That's so pants

It came for me

2012-01-08T21:17:00.002+11:00

'It's Guy Fawkes, Jim, but not as we know it, er, him' by Pants

I was just sitting there thinking ... I would rather go blind, than to see another Larrikin's End fireworks display. And then Barney shoved one of his fine vodkamisus in my free hand and, frankly, I don't remember much after that.

There was a boat involved. I think it was called the Poseidon? Maybe it was the Pontus. I remember it was one of the Greek nautical gods. I survived the experience, so maybe it was the latter. Barney vanished in a vodka vapour with a view to simultaneously appearing in all 2,011 of his Goblet of Fire venues at the stroke of midnight - I've given up wondering how he does that.

I remember what happened now. The commotion of Barney's departure alerted my lovely neighbour Ren. After we'd put out the fire, she invited me to a barbecue on her brother's boat. She didn't want me to be alone, for obvious reasons. The saying, 'fight fire with fire' must have originated in Australia because they've no sooner put out one than they're itching to start another.

I took some homemade lentil burgers I happened to have in the freezer to a barbecue on a boat in Australia, on New Year's Eve. It is a measure of the fine breeding of my hosts that I wasn't bludgeoned to death and thrown on the barbie myself, or fed to the sharks. My hosts, of course, served the finest shark'n'neeps to be found in Larrikin's End. The smell was extraordinary, but I just can't bear the thought of how cruelly neeps are killed these days, and I couldn't eat them.

Ren, after several glasses of Barney's special 2o11 vintage Russo-Barnique, became rather more animated than usual. That does tend to happen with Barney's top-of-the-range poisons. Anyway, she told me the story of the boat we were on. It had been a fishing trawler catching whiting and morwong. When her father and brother ran it, they'd used nets that trawled several feet above the sea floor, which they knew to be ecologically responsible. She told me that her late father was vehemently opposed to the destructive practice of bottom trawling. The old timers knew a thing or two about so-called sustainable fishing.

These days, Ren's brother runs the vessel as a leisure boat. It was an insanely pleasurable evening as we puttered about Lake Larrikin while the barbecue moaned about the indignity of having to grill my lentil burgers. The other guests, who incongruously comprised only middle-aged, divorced dads and their teenage daughters, occupied their time negotiating facebook access and trying to convince each other to either drink less or eat more.

I couldn't work out at first how this strange cohort could have come together. Then my canny friend Ann O'Dyne filled me in. She'd deduced that the mothers had already booked themselves into New Year's Eve parties, knowing that they'd be able to celebrate free from prying junior eyes. Having nabbed the offspring for the premium family event of Christmas Day, when the major and most memorable pay-off comes to the kids, they leave the dads with the lame-duck event of New Year's Eve. What's in it for kids? No presents - only the responsibility of having to sweat over a parent who is likely to want to get seriously pissed, because it may be the only time in the year when it's possible to do that with other like-minded souls. Now that is sad.

By the time it got to midnight, Barney's largesse had gotten the better of even Pants, who ought to know better after all these years of dealing with the devious little voligarch. You'll have guessed by now that the vodkamisu had more than a little something to do with it. Barney had prepared a special batch, which he assured me was child friendly. It was child friendly in the Timothy Leary sense of the expression. None of us can accurately recall what happened after we'd consumed Barney's special dessert. I think we can safely say, however, that the abandoning mothers might find themselves trumped in future years by the notoriously unreliable vodkamisu flashback, which tends to represent events in a much more rosy light than a standard memory might recall them.

We all agreed that the Larrikin's End fireworks display was the best ever. We differed significantly on how long it had lasted. A couple of participants insist it's still going on, even as I write. I wish the dear man whose wife left him for a Thai cosmetic surgeon and his very lovely teenage daughter, would abandon the gum tree outside my house. He has taken on the persona of John Donne and persistently intones,

'and to 'scape stormy days, I choose an everlasting night'

while the daughter's pitched herself in the Longfellow camp, crying constantly,

'O father! I see a gleaming light, O say, what may it be?'

Oh, sorry innocent country people. Flashbacks - probably not something you've ever had to deal with before. Try to look on the, er, bright side. Plenty of people have made money out of documenting their psychosis.

I know Barney is a menace. But who can stop him now?

Do you believe in magic?

2011-12-31T10:55:00.001+11:00

Susan Langford MBE, photo by Stephen Davies

All year I've been planning to post about my friend Susan Langford but one's beloved Guardian beat me to it! The bleedin' front of them. Adds new meaning to the term chutzpah. But, since it is the season of goodwill to all - even newspaper people - and the reason for this cheeky usurping of my right to unparalleled tardiness is both honourable and valid, I will retire in gracious magnanimity. It's a very good piece and I urge you to read it.

The Guardian has named Magic Me, the charity Susan founded in London over twenty years ago, as one of eight charities benefiting from the annual Guardian and Observer charity appeal. This is far more than even the recently employed Pants could have brought to the table and, although it pains to admit, the Guardian's readership is marginally more than can be boasted here at That's So Pants.

I met Susan about ten years ago when I was working in Tower Hamlets. Magic Me was very effectively conjuring community harmony by bringing together (mostly) white elderly people and (mostly) Asian young people to discuss and document their shared history. Inter-generational mixing goes remarkably well if you don't angst too much about it and if you can bring the type of skill and wisdom Susan has in abundance to it. She got a well-deserved MBE last year for her Ginger-Rogerslike ability to waltz backwards in dancing pumps across the seemingly fatally rent fabric of civil society and make it all look too easy.

One of my favourite things that Magic Me does is to host cocktail parties in care homes. Susan discovered that elderly residents were being sent to bed straight after tea for no better reason than to relieve the staff of the responsibility of attending to them. So, she got together a group of adult volunteers who now go into care homes in the evening armed with a variety of drinks to suit diverse tastes, medical and cultural restrictions and with a remit to engage in lively conversation. If I knew that my charitable dollars were being directed towards providing Sex on the Beach to old people, I'd give more. Note to self - start similar charity here in Larrikin's End or move back to London before senility sets in.

Susan talks about the diminishing opportunities for the young and old to mix as people increasingly retreat to within narrowing cultural boundaries. That feels very true, especially in Anglophone cultures. You're much more likely to see large, extended families dining together in restaurants in Continental Europe than you are in Britain or here in Australia. But, I wonder if the great gulf of understanding that supposedly exists between the youngest and oldest of us might be a construct created by the in-betweens who haven't the patience to deal with either. The so-called 'generation gap' seems to me to be a very middle-aged, middle-class concept and it actually doesn't make much sense when you take into account the eagerness of the young to soak up knowledge and the capacity of the old to dispense it. This would seem a transaction opportunity made in heaven, except perhaps to those with a will to contain information exchanges within their own spheres of influence.

Ma Pants (82) and I recently went to a party next door to hers. The lady is Jewish but her husband is not. It was the first day of Hanukkah and we were fed blinis with smoked salmon and capers and also sausage rolls filled with pork mince. Their grandson, aged eleven, served us drinks and then sat down and engaged Ma Pants in a long and intense conversation about the walkie-talkie set he hoped to get for Christmas and the relative merits of the final four contestants in So You Think You Can Dance, an American TV programme to which Ma Pants has been inexplicably drawn. I could only watch it up to the point where the judges started shrieking, a spectacle which I am neither young nor old enough to tolerate.

One programme I did manage to watch for at least a bit is the BBC's When Teenage Meets Old Age, recently played here on our ABC. It's a classic social experiment scenario pitting opposing prejudicial views against each other, presumably with a view to creating a train-wreck no-score draw. Something a little less alarming but a whole lot more interesting happened. Society's economic-outcast bookends bonded in unexpected ways. There was mercifully little hysteria involved and a few ah-ha moments where it became apparent that both ends sensed that they'd been played off against each other by the mysterious middle. Who knew that a little peace, love and understanding could be so easy? That certainly isn't the mainstream view.

Is what Susan does magic or just well-executed common sense? My guess is exactly the right quantities of both. It is magical to have the ability to create the kind of project idea that will appeal to a diverse range of ages and ethnicities and also prove genuinely engaging and uplifting. The Moving Lives Project brought young and old women together to examine the life of Emily Wilding Davies, the suffragette who died in 1913 when she fell under the King's horse at the Derby. History? Politics? Feminism? Dissent? Aren't these all aspects of British society that the mysterious middle would have us believe are of no interest whatever to the young? Nice one Susan.

My last post was about Pecan Summer, the opera written by Aboriginal soprano Deborah Cheetham, who then went on to recruit and train a cast of Aboriginal people to perform in it. I've frittered away many an hour trying to imagine the conversations amongst various funding mullahs when the grant applications for that one arrived. I can't work out which is more remarkable, that the opera materialised or that its very being seems so audacious. When we all now supposedly have the freedom to pursue any avenue that piques our interest, how is it that we're so easily herded into age/gender/ethnic stereotypes when it comes to choosing which path to take?

I, for one, have been freshly inspired. 2012 will be the year of living defiantly. Thanks Susan.

Summery Justice

2011-10-10T19:59:00.004+11:00

Photo by Pants

Of all the things that baffle me about the birth-mother country, the culture wars top the long list. Having been away for the entire protracted business, I find myself left raking over the fragments of what appears to be a truce arrived at through a combination of exhaustion and intractability. No one ever wants to talk about it either, except via an occasional, oblique passing reference. You can't even find anything sensible to read about this pivotal moment in Australian history as its all been buried under the most impenetrable slurry of code and jargon imaginable.

I know it was bad because Aboriginal culture and rest-of-us culture are now very inharmoniously divorced. What seemed like a perfectly sensible idea to start with - that white Australia cease exploiting, suppressing and disrespecting black Australia - somehow morphed into a small room with two very large elephants in it refusing to look at each other. I am being flippant here. I do know that the laws governing access to Aboriginal arts and ceremonies are complex and that it was probably easier to just not go there. But twenty years down the line, we are all paying for that stand-off with, effectively, two entirely separate artistic Australias.

Chinese Australian artist/designer Jenny Kee claims in her autobiography, A Big Life, that Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins told her in the 90s she couldn't paint snakes because snakes are a sacred totem. Presuming that really happened, it's an interesting indicator of how crazily polarised the situation became. That kind of response was, in many ways, entirely appropriate for a people whose culture and identity had been so completely trashed. But the perfectly reasonable act of reasserting ownership over the misappropriated signifiers of culture and identity seems to have effectively assigned Aboriginality to a no-go sealed vault.

In 2008, our then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, publicly apologised to Aboriginal people for the Stolen Generations. In doing so, he opened the door to meaningful dialogue on the contested points of our shared history and the opportunity for a little reconciliation and healing. Except, no one went through it. Four years later, Aboriginal people are still amongst the poorest, most marginalised people on earth and the two cultural elephants are still studiously ignoring each other in their claustrophobic little room. Non-Aboriginal Australia remains self-consciously reserved about making any reference at all to Aboriginal Australia artistically save for the occasional supercilious and self-serving admission of guilt. And Aboriginal arts have generally been corralled into a few ghettos of approved authenticity. When someone does crack the mould, like visual artist Tracey Moffatt or film-maker Warwick Thornton, they are ignored at home even when they are feted abroad.

Which is why Deborah Cheetham's Aboriginal opera Pecan Summer is so remarkable. That's right, an opera. Written by an Aboriginal soprano and starring a cast of Aboriginal men, women and children whom Cheetham scouted and trained herself. Talk about leaping the cultural chasm in a single bound. Reggae is blackfella music. Country is blackfella music. Hip hop is blackfella music. But opera is as whitefella as it gets. And not only that. It's manifestly uncool. Opera is the territory of black-tie wearing, embassy-ball attending, Krug-guzzling toffs. Or is it?

I find myself sitting in a packed Melbourne Playhouse on the final night of Pecan Summer's sell-out three-night season, in the presence of our toff-supreme, the Governor of the State of Victoria, like that was the most normal thing in the world to be doing. For this alone, Cheetham deserves every honour going and a great big grant so that this opera can tour the country for ever and become as firmly etched onto the national psyche as Waltzing Matilda. Bear with me. I'll get over myself in a second. Barney, bring me a chardonnay - I'm poised to review.

Pecan Summer tells the true story of the Cummeragunja walk-off. In 1939, 200 Aboriginal residents left this mission because of intolerable treatment, crossed the Dhungala (Murray River) and journeyed over the border into Victoria, where some set up home along the riverbank. Others walked on to Melbourne in search of work and to meet up with other Yorta Yorta countrymen and women, notably the Aboriginal rights activist William Cooper. Cheetham also interweaves into the main event the dominant national narrative of our times, the story of the Stolen Generations. On the one hand, an extremely tall order. On the other, perfect subject matter for opera.

It begins with a short dance prelude depicting the creation of Dhungala at the beginning of time. This is very simply achieved with dancer Surmsah Bin Saad rolling across the stage in a long piece of cloth which unravels to reveal the river. It serves to remind us that this is the oldest continuous culture in the world and that what we are seeing represents around 70,000 years of storytelling.

We are then transported to the banks of the Yarra River behind Melbourne's Federation Square in July, 2006. Aboriginal community worker Alice (Shauntaii Batske) is mistaken for a derelict by a group of drunken white youths. One taunts her with the question, 'what have you ever done with your life?' She replies that she gave birth to a daughter without much help from anyone. Her colleague Michael (Carlos Enrique Barcenas Ramirez) overhears this exchange. He didn't know Alice had a daughter. It transpires that her daughter had been taken shortly after her birth in 1964, as Alice herself had been ripped from the arms of her own mother at age eleven. Both are children of the Stolen Generations.

Flashback to 1939 and the Cummeragunja Mission in rural New South Wales, where young Alice (Jessica Hitchcock), brother Jimmy (Eddie Bryant), father James (Don Bemrose) and mother Ella (Deborah Cheetham) live. They are a happy, healthy and functional family, despite the tyrannical cruelty of mission manager McGuiggan (Stephen Grant) and the ever-present danger of police swoops to pick off any children who have strayed too far from safety. Everyone in the community knows that once gone, these children will never be seen again.

Act I establishes the rhythms of both family and community life succinctly and poetically through the gentle, harmonious music of composer Cheetham. Although the recitative is classically operatic, the songs are closer in reference to American musical theatre. Cheetham cites Puccini and Saint-Saëns as influences but I think I also detect a little Gershwin in there. The act culminates in a gathering of the Cummergunja residents at Ella and James's house for a crisis meeting. At this point we meet Uncle Bill (Tiriki Onus) who devours his moment with the scary story of Hairy Beka. The point at which they decide to leave the mission is marked by a glorious ensemble number. The souvenir programme, rather annoyingly, doesn't list the 'songs'. I'm still humming the tune though and the words I do remember - 'we'll leave together, we'll go together'.

During the long interval I take notes rather than go to the bar - a first, let me assure you. I think about the very simple sets, costumes, lighting and wonder why everyone thinks they need to spend millions on mounting any kind of play with music in it these days. I also note that apart from the two young Aboriginal women seated next to me and a few others a few rows down on the left, the audience is made up entirely of old, white folks in claret-coloured cardies.

Some months after the exodus from Cummergunja, Alice and her family are living on the riverbank near the Victorian town of Shepparton. The great depression has hit. The people are hungry. They rediscover 'the old ways' of food gathering, like trapping fish. This keeps them from starvation. There is lovely vocal interaction between these four characters, notably the glorious lullaby sung by Ella to the sleeping Alice. I learn from the programme notes that this is a passed-down song, given to Cheetham by a cousin and also known to other Aboriginal peoples. It is the stand-out tune of the show and I can hum it note for note. Suddenly those protocols don't seem so impenetrable.

Inevitably - this is opera, after all - tragedy strikes. Young Alice is tempted into 'town' aka 'peril' by the lure of the movie house. At this point, the fortunes of our close-knit family diverge. Word reaches the riverbank settlement that the hated McGuiggan has gone. The men prepare to leave for Cummeragunja. Ella discovers that Alice has been taken by the authorities. Alice has, in fact, been 'rescued' by decent, white Christian people and scrubbed and white-gloved to within an inch of her young life. Ella risks the short but dangerous route along the river into town. She meets a bad man and a bad thing happens. He tries to rape her. There's a scuffle and he disappears down a riverbank.

Alice appears in the front pew of a small, country church, seated next to the minister's wife. This is the setting for one of the loveliest choral moments in the opera as the members of the congregation sing their hymn. The most significant reason for this loveliness is the knock-out voice of Rosamund Illing, playing the minister's wife. The scene is sweet and genuine. It is not played for laughs. This is one of Cheetham's great strengths. She has a heart big enough for forgiveness and generosity. In opera, it's essential that there be no pantomime baddies. It's equally essential that there be no flawless goodies.

A dishevelled Ella arrives as the congregation is dispersing and attempts to reclaim her daughter. It's a superb climax with the sopranos going head to head. This is the moment I realise Cheetham is bringing something refreshing to our national story and doing it in the time-honoured operatic tradition. Although Ella's absolute moral right in this situation is completely clear to us, she appears to have just killed a man. Although the minister's wife's claim on the girl is utterly spurious as observed through our hindsight lens, we learn she has rescued Alice from the authorities and intends to give her a decent Christian upbringing where she'll have every advantage. Life is complex, as are people and we would all do well to remember that when we're tying ourselves up in knots trying to work out how this broken thing we call our national psyche can ever be fixed.

I had resisted tears up until this point. The postlude brings us back to Federation Square in 2008. A crowd is listening to the Apology to the Stolen Generations being delivered by Kevin Rudd. In the words of that particular Kevin, I admit I 'blubbed' just hearing it again - in part for the squandered hope that it represents. As the crowd disperses, two female reporters appear. At opposite ends of the stage, they each interview a woman. One of the interviewees we recognise as old Alice from Scene 1. The other seems to be telling the same story, except from a stolen child's point of view. It was 1964... The baby was three weeks old... The two women never meet.

This is as near to perfect as a theatre experience gets for me. It's so humbly staged and yet so beautiful, artful and edifying it makes you wonder how idiotic enterprises like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark are even contemplated, much less realised. Not that I've seen it mind but my instinct is to go with the 100% stinker rating from the people who have.

Would I be That's So Pants if I didn't produce one little quibble? I think not. Barney! Top up needed here please. There's one thing I think Pecan Summer is lacking and that's a confrontation between the male voices. Don't get me wrong - I love that this show is all about the women. But I want to hear a complete complement of male and female voices. I think I've spotted the perfect opportunity. Although the show certainly pulls no punches in terms of its statements of grievance, it is missing one very obvious trick. It needs a distinctive voice to carry the political counterpoint.

The aforementioned William Cooper, founder of the Australian Aboriginal League, famously led a delegation of the League to protest at the German Embassy in Melbourne following Kristallnacht in 1938. He delivered a petition condemning the 'cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany'. Cooper continued to protest against the Nazis until his death. He was a Yorta Yorta man who had lived at Cummeragunja. His name is mentioned by the men at the meeting just before the walk-off.

I can't help thinking about the potential of Cooper becoming a character in this opera. I imagine him arriving at the mission to inspire the men instead of just being spoken about in passing. I can almost hear him articulating the arguments for freedoms and rights. Pecan Summer wants for a little more eloquence in that department. I can even conjure the image of him vocally duelling with the nasty mission manager, McGuiggan. Perhaps there's a reason this couldn't happen. Maybe in this sensitive arena the truth just can't be stretched that far, not even by a miracle maker like Deborah Cheetham. But I can dream.

Wherever you are in the world tonight, I hope you get to see this show one day. It's a story that very much wants and needs to be told.

Rising Water - Review

2011-09-04T18:24:00.004+10:00

Baby Swims by Pants

There are only about five reasons to stay in this country that taste overlooked and at least three of them have something to do with Tim Winton. Cloudstreet is a monument. Dirt Music is an anthem. And Breath? I call that a reason to keep sucking up copious quantities of oxygen and recklessly expelling Co2 without the slightest consideration for the environmental consequences. So you know I'm already a devotee. Winton is Sondheim without the songs - and you don't even notice that there are no songs.

My recent kulcha long weekend in Melbourne was packed with gourmet mindfood but Rising Water was the Beluga moment. This is Tim Winton's first play. It seems crazy that he hasn't written one before. His gift for dialogue, matched with the largely uncontested space of contemporary Australian playwriting, seems like an open goal. That thought made me quite sad, not least of all for Tim Winton. Now I'm not only gasping for his next book but his next play as well. I'm thinking I'm not the only one and that Helen Garner should take up playwriting.

I saw a London production of Cloudstreet at The Barbican, five or six years ago. It was astonishing. Winton has an exceptional intuition for establishing a commonality of experience in even the most banal and localised of scenarios. Post-war Perth was instantly recognised in post-everything London. We were as easily drawn into the world of the Lambs and Pickles as we might have been to that of the Montagues and Capulets, the Hatfields and McCoys, the Campbells and MacDonalds or the Fowlers and Mitchells. Winton didn't write the script for the dramatisation of his novel but he did make it impossible to misinterpret. Like Dickens, he's a great literary dramatist. Once he puts words into a character's mouth, they're not easily revoked.

There are two happy consolations for the almost total invisibility of the performing arts in this country beyond a dim awareness of staged movement acquired solely through the cipher of So You Think You Can Dance. The most immediate and convenient is that it's never that difficult to acquire good tickets, even within a week or so of the show.

So, with a click of the increasingly abused mouse, Ms O'Dyne and I found ourselves in the front row, slightly right of centre. I like to be close to the stage so that I can see the expressions on the actors' faces. Just on that subject, this is the third time in succession I've found a conveniently spectacular sole pair of premium stalls seats and no others available and had a 'mmm' moment before committing my credit card. And each time I've bought the tickets and ended up with great seats in a full theatre. Either this is a highly sophisticated selective selling system or I'm a very lucky theatregoer indeed.

The second reason has something to do with the first. Film and television actors have to supplement their livelihoods with theatre work in order to keep body and soul from drifting apart. The core cast of Rising Water is a trio of superb Australian actors capable of appreciating Winton's intent. He is a chronicler of an experience which is largely defined by a very narrow vocabulary of cliches. Australians don't like it when they hear them, but, if they disappeared from plays and films and television shows, we would not recognise ourselves. In everything Winton does, he disciplines his ideas into this highly specific vernacular.

I'd like to dwell on this problem for a moment as I wonder whether it may be restricting playwriting in this country and that Winton might be the only writer with the skill and nerve to use this severe constraint to his advantage. Film-makers usually cop out by supplementing the cast with an American or European star and blaming it on investor pressure. But what they're really looking for is an outsider character who'll not only toss in copious question marks (what? you really think that? Blimey/Holy cow/Mon dieu!), but provide some much-needed relief to the relentless register of Strine. Australians are not much given to critical self-reflection either and Winton does use a catalyst in the form of a drunk and disgruntled English backpacker to pop a few challenging social questions, but you know it isn't because he really needs to. There's not much coherence in her skinful bellicosity and norf London ain't much relief from Strine.

Good dramatists trap characters in circumstance and allow their pasts to catch up with them. It is in that moment that a great play takes place. Its business is crisis and how it's dealt with. Will the character overcome his/her predicament or be destroyed by it?

It's Australia Day and Baxter, (John Howard) is asleep on the stern of his tiny, dilapidated yacht moored in Fremantle, Western Australia. He's woken by Col, (Geoff Kelso) returning to his own wreck with a slab of lager and a bottle of rum. It is after all, the day on which Australians 'drink vast amounts of beer and get sunstroke and run screaming through the streets with the flag pouring off their shoulders like a super-hero's rippling cape while they go after wogs and slopes and towel-head reffos.'

