up travel bills estimated at more than
$10 million over 11 years just flying back and forth from Canberra to
Kirribilli, the Sydney residence where no previous prime minister had
lived, but which Howard chose to make his home. And just as he
eschewed The Lodge in Canberra, Howard eschewed the cheaper Challenger
aircraft that was intended for the Prime Minister's domestic use. The
Howards liked the status of the big Boeing. They became accustomed to
first class.
Back in 1996 the perks of power were anathema to John Howard. He was
carried to government on the shoulders of a party bereft and out of
office for 13 years. Back then, Howard listened to everyone in his
party organisation as they mapped strategies, first for a leadership
tilt and then for a prime ministerial run. For Howard, no advice was
too small. But that was then.

Andrew Robb is a man who knows both John Howards well - the humble
supplicant of 1996 and the hubristic jet-setter of 2007. Today Robb is
a federal Liberal MP himself and has been given the Herculean task of
overseeing the rebuilding of the devastated Liberal Party organisation
and its finances, which withered away during Howard's reign.

...

The role of Howard's wife,
Janette, in the election campaign has played into the story, becoming
a sore point with senior parliamentary members as well as with members
of the federal executive and the campaign professionals.

It was Howard himself who revealed his wife's role in his
decision-making to the public, declaring that he had consulted his
family in his decision to reject the request of his cabinet members to
go quietly. Downer has privately denied that Janette Howard's rage at
the cabinet was a factor in Howard's decision to stay. Nevertheless,
the talk continues in some Liberal circles that Janette Howard turned
on Downer too as the bearer of bad news, asking, "How could you do
this to our family?". In the end only Downer knows the truth, but the
fact it has become a topic of discussion shows how controversial the
role of the prime minister's family eventually became.

Howard had been one of the luckiest prime ministers in history. From
the landslide win of 1996 against Keating through to the tactics of
Tampa, when he literally scared people into voting for him, Howard had
the country in his hand. Finally he betrayed that trust, introducing
Work Choices, the hardline industrial relations policy that had not
been flagged to the electorate. It was the moment when Howard finally
forgot how he had succeeded in the first place - by listening and by
asking voters to reject the arrogance of the other side.

...

Business has flocked to Labor, naturally
following the government of the day. The Liberals must start again
from the bottom. Fewer and fewer major companies are giving to the
Liberals, and in states such as NSW, the ALP has become the natural
party of choice for big property developers. The Liberals have little
hope of making serious inroads here.

...

In just over a decade the Liberals have gone from feather duster to
feather duster. From the party high point when the federal president,
treasurer and director had the clout and respect to give Downer the
last rites for the sake of the party, to the low point of 2007, when
no-one even thought to contact federal director Loughnane to advise
him that Howard had asked his cabinet members if he should stand
aside. Senior ministers say Loughnane found out the same way most
others did, by phoning around to ask what was going on after the
rumour mill started churning.
It was a classic example of the degradation of the party: the leader
mortally wounded and at loggerheads with his cabinet over his future,
and an election coming up...

Loughnane struggled to pull back the strategy from the Howard family,
according to insiders, trying to get Howard to attend meetings without
his wife and key adviser. The problem for the campaign team was that
once Janette Howard took a decision, no-one dared to oppose her.
Moreover, the role of Howard's son Richard, based in the US and
providing his father with a media strategy, ultimately made him the
honorary deputy strategist to his mother.
It was chaos for the professional campaign staff. If the campaign put
out a brochure that Howard did not like, he would distance himself.
The threat of this hung in the air, sapping the campaign of passion
and immediacy. No one would say "shove it up your jumper" to Howard.
Everything had started to crack open the year before. The introduction
of Work Choices, in the face of a broad understanding in the
electorate that this was not going to happen, set off alarm bells
among party hard-heads and professionals. But there was nothing anyone
could do. With the imbalance between the organisation and the
parliamentary wings, there was no substantive discussion in the
broader party, no briefing first of the federal executive; there was
no robust discussion, no testing in the market, and virtually no
research. Here was proof positive that power had gone to Howard's
head.
For Howard himself, the end was tumultuous. He had achieved all his
great dreams, he had travelled the world, lived in the perfect house
on Sydney Harbour, presided over APEC with Russia's Vladimir Putin on
one arm and US President George Bush on the other. Janette Howard,
too, had enjoyed the spoils of office, planning and preparing for a
year for the star-dusted APEC moments, designing the outfits,
orchestrating the menus. For all the world they appeared to be the
glamorous hosts. Watching them through the APEC prism, it would be
hard to believe either seriously entertained the thought of giving it
all away before this grand finale.
Howard was on borrowed time.
Liberal Party polling showed he was no longer trusted, that the
electorate was no longer listening to him. Public polling showed the
same thing. Party research showed that Work Choices was the last
straw. All this must have seemed trivial against the glitter of world
leaders, the intimate barbecues with the Bush family and the revving
jets as Air Force One took off smoothly for Kirribilli.
Howard promised the nation one last time that if they favoured him
with a repeat performance, then he would go. But the public had worked
out that John Howard would never stand down. And that his party would
never force him out. They did not believe him.

In order to finally put a stake through the heart of Lazarus with a
triple bypass, the electorate took on the job itself. They would vote
him out, and not just out of office, but out of his seat as well.