Category: Australia
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A Land of Droughts and Flooding Rains
POLITICS and CURENT AFFAIRS Tuesday, Mar. 8, 2022 Dorothea Mackellar wrote the poem My Country in 1908, from which the lines here – surely the most quoted – are taken: I love a sunburnt country,A land of sweeping plains,Of ragged mountain ranges,Of droughts and flooding rains.I love her far horizons,I love her jewel-sea,Her beauty and…
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Rocking, rolling, riding. Oops!
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022 Political train wrecks come in many sizes. Some are insignificant, merely foot in mouth derailments or negligent slow collisions with the bumpers at the end of the line. Some are the full catastrophe, ripping up the rails and plunging off the trestle bridge into the ravine far below. Scott…
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Welcome, Australia
Some thoughts on why January 26 shouldn’t be our national day Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022 Australia Day generally comes and goes as it pleases in my little corner of the blogosphere. Flag waving, anthem singing, feelgood nationalism and themed barbecues have never been my thing. I’ve been an Australian for 50 years and always counted…
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Off Their Faces
SOCIAL MEDIA | Bans Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021 An old friend* has been banned from Facebook. It’s not a temporary ban, of the sort the platform’s annoying algorithms and equally irritating geeks might mete out to people who fail to genuflect to the Great Cursor, or who post something Zuckerberg geeks deem disrespectful, like saying…
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Do Yourself a Favour, Gladys
Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021 I have some sympathy for former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, as, I think, would many people who implicitly understand that no one is perfect, least of all themselves. She did the right thing – eventually – when the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) named her as a person of interest…
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Mr Porter’s Problem
Thursday, Mar. 4, 2021 It’s not that he’s an entitled brat who’s never properly grown up. It isn’t that he counts himself among a group of Liberal politicians who style themselves The Swinging Dicks (a tip, fellas: buy better underwear). It isn’t that, as a consequence of his all-too-common adolescent male fantasy, he’s in that…
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The God Squad Has the Crayon
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021 Other people’s fairy stories have never bothered me. We’re all entitled to a little fantasy. It’s polite, too, to keep one’s own counsel on the sublime veracities that other people like to claim illuminate the liturgies with which humankind’s need for fiction has underpinned their lives. It is no moment, to…
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Here’s Mud in Your Boots! Cheers!
Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021 This week we will be marking our first Australia Day in country in fifteen years. Throughout the decade and a half that preceded April 2, 2020, when we were FIFOing as a lifestyle, we always managed to be absent for the rounds of increasingly strident and mawkish flag-waving and gong-giving that…
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Tracking down the Morons
Kealy, Western Australia Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020 We’re getting to know our new home area better, now that the temperatures are generally up a degree or two on deep midwinter and the rain, while still frequent and chill to the skin, is more likely to be in the form of showers and thus is relatively…
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Officially an Elderly Obstruction
THE CAGE Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019 My diary noted today that 2019 had now produced 12 rabbits and that our household – that comfortably mannered and predominantly civil paradigm that is not quite entirely virtual since wherever it has been it has always had some physical form – has been smoke-free…
8degreesoflatitude 