Shortly thereafter, the non-drinking Jackie, (Alison Whyte) returns to her boat from what we later learn is a professional trip, changes out of her suit and into sweats and makes herself a cuppa. Already we know that these three Australians at least have an uneasy relationship with their national day. They are three people, parked so close they can step from boat to boat, on the cusp of emptiness, like a bizarre reversal of a boat-people tragedy. Except they can never escape. Whether through lack of time, sea-worthiness, or nerve, these three are tethered to their fates.

Winton says,

We are not sea people by way of being great mariners, but more a coastal people on the edge of things. We live by the sea not simply because it is more pleasant to a lazy nation but because ... the sea is more forthcoming; its miracles and wonders are occasionally more palatable, however inexplicable they may be. There is more bounty, more possibility for us in a vista that moves, rolls, surges, twists, rears up, changes from minute to minute. The innate feeling from the veranda is that if you look out to sea long enough, something will turn up. (Land's End, quoted in programme).

This really is what Australia is all about - unfulfilled promise, unmet longing and incomplete journeys. And these three have failure in their pasts, none more so than Baxter. As a former head teacher in a secondary school, he set up a project for pregnant students and found himself dangerously embroiled in the personal life of one particular girl. For this he paid dearly. Australians despise success and failure in equal measure. If you want to get on in with people, your best bet is to avoid both fame and notoriety.

The staging is clever with the boats set out on a reflective surface and mounted on some kind of mechanism so that they bob about when people move. And we, the audience, are in the sea. We are the sea. We represent the unknown, the mysterious, the longing. I rather liked that. We undulate. We have secrets of our own and we are, of course, dangerous.

The three yachts are called Shirley, Goodness and Mercy. (Winton fully exploits the opportunities for sight gags - there's also a fish in the sky and kite in the sea to remind us of where we are). Those who recall their Sunday school lessons will recognise the reference to Psalm 23, much beloved of classical composers and rappers. 'My cup runneth over' becomes a statement of grand irony. Here in this land of plenty, there is crippling emotional want. Australians are not stifled by a prohibition on free expression but rather by an inability to articulate it. Never is this more obvious than on Australia Day when no one can work out what it is they feel, much less put it into words.

***Spoiler Alert***

Psalm 23 is also commonly used in funeral liturgies and Rising Water is about death. It's there in the title, after all. Winton has a bit of a fascination with drowning and hanging too. He uses the Chekhovian device of introducing an instrument of death in the first act. Baxter tries to tie a noose knot and can't but then produces a 'here's one I made earlier' and strings it around his neck. But, in the end, after poor ailing Shirley is scuttled by the drunk backpacker, he strikes out into the open sea in a row boat.

Reviewers seem to have been confused by the intermittent appearance of a young, unnamed boy in a row boat. This is the youthful Baxter. (People really do need to brush up on their Shakespeare.) By choosing drowning over hanging in the end, Baxter absolves himself of any guilt for what he might have done but clearly didn't and also reconnects with his young, hopeful self.

The reviews for this play haven't been universally warm, despite Winton's official 'national treasure' status. It's quite obvious that a lot of people haven't picked up on the multiple layers of meaning. This is a clever play and Winton manages to open several important lines of enquiry about our fragile national identity and the anxieties that so easily threaten it and the narrow frame of cultural reference in which we inexplicably choose to confine ourselves. It certainly gave me plenty to think about. Can't wait for his Anzac Day play.

Rising Water, The Playhouse, Melbourne until 10th September.

No reason for a llama

2011-08-26T22:18:00.003+10:00

The Alpacas' Teaparty, Kate Bergin (2011) Photo by Pants. Thanks to
Mossgreen Gallery, South Yarra for allowing the Kodak moment.

I went to Melbourne to buy some art. Nothing strange in that. I work now and, although nepotism is obviously a huge factor in my unexpected accelerated disposal income, (i.e. from next to zero to multiples of thousands in 0.5 seconds), I do a good job and more than earn my keep at Larrikin Shire Council.

I am determined to spend my salary wisely. By wisely, I mean I only intend to invest in quaffable wine, readable books and whatever usable else takes my fancy. I don't want to buy shares. Speculation doesn't interest me. Accumulation is nasty unless it makes the world more tolerable. If I invest at all, I want to invest in wit and intelligence, not greed and stupidity.

My walls, as I may have mentioned, are reasonably well adorned with my own cack-handed efforts but I am keen to inflate the tone by throwing in the occasional masterpiece to augment my signature Whiteley print.

It was with this aim that Ms Ann O'Dyne and I set out for South Yarra and a gallery trawl on a sunny Melbourne Saturday. Our first mistake, you could say, was not to have done our homework. I was under the misapprehension that artists wanting to sell their work and agents able to make the connection between keen sellers and equally keen buyers would be easy enough to find.

Our start was glaringly inauspicious. We were on a tram labouring along Toorak Road and several minutes from our randomly chosen disembarkation point when Ms O'Dyne began to speculate aloud about whether or not I needed to inform the Department of Transport of my imminent alighting by shoving my day ticket into the same slot that clocked my boarding. I, of course, had no idea. I know only Oyster Card and the Pantibago. She turned her attention to the hermetically sealed female seated beside me. Ms O'Dyne needed only to utter the words, 'excuse me', to be sliced in two by the most cut-glass Sloane Ranglish imaginable.

'Are rare lair couldn't sir', spaketh she of the realm and further informed us that she'd been in Melbourne only a week. This, apparently, absolved her of any obligation to be pleasant, not to mention civil. Ms O'Dyne noted that the young ma'am in question was wearing Vivienne Westwood earrings. I really can't comment further.

We got off the tram without blood being spilled or alarms sounding. Remarkably, Melbourne's Montmartre failed to leap out and embrace us. We approached this new problem more strategically. Once bitch-slapped, twice shy and all that. Ms O'Dyne looked for someone not wearing Vivienne Westwood earrings.

A freshly latte'd middle-aged man with laptop and iPhone on alfresco table and contented dog at heel proved more approachable. He obligingly used said iPhone to GPS us to some galleries within roaming distance. And then he suggested we get one of these phones or make a note of goal destinations before setting out next time. Well, I guess, no suave man in late middle age is perfect, even if he does have a near-perfect dog.

More good luck than able management brought us to the door of Mossgreen Gallery, an attractive viewing space with an open-air cafe attached. By chance, (ours not the gallery's - presumably they'd planned it well in advance), an exhibition of paintings by Kate Bergin entitled Wild Things had opened the night before.

Surrealism. Well, I'm a fan. I did rush to Dalí's funeral after all. And I can see why people would want to keep painting in that style, especially if they're master technicians, as Bergin clearly is. And then there's the added attraction of the vast numbers of people who want to own paintings that are as beautiful as these. It's not something one needs to guess at. Of the eleven paintings on show here, priced from $6,000 to $30,ooo, ten were sold within twenty-four hours. But as supply and demand skip blissfully off into the sunset together, I'm left wondering.

Could I have bought one of these pictures had they not already been sold? Absolutely. Would I have? Categorically, no. Here's why. I'm one of those crazy old-fashioned people who wants to be challenged by art and shown a new way of looking at the world. Or, at the very least, enticed by satire clever enough to make the old ways seem new. But what we have here is cut'n'past cliché, albeit meticulously composed and executed. Gorgeous and distracting but, ultimately, shallow.

The very beautiful catalogue produced by Mossgreen tells you all you need to know. It consists of exquisite reproductions of the paintings, accompanied by what can only be described as a collage of words, organised into paragraph-like shapes that obey no rules of explanation that I can recognise. I could have picked any one of the irksome fourteen on offer but here's a random example,

'We fall in love with the creatures and engage with them. It is certainly no co-incidence (sic) that Bergin has won many peoples (sic) choice awards in recent times, as well as receiving critical acclaim from the more hardened art critics.'

I can't help myself, here's a bit more from the unattributed introduction,

'On speaking with the artist on the relevance of each ingredient, be it a spoon or the strings or the telephone, there are hidden messages, but the artist does not make this a requirement to enjoy her work.'

Gobsmacked? Read my swollen lips. Hidden messages? Don't make me laugh. What we have here is a collection of artefacts associated with the golden age of Surrealism transported into a classical still life format with a dollop of Australiana tossed in for good measure. And yes, yawn, I do get that telephones, spectacles, spoons, wild and domestic animals and even string all carry intense symbolic meaning. The key to rendering all that meaning meaningful is intelligent arrangement.

André Breton, the founder of Surrealism said,

'The imaginary is what tends to become real.'

This is exactly what I'm not seeing in these pictures. They are frivilous and fun and decorative, but nothing more than that. It does make me wonder why people who write catalogue blurbs feel that they have to insinuate a mysterious secret knowing onto an object simply because it's an oil painting - as if there were no audience at all in Australian capital cities for vacuous but visually striking and expensive wall candy.

Exhibition at Mossgreen Gallery, 310 Toorak Road, South Yarra until 15th September.

A riot of my own

2011-08-17T00:00:00.002+10:00

Labour leader Ed Mild'n'bland recites the Serenity Prayer

I've been away from London for over three years now and I can honestly say that not a day goes by that I don't think of her and miss her. You could say, I get a funny feeling inside of me, when walking up and down. Last week I watched my dear old London, my dear old Hackney, burning.

A lot of people are asking the question, why?

As it happens, I have the Question Why right here with me, just like Woody Allen had Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Together, we will attempt to understand why it is that police shooting someone - tragic as that was - led to several intense days of apparently unrelated mayhem across London and, later, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

When police shoot and kill a young, black man in London and then refuse to show even the most basic of courtesies to his grieving family, outrage and protest is a natural and justifiable response. In a free and functional democracy, you'd expect nothing less. And sometimes protests have turned violent because a single shocking event like that reminds everyone of the chronic racial inequality that seemingly has no cure, despite the bucket loads of earnestness that have been heaped onto it over decades.

It's actually a good thing if people respond aggressively to police shooting citizens. Here in Australia, police shoot people so often that if it makes the news at all, it's usually dismissed as the only possible way of dealing with people who are a bit rowdy and/or suffering from a mental illness.

And it's not as if people haven't rioted in England for the sheer fun of it before and wrecked the shit out of the place. And it's not as if mayhem and opportunism have never gone hand in glove before either. Apparently nearly four hundred cases of looting from bombed-out houses had been reported to the police in the first two months of the London Blitz. So much for standing shoulder to shoulder against that nasty Mr Hitler.

And who could forget Jamie Reid's stickers and their harmonious messages - Save Petrol, Burn Cars and Keep Warm This Winter, Make Trouble and This Week Only: This Store Welcomes Shoplifters that defined the whole netherworld anarchy of the punk-influenced early Thatcher era. Those were fun times. I was there in my guise as a never-to-be-successful musician. We were skint and living in squats but we preferred the term counter-culture to underclass. We never smashed shops. We weren't into trainers and TVs were too big to carry and they weren't worth it anyway if all you got to watch on them was To the Manor Born and The Old Grey Whistle Test.

They tell us it's different this time. People are more downtrodden than ever, but it's not the kind of poverty that makes your belly empty and your shoes in need of a newspaper lining. It's more an absence of knowing what one is missing out on and why. Perhaps you could say it's a poverty of consciousness. (Thanks Question Why, that's very useful. Now could you please tell Barney we need drinks and canapes here. There's a good chap).

They say that while clothing, sports and electrical shops, supermarkets and off-licences were targeted in the smash'n'grab fest, booksellers remained eerily unscathed. And there were stories of looters trying on clothes in H&M and then folding them into branded bags - not exactly Hustler-class in criminal execution, one might conclude. And what was all that about fighting 'the Feds'? Were these rioters so disenfranchised that they'd no idea their adversary is actually called 'the Bill'. No wonder they needed to steal televisions.

Labour leader Ed Mild'n'bland, (pictured above), who interrupted painting his ceiling in a tasteful magnolia low sheen to visit ravaged Tottenham where it all kicked off, concluded philosophically,

'In London, in particular, we know that there are huge areas of wealth that co-exist with huge areas of poverty. Those parallel worlds mean that [poorer] people not only don't have a stake in society but feel that actually what matters in society is something that they can't even reach.'

Do they really? And he would know this how? And what exactly is this 'stake in society', the absence of which causes people to suddenly up and ransack shops for a few days when they'd never done so before and then just as suddenly go back to moping about in an orderly fashion?

I have news for Brother Mild'n'bland - all cities have rich and poor people living 'cheek-by-jowl', as politicians like to say. If they didn't, the rich people wouldn't have flower shop girls to buy their morning button-hole carnation from or grease monkeys to service their Aston Martin. All over London there are elegant Georgian crescents and leafy streets of Victorian terraces next to crumbling council estates and other skimpy social housing and everyone rubs along quite nicely most of the time. And then, suddenly, they don't for a few days. WTF?

The Question Why and I are getting nowhere fast, and not for want of chardonnay, I can tell you. We scour our beloved Guardian for days on end. We cruise what little of BBC TV we ex-ex-pats are allowed. We have to admit we miss The Parliament Channel and that does pull us up short.

And then, we finally come across a flicker of plausibility amongst the conflagration of absurd generalities and panic strikes. We think our old friend Dave Hill is onto something in this piece in The Guardian. Dave says,

'The poorer parts of my profoundly unequal city are marked by long-term and deepening unemployment, ruthless, territorial criminal subcultures and a sense that the London of boom and regeneration has passed them [the disaffected] by.'

It's that 'London of boom and regeneration' that gets us thinking. The riot-hit cities - London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester - are all places that have benefited from major structural regeneration and all the social and economic wealth that flows from it.

The Question Why posits that this doesn't explain why Leeds, Newcastle, Bradford and Sheffield stayed indoors, content to watch the TV they already had - but he would, wouldn't he? So I send him off to get more wine.

I think Dave has hit on a nuance that no one else has adequately explored. There has been no shortage of people suggesting that money spent on reviving desolate town centres, building decent social housing, supporting young families in need via Sure Start and refurbishing recreational facilities that had been rotting away for decades has been pointlessly squandered. As someone who spent fifteen years working on some of those programmes, I admit I have seen a bit of corruption and some, shall we say, headcase schemes masquerading as 'innovative solutions'. But no one could seriously dispute that turning around the physical decline of London and other major British cities was a good thing for the well-being of their citizens, not to mention vital for their survival as places.

What Dave says makes perfect sense to me. There are, inevitably, people who miss out on whatever benefits might accrue from the sort of chaotic revitalisation that tends to be the norm in Britain*. And that void might not be material or even social. It might just be that improving the lives of more people in the most disadvantaged circumstances has the unintended consequence of further marginalising those who become a diminishing and more isolated few. Well, I guess we always knew the wealth 'trickle-down' effect was a scam. But what to do?

Dave Hill proposes,

'London must stop planning simply for growth, for efficiency or for aspiration. It must start planning for serenity too.'

I agree. But how can any big city achieve this now when its very survival depends on its ability to compete? London's forebears knew about the serenity factor, which is how it ended up with all its great parks and duck ponds. It's clear to me, at least, that the only way to retaliate is to meditate.

At last, here's the Question Why back with fresh supplies of wine. As I sip, I begin to slowly croon,

Quiet riot
I want a riot
Quiet riot
A riot of my own...

And as we're all getting nicely mellow I recall,

That's So Pants is five today.

* I know we're supposed to reference all commentary on the riots as England-based because trouble only erupted in English cities but, seriously, does anyone think this could not have happened in Glasgow or Belfast or somewhere in South Wales?

This is the way The World ends

2011-07-13T21:22:00.003+10:00

Boom by Pants

I don't know about you, but I'm for a bang rather than a whimper. And please let us have a big bang, because we do need a makeover in the world-domination department. I refer, of course, to the deliciously possible implosion of the evil Murdochian empire whose insidious world view has soured our breakfast milk these three decades past and quite possibly curdled our sense of common decency for generations to come.

This is the kind of Armageddon one can happily sit down to brunch with. One's beloved Guardian has distinguished itself with uncommon acts of bravery by standing up to the biggest media bully ever and chipping away at the weakest link in its seemingly unending chain of command - for absolutely years. The News of the World was weak in every other respect than that it was owned by News International. From such oddfellows is hubris made. So let's see how far the mightiest can fall. I have popcorn at the ready.

The Guardianistas were right about everything from the grotesque culture of entitlement and deservability that has filtered from the Murdochs down to their chosen and favoured to the absurd deference paid to them by the people who we elect to, you know, serve us rather than some random, self-appointed fief who happens to decide it is he who is the rightful ruler of all Anglophone democracies.

And now it seems, incredibly, that there is such a thing as an ethical 'line in the sand' beyond which a tyrant on quest for total power over what we read and watch in the best Orwellian sense, oughtn't to be allowed across. How good is that? I marvel at the process. At what point does the moral compass stop spinning uncontrollably enough for a cool assessment to be made? When a missing child's phone messages are callously deleted to make room for more desperate pleadings from her parents to call home? When confidential information about a Chancellor of the Exchequer's sick kid is used as a weapon to brow beat him into fessing up an exclusive? When there are so many coppers on the payroll that there aren't any honest ones left to make an arrest?

The pace is so frenetic, I hardly dare write anything for fear some new and even more outrageous revelation will have happened before I've managed to hit 'publish post'. At the time of typing this particular sentence, Murdochs Snr and Jnr and the flame-slash-corkscrew-haired siren who could be the cause of their downfall, (I'm already playing the movie in my head and wondering if Minnie Driver is willing to be made hard enough), have been invited to a 'please explain' session by the British Parliament. It's even possible that the Murdoch stranglehold on the British media may drop stone dead in a single afternoon. The words dragon and slain bob tantalisingly about together.

That it's come to this is amazing in a way that only seems obvious in absurdly elongated retrospect. The most astonishing realisation is that it's not the despicable way in which the Murdoch papers have openly and proudly operated that has occasioned their present predicament, but the fact that they've picked the wrong victims. As Hugh Grant rightly pointed out, no one cared when it was just rich, spoilt celebs whose privacy had been compromised. This is where News International launched into fatal hubris. And this is why the Murdochs should and will go down - because they didn't and don't know where to stop - and none of us can live with that.

For the past thirty years, we've been existing in a world where politicians on three continents have simply accommodated the 'Murdoch factor' into all of their dealings all of the time. Life has functioned well enough, but we've no way of knowing how much more pleasant it would have been without the unquantifiable nastiness of the Murdochian influence on the political and social landscape.

As I write, the British Parliamentary debate on News International's bid for full ownership of BSkyB is beginning and I'm just about to go to sleep. Hopefully, I will wake up in a world that is down by at least one serious arsehole. It would be lovely and twisted and extremely poetic if it were class snobbery that brought Murdoch down in the end; if the posh Tory PM and his cohorts banished the ghastly colonial on the grounds that he is ill-born and shabby and not fit to be invited in for tea no matter how much grubby merchant cash he has. What a perfectly Dickensian ending that would be. And I will dream on it...

An owlycat doesn't change his stripes

2011-06-21T16:20:00.001+10:00

Nathan Coley at ACCA, Melbourne until 24th July. Photo by Pants

Just when I think Barney can shock me no more, he pulls off another feat of staggering chutzpah. You may recall my mentioning a couple of weeks ago that there was to be a by-election here in Larrikin Shire, and that Barney had put himself forward. Well, the little bugger got up, itself a minor miracle as he hasn't managed that since September 2009.

What I mean to say is that Barney has been elected to our local council. It has taken some weeks for the official announcement as there was, unsurprising, a good deal of evidence of vote rigging. I don't mean to disparage Barney's achievement, but I should mention that his only opponents were a four-year-old with a criminal record and a three-legged Jack Russell. The Jack Russell put up a valiant fight and it was collar and collar there for a while, but Barney discovered the electoral commissioner's weakness for peppermint vodka cocktails and it was pretty much all over after that.

True to his word, Barney has employed me as his assistant and, as of three weeks ago, breadline budgeting is a thing of the past. He does insist on being called Boss Hogg in company, but other than that, things are pretty much as they always were with us. And just like any other assistant to a shady underworld figure masquerading as a hypoallergenic GM hybrid household pet who has just been elected to a local authority, my job is to pretend that his long absences are easily explained and that the vast sum of money missing from council coffers is off undergoing rigorous checks and balances and will return shortly. Un petit morceau de gâteau.

So now, with my first pay cheque in more than three years in my hand, I'm cashed up but time impoverished. What to do when a couple of $K could have put me on a plane to half the places I haven't been but I'd still have to be back at my desk on Monday morning?

'I know', I thought, 'I'll travel, via the magic of a musical theatre matinée, to Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century and I shall be wined, refined and back on the train by 6.25pm'. And so it was. And furthermore, I inveigled Ms O'Dyne to accompany me to Dr Zhivago.

This new American musical, set in Russia and spoken in BBC English, has premiered in Melbourne, Australia. That's globalisation for you. My guess is, given the scope and ambition of this show and the calibre of the people involved, that the Melbourne run is a very off-Broadway try-out.

To find out what I thought of it, you'll have to wait a week or so. It's not often these days that I get to see something ahead of six billion others, so I'd like to consider my review quite carefully.

As it happens, I do have a copy of the Boris Pasternak novel on which it's based. I'm going to read it again since I was probably sixteen when I was first swept away by this great astrakhan'n'anarchy saga.

I will say this though - if you live in Melbourne, you've got a few days and there are tickets available. I'll venture to suggest that, if you're reading this, you may well enjoy Dr Zhivago. I don't have too many readers in Brisbane, but ditto to you as the show is going there in a few week's time, again, for a very short run.

If you go by train to Melbourne from Larrikin's End, you have to sleep at the station as not even larks get up that early. However, once you're in your ancient carriage with the reassuring waft of microwaved-in-plastic pastries wending its way into the deep recesses of your undergarments, you simply relax and prepare to enjoy the fascinating sub-culture that is people who can't afford a car, even in Australia.

The matinée starts at 2pm and I'm deposited in central Melbourne at around 10.20am. My first stop is the National Gallery of Victoria. There's a new exhibition called Vienna Art and Design, featuring the work of Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann and Loos starting on the very day of my arrival. I adore Klimt and will squander a day on him later in the year. There's not enough time now to breathe in Vienna. I stop by the NGV to buy their book on Rosalie Gascoigne, published two years ago. And now it's out of print. Charming.

Undaunted, I move on to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) to see the Nathan Coley exhibition. ACCA is a strange sort of confection in that it's hard on the outside and also hard in the middle. The phenomenon of external hardness is not particularly unusual in an art gallery. I think of the Tate Modern in London for example. Then again, The Tate Modern was conjured from an old power station that wasn't going to be anything but an old power station and the only way of cuddlifying it was to put lots of mellow, curvy things inside, which the Tate people have done remarkably well.

The ACCA was actually purpose-built to look like a wrecked nuclear submarine, which is quite a self-challenge. And some might even say a pointless one, especially given the absence of even the slightest concession to interior mellow, curvy cuddliness. The overwhelming feeling is one of going into and being inside the world's biggest toilet.

I have seen some very good things at ACCA in the past, most notably the Tacita Dean exhibition in 2009 which featured all of her best-known video works. ACCA needs an artist as substantial as Tacita Dean and works as powerful and engaging as her Palast (2004), Kodak (2006), Michael Hamburger (2007) and Merce Cunningham performs Stillness in three movements (2008) to overcome the sheer emotional iciness of the building.

