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Eye, Eye!
Wednesday, Apr. 14, 2021 Just a little bit of whimsy ahead of an event I’m not looking forward to. This week I shall be having the first of two cataract surgeries. The first is in two days time, on Friday, Apr. 16, and the second is scheduled for May 11. I’ve read up on the […]
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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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Silence is No Longer Golden
BOOK REVIEW: GODS AND DEMONS A foreign correspondent’s memoir | Deborah Cassrels It’s certainly not Scoop, and Deborah Cassrels is hardly Evelyn Waugh. But there are enough fanciful echoes of imagined distant drums in Cassrels’ book, and there’s sufficient colourful reportage, to prompt consideration of the demerits of figjamery. According to the book cover, it […]
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Feisty Gal
Mara Wolford, 1969-2020 Soon after the Distaff and I left Indonesia at the beginning of April this year, Mara Wolford sent me an SMS from Bali. It said, simply, “I’m glad you’re safe at home. That is all.” I thought nothing of it at the time. Wolford had a penchant for oblique reference. It complemented […]
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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 […]
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How High Can Everest Rise?
This appears in Quadrant magazine’s November 2019 issue, just out. The Dizzying Heights Ross Fitzgerald and Ian McFadyen ISBN No: 978-1-925736-30-4 Hybrid Publishing : Melbourne pp. 248, $24.99. Review by Richard Laidlaw It’s plainly very difficult being a political satirist these days, when the politicians seem to have cornered the market themselves and to have […]
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It Will Be Meowvellous
Bali Sep. 4, 2019 Australian Elizabeth Henzell, from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, is a fixture in Ubud and runs Villa Kitty at Lod Tunduh, although it might be more accurate to say that it runs her, since that’s the way of much charity work in Bali. She would modestly demur, no doubt, at the […]
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