Robert Nelson writes in The Age, Australia provides the ideal canvas for the Scottish artist Nathan Coley to investigate the annihilation of civic space. Well, it was hardly CSI South Bank. I'm afraid a few neons (I am so over neon) and one little razzle-dazzle church (lovely as it is to look at) and even the razzle-dazzle room (pictured above), which was rather joyous to be in all alone, is not nearly enough to dominate the chasm that is the ACCA in any meaningful way.

Ms O'Dyne and I met for lunch at Shoya Japanese Restaurant, just around the corner from Her Majesty's Theatre. If you are ever in Melbourne and you like Japanese food, go to this restaurant. I warn you though, if your knees are as 'crispy' as the tempura of your dreams, the seating is challenging. The total experience is the sweet spot where food both delicious and inexpensive meets atmosphere that is quietly spectacular and service that reminds you that humans can actually do the ask'n'receive thing without too much fuss'n'bother.

My sublime Saturday faded into distant memory when I arrived at my desk on Monday morning to find that Boss Hogg Barney had booked me for a video conference from his Dubai World base. Well, I'm afraid I have to play if I'm ever going to get that trip to Vietnam I've been craving.

So, he gets on the big screen, and he says,

'Community engagement, is that what Moonies do before they marry en masse?'

Uncle Bob (1922 - 2011)

2011-06-03T19:30:00.004+10:00

Stars, Kodakotype by Pants

A poem for Uncle Bob

When I close my eyes I picture you flying
And I remember how you loved every kind of sky.

I imagine a spectacular view
And think you must have been tempted from us
By the sweetest of dreams.

Your long love affair with life ends
And life itself will feel the loss.

You went gentle, as was your way
Not into any old good night, but into the bright day
And I remember how you loved every kind of day.

When I close my eyes, I picture you flying
And in your incredible lightness, soaring
As only the truly pure of heart can
And l remember how you loved every kind of heart.

And I will carry you in mine
Until the stars no longer wonder what keeps them apart.

Can we have our balls back please?

2011-05-28T15:21:00.007+10:00

Heavy Weather, Kodakotype by Pants

The reason I mostly don't write about Australian politics is that there are only so many ways one can ask, 'what kind of ghastly, unedifying spectacle is this then?' We have become stupid-rich, like Texan-rich. And we've developed the politics to match.

And we don't care about anyone but ourselves. We have such a wealth of natural resources that it hardly matters if we squander most of the money it generates on crackpot schemes. There will, it seems, always be enough for a fourth giant flat-screen TV and a third SUV. Gosh, even I've got one each of those and I'm poorer than a church mouse's charlady. (In my own defence, I would like to plead that the TV was a present).

There's nothing to play for here, except of course, power itself. But here's an interesting rule of thumb for you, the more mineral wealth a country has, the more morally and culturally backward it is. Case in point - Saudi Arabia.

Why are our politicians so thick that they can't oversee the paperwork for a few thousand desperate refugees or settle on a price for taxing carbon emissions? One is tempted to conclude that it's because they can neither write nor count.

Retiring Labor minister Lindsay Tanner cashes in on this supposed mystery in his recent book Sideshow, the dumbing down of democracy. He says it's all the fault of the media for hounding politicians to the point of exhaustion only to ask daft, rhetorical questions. That does seem true, at least in part. It's not uncommon to hear, even on the ABC, our national broadcaster, a bulletin that leads with a 'so and so says whoseamecallit is a nasty, smelly snot' sort of a statement. Australia is, it seems, a microcosm in which all the foolishness of modern politics can be viewed.

We are in the perfect position to take meaningful action on climate change. We have vast resources of every kind and a tiny population - although they all seem to want to cram into one outer-Sydney suburb like elephants into a telephone box. So what's that all about then? And we have the lowest electricity prices of any OECD country. Yet, all I have heard for the last three years is, 'why should we be the first to do something about it?'

Well, yes, let's do ignore the fact that the European Union has had an Emissions Trading Scheme since 2005. It may be a fairly crappy one, but at least a great big swag of countries got together and made an effort. Let's also conveniently forget that China, the world's biggest polluter, has set a target for a 40-45% reduction on carbon-dioxide output per unit of GDP to be achieved by 2020. Maybe it is bogus because, you know, China is like that, but it's at least a token gesture further than we are prepared to go.

People in Australia don't want nuclear power. Fine. I don't want it either. But there's never been a serious chance of us having it because nuclear power is not cost-effective for tiny populations scattered over huge areas, even when they're supplying their own uranium. The only population concentrations we have that could feasibly support a need for nuclear power are in major coastal cities, which is exactly were you don't want a nuclear power plant to be located.

Why are we even still talking about it? Mmm, let me take a wild stab - because it's intellectual tic-tac-toe. It makes us feel good to appear to be considering something deeply important without having to go to the bother of contributing actual cogency and pertinence.

Australians think that the only other option to the non-option of nuclear is wind power and that wind turbines are ugly and kill the birds. Well, yes and yes. But we don't necessarily need to put them smack-bang in the middle of pristine wilderness areas or bird migration routes. And is it too pie-in-the-sky to imagine that someone, someday might come up with a more aesthetically pleasing design for a wind turbine given the right sort of incentive?

We never talk about cogeneration, the process by which the heat created by the generation of electricity is harnessed for district heating. Cogeneration is widely used in northern Europe and also heats over 100,000 buildings in Manhattan, the biggest 'steam' district in the world. It's perfect for high density areas like cities and big towns. It's especially good for places with long, cold winters, like we have right here in Victoria for example - where we also have rather a lot of dirty brown-coal power stations. But instead of using all that by-product hot air to heat our houses, we give it to our politicians to blow back at is with interminable regularity.

We have actually heard of solar power - in fact we're pretty sure we invented that and that our technology in the area is 'world class'. So, how many solar power stations have we got? Er, none. You go to Greece and there are photovoltaic cells on every single house in some parts. Even brain-dead Greece managed to build more than a dozen solar power plants in 2009 before it went broke. The Greeks may not have anything to eat soon but at least they won't die of hypothermia. Here in Australia, we think it's a wonderful idea and will certainly get solar panels on our house if the government sends a man around to do it for us for free.

We leave one of the biggest carbon footprints per capita in the world and enjoy one of the highest standards of living in said world and yet we really are so selfish that we think we should be the only country to be exempted from doing anything about climate change. So, that's basically why I don't write much about Australian politics. It's just too embarrassing to think about most of the time. Happily, I live close enough to sand to just go down to the beach and stick my head in it.

But all of that might be about to change. Our indomitable Barney is on the very cusp of entering the stupid game himself. If you think, as I do, that the bar is already dangerously low, let me tell you that you have not seen anything until you've experienced Barney doing the limbo.

Today there is to be a by-election in Larrikin Shire and Barney has put himself up as a candidate. The ballot was occasioned by the recent tragic death of Councillor Doolittle Furphy Larrikin, the great-great-grandson of Larrikin's End's founding father, Sir Joseph Furphy Larrikin. Cllr Larrikin was found face-down in a barrel of our local delicacy shark'n'neeps, while gallantly attempting to better his own Guinness World Record for the 81st time. Everyone agreed it was the way he would have wanted to go. It is said that 67% of Australians are either overweight or obese. If that is true, Doolittle would most certainly have been in the top one per cent. Barney says he won't even try to fill Cllr Larrikin's shoes. If he wins the election, he'll have them made into jet-skis.

Barney had set his sights on the Republican nomination for the US presidency. He is eligible because, like Bruce Springsteen, he was born in the USA. And he's certainly rich enough to pay off anyone that needs paying off. Then I reminded him of how unpleasant the presidential process can be in America, especially if one is 'differently equal' in the ethnic diversity department. I think it could be argued that whilst Barney most certainly hails from the USA, his claim to being 'born' could be challenged. It could just as easily be said that he was 'crafted'.

If Barney wins his council seat today, I will be taken on as his full-time assistant. Barney says, 'why be in politics if you can't seriously practise nepotism?' Besides, as I know all his darkest secrets, it's better to have me inside the tent.

Well, I'm off now to vote now...

The People's Toffs

2011-04-30T10:50:00.012+10:00

Royal Wedding 1 by Pants (Acrylic on canvas)

As expected, the royal wedding has rehashed all the usual gaping anomalies and circular arguments about the monarchy; its place and function. The royals are a fissure in modern, multicultural Britain, reminding everyone that the endless talk of 'striving for equality' is utterly pointless as long as they remain enthroned.

Here in Australia, we have a slightly different take on the whole confusing business. The British Queen is still head of state of this country - arguably an even more pointless situation in an independent nation. But, as no one has ever been able to come up with a workable alternative, we confine ourselves to exploring the question of whether or not the royals are 'relevant'. Well, of course they're relevant, in the same way that religion is relevant. Their relevance is sustained by their seemingly unassailable ubiquity. And at least we're not struggling to prove their existence. I have personally pressed flesh with more of them than is strictly hygienic so I can vouch for that much. They are a mighty and entrenched construct that no one has the stomach for dismantling, no matter how just-plain-wrong we might find the present situation.

Since I am not daft enough to spend the day chasing my tail in order to discover that it is still there, I'll get straight to the point. ('That would be a first', says Barney, a staunch royalist). My proposal is that the current monarchy be replaced with Pearly Kings and Queens, at least as a transitional mechanism until we figure out why it is that a free and liberal people requires the illusion of servitude to maintain civil society.

Pearlies embody all the fine qualities that are considered positives in a royal family. They work for charity and perform a ceremonial function, but without requiring silos full of readies to keep them in beer and skittles. They get about in black cabs and generally have just the one suit of clothes that they've designed and sewn themselves. There is still the problem of heredity as Pearly titles are handed down through families in more-or-less the same fashion as occurs within the nobility. And it is a strictly London-based monoculture. But there's no reason they can't expand ethnically and geographically, certainly not one that would require an Act of Parliament, anyway.

There are all sorts of practical problems involved in dispensing with the royal family, not the least of which is what to do with all those fine palaces and cathedrals. My solution is that the Pearlies could turn all the regional estates into holiday camps and take turns at caretaking Buck House and the Windsor Gaff. The Tower of London would make an excellent indoor/outdoor adventure centre. Just think of how much fun could be had bungee jumping from those towers and the internal walls are just crying out to be defaced by climbing spurs.

The royal parks could be divided up into allotments dedicated to the growing of austerity-busting, obesity-melting Swiss chard and curly kale. And the jewels - can you imagine the Koh-i-Noor diamond adorning a fine flat cap? What a picture that would be. I would keep the garden parties but I would add a jumble sale and a tombola. A plate of egg sandwiches can only be enhanced by the addition of a bit of a rummage in other people's cast offs and a wager on a bottle of Babycham. The cathedrals would make excellent music halls. Just think of how glorious Jerusalem would sound played on spoons.

Instead of having just the one king and queen, they could take turns. One week it's Crystal Palace's turn and the next it's New Cross and Old Kent Road, and after that, Isle of Dogs. They could get professional cockney Barbara Windsor to draw the lots, sort of keep it in the family. And instead of flying the Royal Standard, they could just hoist up a nice cheery kerchief. And there could be a rash of new Royal Patents - F. Cooke's eel and pie shop, Truman's Brewery and Fags 'n Fings could get lovely 'by appointment to their multifarious majesties' signs put up. It would be a boon to London's economy and a tourist magnet, especially the stewed eels with pie and mash - yum! They'd certainly put dull old cucumber sarnies in the shade.

Problems may arise with rotating Pearly royalty if they were called upon to visit Australia though. They may be mistaken for asylum seekers and dispatched to a remote island for 'processing', which, in this country, means a very long unscheduled holiday in a place that wouldn't be your first choice. No amount of claiming to be 'on state business' would wash there, I can tell you. Customs officers have lost count of the number of times they've heard that one and that other hoary old porkie about being 'at risk of death or persecution'. It's a lucky thing that the Britannia has been decommissioned. I wouldn't advise anyone to try to come here by boat.

So, who's on board with this fabulous compromise? Let's seal it with a song. Just watch the bouncing ball.

My old man said follow the van, and don't shilly-shally on the way, pom, pom, pom...

So Much For That

2011-04-18T09:49:00.004+10:00

Patchwork, Kodakotype by Pants

A few weeks ago, I wrote a withering review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom in which I quoted Lionel Shriver's assessment of its instant, gushing and quite undeserved Great-American-Novel status. She says,

"Great American Novel" = "doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man."

I then promised to read some Lionel Shriver and have just ploughed through So Much For That. I'm not convinced that Shriver is in a position to aim rotten tomatoes. No stranger to the doorstop genre herself, Shriver has delivered a whopping 433-page diatribe on the inequities of the American 'health-care' system that falls short of coherent and is often a rather-too-obvious rehash of all the usual clichés about modern American life. It is part-novel,part-op-ed piece and part-extended-blog; and does none of them well.

Handyman Shep Knacker has a dream to escape to something he calls the 'Afterlife'. Some years earlier, he'd sold his handyman business for a million dollars to a lazy-slob employee, a man he'd come close to firing on a number of occasions. The taxman gobbled up a quarter of it and the rest went into 'can't-lose mutual funds'. He set his family up in a rental home and he and wife Glynis made regular forays to off-the-tourist-map locations in search of their Afterlife retreat. But paradise after paradise has been eliminated for falling short of ultimate perfection in some small detail. So they sit in their Westchester rental and Shep stays on as an employee for the firm he used to own, in a limbo between past and future lives.

At the beginning of So Much For That, Shep has decided the Afterlife's time has come. "A 'month-or-two' had now stretched into over eight years." The 'can't-lose' fund into which he'd sunk his nest-egg capital has finally recouped its original value after years in the fiscal doldrums. Without consulting his family, he has bought three tickets to Pemba, one of the Zanzibar Archipelago islands. The third ticket is for son Zach, whose hunkering down in his room in the manner of a Japanese hikikomori, has lately been the cause of concern. Shep is going, whether or not the rest of the family is in. Very democratic. In fact he's even burned his bridge at work, directing a "so long, 'asshole", to the 'callow, loud-mouthed, ignorant twit' who had been paying his salary.

"... I'm afraid I will need your health insurance", Glynis announces coolly after Shep has dropped his Pemba bombshell. Glynis, it seems, has a trumping bombshell of her own. She has been diagnosed with deadly mesothelioma. Moving swiftly on, we cut to the home of Shep's best friend Jackson and his wife Carol who are dealing with an ongoing health situation of their own. Their eldest daughter Flicka (don't ask), has a rare congenital condition called familial disautonomia. Consequently, both Jackson and Carol are trapped in jobs they consider somewhat beneath them by their need for employer-funded health plans. Jackson works with Shep at 'Handy Randy', in a job whose protected generous salary and benefits were negotiated by Shep when he sold the business.

So, that's the set-up, all established in the first couple of chapters. Would you be surprised if I told you that nothing much happens for the next three hundred pages? I know I was, and not in a pleasant way. Along the road, Shep acquires an added burden or two. His self-righteous documentary-making leech of a sister tries unsuccessfully to tap him for money to buy a Manhattan apartment but he ends up subsidising her utility bills, and his ex-clergyman father takes an uninsured fall and lands in a gold-plated recuperation facility on Shep's dwindling dime. But the substantial 'middle' of So Much For That is, I'm sorry to say, wasted on rant that is long on scattergun rage and short on reason. Then suddenly, at page 303, and with no warning, the story wakes up and makes a frantic dash for the finish.

*Spoiler Alert*

I am going to reveal the endgame here because I'm beginning to wonder if there can ever again be such a thing as a Great American Novel, and I'd like to explore that a bit. This is not a new book, (published 2008). However, if you would like to read it and don't want to know how it concludes, stop reading now.

Shep's $731,778.56 savings disappear on medical treatment not covered by health insurance. He gets fired anyway for taking too much 'personal time' so ends up with no coverage. The net result is that Glynis's life is extended, in pain, for approximately three months. Jackson, inexplicably, decides to have expensive penile enhancement surgery. He opens several new credit card accounts for this. Unsurprisingly, it's not covered by his health insurance. Neither are the two unsuccessful restorative surgeries he requires when it goes horribly wrong. He makes a token effort to pay down the credit cards by stealing his employer's customers. The debts mount. The day Shep gets fired, Jackson calmly goes home, lops off his recalcitrant dick with a meat cleaver and shoots himself. Glynis sues the art supply company she believes is responsible for the mesothelioma and, in what must be the most expedient court case in US history, wins a settlement of $1.2m. She lies during the deposition. She knew the products, which incidentally she had stolen from art school, had been recalled but used them anyway. The money goes straight into a Swiss bank account. Shep takes everyone to Pemba - his dying wife, Jackson's grieving widow, sick kid and other kid, his own hikikomori kid and his ailing dad, whom he springs from the care home. The sick ones die off in short order leaving Shep and the widow Carol to live out their days in tropical bliss.

One of my main criticisms of Freedom is that it has no moral core. It contains not one character with sufficient decency or clarity of purpose to credibly explore the central question of any novel - how is one to live? I'm not against flawed and reticent humans, but there needs to be a belief in something other than oneself and one's inalienable right to get one's own way to hold my interest. So Much For That suffers from the same fault. It is ostensibly a book about the ridiculous health-care conundrum in the world's wealthiest country. One can essentially be 'ruined', in a quaint Dickensian sense, by the simple act of getting sick. Sounds like a great premise for a novel because that is just plain wrong. But, inexplicably, the author does not nail that.

Shriver has been resident in the UK for many years and has first-hand experience of a health-care service that is by no means perfect but is the diametric opposite philosophically of the American 'system'. In Britain, health care is free at the point of service. If you're sick, you get treated without having to pay. If you need drugs, the prescription is subsidised so it costs only a few pounds. It is not 'free', but 'prepaid'. Every working Briton pays into a universal fund that pays for people who get sick and need to be helped. If you want private health insurance, you pay for it in addition to National Insurance contributions. In the US, individuals pay into their own fund that only benefits them and their family. If they never get sick, or only get illnesses not covered by their insurance, private enterprise gets richer. Britons have the comfort of knowing that if they don't get sick, their contributions have directly benefited those who weren't so lucky. For reasons that are a total mystery to me, the American obsession with self-reliance appears to completely cancel out the human instinct to care for others when it comes to illness and disadvantage. Perhaps this partly accounts for the moral murkiness of this book.

The way that Shriver has chosen to handle the absurdity of people being financially ruined by illness is baffling to me. Over 433 pages, she could have conducted a comprehensive discourse on the moral conflict inherent in a market-forces-led approach to life and death. Instead, she chooses a clumsy device that trivialises her subject. The arguments are filtered through the prism of Jackson's angry rants directed at a non-critical audience of one or two, and usually triggered by the title of a book he will never write, like,

SOAKED: How We Wet, Weak-kneed Wusses Are Taken to the Cleaners and Why We Probably Deserve It.

and

How We Gullible Goodie-Goodies Are Brain-washed into Shit-Eating Compliance (or) You Have No Idea How Much You Could Get Away With if You Only Had Balls.

Jackson divides the world into 'mugs and mooches'. The law-abiding citizens are 'mugs' who carry the load for 'mooches'. Injustice is not seen as the absence of universal fairness, but the bum deal of ending up as a giver rather than a taker. Shep and Jackson both perceive altruism as a mug's game. This would have been a much better book if they'd disagreed on that point. But no. Shep achieves the transformation from mug to mooch in the end by simply abandoning the accumulated complexities of his life, leaving his car at the airport and splitting with his ill-gotten legal settlement. He encourages Carol to dodge Jackson's whopping credit-card debts by doing the same. It's arguable that neither Shep nor Jackson were ever good people. Both behave dishonourably towards their employer and think this is justifiable because, by their assessment, he is their moral and intellectual inferior. They are wrong on both counts. Handy Randy not only comes into money perfectly legally through a trust fund, he has grown the business and made it much more profitable. Shriver has shot herself in the foot with her own irony. I sure hope she's covered for that.

I happened to hear an interview with the late American author and social commentator Joe Bageant the other day. He died a couple of weeks ago - of cancer spookily enough. Bageant said that there were whole streets of houses in his hometown of Winchester, Virginia where families were renting houses that had been built by their fathers and grandfathers. They'd had to sell to slum landlords to pay medical bills. The slum landlord then rents the house back to them for a hefty price. Why don't any of the characters in So Much For That get politically active instead of dreaming about living high on the hog on a tropical island and having their pricks lengthened? Bageant wrote a lot about class in America. It was his view that Americans exist in a kind of collective hallucination where they think that because they can buy a new car on credit and a house on a hundred-and-ten per cent mortgage, they're middle class. They're not dirt poor because at least they have clean clothes, but they don't actually own anything except debt. They work in call centres, which Bageant describes as 'plantations', in mind-numbing jobs that they can't leave because they need the health insurance. Bageant calls this a form a of 'indentured slavery'. So where is Norma Rae when you need her?

I wonder if it's even possible for an American to write a Great American Novel now. Lionel Shriver couldn't find the objectivity or courage necessary to confront a clear breach of the social contract, not to mention the Hippocratic Oath. So much for 'never do harm'. Not only does Shriver fail to adequately tackle the central issue of the corrupt relationship between health-care professionals and health insurers which involves each pathologically exploiting the other and directly causing misery to patients, she opens several other lines of inquiry which she then drops after a few cursory remarks. She brushes over the insidious demand on patients with terminal illness to 'battle' their illness and remain relentlessly positive. She never convincingly challenges the ethics of routinely extending the life of terminal patients by a few months at costs into the millions of dollars. It isn't enough just to toss a few snippy comments into a character's mouth, not on a subject as vexed as the one she's bitten off. It needed a good chew.

It seems to me America needs a Great American Novel more than ever but is there anyone left with the critical chops to write it and will the country be able to take it? Shep's American dream is to escape the country altogether, forever. Perhaps that's all that's left. Maybe Americans have the health-care system they deserve. I suppose it's always possible that this is Shriver's point. If so, it's a bemusingly round-about way of making it.

Speaking of escaping, the late David Foster Wallace's uncompleted novel, The Pale King, has been lovingly assembled from drafts and notes by his longtime editor and friend Michael Pietsch and is just out in Australia. Alerted to this some weeks ago, I tested my local library's borrower-choice service to the limit by suggesting they purchase Infinite Jest. Never in a million years did I imagine I'd get away with that. But today there it was, all fresh and new. All one-thousand-pages-and-change of it. There's a budget surplus to be exploited there, I can tell you. I'll be straight back tomorrow to order The Pale King. Larrikin's End Municipal Library will almost certainly have the oddest fiction collection of any regional Australian town by the time I'm finished. Another pretentious doorstop written by a man? I'm about to find out.

Dumb's the word

2011-04-02T11:50:00.007+11:00

Fiddling while Rome burns, Kodakotype by Pants

In the last week or so, three speakers on radio and television have informed me that they were 'in agreeance' with something or other. Two were professional presenters and one was the spokesperson for a big organisation. Let us be completely clear, 'agreeance' is no more a word than 'annoyment' is a word (although it should be - the more words we have to express the state of being pissed-off we have at our disposal the better, in my view). So, what is going on when people who talk for a living are unfamiliar with the most common of expressions?

I know I'm not the only person to observe that the linguistic skills of the general population are deteriorating. I think it's true in all Anglophone countries. You're probably as tired of reading about it as I am of complaining about it. On the face of it you could say, so what? If you can roughly decipher meaning from a jumble of malapropisms, non sequiturs and neologisms, job done innit? Can we move on to cracking the global energy crisis now, please.

I don't think so. When people can't express themselves and be understood by others, they get frustrated. Frustration with being misunderstood can quickly turn to anger. Believe me, I know all about this, because I am very often on the receiving end of other people's failures to comprehend what I'm trying to get across to them. And it certainly does make me angry. And anger doesn't get anyone very far in a discussion. You need focus and good comprehension skills for that. And let me ask you this - if your boss claimed to be 'in agreeance' with your views, would you not think you were deserving of a better job? Perhaps your boss's job?

The first casualty of speech laxity is that no one you ever have to deal with feels obliged to listen carefully to what you are telling them. Neither do they expect perspicuity from the fullness of a sentence. That would be far too simple. Instead, they scan your conversation for 'key words' and put them together in whatever order best suits their own purpose. So, instead of both of you walking away from the encounter with a clear understanding of each other's opinions and wishes, the meeting turns into the opening salvo of a long email war about the substance of the 'agreeance'.

Politicians and others who are in the position of having to make public statements where the consequences may rebound on them in unpleasant and unforeseen ways, have learned that vague equals non-binding. It's much easier to slip out of a poorly formed fragment of a statement than it is to retract an unequivocal commitment. So now they routinely use the tactic with that express purpose, even if they do genuinely hold convictions and actually can speak with clarity. In the days when poor language skills were not tolerated in the public domain, this course would not have been available to them.

I find the disintegration of the language to be both progressive and cumulative. I have long believed that my own precision with the language is being compromised by the constant bombardment of bad grammar and incorrect spelling. I blame twenty-five years of riding around on the top deck of London buses and subliminally absorbing greasy-spoon menuese - lassunya anyone? I now have to check regularly the spelling of words I do know but not with the confidence I once took for granted. I can no longer count on the reinforcement of that knowledge coming automatically to me via reading.

I have recent experience of attending an institute of further education. I would describe its general written language standard as sub-literate. And the worst thing about that? The teachers wallowed in their own ignorance. They thought themselves far too arty and alternative to bother with such trifles as proper English. I'm just old fashioned enough to think that an educational institution has a duty of care to maintain a basic standard of literacy, much like a cake shop is obliged to stock cakes.

There is a particular example that will always fill me with contempt for their arrogance. I know I've mentioned this one before, but it seems to me a particularly pertinent case in point. At the very beginning of my art course, I received a handout entitled 'Complimentary Colours'. I immediately and diplomatically pointed out to the teacher that 'complimentary' was incorrectly spelt. It should be complementary. Her response? 'Oh, Spellchecker should have picked that up.' 'Ah, no,' says I, 'two different words: two different meanings.' She looked at me like I'd grown an extra head. Further handouts contained no correction. 'Complimentary' colours remained with us, presumably to give themselves away for free and tell us now nice we look today.

Perhaps you can determine whether or not incorrectly applied homophones require revision using your own self-styled value system. You could base your decision on how similar to the actual word you want to use the one you have used looks and whether or not you think it's that important to bother in the first place. Perhaps you can write a wrong, or indeed right a song and tell which witch is which with a blindfold on. But isn't that all a bit too hard, not to mention not especially egalitarian? Wouldn't it be easier and fairer to stick with the one simple rule and one indisputable source of verification - the dictionary - that have served us well for centuries?

One of the great misconceptions of our time is that simplification and casualisation of the language is a gesture of inclusivity. Wrong. It has not only made it possible for people with power to manipulate meaning with liberal use of obfuscation, it has robbed the people without power of the tools to effectively challenge false and absurd claims. Any politician or belligerent capitalist can flannel past a question from the current gormless breed of journalist by stringing together a few positive sounding 'key words' and trailing off with a defiant 'yeah.' Most of the time, they can get away with avoiding verbs altogether. Verbs are, after all 'doing' words. Wouldn't want to raise public expectation with any of those now, would we? And, they can freely misconstrue any counterargument put to them without fear of being called out on it.

Recently, I heard on the radio a candidate for an approaching state government election talking about what appeared to be quite a serious problem at railway stations. She said,

'Station staff have been stripped, which impacts on safety.'

I'll bet it does. Do you want idiots like this legislating on your behalf?

Roughly half the people I know learned English as an additional language. Rarely do they make mistakes in either written or spoken English. And if they do, they not only appreciate being corrected, they don't make that mistake again. It seems to me that learning English as a 'subject' rather than as a laborious task undertaken to reach the minimum requirements necessary to enable you to buy stuff, gives people an appreciation of the beauty and versatility inherent in its complexity.

It may seem pedantic to quibble about sloppy use of prepositions. But I am going to go there for two reasons. It is not difficult to learn the correct way and the correct way contains a logic that we must not lose from our language. The particular example I have in mind is one of the most regularly heard mistakes. It is far more common now to hear 'different to' or 'different than' in the vernacular. The correct assignation in this series is,

the same as
similar to
different from

Prepositions used to complement an adjective or adverb are supposed to relate in a logical way. They should 'agree'. 'From' signifies travelling away. 'To' denotes travelling towards. Why would I want to use 'different to'? It's an internal contradiction. And as for 'different than', why can't I use 'different with' or 'different for' or 'different against? As with the homophone example, who decides which variant is meaningful? Some thick art teacher in an Australian country town? Isn't it easier for us all to learn the right way to start with? It seems a nonsense to me to muddle through with having to guess what people are on about when we all have the elements necessary for complete clarity at our disposal. Plasticine comes in a huge range of vibrant colours. If you mix them together indiscriminately, you get a dull grey. It's the same with language.

I refuse to accept that this is a Luddite view. I am not opposed to the language growing and changing organically. I just don't want to wake up one morning to discover my mother tongue has turned into Jabberwocky. The addition of a new word should not result in the redundancy of twenty others. I'm also not theoretically opposed to some rationalisation, provided there is no attendant loss of dexterity. Here's an example of the mess you can end up with if you simply chuck a familiar colloquialism at a sentence without considering its individual meaning. I recently read in a British daily newspaper that the Australian zookeeper Steve Irwin had,

'died at the hands of a stingray.'

Stingrays have hands now? Interesting. What did it do - strangle him? Mow him down with an AK47? Feed him arsenic from a silver chalice? Admittedly, this crudity was in The Daily Mail but let us not forget that this nonsense was written by a person with the job title 'Journalist' and, very likely, a tertiary qualification.

A year or two ago, I wrote with some glee about Tesco customers who harangued the UK supermarket giant to the point where it capitulated to public pressure and rephrased its 'Ten items or less' checkout sign. I frankly don't care if the word 'fewer' disappears from the English language because individuals choose to stop using it. This will almost certainly happen because no one likes it enough to protect it. It's arguable that separate determiners are not really necessary to distinguish quantities that can be expressed as integers from those that can't. I guess I can get used to the thought of having 'less' apples today than I had yesterday. It might not sound so wrong in a few year's time.

Tesco, however, is positively Pulitzer compared to our supermarket here in Larrikin's End where checkout signage informs the customer that,

'Our checkouts are plastic bag free when you purchase three items or less.'

I've long since abandoned the expectation that hyphens should appear to lend sense to a sentence, especially in supermarket signage. And don't get me started on the abuse of the apostrophe which seems to have been relegated to the sole function of separating syllables in celebrity names, (Mo'nique, Des'ree). In any case, these are minor misdemeanours compared to the homicidal act that is the nonsense sentence. I did, in fact, purchase exactly three items from the Larrikin's End Lazymart yesterday and the plastic bags did not miraculously vanish as a consequence.

We want to be a little more careful about wandering too close to the thin end of the wedge when it comes to dispensing with our options for describing quantities. It was once a reporting convention to round up casualty figures if the exact number wasn't known and a bulletin was imminent. So, you'd hear reporters in disaster zones say something like, 'more than a hundred people were killed in ...' You understood that that meant 'on the information we have to hand at this very moment, we think it's about a hundred and maybe a few more.' It was an acceptable compromise to sacrifice absolute accuracy given an intractable deadline and the undoubted public interest in this kind of event. Now, you hear reporters using that locution for what would appear to be exact numbers. It's not uncommon to hear something like, 'more than six people were killed in ...' What is 'more than six'? Seven, eight, 4.3 billion? I recently heard a bulletin on our broadcaster of record, ABC Radio National, begin with the words, 'more than 171 people...' And, this morning I read a report on housing 'issues' informing me that 'forty per cent of households are made up of two people or less.' What does less than two people mean?

You'll know the expression, 'the price of freedom is eternal vigilance'. I don't think it's an overreaction to apply it to the preservation of language as it's the only tool most of us will ever have with which to challenge oppressors. It is also the only weapon that cannot be taken from us once we have it. There are some not very nice people out there who can and do benefit from our diminishing collective ability to fight bogus assertions with sound logic and verbal integrity. The pen might once have been considered mightier than the sword but the words it has previously wielded so deftly are now well on the way to acquiring the status of a condiment.

It really doesn't have to be this way. Let's solve the problem now, while there are still enough of us alive who can remember how the language is supposed to work. Schools need to get themselves back in the business of handing down the heritage of knowledge instead of doing whatever it is they do now, which I presume is something akin to what happens in a car factory. If I had a penny for every time someone has said to me, 'let's not reinvent the wheel', I'd be able to buy a very big block of Parmesan cheese. Yet, reinvention of a perfectly adequate wheel is exactly what is happening to our language. A lexicon that has been honed to a high level of sophistication over many centuries and is beloved by everyone except its native speakers is being rapidly deconstructed by the most brutish amateurs amongst us. Let's not allow this.

Can I get general agreeance on this proposition? If not, I'll have no recourse but to experience extreme annoyment.

PS. It goes without saying that any post I write about grammar and spelling will contain some errors. Naturally, I will check it a dozen times. But, one or two will slip through to remind me that I am far more human than I care to admit.

One hundred years of platitudes

2011-03-08T23:56:00.004+11:00

Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst by Pants

Today is the 100th International Women's Day. IWD rates a public holiday in Afghanistan, a place where women are afforded the highest possible respect, as we know. Also Azerbaijan, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam if Wikipedia is to be believed.

Forgive me if I don't immediately start roaring in numbers too big to ignore, but I'm wondering in what sense genuine progress has been made in advancing the international status of women over one whole century, which is a lot of time in anyone's money. To put things into perspective, the Animal Cruelty Act (UK, 1911) is also 100 years old this year and the ill-treatment of animals is so rare as to cause front-page consternation in that country, unlike domestic violence.

Here in Australia, we recently bagged a head-of-state trifecta. Our titular head is still the Queen of England, who has been in situ since 1953. In August 2010, we elected our first-ever female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. The constitutional conduit that makes this remote monarchy functional is our first-ever female Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, who took office in 2008.

Hoorah! you might conclude. But, actually, Julia Gillard's government was elected with such a grudging margin that it requires the co-operation of two men who would normally vote with the other side, and might well do so in the future if the opposition comes to its senses and ditches the clown it has fronting it now.

We have in this country a long history of tossing in a woman to oversee a disaster end-game at state government level. The political plight of Kristina Keneally, Premier of New South Wales, is instructive. She was recently given the job of leading an aged and corrupt government into certain defeat. And probably she took it because it was the only chance she was ever going to get to lead any government. And maybe that will look good on her curriculum vitae, but it sure doesn't send a great message to young women who are thinking about entering politics.

Today, coincidentally, a national survey shows the Gillard Government at a record low in popularity for a Labor government. This is supposedly because it is trying to introduce a carbon-pricing mechanism. Most Australians believe that no other country has one of these*, and although we love nothing more than to be world leaders, we are less keen when actual risk is involved. We would do almost anything to stop climate change, because we are such a caring and lovely nation, but paying a little more for electricity and petrol is an ask too far. This is not an intellectual environment in which advanced ideas like gender equality could really thrive.

It is painful to watch Julia Gillard struggling to find a workable persona in which to function in a job she could do in her sleep if it wasn't predominantly about sustaining a marketable image and answering stupid questions. Unfortunately for her, her predecessor's lack of a credible personality created a pressing need to prove she was not of the same mould. Little did we know the branded Kevin-07 was a model number when we elected him, er, it.** Julia needs to watch out for the Kevin-11 upgrade. I'm thinking its future ambitions do not lie in the after-hours grocery sector.

Queen Elizabeth II has been on the English throne since before I was born so I have no concept of how a male monarchy might look. Having spent nearly half my life in England, I can guess there isn't a lot in it. 'Monarch' would appear to be a genderless role. We still did Kings and Queens of England when I was at school and, in any case, I have Antonia Fraser's definitive work if I need reminding. Three English Queens have dominated the last half-millennium and all of them have wasted an inordinate amount of time on men's business, i.e. the gaining and protecting of territory.

I was living in England for most of the Thatcher years and I seem to recall that there wasn't much sisterliness involved in her long tenure. Spitting Image depicted Thatcher in a pin-striped suit. It's the same memory I have of her, even though her actual style was much more pussy-bow. There simply wasn't any personality to Thatcher, which is, I guess, why no one ever uses her first name.

The role of Governor-General in Australia is, basically, to be on permanent high-tea alert, unless the government of the day looks irretrievably shaky, in which case you can get drunk and sack it. Quentin Bryce seems like a neat and charming safe pair of hands, and probably not someone who would dissolve parliament in a claret-fuelled fit of pique or cover up for child molesters, or even speak her mind in an unladylike manner. And she doesn't appear to be very effective as a female role model. Given that power brokers were apparently very keen to see a woman in the job, where is the distinction that would have lent that ambition meaning? Or maybe it's simply a typically Australian hollow gesture based on nothing more than a desire to appear to be doing what is right and proper.

I didn't serve my own cause at all well by returning to Australia. Political activism peaked here in the 1970s and has been on a relentless road back to 1959 ever since. Today, the most-mentioned IWD event has been the setting up of a Women's Chamber of Commerce to benefit our tiny number of captainettes of industry. Presumably they'll be meeting in a Starbucks of their choice. Maybe they'll even set themselves to working out why it is that although women comprise more than fifty per cent of university graduates in this country, less than two per cent of CEOs in the top tier of businesses are female.

It's all very easy to get caught up in endlessly discussing whether or not there should be quotas introduced for female representation on the boards of blue-chip companies. The reality is that having a few women perched on rosewood sipping Evian doesn't seem to have much of an impact on how these companies operate. Gender wage inequity is getting worse, rather than better. There are more and more women living alone into old age and, because most of us have an inconsistent employment history, often at seventy per cent or less of the male wage, our retirement income tends to be much lower than that of the average man's. No one is seriously talking about the unfairness of that situation - even in the country that claims 'fairness' as the foundation of its nationhood.

So, is IWD really all about token gestures and self-congratulation now? What about the rest of us? At least 1970s feminism aimed to improve the lives of all women.

* Jill Duggan, a carbon-price expert from the EU's Directorate-General for Climate Action was placed in the unfortunate position of having to break it to Australia that we have not, in fact, invented everything.
** I've taken liberties with the metaphorical 'we' here. I was not actually living in Australia when Kevin Rudd was elected - but I would have voted Labor and supported him as PM.

She jests at Oscars that never felt a wound

2011-02-28T23:04:00.032+11:00

A family torn apart - Kodakotype by Pants

This year, the Question Why and I approach the Oscars with more than a smidge of sadness, for our little family is at war. Those of you who have been with us for a while, (and you have our sympathies for that), will be aware that our erstwhile owly-cat was developing ideas far estranged from his appointed station. It was only a matter of time before Barney would venture beyond his various oligarchical interests and into the world of show (off) business. We cannot comment further on Barney's Version as the matter is now sub judice. We can say, however, that The Pants Rebuttal is in pre-production and looking for investors. In addition, we are not best pleased with having to make our own eggs Vladivostok and fix our own drinks. We can only hope the judge takes that into account.

But we are troupers and we prime ourselves for Hollywood's fright of frights with domestic chardonnay, the memory of last year's atrocities still alarmingly fresh. Doogie Howser trying to sing. To paraphrase Nora Barnacle - Doogie should have stuck to keyhole surgery*. Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin trying to get along and be funny at the same time - like trying to chew gum and swallow it simultaneously. And those weird, acrobatic representations of the Best Picture nominations. I can clearly remember 'he who is now dead to us' saying at the time that he thought powerful hallucinogenics must have been involved. For the life of me I can't recall whether he was referring to the them or us. No matter.

It's a new year and a new batch of films and, well, quite a lot of them are good. We never forget that good films often make for tremendously bumptious ceremony and are licking our lips in anticipation. We find it remarkable that people who are trained, honed and paid several fortunes to speak, seem unable to when called upon to do it in front of an audience. It isn't difficult to work out why films cost so much to make once you've watched a couple of DVD featurettes though. Clearly, they're painstakingly assembled word by word from exhausted actors who've been woken at 3am, spent eight hours in makeup having various prosthetics attached, and then arrived on set only to expire after gasping out a couple of incoherent sentences.

A few minutes into the red carpet preamble, the Question Why and I start to feel uneasy. Something's wrong. No one is wearing anything even vaguely sniggery. No guffaw hair or lol bling either. We are already clawing for amusement potential. Is Mark Ruffalo really married to a woman called Sunrise? Her dress isn't brilliant, but it's no way Sarah Jessica Parker. Sandra Bullock's frock comes with its own padded seat but the front is gorgeous and she's so gracious and charming, that we can't contemplate finding mirth there. As Wimbledon veterans, we know only too well the value of a little padding when you have to sit and watch the same people doing the same thing for hours on end. Cate Blanchett's wearing a very elaborate pincushion. Perhaps she's got a quilt on the go. Where's SJP? We've got candyfloss withdrawal already.

And then it gets worse. The opening sequence, a montage of the nominated films splicing hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco into an imagined narrative, supposedly dreamt by Alec Baldwin, is genius. Alec Baldwin is the Hollywood miracle. You can forget your Mickey Rourkes and your Jeff Bridgeses. Alec Baldwin, like William Shatner before him, embraced and exploited his own caricature, turning a tank into a bank. The most fleeting appearance of Alec Baldwin now brings with it a virtual canon of cultural knowing. And finally, finally someone at Oscar HQ has worked out that movie people might prefer to contribute some of their CGI know-how to the party rather than squirm helplessly in their seats as they watch their movies represented in dance and mime.

The Question Why and I are initially elated but very quickly disturbed. What are we going to blog about? Normal service appears to resume after the montage culminates in a triumphant Back to the Future segue that transports our hosts into Kodak Theatre. Five minutes of asinine pantomime banter between Hathaways and Francos, younger and elder appears to be setting the world to rights. We are only halfway through tuning our critical forks, and then it all changes again. We haven't even had the chance to work out whether or not there's a joke in James Franco's Nana thinking she recognises a fanciable Marky Mark. Just to clarify, we do know that was meant to be a joke. But we are only interested in the joke about the joke. The jury is in the bar and ordering doubles on that one.

The award for Cinematography gives us an early opportunity for giggles. Wally Pfister (what a funny name, chuckle, chuckle), arrives to collect his award for Inception wearing an interesting (tee-hee) tiara,

Kodakotype by Pants

We laugh until we realise we are hungry (approximately 0.5 seconds). We have to admit it, we miss Barney's cordon bleu catering. We can toast with chardonnay but we can't as easily chardonnay with toast, if you know what we mean. It is with a certain amount of spite that we begin to hope that Barney's Version is as roundly snubbed as we feel right now.

Kirk Douglas hobbles into frame, having been described as 'a living legend' but looking more like he has escaped from the obits sequence. He appears to be a living, er, cadaver. Astonishingly, he is nearly coherent, and almost funny. And not that embarrassing, considering.

We are just thinking what is wrong with Hollywood when, Melissa Leo arrives to remind us of
where we are,

Kodakotype by Pants

Accepting her Best Supporting Actress Award, Leo says, and we quote in delirious verbatim,

'When I watched Kate [Winslet, presumably] two years ago, it looked so fuckin' easy'.

They bleep it in America but aren't so quick here in Australia, where we get the full joy of the first ever Oscarfuckutterance at 1pm. The Question Why and I are not flustered as we have heard the cuntutterance on The Book Show already today before lunch even, and not for the first time. But then Leo, seemingly oblivious to, or maybe empowered by her groundbreaking addition to the Oscars nomenclature commenced to yell, then cry, then yell again and wave her Oscar about madly and proclaim, 'It's about selling motion pictures and respecting the work.' In other words, an each way bet.

Shaun Tan wins Best Animated Short for The Lost Thing. We love him and hope he does as well as Adam Elliot, whom we also love. Toy Story 3 wins for Best Animated Feature, kicking off a slew of sure-thing announcements. The King's Speech. The Social Network. The King's Speech, etc. We fidget with our toast soldiers, catapulting bits of our substandard eggs Vladivostok at each other and bickering over whose turn it is to get another bottle of chardonnay. Russell Brand and Helen Mirren are funny, and sweet.

Kodakotype by Pants

Okay, bored now. No frock fright. Where is SJP? No one drunk or stoned or suffering from a discernible mental illness. What is going on? 'Are we the only scallywags left on the planet?' posits the Question Why. Apparently. Then, blessed relief. Enter Oprah,

Kodakotype by Pants

... dressed as a bowling-ball bag.

Then it's back to Decorum Central. Anne Hathaway sings a little spoof aimed at Hugh Jackman, who, it seems, should have been up there with her. He appears none too thrilled to be chastised but an actual scowl would have been nice. He's obviously still feeling a little sheepish after his own atrocity of a routine two years ago. What? They're demonstrating judgement now? Where will this all end?

Hathaway continues to arrive onstage in a series of what we can only describe as 'gowns'. This is actual finery as opposed to some pinched queen's idea of spiteful humiliation. The poise, the elegance. It's all too much. What were all the ill-advisers doing this year? (Don't worry, it'll look great on. It's amazing what a little Blu-Tack can do). They can't all have rushed to Colonel Gaddafi's sartorial aid.Where is SJP?

A medley of songs, arranged sumptuously for orchestra. A genuinely clever musical mash-up turning bits of dialogue into song. The Question Why and I are in uncharted waters here. We are having to resort to Thesaurus.com to supplement our vocabulary which, it must be said, has not been compiled for tasks beyond ridicule. We think what we are witnessing might be dignified, sophisticated even. And then we realise with horror that what we are seeing here is actually tasteful. We're not sure that this is even legal, which is why we've come to the conclusion that Barney is somehow implicated.

We can only hope against hope that sanity will prevail and the Best Actor and Actress announcements will be preceded by interminable, hideously gushing testimonials from a selection of previous winners like last year's which left us gagging on our vodkamisu. No such luck. Short. Tasteful. Appallingly so. This is like watching a theatreful of Roger Federers.

And then, a grand finale of statements of the painfully obvious. The King's Speech. Natalie Portman. Colin Firth. The King's Speech. The edges of our seats remain conspicuously under-occupied. We aren't watching next year, not unless SJP is in every movie.

*Nora Barnacle apparently announced, on the publication of husband James Joyce's Ulysses, 'Jimmy should have stuck to singing'.

Freedom - just another word for nowhere else to go?

2011-02-10T17:35:00.007+11:00

Escaping from a bad book by Pants

During the Christmas holiday I made a third, unsuccessful attempt to read The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed book of ten years ago. It's rare for me not to give a novel a fighting chance to win my affection. Few are the books I have failed to finish. Even when I'm not enjoying one, I persevere because a novel is a journey with the end as its destination and I have already bought, or more likely these days borrowed, my ticket. You can hardly say you hated Paris if you only got as far as the airport.

However, sometimes you just know you'd be better off deciding to go somewhere else instead. I won't be writing a review of The Corrections, now, or ever. I tell this story merely to indicate that I was not well-disposed to the author when I set out to read Freedom, his latest effort. And it was all downhill from there I'm afraid. I made it through all 576 of its pages. I did want to write something about it because of its status as an, or even the important book of the moment. It was done under extreme sufferance, believe me.

But this is not going to be a review, at least not a conventional one. There are plenty of those out there already. I did think I was going to write a review when I sat down which is why I copied out many, many paragraphs of the most turgid prose and dialogue imaginable, as if somehow expecting to logically dismember it to show you why I think this is really, really bad writing.

And then I thought, hang on a minute, this must be patently obvious to anyone who's devoured a few cracking tomes and has actually spent a little time listening to humans form sentences. So why does every literary critic from Äänekoski to Žužemberk think Freedom is not only a Great American Novel but the Great American Novel? It just doesn't add up. And then I thought, whoaa, something else is going on here, right? How else would you explain the deluge of unctuousness and grand claims for this novel. Supposedly, it examines some of the most important and vexing issues of our time. What? Via witterings like this?

‘In my own way,’ Walter said, ‘I guess I was part of a larger cultural shift that was happening in the eighties and nineties. Overpopulation was definitely part of the public conversation in the seventies with Paul Erhlich, and the Club of Rome, and ZPG. And then suddenly it was gone. Became just unmentionable. Part of it was the Green Revolution – you know, still plenty of famines, but not apocalyptic ones. And then population control got a terrible name politically. Totalitarian China with its one-child policy, Indira Gandhi doing forced sterilizations, American ZPG getting painted as nativist and racist…’ and on and on and on.

Quite honestly, can you ever imagine anyone saying anything like this in an actual conversation with anyone? What if I tell you that Walter is in fact talking to his best friend and former college roomie who lived with him during the time he's recounting?

There's really no need to relay any more. It's all like this, pretty much. The characters all sound like they're reading verbatim from either a personal growth manual or an inter-governmental interim report that's about to be justifiably shelved. And they all sound the same, for all of their miserably unennobled lives. Walter speaks in the same stilted, declarative voice throughout, his tone untempered by either time or circumstance. In an actual person, that would be unusual. In a main character in a novel spanning twenty or more years, it’s unforgivable.

Walter's wife Patty is relegated to the ungainly situation of having to explain herself to us autobiographically in the third person, ostensibly as a form of therapy. Presumably Franzen tried, and failed, to achieve a credible 'voice' for her any other way. It's quite pitiful to read the reviews that found this incongruous device acceptable, even refreshing. Given that the omniscient perspective bestowed on the male characters allows them to free range the most hideous and implausible of thoughts without the responsibility of owning them, it seems particularly disingenuous to confine poor Patty to reflection. And given the claustrophobic confines of her world, it's torture for the reader. Not Tolstoy. Not even Toy Story. Not even close.

The rolling exposition trundles by like one of those three-mile-long super freight trains leaving you, the reader, to play the hapless sedan parked by the side of the road while countless identical carriages of indeterminate content pass by. And there you are at a crossroads, waiting to continue your journey, apparently for ever.

So what's going on here? A partial explanation may be found in a theory proposed by John B Thompson in his book about publishing trends, Merchants of Culture. He suggests that publishing businesses are under unreasonable pressure to grow profits in today's stagnant market, a problem which he calls 'the growth conundrum'. They can't publish more books because each new book requires editing and marketing resources, which are finite and add to costs. And they can't rely on existing best-sellers to contribute to growth because their commercial value has probably already peaked. In response to this problem, they have come up with a profit-salvaging product - the 'big book'. Thompson defines this as 'a hoped-for best seller' which 'exists in the space of the possible nourished by hope and expectation.’ In other words, it's a bet, backed to the hilt by buzz and hype, which will hopefully convince sellers and buyers alike that this book is crucial. You can listen to Thompson talking about this phenomenon here.

It makes sense. Franzen won the National Book Award in 2001 and was short-listed for the Pulitzer in 2002 for The Corrections and hadn't published a novel since. Anticipation had reached a frenzy not seen since the days of Harry Potter sequels. Undoubtedly, it was the perfect 'big book' candidate. Any book successfully proposed as a Great American Novel is, by definition, a 'big book'. Popular contenders for the Great American Novel have been a bit thin on the ground since the turn of the millennium. The last book seriously canvassed for this title without a crown was Cormac McCarthy's The Road in 2006. A beautiful, poetic book, exquisitely and tightly written.

How times have changed. Lionel Shriver responded to Freedom in The Independent with justifiable consternation, "Great American Novel" = "doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man," she said. And she's absolutely right. This is a naked emperor of a book. I can understand the public being taken in, but the critics? So, what's gone wrong in the last five years? Is this really as good as it gets?

Sadly, I think so and here's why. I think the American psyche is in free fall, its convictions reduced to a defensive hotchpotch of beliefs, fears and hatreds. I think hyper-conservatism has fostered a retrofit of a pale-stale-male national perspective circa 1960, to the complete exclusion of any other viewpoint. It's like Mad Men leapt out of the TV and swallowed the continent.

I think the wound to America's cultural confidence inflicted by 9/11 was much more severe and lasting than previously imagined. One thinks of the devastation of the twin towers as striking a symbolic blow to American commerce but, in reality, the financial sector hardly skipped a beat. It was the artists and intellectuals who couldn't process what had happened. (I submit in evidence John Updike's abysmal 2006 novel Terrorist.) But the destruction of the towers was just a punch on the nose, the real body blow appears to have been inflicted by the 2008 financial crisis. The free-market economy in which the nation gullibly invested its self-esteem was found to be not only weak but corrupt too. There is very little goodness to believe in here. And clarity about the principles of decency is fundamental to the moral core of any novel about society.

The other problem, as I see it, is that the liberal left has lost the plot completely. A country where even Democrats are conflicted about whether or not it's a good idea to spend money on educating its children and alleviating the suffering of its poor, sick and old is in real trouble morally. And without clear conviction, there is no firm narrative and strong voice. What you get instead is a lot of qualified, bureaucratic, frequently incoherent hypothesising coming from so-called leaders. The arguments are not being distilled, dispersed and debated, leaving writers without cogent theses and antitheses to explore. Freedom is a book that doesn't seem to believe in itself.

I should add, so as not to sound completely anti to all my lovely American friends, who are amongst the smartest people I know, that the articulation crisis is not confined to American letters. Last year I read A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks. Here's a typical slice,

[Gabriel, a white lawyer, is talking to his client Jenni, a train driver of mixed heritage, over a not-strictly-ethical first date]

‘Do you understand natural selection?

'I think I was off school the week we did that one.'

'It’s like this. Species change because, as they breed, minute errors occur in cell duplication which give minor variations to the offspring. Usually the change dies with the individual. But once in a million times this tiny change gives the individual an advantage in this world, so he’s favoured in breeding. The change is passed on and becomes embedded. The species has evolved. To survive better than your competitors, you need only minute advantages. But some freak change happened in human ancestors. It was not microscopic, it was gigantic. We needed only to keep half a step ahead of other primates and carnivorous land mammals with strong incisors. But instead of that, we produced Shakespeare, Mozart, Newton, Einstein. We only needed a slightly more agile gibbon and we ended up with Sophocles. And the flip side of this colossal and totally unnecessary advantage was that the human genome was, to use our favourite technical term, fucked. It’s unstable, it’s flawed, because it’s ahead of itself. One in a hundred pays the price for everyone else to live their weirdly hyper-advanced lives. They’re the scapegoats. Poor, poor bastards.'

Easily as clueless and nauseating. Maybe Britain is suffering from the same malady?

Oh, and just one final coffin nail before I'm done. I'd have thought a 'big book' and Great American Novel to boot might have warranted a fact checker capable of spotting this howler,

[Walter's Swedish grandfather Einar has sent his relatives back home Christmas letters in which he]

‘lambasted the stupidity of America’s government, the inequities of its political economy, and the fatuity of its religion – drawing, for example, in one particularly caustic Christmas greeting, a cunning parallel between the unwed Madonna of Bethlehem and the “Swedish whore” Ingrid Bergman, the birth of whose own “bastard” (Isabella Rossellini) had been celebrated by American media controlled by “corporate interests”.'

Let's leave aside the gratuitous sexism as it is rampant throughout the book so why quibble about ONE instance? This is factually wrong on several counts. The child born to Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini before they married in 1950 was their son Renato Roberto Giusto Giuseppe, known as Robin. Isabella and her twin Ingrid weren’t born until 1952. And far from being ‘celebrated’ in America, Bergman was run out of town, not daring to return until 1958, two years after she had won an Academy Award for Anastasia. Given that this reporting is from the narrator, and can't therefore be attributed to character bias or unreliable memory, it's an obvious and gauche error. The prosecution rests, your honours.

Nobel Laureate Albert Camus knew a little something about freedom. One of the many things he said about it was,

'Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.'

Oh yeah.

I think it was the wonderfully witty Lionel Shriver who also suggested that a certain cohort of grossly over-feted contemporary male authors might benefit from closer editorial attention. Camus certainly knew how to slenderise prose. The publishers of 'big books' in the future might look to investing a little less on red wine and a little more on red pens, that is if they don't want to send readers spiralling back to the twentieth century in search of a satisfying read. While we're on the subject, here's something Ernest Hemingway supposedly told F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934,

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

St. Google of Oracle informs me that Franzen’s birthplace of Western Springs, Illinois is a mere 23 minutes (30 in traffic – provided you don’t get into a road rage scenario with Walter Berglund that is) from Hemingway’s in Oak Park. It’s a pity Franzen didn’t inherit Hemingway’s enthusiasm for prose pruning along with his natal zip code.

I feel I ought to make some gesture towards psychic cleansing, so I have today reserved from Larrikin's End Public Library two novels by Lionel Shriver. I would also like to send an open txt msg to Toni Morrison - please write 'big book' of 2011. Thank you.

Afraid of the light

2011-02-04T19:30:00.009+11:00

Max Afraid. Kodakotype by Pants from 'Mary & Max'

It was Plato, I believe, who said something along the lines of it's easy to sympathise with a child who is afraid of the dark, but the real tragedy is when adults are afraid of the light. Actually he said 'men' as I recall, but the Ancient Greeks had a nasty habit of ignoring women in their intellectual musings - not so different from modern Australia, actually. I'm afraid of a growing number of things, but light isn't one of them. If only there could be more of it. Sigh.

I am not currently an economically productive person by official standards. Quite a lot of that is my fault, admittedly – but not all. I would happily work in my old vocation of peripatetic (or very pathetic, if you prefer) manager of local government projects but no one here will have me. I hadn’t factored in the enormous cultural gulf in operational methodologies that exists between the Australian and British experiences when I set my sails a couple of years ago. Whereas most inner-London councils are stocked with people who write poetry and played in punk bands in their respective reckless youths, in Australia they’re all MBAs with a fetish for pinstripe.

It's true that doing a crazy art course for a year did nothing for my credibility, but after I'd survived that, I tried hard for six months, and then progressively less hard, until I petered into a state of thinking, well ... the right opportunity will find me ... it always does ... if I need it ... zzzzzzz

I went for a two-day-a-week job here in Larrikin’s End a while back. I read the stated salary as net rather than pro rata, and even then was shocked. I would never have applied if I'd realised the whole weekly wage was only marginally more than my previous hourly rate.

Having been shortlisted, I found myself facing an interview panel consisting of four people in identical button-down shirts featuring a nautically themed corporate logo. Two were men and two women - and you could hardly tell them apart, but not in a coolly reassuring, androgynous seventies way. It was more like Max Headroom had reproduced inappropriately. I thought I’d stumbled into Shell Oil by mistake - after the nuclear accident.

The interview lasted over an hour and involved scenario questions so convoluted, I wondered if I might go home with a commemorative mug for my trouble. It was the final question that flummoxed me though. I was asked to list the functions of a local authority. No one’s ever asked me anything like that before. Game over. I’m crap at interviews anyway and I’ve always managed to avoid them in the past. I came from an era when people just hired their friends. You know what you’re getting that way. This all tightened up in the mid-nineties so I switched to working contract.

I once secured a job where I was responsible for an operational budget of over 20 million fine English pounds on a project worth ten times that by dropping in for an informal twenty-minute ‘chat’ with the director, whom I didn’t actually know. Fortunately, he could read and applied this particular skill to the perusal of the curriculum vitae I had helpfully supplied earlier. This told him all he needed to know about my ability to do the job. Meeting me was just a formality to satisfy himself that I (i) existed (ii) was not obviously a psychopath.

I finally gave up on getting a decent job when I went for a position and was told that the departing post holder had a PhD in ‘community engagement'. See, to me, that's like saying you've got a doctorate in 'forming whole sentences' or 'not being a total cunt'. There's nothing that complicated about conversing with the general public. You just have to know what you’re talking about, be honest and not act weird. When the public sector comes on all corporate and academic, well, it’s no place for the likes of me.

So, I’m officially non-productive. That’s not to say I don’t do anything. As you know, I can usually be discovered industriously converting thoughts into by-product with complete ambivalence to the existence of the external economy. The internal economy, however, is a phenomenon I can’t ignore. For the last couple of years, I have had to rely on the state to supplement my subsistence with a partial unemployment payment. I don't have any bad feelings about that. Being an old socialist, I do not regard the word 'entitlement' with anything but affection.

The state clearly doesn’t expect much of me since it hardly ever bothers to contact me. It's an odd position to take, given that it gave me an astoundingly good education for free. I have a ‘workplace consultant’ whose last job was as a hairdresser. She works for a quasi-private sector organisation that claims to be not-for-profit but is ever expanding, so obviously does turn over 'a profit'.

There are three of these businesses in Larrikin’s End (pop. 6,000), contracted to provide ‘unemployment services’. This means they maintain a suite of offices and a staff of up to six ‘consultants’ each. You never see anyone in any of these offices. Their banks of computers remain unpeopled, as do their training rooms. I can do a quick calculation in my head and I would guess that around $1.5 million is being spent annually on maintaining these offices that, as far as I can see, only duplicate a service that already exists. Access to free internet and all the local papers are available at the public library.

I have given up trying to explain to the hairdresser what the ‘public sector’ is. She thinks there are only two types of job – trades or retail. I see her once a month and she tells me about her boyfriend and what new white goods she plans to buy. If she has any expertise in the general area of human resources, she's keeping that particular light firmly concealed under the deepest bushel it's possible to imagine.

The government agency that dispenses my fortnightly alms is called Centrelink. It sounds like a type of leisure park and actually looks a bit like an indoor bowls venue, except with desks and without balls. The people at Centrelink phone about every three months to find out if ‘my circumstances have changed’. I feel a bit like a Dickens character, sitting out my days in contemplation of my expectations. Like Pip's, 'my circumstances' lumber on without fear of fortunate change.

Today I received one of these rare phone calls. I had to verify the various elements of ‘my circumstances’ that are of particular interest to Centrelink. After confirming my name, age, address and that I had not done any paid work in the last three months, I was asked to confirm my educational attainment details. I relay this conversation, to the best of my recall,

She : You have stated that you have a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Me : Correct.

She : Is this qualification current or does it need to be upgraded for employment purposes?

Me : It’s a Bachelor of Arts. It doesn’t qualify me for anything.

She : Do you need to upgrade to enable you to get a job?

Me : (thinking this is a bit like the American in Paris who just asks the same question in English but much slower and louder, expecting to get a different result). It’s a certification of a general education, not a qualification.

She : But, I just need to know if it’s a current qualification.

Me : (thinking it’s very bad to argue with stupid people who control your purse strings but equally bad to indulge stupidity, temper my response with a highly ameliorative tone). Well, it hasn’t been revoked by the university if that’s what you’re asking. (Honestly, we are at a loss).

She : So, I’ll put yes, the qualification is current.

Me : Yes, I think that would be a good idea.

So, my question would be, just how low is the bar now? I’ve got a ‘workplace consultant’ who doesn’t understand the term ‘public sector’ and a Centrelink operative who doesn’t understand the concept of a ‘tertiary education’. Having had time to reflect, I’m guessing the basis of the question is to determine the number of people who require ‘upskilling’ to render them ‘job-ready’ but what’s with the robot act? Surely, someone working for Centrelink at client level has a basic enough education to recognise a simple contradiction. Aren’t we all supposed to be schooled for deductive reasoning? Did she not get that the statement I made negated her question, indeed trumped her question?

Not that I'm guessing she had a PhD in 'community engagement' but, if we're so into 'qualifications', how about a Certificate of Proficiency in Listening or a Diploma in Practical Reasoning?

I've never been afraid of the dark before, but hey, I'm getting there ...

Me Vs Me

2011-01-28T19:10:00.012+11:00

Nadal Vs Nadal. Kodakotype by Pants

My very long road trip is finally over. It was artificially extended by the extreme and prolonged illness of Ma Pants being neatly juxtaposed with major flood 'events' as they now like to call them, pretty much wherever I chose to lay rubber.

While I was away on my quest to make friends with the birth-mother country (which failed spectacularly, btw but will provide me with angst fodder for years to come), Melbourne friends Sheila and Paddy came to make their annual 'improvements' to my living quarters. They have always moaned about my tiny little LCD TV and tried various reconfigurations to outwit its general dodginess. I brought it from Britain thinking to use it as a monitor for the DVD player, which I also brought with me. Never did I imagine that it would actually work as a receiver, which it does only after a fashion. I don't really watch the TV but it tolerated national broadcaster ABC and public broadcaster SBS with less reluctance than the commercial stations so we got along just fine.

Sheila and Paddy took it upon themselves to purchase for me a digital HD TV the size of Bikini Atoll. At first I was horrified but once I'd watched a few matches of the Australian Open, I found myself more amenable. After they'd gone, I looked at the receipt, which they had to leave for the guarantee. It was just under $500. I was most relieved. I thought TVs like that cost about the same as a car. I'm also quite gratified to find that I can attach it to my decrepit DVD player. I might even start popping corn and charging admission.

It's an interesting, unstated 'social contract' I have going with Sheila and Paddy. Naturally, I was delighted to have responsible people occupying my house for a substantial portion of my six-week absence. But my friends see it somewhat differently. Notionally I could rent out my house for maybe $1,000 a week in the high season and, maybe, they think they're getting a good deal having it for free. But, of course, I could never rent it out because it's full of my stuff and not the stuff of holiday expectations. But they feel obliged to compensate me in some way, even though I've made it abundantly clear there is no quid pro quo required. Like most social contracts, it contains an unequal power dynamic. I get no choice when it comes to the largesse bestowed, presumably because if asked, I would say 'no'. Of course I would, so what would be the point of that? I have settled for being grateful for and enjoying various items that I could easily live without. This seems to keep everyone happy.

It's true that I have Spartan tastes which suit me fine but are probably not equal to the challenge of satisfying all categories of guest. And I have followed the Pants family tradition of harbouring the most uncomfortable of furniture. I don't know why this is but I did notice that having to sit on Ma Pants's veteran sofa for the better part of six weeks resulted in stress on back muscles that not even Gray's Anatomy is able to identify. Ma Pants is probably the most puritan of us when it comes to home-deco torture because she puts the most uncomfortable of her furniture in the places where it is most likely to be used. She has tolerable seating but it's all in the front parlour which, in typical Edwardian fashion, we are only allowed to use at Christmas or if we have visitors.

Because it rained for the whole time and Ma Pants was sick, I did not get out to do the jogging and surfing that usually limbers me up for the hardcore perching involved in watching DVDs with her. We watched films from lunchtime until bedtime most days which prevented my brain from numbing but had precisely the opposite impact on my derriere.

Unlike Ma Pants, I have something of an excuse for my deluxe deficit. Until recently, I had only the smallest of apartments and it's quite hard to buy furniture that is both compact and comfy. I have also almost always been broke. Since I have the new TV however, I have discovered that the sofabed settee I scraped up the readies for last year is, in fact, only endurable over the long periods of bum parking required of a tennis match when folded out as a bed. This is fine when it's only me but not so great when there are visitors who want to watch my now very watchable TV. So I am commencing internal fundraising for proper lounging furniture. The question remains - will I know it when I see it?

I do wonder why, since I so value being comfortable, it has not occurred to me before to break the family mould and invest in more suitable body slings. My god-bothering grandmother had a most grotesque white vinyl sofa of the type that makes church pews seem cloud-like by comparison. She compounded the agony by retaining its heavy plastic transport covering, so you were either sliding off it or sticking to it, depending on the humidity. I wonder if this is where it all started. One may self-allow a little goggle-boxing but only if laid out on a bed of nails. Or maybe she was just trying to train us to prefer church over The Munsters. Well, that was for sure a misfire strategy.

Among the smaller acquisitions occasioned by Sheila and Paddy's visit is a stylishly retro 80s clock radio bought from a local charity shop. This really is a gem. A Sony Dream Machine, no less. When I installed it on my beside table, I became aware of an interesting phenomenon. Ever since I bought the house in Larrikin's End two and a bit years ago, my favourite room has been my bedroom. I love every aspect of it from its crappy little en suite bathroom and tiny balcony with economy-grade ocean glimpses to its puke-coloured carpet and full-length vertical slat blinds. I realised I like it because it reminds me of a cheap resort room. The Dream Machine completes the idyll.

I daresay that one of the reasons I do not have comfortable seating is that I am nearly always lying on my bed. It is my preferred place for writing where I recline with lots of feather pillows and my laptop on a breakfast tray, which incidentally also doubles as a breakfast tray. I am writing to you from that particular location now. And it is lovely. It's very good to be home - alone.

To the lighthouse, darkly

2010-12-28T06:25:00.002+11:00

Kiama Lighthouse by Pants

Part 1 - The window

Moments of clarity aren't generally a feature of Pantsworld. The nearest I come is a durable and unerringly reliable flight instinct, which has been well and truly enabled by the proliferation of budget airfares. Timely consolidation is the only explanation I can offer for my relative financial security. If I had to rely on trust, reason and hard work, I'd be living in a cardboard box. Instead I live in a comfortable and roomy house with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the sea. Instinct is not a bad substitute for insight, if acted upon decisively.

If looking out at the world could provide guidance as to how to live in it, I'd be off fulfilling my destiny right now instead of writing this post. It isn't that simple. When I look out, I see only that there is something to be seen. I do envy people who have a life plan and/or a sense of purpose. It is tempting to believe that we are all wallowing about in a post-modernist fog of indecision but I've read enough books to gather that at least a few people know what they're talking about. My question to myself, as yet another year parks itself in a used diary, is why don't I? I like to think I know enough to at least place myself in the path of enlightenment.

I've tried to keep it simple. Easy on the Heidegger, Kierkegaard Lite, slavish devotion to ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone, that sort of thing. I even read Eckhart Tolle. Books treat the symptoms but they don't cure the disease. Besides, although I'd very much like a few hints on what a well-lived life might look like, the last thing I'd want to do is to try to follow someone else's rules. I have trouble enough keeping up with motoring regulations.

Part 2 - Time Passes

The continuing source of my angst is that I am yet to find a snug fit for myself in this big ole world. It's like being in a shop with every possible jacket, except for the one that actually keeps you warm. I have fallen between two conflicting cultural stools. Having left Australia for Britain in my twenties and returned in my fifties, I find I have missed several tectonic shifts in national perception, resulting in my having no idea what everyone is on about most of the time. The perennial Australian quest appears to be a search for identity and authenticity, which is not what I'm looking for at all. I know well enough who and what I am, I just don't know what it is I'm meant to be doing.

I don't think it's a question of requiring a sense of place or home. It took me a long time to work this out because the pressure to believe in 'belonging' is relentless and moving around has been so much a part of my particular sojourn. Actually, with one or two very short-lived exceptions, I have loved the places I've ended up in. In fact, I've never actually been to a place I didn't like. I'm lukewarm where Florence is concerned but I think that's because, by Italian standards, it's a fairly ordinary place. If Florence were to relocate to, say, north-eastern Victoria, I'd probably go there every other weekend.

I was happy in Hackney, London. I'm happy in Larrikin's End, Victoria. I'm even happy in Noosa, Queensland where I'm currently holidaying, even though the surf has been rubbish and it's rained incorrigibly for the last week. For me, contentment is not related to being part of a tribe, although it would be nice to occasionally find some people to agree with. I don't want for company and I certainly don't require approval.

Neither am I dissatisfied with anything I've done in the past. My only regret is that I could have done more of quite a lot of it without breaking sweat and I sometimes wish I had. But there is no missed sleep because of it, nor feelings of guilt for that matter. The discontent comes from a lack of understanding as to how all these fragments of toil and experience go together to form something I'd like to call a 'life' but feel it's not quite worthy of the name yet. It's rather more like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that remains shrink-wrapped even though the picture on the box is fading with age.

Part 3 - The Lighthouse

This year I have tried to read my way clear of the worst of the confusion, I like to think with some success. Mostly I read philosophy, artists' autobiographies, books about Australian art and novels. And a little bit of poetry and popular science. Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf led me immediately to To the Lighthouse, which I studied at university but had not read since.

The painter, Lily Briscoe, (whose initials I share in my real world existence), makes a decision to separate vision from ambition. Like Woolf herself, she works not for fame and fortune but to solve the dilemma presented by her very existence. If I am here, what am I for? Lily must run the gauntlet of societal expectation and confinement. Taunted by Charles Tansley that women can't write and can't paint, she doggedly pursues 'something clear as the space which the clouds at last uncover - the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon'. Like Lily Briscoe, I have no compulsion to compete in the market economy or hunt down the artistic holy grail of recognition. That 'little piece of sky which sleeps beside the moon' seems to me a far greater prize.

This year began with a head trip and ends with a road trip. The road trip was occasioned by the need to deliver three paintings to the family members to which they had been promised. These paintings, entitled Something in the City, I, II and III, came about accidentally. They were my response to a typically incoherent art school set task. That bothered me for the longest time but I finally got over it because everyone seems to like them, including me. I have decided to make this my 'oeuvre', at least until I can think of something I'd rather paint. Believe me, given my mental state for most of this year, this qualifies as a huzzah moment.

I hoped the slow road trip around the east coast of Australia might serve to ease the standoff extant between me and the birth-mother country for the last three years. Two weeks before Christmas, I packed up the Pantibago with a week's worth of clothes and energy bars and set off under the threat of torrential rain and flooding. My plan was to drop in on a few people and places that I probably wouldn't get to see unless I drove there and end up on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, where all the immediate Pantses reside.

For eight hours I drove through thankfully light but nonetheless dreary drizzle. An entirely unseasonal and positively unAustralian fog chased me into Kiama on the New South Wales south coast. As I arrived, it enveloped the town, transforming it into Wuthering Heights. To the Lighthouse opens with a planned trip to a lighthouse being cancelled because of deteriorating weather. Brushing aside any threat of a bad omen, I made my pilgrimage to Kiama lighthouse where I was promptly drenched by the most spectacular thunderstorm. It was so intensely electric, it crossed my mind that I could be struck by lightning. It wasn't quite the artistic awakening I had had in mind. After giving me nothing more than a sound waterboarding, the tempest rolled triumphantly out to sea, leaving behind a brilliant sunset and a glimmer of belief in a particular piece of sky.

More on the road trip later...

A drop in the notion

2010-12-04T09:56:00.007+11:00

Drops, Kodakotype by Pants

In 1953, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffered a serious stroke and was taken to his country home to recover. Under these circumstances, you would expect the PM's deputy to take over. Unfortunately, Anthony Eden was also quite sick. What to do?

The solution was to keep the job in the family and the British public in the dark. Churchill's closest aide, Christopher Soames, who also happened to be his son-in-law, sat in an outer Whitehall office gleefully making executive decisions which he then legitimised by forging the prime-ministerial signature for the four months of Churchill's recuperation.

Brushing the impropriety aside decades later, Churchill's daughter, the Baroness (Mary) Soames, ruefully quipped that people knew how to keep confidences in those days.

Fast-forward to the year 2010 and the WikiLeaks melodrama now stalking the world's stage like an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In other words, a highly anticipated statement of the bleedin' obvious with crass song'n'dance routines but the kind of train-wreck allure that compels you to line up for hours in order to throw good money at it, despite the certain knowledge that the only thing 'hot' about it will be the air it exudes.

The whole 'who knewness' of the dripfed titbits is a cheap sideshow. US embassies acting as a spying network? Get outta town! Karzai corrupt? Bombshell! Russia controlled by Mafia? Zdra-stvu-eetee! Berlusconi vain, feckless and anybody's? Mamma Mia! Gordon Brown rubbish? Here's a feather - go your hardest! I know this stuff. Next door's cat knows this stuff. The Hermit of Mink Hollow knows this stuff.

The main event here is not the information itself, but the wholesale capture and dissemination of it, and what that means for the kind of opaque, fork-tongued 'diplomacy' that is the status quo. We are all John le Carré now.

The lust for the head of Julian Assange is also a sideshow. It's a case of training your WMDs on the messenger. Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Atlantic says,

The "culprit" is the Internet, and how it facilitates asymmetrical power and transparency and removes any individual's responsibility for that transparency and asymmetry. No single editor or newspaper editor had to take the hit for this. No one could stop it. Even if every MSM outlet refused to publish these, the blogosphere would soon swarm over downloads which could be shifted from server to server.

The only way to stop this is to ensure that no one in the entire government has access to non-top-secret info (impossible) or that government itself return to the days of carrier pigeons. This is our new reality. The character or crimes of Julian Assange are a red herring.

Culprit? Now that is a word that implies agency, even if you hang quotes around it. Blaming the internet for this is a bit like blaming the washing machine for turning your underwear pink or the oven for burning your cake. And, as Sullivan points out, that particular genie is out and proud.

So, let's return to the Churchillian AWOL from high office. The proprietorial assumptions Mary Soames deploys to dismiss what is clearly a very wrong thing to have done are outrageously risible but the only thing that has really changed in the last sixty years is the potential for damage flowing from the badly kept official secret.

Officials still do very wrong things and expect to get away with them. We are all Spencer-Churchills now. The most junior public servant, not to mention your average fourteen-year-old with a laptop and the price of a Big Mac, is capable of the cyber equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

That world leaders and their diplomatic representatives behave like petulant children and worse is no big revelation. We all knew that. It is palpable. The real leak here is the poison that is leaching into every aspect of global society by the march down the ranks of such arrogant venality. When it was confined to the aristocracy, the bad behaviour was containable and didn't appear to corrupt everything. No one ever looked to the Lords for moral guidance.

But now every developed-world municipality has a frontline of robotic little Hitlers poised to pounce on the slightest civic infringement while their bosses bounce from conference to conference in the name of 'networking'. Ostensibly, they're claiming to be sharing around their 'best practice' but since no better ways of doing anything at all ever result, we can only assume these beanos are actually dedicated to shag surfing and job hunting. Accountability - don't make me laugh. The quest for personal power at the expense of decency is universally lauded, and it's learned much lower down the management ladder these days.

If there is now no such thing as an unguarded moment in diplomatic circles, then surely this is a timely opportunity for a review of personal motivation and behaviour on the part of those we entrust with maintaining global civility. What it should not be is an excuse to hunt down a man who sets up a website to serve the public interest on what appear to be trumped-up rape charges. Given that most rapes are cynically dismissed and the victims vilified rather than supported, it is shameful to be exploiting rape as an excuse for a show trial in this context.

There's an old saying, 'it's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the world'. My message to all the reprobates whose tongues got caught in the WikiLeaks mincing machine would be, if you don't want your ships sunk, keep your lips together and your fat fingers away from the keyboard, especially after you've had a few. And if you don't want to come across as an arsehole, don't act like one. Much more efficient to change the culture than to go back to using carrier pigeons. Less messy too...

Snape Charmer

2010-11-25T13:05:00.015+11:00

Snake Charmers, Jaipur, India by Pants

There may be some karmic explanation for why I always pick a freak scorcher of a day to book my car in for its annual service, but since I'm not naturally a tuned-in type of person, I cannot intuit it. I chose a mechanic in the next town rather than one right here in Larrikin's End because he came enthusiastically recommended, and because 'mechanics' in Larrikin's End seem only to occupy garages when the fishing is no good.

I have learned it is best not to take your car anywhere near a garage that is not endorsed by at least three people who can prove they have no immediate relatives working there. I keep going to my garage because any mechanic who can look under your car and find nothing to tinker with is the motoring equivalent of a field of shamrocks made out of real emeralds.

Having alighted from the Pantibago into a day hot enough to qualify as a tandoori oven, I realised my only chance of survival was to find a place in which to pass the requisite three hours of servicing time. Since I did not have any chicken about my person, opening a tandoori stall was out of the question. I would need to find other employment for the duration, preferably in a freezer somewhere. The coldest place in town is always a cinema, so that is where I headed. As luck would have it, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 was just powering up.

I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter books, by which I mean, I tried to read the first one and gave up after a few chapters. In the world of Pants, that qualifies as significant rejection. It is rare for me to give up on a book. We have to be irreconcilably incompatible for me to withdraw my bookmark with this level of haste. I do, however, love the films and have seen all of them - some more than once. The relevance of this concentration of engagement becomes apparent as I'm watching the film as I've already been exposed to a number of reviews.

They were carping on a scale stretching from niggling to downright affronted. Some claimed the plot is hard to follow and relies too heavily on revelations contained in previous films. Well, yes, that's series for you. Recaps and flashbacks disrupt the forward motion and I'm glad the makers of the Harry Potter films have resisted the temptation to handhold the uninitiated. I don't have much of a sense of humour where condescension is concerned and I figure if I can remember a few basic plot lines, then anyone can. I do not want to be paying again for something I've already seen.

Granted, the film is short on those ingenious little magic tricks and trappings that abounded in the first couple of films. And if that's the thing that levitates your enchanted galleon, then you may be disappointed. There is no gratuitous gadgetry here. And there is no Hogwarts in which to stage all those grand ceremonial set pieces that temper the tone. In this episode Harry, Hermione and Ron are cast adrift on a creepy treasure hunt to locate and destroy a series of 'horcruxes' - objects in which über baddie Voldemort has secreted fragments of his soul. All part of his grand plan to attain immortality.

There never has been anything particularly original about the Harry Potter series. JK Rowling's talent as a storyteller is that she can effortlessly lever in common and recognisable tropes from other stories or historical events, needing only a passing reference to import their meaning.

The films are even better at this type of shorthand. The presence of a black leather trench coat on a Ministry of Magic employee signals just how sinister and serious the pogrom on 'mudbloods' is likely to become. At one point, Harry wears a horcrux in the form of a locket on a chain around his neck. He becomes aggressive towards Hermione who orders him to take it off. She needs only to verbalise this and we immediately recognise that, like Frodo's ring, the locket corrupts. No lengthy explanation is needed.

The narrative niftiness and an almost complete absence of any other characters besides the teen trinity leaves a lot of space for some introspection. This hasn't gone down well with everyone. Some reviewers have scoffed at the long, lingering looks and painfully strained relationships. HP7P1 has a cinematic eternity to travel before it reaches the time-frozen excesses of Twilight gazes. Let's not lose that perspective. We've seen these kids grow and their burdens grow with them.

As dramatic trajectories go, I think the film has the character development about right at this point. When you're sixteen-going-on-seventeen, life really does slow to a torpid pace as you drag your adolescent self through those torturous final years of schooling towards adulthood and the freedoms it represents. And no one does tell you anything and you really do have to work the world out for yourself. And even if adults did try to advise you, you would never, ever have given them the time of day.

In one scene Harry leads Hermione into a tension-busting dance. They are holed up in a tent in the New Forest. Ron has scarpered and both are feeling mentally and physically beat. Harry extends his hand with youthful manliness. Hermione, for once, suppresses her inner control freak. They dance along to some music playing on an old-fashioned battery-operated radio, echoing a thousand films past. But this is no seduction scene. What we get is neither sexy nor romantic. It's the senior prom these kids were never able to have. This is the dance of transition. A small gesture from the seventeen-year-old who is destined to battle evil on behalf of all humanity, whether magical or muggle, indicates a rite of passage traversed. And it doesn't call for compromise on the part of Hermione. What we have here is a maturing of equals. In a cinemascape awash with girls depicted as legs with lips, I'm personally very glad of the individual that is Hermione Granger.

The parking of adult business while all this growing up is occurring is quite brilliant, I think. We are reminded at intervals that the mature-aged constants are mobilising on their various sides. The exception is Hogwarts head Albus Dumbledore who is killed by the series chameleon Severus Snape in the previous episode, Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. Snape has been, from the very beginning, the bellwether character, the one who is always on the winning side. He is the one you know will always return in some pivotal way to turn the action.

Snakes have been used sparingly over the course of this series. But when they do make an appearance, they scale up, (sorry) the fear factor exponentially. Harry Potter, as any gule kno, is a parselmouth - someone who can speak and understand the language of snakes. He discovers this ability early on via a quality encounter with a friendly giant python at London Zoo. By the time we reach Voldemort's conference table in this penultimate episode, the serpent has become a terrifying enforcer of master's will.

There is no great mystery to the quest of Harry Potter. He's going to save the world. We all know that. It's what heroes are created to do. The skill involved in building suspense despite the outcome being uncontested territory is not to be underestimated. I was perfectly happy to have arrived at the destination at which Part 1 terminates and very much enjoyed the ride. It's selling this film short to dismiss it as 'one for true fans only'. It's way better than that. But it is a serial episode and you do need to have been following the story. It seems bizarre to me that reviewers should claim a right to expect that a cinema film must be comprehensible as a stand-alone product when it clearly markets itself as one segment of a whole. Serialisation is a tradition that is centuries old and one that has always met with popular appeal.

The decision by Warner Bros. to split this final book into two movies may well have been motivated by a desire for greater profit. The last time I looked, film companies were not in the primary business of elevating public culture. It's a bit like chiding a casino for promoting gambling. It's not like we're being horribly and cynically exploited here. I doubt there will be many people moaning that they'd have preferred to see a movie series that has transfixed a decade done and dusted this year.

I'm looking forward to the 2011 finale. As I said, I haven't read the books, but I know what will happen. I just don't know how it will happen. I do know that the Pantibago will need a service about the time it comes out though. Wainsdale will have to wait until 2012 for that tandoori stall...

I could whale away the hours

2010-11-14T19:47:00.001+11:00

Beached by Pants

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. I can only say I identify with poor Jonah. I very often feel that I have been swallowed by a whale. I even more often feel the need to recount the story of what happened to me inside that whale. It strikes me that everyone's experience as temporary krill is going to be different.

Last year I complained at some length about the interminability in which time itself seemed to have been frozen by dint of my concurrent attendance at that wretched art course. A leviathan in the pantheon of learning conveyances if ever there was one. But at least I got a lot done. It may not have been work I particularly relished doing, but it got completed. This year I can make no such claim. Unfortunately, when left to my own devices, I achieved very little.

I can make a case for having my head so jiggered and my spirit so buggered that it has taken all this time to get over it, but not even I entirely swallow that. It is true that I needed to step back and assess the assertion that it is better to be doing something than nothing.

I have always notionally supported that idea, not least of all because it feels better to have done something than to have let a day, or a week or - horreur - a year pass without something to show for it. And it certainly feels good to corral a conundrum into a neat little picture or phrase.

A work of art is the map of a thought. Or, at least, that's what I think it should be. I guess the begged question was, and is, does the quality of that thought matter? Is its origin pertinent?

Last year I created a series of pictures that turned out rather well. I liked them and so did the teachers. Mistress of the brush even tossed about some hints that she would consider buying one. I was mortified and stamped on the suggestion with both feet. The nerve!

Before you move to stage an intervention, let me elaborate. As much as I like the pictures, they are the solution to a fabricated problem, one that would not have existed had the teacher not contrived to invent it. In fact, the gestation of these pictures was so random and inane, it's a wonder they turned into anything at all. Can it even be art if there is no causal link to deliberate intent?

That hardly seems a fitting overture to a life's work to me. That the teacher even entertained the thought of owning such a thing struck me as distastefully vain. I, of course, can overcome my disdain as any splash of colour on the vast deserts of magnolia that pass for walls here at Seat of Pants can only be considered an improvement.

I suppose it's a question of 'process'. Always a difficult consideration for me. I know well enough that the perfect idea is likely to be on the bus after the one Godot caught. And there is merit and satisfaction in turning a naff idea into a painting decent enough to not shame a wall. But what really troubled me about the whole 'process' was that where teachers appeared to see some USP-shaped niche based on something a student was coerced into producing under entirely manufactured pressure, all I saw was the total absence of vocational inspiration and that just wasn't going to work for me.

So I haven't painted at all this year. But I have written, a bit. Yes, I am struggling through revisions on my third attempt at a publishable novel while staving off the temptation to start on numbers four, five and six, which all have the cleverest titles ever conceived.

Everything I've done this year has sort of sucked which is the opposite of what you'd expect from a whale ride. Sadly, all the blow is in the past, I fear.

In a vegetative state

2010-10-25T18:41:00.007+11:00

Every Saturday I buy The Weekend Australian newspaper. It's bilge but it's the best on offer. It has the whole week's TV in it. I don't watch the TV but it's nice to know I'm not missing anything.

It has two Sudoku puzzles which can take me several days to solve. Usually I get the 'advanced' one out before I conquer the 'easy'. Make of that what you will. Mostly I read the newspapers on-line, but the weekend seems to demand some unwieldy broadsheeting, at least in my world.

So I open up The Weekend Australian with well-honed low expectations and I find this gem,

New investigations team

The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell and editor Paul Whittaker today announce the formation of a national investigations team to leverage the newspaper's story-breaking credentials.

'To leverage the newspaper's story-breaking credentials.' Let us stop for a minute and try to imagine the intellectual environment that might have produced such erudition. Barney is fairly sure Polish vodka was involved.

Intrigued, I read on expecting to discover that the esteemed editors have assembled a team comprising Woodward and Bernstein, Erin Brockovich and Julian Assange but were just being extremely modest about it, as is the Australian way.

But no, what Mssrs Mitchell and Whittaker are attempting to articulate is the fine detail of an office reorganisation. What they appear to be saying is that four people who already work at The Australian will be sitting together in the future.

Leading by example, Mitchell and Whittaker subject themselves to exacting self-scrutiny when defining the role of this new team,

'The Australian has a proud record of investigative journalism and we are now building on that with a dedicated team of first-rate reporters who will have a wide remit.'

Well, how reassuring is that? It's excellent to know that people who have undergone the terrible disruption of having to move desks will pretty much be able to do as they please by way of recompense.

You are wondering how I'm going to tie in the vegetables? Does the word Rupert mean anything to you?

We low-income earners for whom pension eligibility is increasingly reliant on Leprechaun connections, pan for quality bargains like movie people scout for coordinated infants to complete their rainbow families. Our local 'supermarket' (I don't know when the word supermarket came into use for a shop that's really quite small, but I don't have any other word to describe what, in Larrikin's End, passes for a shop that will stand between you and starvation provided there is not a major sporting event on).

Sorry, that diversion was so long, I think I might have to abandon it. It reminded me that in the film Up in the Air, Alex (Vera Farmiga) calls Ryan (George Clooney), 'a parenthesis' and all I can think of is this is George fuckin' Clooney. So what is her idea of concrete sentence? That man I would like to meet.

Sad to say that George was not included in the vegetable selection above, and it was no worse for it, given that I'm not eating meat these days. Sorry George.

Larrikin's End Shopahoy, (well, it is a fishing town), randomly offers shoppers the chance to grab as many fresh fruit and vegetables as they can cram into a bag for one Aussie dollar. They never advertise when they're going to do this for obvious reasons. Today I was lucky enough to be right there before all the good stuff had gone. That's two bags full above. Two dollars. The mango alone is worth that. As you're reading this, it's almost all been cooked up in sauces and soups and quiches.

Shopahoy is not my only source of glee bargaining. Larrikin's End Library regularly de-accessions books and sells on donations that don't fit their strict selection criteria (westerns, romance, fishing, golf). Today I got a book on Turner for $1 and Plum Sykes's Bergdorf Blondes for 50c.

The Weekend Australian costs $2.60. I can't eat it but I can burn it. Most of it will get pulped to keep me warm next winter.

Hail Mary full of pants

2010-10-17T14:30:00.007+11:00

Mary MacKillop by Pants

We Australians simply love to be the centre of world attention, and we don't scrutinise too closely the credibility of its premise. I submit in evidence the sisters Minogue.

Speaking of sisters, the cause célèbre this sabbath is the canonisation of Mother Mary MacKillop, founder of the order of The Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart or, as we compulsive diminutisers like to call them, The Brown Joeys. To this end, throngs of salivating believers and non-believers alike have gathered in Rome and all related orbits.

Interestingly, when it comes to sainthood, which is right up there with virgin birth at the leg-pulling end of the belief spectrum, one does not have to be an adherent to join in the celebration, apparently. The Catholic Church has shown a great generosity of spirit in offering Mother Mary as a saint for all Australians.

Speaking at a mass in Sydney, Father Graeme Malone gushed,

"One of the important things about a canonisation is that ordinary events and ordinary connections in life take on a grace dimension. Our history becomes holy while our present remains messy."

"Today we reflect on many things but especially on Mary's constant pursuit of justice even beyond personal persecution and a misunderstanding which in part evoked her excommunication from a church she deeply loved."

Well yes, that's all well and good. Mary MacKillop did open schools and hospitals and orphanages and shelters for the homeless and vulnerable women. And she did achieve independence for her order from the Pope to keep it from being corrupted by a spiteful priesthood. And she was ex-communicated for daring to challenge a paedophile priest. And she did this all over a hundred years ago before even the first wave of feminism. And she did it from within a stultifying organisation and in defiance of a Goliathan power base.

But this is not why she's being made a saint. No, she is being canonised because a couple of people got sick and then got well and they also happened to have prayed to Mary MacKillop. In the absence of any medical explanation, Mary is the default penicillin. Just so we're clear, the entire world, (so we are led to believe), is preparing garlands not for provable and proven acts of courage, compassion and all round jolly goodness, but for events with which a causal link to Mary MacKillop never has and never can be evidenced. She was, after all, dead when these events known as miracles occurred, which in my admittedly secular view, is a fairly big minus when it comes to demonstrating agency.

To be fair, it does take a long time to ascend to the canon of saintliness - well over a hundred years in MacKillop's case. It is quite unlike a Nobel Peace Prize, for example, where you can have one foistered upon you before you've actually done anything. I'm sure Barack Obama would have preferred to slate up a few more achievements in addition to being a pale enough black man to get elected President of the United States.

And you have to be dead to be a saint as opposed to being barely born to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Henry Kissinger won one and there is no evidence that he was ever actually born. It's interesting to note that very few women have won a Nobel Peace Prize, given that we start so few wars. Just sayin'.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded every year and sometimes it's quite hard to find a man who can stay out of mischief for that long. Sainthood isn't hampered by deadlines and, by Jehovah, doesn't that show. Some popes have a taste for it and it seems a fast track has been installed at the Vatican since the last white smoke event. Perhaps it's a case of new graces, new faces and god only knows (sorry Brian), the church has sustainability issues. There was a backlog to be churned through, but the current pontiff's appetite for ceremony has clearly benefited our Mother Mary.

It is a long and winding road. First comes death, obviously. You can do nothing to further your ambitions in Simon Templardom until you've firmly carked it. After a decent interval, say seventy years, comes the beatification or, as we Aussies prefer, being 'rendered beaut'. Mary reached that milestone in 1995, after several arch plots by evil scheming clergy to besmirch her memory. How she must have fumed up there in her new home of Hevnabuv and determined to get her own back by randomly selecting terminally ill cancer patients to ...

Enough. So why are we still playing this silly game? It's like saying it's only possible to have sex if you have completed a few rounds of Twister as a preamble. It's as if the children are keeping the Santa myth alive for fear of breaking the parents' dear little hearts. Can we not just grow up and honour Mary MacKillop for being a real woman who dedicated her life to the genuine care of humans with whom she actually came into physical contact? And what's with the Catholic Church and its sheepish obfuscation - who does it think it is, JM flippin' Barrie?

Sealing fan

2010-09-27T13:49:00.015+10:00

The seals of Larrikin's End by Pants

Herman Boerhaaven, famed botanist, humanist, founder of clinical teaching and subject of a biography by Dr Samuel Johnson said,

The great seal of truth is simplicity.

For your pleasure, the great seals of truth. What are they doing? Why lolling about of course. I am here to tell you that seals have the secret of life cracked. I always knew that there would be aimless drifting involved.

If you want to know how pointlessly complicated life can be, drop me a line and I will send you my friend Sheila. She has made it her goal in life to render me insane. I don't know why. I have nothing worth stealing and, as far as I can recall, I didn't ever murder any of her children. But Spring arrived with Equinoxical punctuality, heralding the beginning of the visitor season. And Sheila is never far behind that fateful moon.

Fortunately, Sheila is married to the most amiable man who ever lived. Paddy brings me wine in large quantities, quality hand-me-down furniture and near-new gadgetry. All of which I gratefully receive. He drinks. Why wouldn't he? He scours my house for repairs to carry out. He finds plenty, believe me. This gives him an excuse to make multiple trips to the hardware shop where he can hold a long, logical conversation with a soft-voiced man of a certain age who knows about fasteners and shares his passion for joinery and tranquility.

One needs a high level of strategic skill to deal with the frenzy of Sheila stage-managing activity that will occur quite naturally of its own will and volition. Breakfast, in my experience, is much more pleasant if it is not accompanied by the 43rd repetition of her speech on the correct way to prepare compost. I moved here because it is quiet. I forgot to account for the fact that cacophony is almost always mobile.

If you take her out on the water, she shuts up for a few hours. It's bliss. You show her great holy seals and a kind of hush falls all over the world. You can almost feel it putting itself to rights. In addition to making very little movement, seals are almost entirely soundless. I was rather hoping some of this ambiance would last longer than the boat trip. Not a bit of it. When we get home, I run off some of my photos onto a disk for her. Her response? She rounds on her hapless husband with the retort,

'Paddy! Why doesn't our camera take pictures like this?'

Nothing to do with the person holding the thing, of course.

One's adored Guardian today publishes a story on the mysterious reappearance of species thought to be extinct. One of these is the Guadalupe Fur Seal, which was believed to have been hunted to extinction over a hundred years ago. But the seals did what any sensible species would do if faced with a ferocious predator threatening its very tenability. They moved.

As I have also discovered, this doesn't always work. Laying low and minding your own only works up to a point. The great seal of truth may be simplicity, but that seal is easily broken by synthetic complexity. You can be lying about, perfectly contentedly, doing no one any harm, least of all yourself, when someone can randomly come along and chop you up to make things that no one really needs. If that makes sense. Cut me a break. It could be a week before I start making sense again...

Black Swan Theory

2010-09-20T08:59:00.014+10:00

A family affair by Pants

Most people, when they buy a house, have a list of essential and desirable criteria to aid them in the decision-making process. They will want a certain number of bedrooms, bathrooms, recreation rooms and car parking spaces. Adequate shoe accommodation and a home theatre will be on some people's lists. Others will want to know how many walking and/or driving minutes are involved in trips to the shops, medical centre and schools. Almost everyone will want a house with street appeal.

Although I do get a bit thingy about natural light and have been known to thoroughly test hot water systems and water pressure because I use my morning shower as a CPR substitute, there are really only two essential requirements for me in a living space. I must be able to see the water and there must be swans.

That's right. I said there must be swans. Swans are on my essential list. It has not always been this way. When I bought the flat in London where I lived for eleven years, I did so because it was beside a tranquil canal full of great big fish that I could see from my top-floor windows and the flat's east/west aspect maximised light capture. The water pressure wasn't bad either. I knew there were swans on the canal because for the previous twelve years, I'd lived in a council flat nearby. What I didn't realise is that when you see swans all the time, it becomes impossible to survive in the modern world without them.

The swans on my canal in London were Mute Swans. They are the most beautiful. Their ability to luminesce by moonlight gives them the edge. I get where Tchaikovsky was coming from. And Julius Reisinger, choreographer of the first Swan Lake. And Matthew Bourne. I have seen many performances of this scrumptious ballet including one at the Kirov in St Petersburg - although it was called Leningrad when I went there. The last one I saw was Matthew Bourne's, which I adored. Swans are strong and muscular and not a little ill-tempered. The all-male swanery clobbered the characterisation in the most delightful way.

The Mute Swan, despite its almost unfeasibly compact elegance on the water, is a huge and ungainly creature out of it. Like all its less glamorous anatid relatives, it waddles. When you see one lope awkwardly across the water on takeoff or skid drunkenly on landing, you realise with glee that there is a delinquent side to this bird. The sight of one dive-bombing the annoying rowers who'd shatter the Sunday morning peace would have me chuckling for days. I used to wish they'd attack the trainers who followed on their bicycles and tormented their charges, and anyone else within a ten-mile radius, through deafening megaphones in preposterous, home-counties lisps.

In London, the Mute Swans nearest me annually built an enormous nest on the water, anchoring it to some long-redundant towing apparatus. My flat was along an old towpath. My building replaced the derelict Matchbox Toys factory. There was a time when factories lined the whole waterway and horses hauled their produce down the canal to warehouses, or out to The Thames. Now it's a haven for waterbirds and people who like to watch their dogs chase them.

You would never see the Mute Swan cygnets until they were near enough fully grown. They still had their 'ugly duckling' brown feathers. It would always seem to me that the first outing would be by full moonlight on a beautiful summer evening. I would look out the window and there they'd be, a parent leading, the cygnets following in a disciplined line and the other parent bringing up the rear. They were like a maritime Von Trapp family.

The year I first moved into that flat, there were six pairs of Mute Swans hanging around and they'd often glide by my windows as if they were auditioning for Busby Berkeley. I never saw that many again. A single Black Swan sometimes appeared with them. It was only about three-quarters of the size of a Mute Swan. The first time I saw it, I phoned the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I very excitedly told them that I had discovered Australia and disproved Juvenal.

They weren't the least impressed. Exotic birds are not at all uncommon in London. They escape from zoos and private aviaries all the time. Being able to fly is a big advantage if escape is your agenda and the temperate climate provides a fair chance of survival. This Black Swan was tolerated, if not exactly overwhelmed with affection by the group, even though it had no hope of finding a partner. It was a remarkable thing to witness, literally a Black Swan event. The symbolism is a thesis in itself. I have some photos somewhere. One day I'll scan them.

Here in Larrikin's End, the swans build their nests on the shores of Lake Larrikin, trusting souls that they are. The council comes along and erects great fences of orange plastic around them. They know the local youth better than the swans do and they also like to make Lake Larrikin look as unattractive as possible. The Black Swans' faith in humanity extends to promenading their gorgeous cygnets when they're very young.

Will you just look at those gorgeous little fluffies! Pants categorically disproves Hans Christian Andersen. Presumably my doctorate is in the post.

I may have chosen my house on the most flaky criteria that ever existed but a day doesn't go by when I'm not thrilled to be here in this big yellow box which is the ugliest of ducklings in real estate terms. It's beautiful on the inside and, luckily, that's the bit where I actually live.

I may not have swans passing by below now but they pass by above often enough, and there are pelicans as well. If you start me on pelicans, I won't ever stop, so don't even think about it. Every day I take an elderly jog along Lake Larrikin. This morning, while I dodged delusional swooping birds for whom I personify either an egg snatcher or David Attenborough, I took a moment to reflect on swans and how we might think of them as a metaphor for multiculturalism. And then I remembered the South American Black-necked Swan. It's got a black neck and a white body. At that point it all got just a bit too complicated. Perhaps that doctorate should go back in the freezer, for now...

The Beggar's Belief Opera

2010-09-15T15:42:00.014+10:00

Source : AP

I was just sitting here thinking - I don't feel nearly miserable enough about the dire state of our gross national psyche. What would be top of my wish list for a paradigm-shifting event designed to plunge Australia's dignity into irrecoverable depths of debasement? I know, we could offer the world's tackiest billionaire, plus three hundred favourite white goods-obsessed, triple-choc muffin-scoffing, guru-worshipping parasites, a free holiday.

Unfortunately, 'Sir' Richbastard Brandname wasn't available. Besides, he can have a free holiday in Australia whenever he likes. Apparently, we can't get enough of his loathsome airline and creepy communications systems. But Hosanna! Oprah roars into view to meet our seemingly insatiable appetite for world-class ghastliness. Yes. Australian governments, of whatever hue, have an enviable lineage in dribbling sycophancy when it comes to the legends of louche.

Visions of Dr 'Sir' Lesley Colin Patterson dance about before my eyes as I read the news that Oprah Winfrey, Queen of Crass, Empress of Excess, Duchess of Daggy, has been invited to personally introduce her highly destructive brand of extreme self-actualisation to our culture in the cause of ... well ... no one seems entirely sure what exactly.

But we do know that the hard-nosed professionals at Tourism Australia, who are seasoned in the tough art of negotiating celebrity freebies, drove a titanic bargain with Oprah. It must have been a tense twelve months in which the concept of 'complimentary' was debated to within an inch of its stretch limousineness. Obviously out-manoeuvred, Oprah capitulated with a conciliatory,

You had me at the words 'Sydney Oprah House'.

Possibly a misunderstanding.

But it's all so, gosh, thrilling. And John Travolta, bona fide QANTAS pilot and darkly weird cult follower, is going to fly them all here on his own personal 747. I have to admit, when I close my eyes, I fantasize about dodgy pop rivets, cheapskate flotation devices and corner-cutting developing-world servicing.

In many ways, Australia and Oprah are like very needy sisters, sharing an abused childhood, complicated family history and pathological ambition to be universally admired. Oprah is the better known, so I guess she's the big sister. So it's only fair that the younger sister foots the bill.

The estimated AUS$3.5m we are donating via tax revenue that might have otherwise been spent on services for, say, the desperately disadvantaged Aboriginal communities the billionaire Oprah and hangers-on are keen to gawp at, is insignificant, according to former Tourism Minister, John Brown,

'We spent hundreds of millions of dollars over 30 years without much effect, I must say that honestly.'

And that's an argument for chucking a couple of million dollars at one of the few people in the world who would regard such an amount as conceptually meaningless? Oprah's probably spent more than that on chocolates and Christian Louboutin shoes. The phrase 'good money after bad' springs to mind. Ex-minister Brown continues,

'The publicity that Oprah will bring to Australia around the world is something you couldn't buy.'

Except that we have, apparently.

Real Julias 2, Rabbitohs 1

2010-09-10T15:18:00.013+10:00

And don't you ever try that again. Kodakotype by Pants

The Punch & Judy Show that is Australian politics has thrown up a result at last. That happened on Tuesday. The country managed perfectly well without an elected government for a couple of weeks. I don't think the sheep knew the nation was in crisis. Asylum seekers got a brief reprieve while our constitutional viability hung by a thread and no one started any wars or introduced any taxes.

I have been in no real rush to pronounce on the denouement. It is something of an anti-climax after the nail-biting seventeen days, three hours and forty-nine minutes-but-who's-counting in which three unknown country independents played a very long hand of Texas Hold'em with our GDP.

Real Julia (aka Muzgalard, aka Judy) won. Her opponent Rabbitoh (aka Mezdarabbit aka Punch) also won - in his imagination. It seems the Rabbitohs do not think the result is 'fair'. The Australian people clearly wanted 'a change of government', they say. The Rabbitohs got more seats, more actual votes and a higher percentage of the preferential vote, they say.

Well, no, no and no, actually. The Australian Electoral Commission hasn't quite finished counting but the Real Julias (aka Australian Labor Party), are ahead of the Rabbitohs (aka Liberal/National Coalition) on all three measures. Admittedly, there's not a lot in it but it's difficult to see how less can be made to appear more in this instance.

The Rabbitohs would have us believe that, by this flimsy token which also happens to be a giant porkie, the Real Julias have not achieved 'legitimacy' as a government. I could be wrong, but I don't think it quite works that way.

It's a bit like saying the bigger the jar of Marmite, the more authentically Marmite it is. This is plainly erroneous. Even a hospitality sachet of Marmite is still Marmite. Unless of course it's mislabled and is, in fact, marmalade. Although not terribly pleasant if, like me, you love Marmite but are pathologically ambivalent towards marmalade, such an occurrence is extremely rare in politics.

You may not be able to fit a policy Rizla between the fiercely opposed teams vying for control of this great land, but it's still fairly easy to pick the players who've had Marmite for breakfast.

Then there is the question of the collective intent of 'the Australian people'. Now, to take up the Marmite metaphor again. Say I am a single molecule in a jar of Marmite - you wouldn't be the first, believe me. We may all be able to recognise that collectively we comprise Marmite but I very much doubt that we would be able to collectively will ourselves to turn into marmalade, no matter how desperately the politician holding the toast might desire it.

I also suspect that we would find it equally difficult to convince someone spreading their toast with Marmite, that they would prefer to be eating marmalade. It would be an uphill battle with me, I can assure you.

So, I hope that clarifies the situation for my international friends. These things are enormously difficult to understand, aren't they?

I must say, it does seem a very good time to be a 'regional Australian'. Larrikin's End, while possibly not the sort of place most people would consider to be a good investment prospect, is set to prosper from this particular roll of the electoral dice. It's what Vernon God Little would call a new 'power-dime'. If anyone can jiggy a fucken lurk from a shifting power-dime, it's the layabouts of Larrikin's End.

How has this miracle of fortune come about? National government in Australia has basically been a two-hander for all of my longish life and beyond. There have occasionally been other parties. In the time I lived abroad, the peculiar Australian Democrats came and went. For a period they ruled our upper house, the Senate. From July next year, the Greens will wield in the Senate, hopefully with gentle intent.

For reasons I cannot explain, we elect a batch of Senators a year in advance. Perhaps they need to go on preparatory viaduct-building seminars and attend workshops to perfect their theatrical hissing and snarling skills.

Sorry, you wanted to know about the Larrikin's End windfall. Australia's political arsenal always has a couple of time bombs in it. You will usually find them described as 'colourful', meaning you can safely assume they are mad but no one else was willing to stand so they are it.

When the numbers had done with their crunching and the dust finally settled on the world's driest continent, three dudes were left holding the balance of power. Incredibly, only one of them was mad.

The nation's media, whose cultural reference palette runs an impressive gamut from HBO to Hollywood and back on a good day, dubbed them 'the three amigos'. They are three country independents whose natural affiliation would have been with the Rabbitohs except they'd been chucked out or something else generally unpretty had happened.

Real Julia needed only two of the three. Real Julia had the high hand. The payout to 'regional Australia' is one billion of our fine Aussie dollars. Not a lot in today's money. What does a billion get you? An Olympic swimming pool? It's rumoured that Rabbitoh promised a lot more. The game was up when 'due process' revealed that Rabbitoh's offer was made up of betting slips and pawn tickets.

Ever the optimists, we Larrikin's Enders look forward to a chip off that billion coming our way. We probably won't get enough for a new gas cylinder for the community shark'n'neeps fryer but we might get a new awning over McDunny's. That would be handy as the one he's got up now doubles as the respect quilt for road fatalities and I'm not sure that's entirely hygienic.

The god of small minds

2010-08-31T10:46:00.000+10:00

View from our window by Pants

I am very lucky. Seat of Pants has a spectacular outlook. I can't imagine ever living in a house with no outlook. At the moment, I'm more reliant than ever on confirmation that the world is, in fact, a very big and diverse place. Having an ocean to look out upon helps a lot. An ocean is proof that your insular, myopic country has a boundary. Beyond this point there may be dragons but also, quite possibly, intelligent life. Sadly, for me, the nearest landmass is Tasmania. It's a version of Australia as envisaged by Quentin Tarantino. But never mind.

Soon there will be whales. They can't arrive soon enough. Whales come from elsewhere, bringing all the promise that elsewhere exists. I think of how desperately I wanted to leave Australia when I was young and how I miraculously did and how brilliant that was except that I came back and it had regressed, so hideously and unimaginably. I left in the early 1980s and returned three decades later in the early 1950s. My only consolation is that being an American repatriate is probably much worse.

Timothy Egan in The New York Times writes about the escalating ignorance of Americans. An increasing number believe that President Barack Obama is (1) not an American citizen (2) not a Christian, despite the official reproduction of his birth certificate and evidence of his religious practice appearing with pointless regularity in every possible media crevice.

Of course it's worrying that Americans are still cloaking racism in cultural convention, but hardly surprising. What's really shocking is their flagrant willingness to suspend the distinction between factual and conjectural information. Did anyone ever question that Dr Martin Luther King was (1) not an American citizen (2) not a Christian? There is nothing quite like an inability to distinguish verifiable fact from unknowable conjecture as a gauge for rank stupidity.

I have had a related experience this week. Occasionally, I make a bid to offer my usefulness to society as a volunteer. I regret to say these efforts have yielded uniformly negative results to date. Perhaps some of that is my fault. I've had a lot of experience of evaluating community and voluntary organisations in receipt of government money. Suffice to say, my eyes are significantly less bright and my tail pitifully less bushy than they might otherwise have been as a result of this direct witness. It's a sad thing when the only evidence of an organisation's creativity is in its gift for subterfuge.

I had it in mind to contribute to literacy. There exists, apparently, a national literacy programme. After a longer internet trawl than should have been necessary, I managed to track down a contact info@ address. A week or so later, I received a 'don't really know much about this but you could try...' response. In my experience, this sort of reply is routine when you try to follow up on an 'initiative' with blanket TV advertising and a call centre number. I didn't phone the call centre because I knew the 'person' I would end up 'speaking' to would be programmed to collect 'data' and would not be remotely capable of dealing with my inquiry.

So I did try phoning the contact number given by the vague 'you could try...' person. It connected to Larrikin's End Community College. I am reasonably sure it's the place Joseph K is taken in The Trial, so I approached with some hesitancy. A woman with extreme salon hair and scary talons sat me on a broken typist's chair and explained to me authoritatively that literacy is 'not about reading and writing'. When I cautiously raised an eyebrow, she sternly informed me that 'students don't respond to a classroom environment'. Oh, so that would explain why my own education was such an unmitigated disaster then. I felt like the meat in a Derrida sandwich about to be demolished by Foucault.

The 'literacy' programme at Larrikin's End Community College comprises a cooking class and a gardening class. The gardening class is taken by someone whose own English is, shall we say, in development. Can't be too careful with these things. Wouldn't want to confront our learners with intimidating expertise now would we? Wouldn't that do desperate things to their self esteem to realise that there are people in the world who have transmittable knowledge from which someone might benefit? God, I'd be suicidal too if I had to face the possibility that there was someone in the world with a more advanced understanding than I have, about anything.

I know it's pointless to argue with an automaton so I don't. There are ethical issues, to be sure, but if you think an automaton has more hope of grasping these than it has of telling fact from conjecture, then you need to check your pulse. I was handed a form to fill in. Naturally, it was designed to solicit as much demographic information as it is possible to collect without appearing voyeuristic. I put down my name, address, email and mobile number and backed out of the room very, very slowly.

I did not complete the copious questions about my interests, skills, abilities and the inevitable one that asks 'how did you find out about us?' You'd need to set a month aside to tackle that one. It's like a Cluedo question. Clearly, they make it as difficult as possible to 'find out about us'. They appear only to want you to discover them and then plot your trail for posterity. They have no interest at all in engaging you further. It seems like a motiveless crime.

To deal with the modern world, you need a strong bunker. But the bunker needs a window. Sea is great but nothing quite beats sky. Many of our metaphors for mood come from sky. Blue skies, grey skies, dark skies, bright skies. The moon in all its psychological phases. Clouds convey storms, glooms and obfuscations. And the sun. It rises and it also sets. A neon reminder that there will be a tomorrow. I have them all. I need them all because I can only think outside the metaphorical box by being able to see beyond my particular home box in a way that isn't filtered or censored or reinterpreted. It's just me looking.

Thank you Seat of Pants for all your spectacular picture windows and skylights because you never let me forget that there is a universe out there and that it is my responsibility to see it.

Four men and a mobile

2010-08-22T16:27:00.014+10:00

Kodakotype by Pants

The Australian election. Root canal treatment without anaesthetic while watching a scoreless draw with teams made up of Belgian Big Brother evictees and Turkey's Got Talent rejects. It goes to a penalty shoot out and guess what? No goals. And no government. So all that suffering was for nothing. Nothing! The CIA has already patented a selection of sound grabs from the interminable witterings of our parliamentary candidates which they plan to use to drive Colombian drug barons from their mountain lairs.

When I discovered my passport was out of date, I nearly did myself in. And you know the worst of it? The Australian election cycle is officially three years but governments usually barely last two and often go to the polls after one. This means that politicians are never in anything but re-election mode. It's one long, insufferable me-fest characterised by unseemly neediness and a freakish disdain for coherency. There is a limited perverse pleasure in watching people so desperate to be heard struggling to find the ability to speak, I suppose.

Thinking the end is mercifully nigh, I hold on to my sanity by ignoring the local media and reading only foreign papers online. Election day finally dawns. I pootle down to the Larrikin's End Bingo Hall to exercise my compulsory free democratic right. In the lower house, the choice is between two Darrens. There are an awful lot of Darrens in this election. Darren could be a generic term for Member of Parliament for all I know.

It's not been easy to decipher actual information in this campaign. One could be forgiven for thinking it's all been one long charitable plea for compassion towards the intellectually disadvantaged. Please give this halfwit a job. He could never survive in the real world.

As always, I have a book with me. I've learned never to approach a potential queuing situation without a book. A book is portable defensible space. Most people will respect that someone with their nose in a book is telling you the doctor is definitely not in.

I arrive at the Bingo Hall. A monstrous matron with salon hair and orang-utan lips shrieks at me on behalf of blue Darren. I manage to escape with my hearing more or less intact. I'm for red Darren and I've already memorised the order. The last time I voted in an Australian election was 1980. I made it my business to bone up on the form beforehand. After all I've been through, I don't want to end up with a spoiled vote.

The book is an excellent idea. It's a seriously large hardback that screams do not disturb. Actually it says Sebastian FaulksA Week in December, but it has the same effect. Inside the Bingo Hall is a line of people going all the way around the outside wall. The last time I was in a queue this long there was a jumbo jet involved. This is a half-hour queue. I open the book immediately. The man two behind starts one of those pointless conversations that immediately identifies him as a nutter with the woman directly behind me. Don't know why we bother. Doesn't matter who you vote for, you end up with a politician. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. Thank you Sebastian.

Half an hour later I get to the registration table. I'm exceptionally good at judging queue duration. Methuselah's grandfather asks my name. He hears my reply on the fourth attempt, as does everyone else in the room. He finds my name, ticks it off and hands me a small green paper listing a selection of fine Darrens. He also hands me a white paper that looks like something the Andrex puppy dragged in. The senate ballot is three feet long but short on Darrens.

On my way home, I stop into McDunny's for three portions of our world famous local specialty shark'n'neeps. Barney and the Question Why very sensibly sent in postal votes. This handily dispensed with some awkward eligibility issues. I'm not sure quite how they managed to enfranchise themselves but they have been taking an unusual interest in the death notices in the Larrikin's End Idler of late.

Shark'n'neeps all squared away, we gather around the television with a big bowl each of Barney's fine vodkamisu. What a shock. We are used to the BBC's Peter Snow and his frenzied waving arms and his maps with lots of flashing lights and his state-of-the-art swingometer thingy. But what do we get from Australia's national broadcaster? A quartet of pale stale males and a mobile phone.

That's it? says the Question Why. For seven hours we follow two journalists, one with his face permanently buried in a laptop, and two grimacing senators. It would appear their priority is not to provide an engaged perspective to a television audience. The senators spend the evening taking calls from their central offices because this is where all the information is coming from. It's like sitting in an accountants' office for a whole day and watching them quietly getting on with their work. Although they probably wouldn't let you spend the day downing vodka slammers in an accountants' office. I suppose from the senators' point of view, the experience is akin to inviting the whole country along to your job interview. Whichever way you look at it, it's weird.

Every now and again the head presenter, Kerry O'Brien, (who at least has the decency to have hair that is a colour other than grey), locks onto a camera and demonstrates the delicate art of stating the painfully obvious. To relieve the tedium they occasionally cut to a woman overlaid with a bar chart. A bar chart! Where are our bells? Where are our whistles? Why don't they just calculate it all on an abacus? At least the sound might be an interesting distraction.

All that is going to happen is done by 7.30 but the broadcast continues for another five hours. Why don't they adjourn to the pub and throw peanuts at each other? asks the Question Why. We certainly would have done that if we'd been in the swivel chair.

We appear to have a dead heat, with an emphasis on the dead. At some point we will get a government, although what use it will be is another matter. We don't know much about what either side intends to do. They were all so busy telling us what they weren't going to do that they never actually got around to outlining any actions. It would appear that electoral reform will be on the agenda. Barney has come up with a proposal that sounds quite good to me. He suggests that MPs should be chosen in a community game of Spin the Bottle. He says he'll even provide the bottles. Policy matters should be decided by a couple of rounds of Truth and Dare. This would all be over quite quickly and we could then spend the rest of the night throwing peanuts at each other. Sounds like a plan to me.

Real Julia - not a Spanish football team, but close

2010-08-12T18:35:00.001+10:00

Real Julia by Pants

Many megapixels ago, Ma Pants popped a little Kodak under the Pants family artificial Christmas tree. Ever since that happy day I have used it to subvert the basic claim of digital imagery - greater clarity.

Recently, I made a tiny incremental upgrade to a Canon Powershot because they were going very cheap. It's an ill GFC don't blow no one some good. The Canon is better for everyday pics where I want a pelican to look like a pelican but the Kodak is my instrument of choice for one of my favourite occupations.

I admit it's a bit weird to want to use new technologies like digital cameras and flat-screen TVs to create a very old effect like a double exposure. On a certain aesthetic level, a much better result could be achieved in a few minutes using Photoshop.

But I grew up with the obligation to spent a long Christmas holiday with the happy-clapping country grand-parents. The big box of old photos was a source of great imaginary journeys through a family who gave little away. My other choice was to fashion felt figures into pre-determined biblical outcomes. What would you pick?

My grand-parents were all born more than 100 years ago and some of the photos in the big box were of their grand-parents. The photos that I loved the best were the big family portraits where at least one face was lost to history because its owner could not stay still for the requisite minutes required to secure an accurate fix. My family are big sneezers. I've always been interested in the more blurred aspects of life anyway.

I admit I was only half engaged in the discourse transpiring on the ABC-TV programme Q&A when I made this Kodakotype, but I must own to being chuffed when my meagre efforts were rewarded. I need little incentive to remain in bed during this turgid winter so it's absolutely thrilling to me to be able to create while maintaining a resolutely slothful demeanour.

Our electronic media typically refers to our Prime Minister as Muzgalard. This nation will live to regret the latent skimping on elocution tuition that frequently forces previously distinct words into one long sausage of strangled syntax. Adds a new dimension to the term 'mincing words'. Although I'm all in favour of visual blurring, verbal bubble'n'squeak is more difficult to take pleasure in.

The PM's name as it is writ is Ms Julia Gillard. Our media mouthpieces like to place a strong stress on the Ms so that everyone will know how terribly clever and modern we are to have a post-feminist, unmarried woman PM. She's also an atheist but it's a bit more difficult to represent that in speech.

Anyway, the PM has had something of an identity crisis of late. She began her re-election campaign as if she were embarking on the first reading of a part she wasn't all that sure she wanted to play. The all-important opinion polls reacted. She took a painfully long time to settle on a suitable personal style, which was more than a little rattling as her opponent, Mezdarabbit, is thicker than two short planks with George W Bush in the middle. Then she compounded the error by treating us to a running commentary on how she intended to pop herself back on the casting couch and re-emerge as a reinvented 'real' Julia. This little 'making of' featurette did little for her credibility.

But it did give me the opportunity for a neat, if trite, visual metaphor. I am, after all, ethnically Australian so it is in my DNA to be shallow.

Those of us who are pathologically dissatisfied like to fancy that there is an alternative to this world and that the portal through which it can be entered is discoverable if only we can bring ourselves to a worthy state of divine idleness. It may appear that the double-exposure Kodakotype is merely the lucky result of clicking at the precise moment the director makes a decision to switch cameras but to me it is proof of another, more engaging world. It is the hope that keeps me alive.

Our political landscape is a dismal thing. Fortunately, any idiot can run Australia. Many have before and many will again. Meanwhile, I shall keep searching for my fractal escape hatch...

Char baby, let's call it a day

2010-08-07T21:47:00.009+10:00

Hearth break by Pants

I now understand why the poor waifs who attended to cleaning duties in the great houses of Britain were called chars. Seat of Pants is hardly a stately manor but it does require great efforts on our part to keep the house functional. I say 'our' but it's actually down to me to sort our collective creature comfort. Barney is all paws and claws when it comes to anything practical and the Question Why is annoyingly inclined to revert to type to no useful end at the sight of a domestic dilemma.

A southern Australian winter is tough on us soft Londoners used to double glazing and cheap gas-fired central heating. Although we do have some oil heaters and a reverse-cycle air-con thingy, I much prefer to use the wood fire as it heats the whole house evenly and at predictable cost. Larrikin's End is in a forestry-managed part of the world so we are burning locally grown timber brought to us by admittedly dodgy geezers who don't charge very much and do their best to cheerfully stack the logs in the shed, however complex an operation that would appear to them to be.

The Pants hearth doth create a lovely warmth. Unfortunately, one has to have the skill and timing of a whole Royal Navy engine-room regiment to keep the fucking thing going. Happily, enough trees either die from neglect or get knocked down in storms to provide kindling for the year. I buy newspapers for two reasons. The other one is that I can't work out how to do sudoku online. I'm terrific at getting the fire going. But I'm always busy doing something else when the right time for another log rolls around.

The stove is perfectly located for heat distribution. It's on the ground floor, right in the middle of the house. The problem is, I'm usually on the upper floor. You can't see it from the photo but the flue extends up to the second floor and acts like a radiator. I only notice that the temperature is dropping when it's too late to just chuck another log in. That means I either sacrifice precious kindling to get it going again or reacquaint myself with the beaver lamb coat I bought at Camden Market in 1982 and only ever seriously wore in a Russian winter.

Maybe it's just me. I've never had to deal with a wood fire before. I've been in houses with open fireplaces that had carpet and soft furnishings that were unabashedly cream. I'm sure I have. And their owners didn't seem the least bit stressed. And the creaminess of their decor didn't seem the least bit compromised. It must be just me. My fire isn't even an open one but the soot just gets everywhere. I've cleaned it up for the picture. It took a great many minutes, I can tell you.

I was lucky that the previous owners of Seat of Pants left the fireplace implements as they didn't leave anything else. When I relinquished House of Pants London, I left my successor an entire folio of operating instructions for the flat including manuals for all the important appliances. How difficult can that be?

I've been established at Seat of Pants for nearly two years and the other day I found a light switch in the kitchen I hadn't discovered before. That could be an indicator of how much time I spend in my kitchen.

The soot, however, isn't as easy to ignore. I now understand the concept of spring cleaning and why our ancestors used to beat their rugs. Happily, my rugs are all machine washable. With your permission, I shall beat Barney instead.

Sub-Prime Ministerial Crisis

2010-08-05T18:02:00.017+10:00

Neckeneck by Pants

If I begin by quoting Princess Diana, you will have no trouble locating the business of this post in the index of gravity I know you keep meticulously for matters of world import.

'There were three people in this marriage. It was a bit crowded.'

Yes, that is what the koala-eyed martyr to style over sense told BBC Panorama interviewer Martin Bashir back in 1995, leading many of us watching to speculate more about what had become of the famously serious and probing Panorama than to muse over the skeleton of the royal marriage. It had been three years, after all, since the Wales's separation had been announced by the then Prime Minister John Major with a characteristic sombreness that was custom made for such an occasion. It was old news then. Why should it be of even the remotest interest now?

At that time, the Oprahfication of the media was merely a spark in its creator's greedy eye. We did not know then that within a wink of that eye, every item would be judged by its ubiquity, portability and endurance rather than its intrinsic value. A Princess Diana story was like a plastic bag. It could transport and distribute any amount of emotional tat and would take a thousand years to biodegrade. Little did we realise that this plastic standard would be the one by which every public interest story would be judged into a Disneverever future.

Cut to Australia and Election 2010 - Two Punches and a Judy. Much like the historical royal scrappage à trois, there are three people in this tussle. All are appealing to us to lift them into credibility via seasonal prêt-à-porter notions. We are all Martin Bashir now. But where to begin? The plot is less engaging than one of those desperately hopeless American sit-coms that die halfway through the first series. We have only the characters on which to pin our ... hope is too fantastical a word. All I can think of is undespair. Let me press on with my nightmarish imagining.

Neckeneck, a play in three scraggly acts by Pants

Dramatis Personae
Punch 1 is played by Kev Nrud, a sorehead from Queensland.
Judy is played by Muzga Lard, a redhead from Victoria.
Punch 2 is played by Mezda Rabbit, a bonehead from New South Wales.

It's very much a work in progress but here's where we are in our workshopping.

Act 1 - Location : The merry-go-round.
Punch 1 has a sort of breakdown which is a bit serious because he's meant to be running the country. Judy pushes him off the merry-go-round and takes over. All action is offstage which is a bit confusing for the audience.

Act 2 - Location : The slippery slide.
Judy and Punch 2 stare at each other for the longest time. Punch 1 goes into hospital.

Act 3 - Location : The sandpit.
Punch 1 emerges from hospital having had his gall bladder removed. It is not known whether a plastic bag has been inserted in its place as, clearly, not all possible gall has been exhausted. The principals are joined in the sandpit by any and all living former leaders of every political party and a couple of dead ones to boot. John Belushi yells, 'food fight' and it's on for young and old.

Epilogue
Anyone's guess but a car crash is definitely in the mix.

Mr Mombastic

2010-08-01T15:15:00.022+10:00

Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of Australiana. To me, it's the cultural equivalent of never having gotten over a crush on Plastic Bertrand. A childish joke that should be vacuum-sealed and placed in a museum of ill-considered novelties.

My birth-mother nation is, I am afraid to say, often on the brink of toppling into inescapable artistic self-parody by excessive reliance on its limited vocabulary of clichés. Outsiders - and I am, having lived most of my adult life abroad, definitely an outsider - don't find it funny or clever.

So, when someone actually turns this mawk magnet on its head and creates genuinely great art from the crass artifacts that comprise Australiana, I find I must scratch the surface. Such a someone is Chris O'Doherty, AKA Reg Mombassa, late of 80s pop funsters Mental as Anything and fresh from a long stint designing shorts for Mambo and blow-up figures for the Sydney Olympics.

The Mind and Times of Reg Mombassa by Murray Waldren (HarperCollins, 432pp) came out in Australia last year and, as far as I can tell, is not yet available anywhere else. That I am reviewing it is quite possibly a pointless exercise, as it costs as much as a fortnight's worth of groceries and wine, a budget-battering AUS$75. However, the Larrikin's End Municipal Library has seen fit to purchase it, giving me the chance to peruse at my leisure. I must remember to check the librarian for signs of malnutrition.

All the classic components of crass are assembled - the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, beer cans, thongs, utes, barbecues, kangaroos, pineapples. But somehow, these magically conspire to create something wonderful rather than induce a desire to reach for a large G&T and go in search of my passport. How is it that Mombassa has burrowed his way into the cold heart of Pants while Ken Done remains fit only for one's fourth-best umbrella?

I think it's because he's a transplanted New Zealander. Kiwis have an uncanny ability to observe Australian life with great affection and empathy while maintaining a detachment from our mucky and rather nasty competitiveness. There is a layer of smugness which is almost mandatory in Australian artists taking Australia as their subject. Mombassa displays an objectivity that reads as sincerity. And he tells you something you don't know about something you think you either do or should know everything about. I'm amazed and delighted he's gotten away with that for so long.

Australians are obsessed with contributing to the nation's imaginary world standing. All you have to do to realise how anachronistic a notion Australian nationalism actually is, even if you think you're being ironic, is to leave the country for an extended period. The long stay is important because anyone will humour you if they think they don't have to listen to you for very long. London certainly set me straight. Britons know precisely three things about Australia,

1) Neighbours.
2) Minogues.
3) It's where Aunt Evelyn went in 1965 and was never heard from again.

Australia is Belgium with beaches, a perpetual summer with Plastic Bertrand.

One of the keenest observers of flaws in the Australian psyche is Kiwi Richard Lewer, long-time resident of Melbourne.

When I first saw Lewer's I must learn to like myself, (above), I was seized with great joy and a little jealousy. As school children, we were made endlessly to draw maps of Australia, its individual states and, occasionally, some of its neighbours. I can probably still fashion reasonable facsimiles of Japan and New Zealand. I may not have been as familiar with the reality of chalking up a hundred lines as Bart Simpson is but the concept is not lost on me. I received this punishment only a couple of times. 'I must not talk in class' was one. The thought of a child verbally interacting with her education was enough to send a teacher in search of a shaman in my time.

I must learn to like myself is the kind of artistic moment I dream of stumbling upon and celebrate when I do. For me the perfect artwork is like a magic mirror. You see a smarter version of yourself staring back at you. It is the statement I always wanted to make about my birth-mother country and never thought of - hence the hint of jealousy. It distils our seemingly intractable struggle with both internal and external identity into the penance of a disturbed and untidy but also incorrigibly aspirational child.

Kiwis get us in a way we don't get ourselves. Reg Mombassa can arrange a pick'n'mix of idiot icons whose singular talents would be lucky to score themselves a place in a snow dome into an ensemble cast of characters capable of performing Brecht.

Rosalie Gascoigne was one of the greatest artists Australia ever produced. She too came from New Zealand with an open mind and preparedness to embrace this country and the greatness it was ready and willing to reveal. When she arrived with her astronomer husband in the nation's capital soon after WW2 ended, she was alarmed to find that her contemporaries among the 'wives' were only concerned with the minutiae of decorum. Gascoigne was a university graduate too and not about to be defeated by what others made of her housekeeping shortcomings.

Neither was she inclined to make Hokusai-sized waves and discovered her milieu in Sogetsu Ikebana. Here she found a discipline worthy of her intelligence. She credits it with 'training her eye'. Gascoigne went on to create monumental but poignantly personal interpretations of rural Australia when many home-grown artists of European origin were still struggling to work out whether or not they were allowed to go there in art.

Reg Mombassa navigates his expansive territory with equal confidence. Taming the wild beasts of Australian trashonography into sweet and fine jokes is no mean achievement. But that's only a smidge of the Mombassa range. I was delighted to find that much of his work is in coloured pencil, a habit he got into on the road. And he draws and paints from photographs. If you have been to art school, you will know that it is a total no-no to admit to this practice unless you are stratospherically famous.

If you are wealthy enough to buy this book, or fortunate enough to have a library with undermanaged underspend, you will delight in the preternatural re-interpretations of family snapshots of people and places from the real life of Chris O'Doherty. He is generous enough to allow reproductions of the actual photos so you can see for yourself how he substracts the superfluous and adds the little sprinkle of self that takes you to where he lives.

The most exciting thing for me, apart from all the scuzzy background Mentals gossip which I missed over the last quarter century, is to absorb, in one great gasp, the extraordinary breadth of the Chris/Reg vision and goggle at the beauty of his mature landscapes.

Buy it or borrow it as soon as you can.

Books and the Booker

2010-07-30T18:16:00.008+10:00

Books and the Booker by Pants

I hate calling it the 'Man' Booker Prize. It's an unwelcome reminder that at least two thirds of all literary prizes are won by men. The Booker, to use my preferred nomenclature, does mix it up a bit, with the occasional woman, non-white man and even non-white woman breaking through. I haven't read all the winning books since the prize's inception in 1969 but I've worked my way through nearly all in the last twenty years and most of the shortlist as well.

There are a few missing from my experience. At the moment I'm reading The Line of Beauty. I first started to read it in 2005. I was a few pages in when the London bombings occurred. I was on the tube, going to work at Wembley Town Hall at the time. All I'd remembered was that Nick's first ever blind date is with a black guy who works for The London Borough of Brent. His ghost would have been located somewhere in my building. I found that mildly amusing, but not enough to keep on with the book. I'm having better luck this time.

These days I don't buy books new as they cost the same as a week's worth of wine and groceries. Luckily for me, there is a charity shop in our nearest big town where someone with both a high disposable income and Booker-related tastes deposits her pre-devoured books with unseemly haste. She must have a spurn-after-reading policy. I assume she's female because women comprise the vast majority of readers of literary fiction. Last week I picked up a copy of Wolf Hall for a precious few of our local dollars. Thank you frivolous benefactor.

My other source is throwing out great hints around birthdays and Christmas. By this method I have acquired several Booker winners and one or two shortlisters. I've assembled all the chosen that could be culled from my bookshelves and photographed while the microwave was reheating last night's leftover gnocchi and char-grilled vegetables. It should be noted that when Barney char grills it usually isn't intentional but I don't like to waste food. I am less precious about sparing Barney's feelings.

I'm fairly sure I've got a copy of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin somewhere. Despite my spending the better part of a day sorting my fiction collection into alphabetical order, it was not there among the 'A's. I secured a copy of The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai on one of my regular assaults on the Ilford Oxfam just before I left England for good in 2008. I was on my way to India and thought it would be a good topical read. I was there for over a month and, fortunately, fell in with a group of readers. We kept swapping books and I ended up with a lovely hardcover first edition of On Chesil Beach.

Sadly, that was a week or so after I'd met Ian McEwan in Jaipur so I wasn't able to get him to sign it. On that occasion, the sainted one said some rather spiteful things about Anne Enright's book The Gathering, which had beaten him out for the Booker a few months earlier. I wouldn't have liked to have had to choose between them. I didn't get to read The Gathering until I arrived in Australia and secured a library card. Then I could see why McEwan was so pissed off. They'd essentially written the same book. Both were stunningly crafted examinations of human frailty. When I feel, as I so often do, that I'm completely ill-equipped for life, a book like The Gathering or On Chesil Beach reminds me that I'm failing at least as well as most people.

By chance, I recently came across an article or blog post which I have now no hope of referencing because it was days ago and there has been much wine under the bridge since then. The substance was that the writer had attended a writing workshop given by Anne Enright in which Ms Enright advised on the writing of dialogue. What she said was that one should hold a page of dialogue at a distance and if the lines looked roughly the same length, then you're doing it right. Arise St. Anne.

I've recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the first (and very likely not the last) time. It absolutely obeys the Enright manifesto and is a work of complete perfection. It would, of course, never have been eligible for The Booker Prize which is only open to writers from countries who did not wage war on the British Empire and win. This is going to sound strange but reading that book brimmed me over with hope. McCarthy allows himself a pauper's palette of possibilities yet creates an absolute jewel from almost nothing. Something about that just makes me want to live.

Mostly, I agree with Booker selections. The God of Small Things, A Fraction of the Whole, Vernon God Little, and Booker of Bookers winner Midnight's Children will always have an honoured place among my favourite books. Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole lost out in 2008 to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. It seemed a bit unfair. Although I enjoyed The White Tiger I had a lot of trouble getting into step with its rhythm. This week I listened to a recording of it with first-person narrator Balram represented precisely in the clichéd sing-songy voice my instincts were working very hard to reject on ethical grounds. I immediately reviewed the text and found the writer's intent was to infer exactly that voice. Multiculturalism is complicated.

Which brings me to the latest Booker longlist. I've only read one of the books on it, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. I've also only read one of the shock omissions, Solar by Ian McEwan. As difficult as it is to leave aside my McEwan bias, all I can say is I wouldn't have minded being a fly on the wall in the McEwan house when the list was announced, especially if he'd read The Slap.

It is the sort of book that induces only despair for the future of literature. It struggles to overcome an extreme hands-off editing strategy which often leaves you wondering if you're reading several drafts of the same sentence. The laboured explanations of cultural and symbolic references are simply baffling. 'Show don't tell' is superseded by 'show and tell to the point of torture'. If, as has been suggested by the local media, The Slap represents life in modern multicultural Australia, then I'm an inter-generational panel beater on the international gelati exchange. Seriously, the only pertinent slap present is to the face of the intelligent reader.

Solar - I know I've been saying I'd write a review for weeks. I just loved it and can't imagine that I could add much to what's already been said about it. It's a familiar journey in excellence. Ma Pants, (who is 80), and I read it at the same time and we had several highly animated discussions on the finer points. Perhaps this isn't much of an advert. Possibly more a kiss of death. I hope it's not the case that Booker judges are presuming to pander to what they imagine is more accessible to young people - i.e. representing the muck and mess of life with mucky and messy writing.

McEwan's infuriatingly successful non-entity Michael Beard and his complexity of work/life intrigues is far more fascinating to me than Tsiolkas's cardboardery of creeps whose inability to resolve their tediously contrived minor personal 'issue' unfolds over an interminable 483pp. After overhearing St. Ian diss St. Anne I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that the body of one C. Tsiolkas has been found inexplicably inert in the vicinity of a damaged glass table.

* * * *

Those of you who are parents or owners of expensive hyp0-allergenic designer pets will, I am sure, sympathise with my current position. Barney, as you may know, is a billionaire in his own right but I am still responsible for his conduct. You cannot imagine my horror at being accused of owning a pet who knowingly contributed to the intoxication of a man who has been eligible to get legless for the past three years. Yes, I am ashamed to admit that Daniel Radcliffe's 21st birthday party did, in fact, take place at one of Barney's extensive chain of Goblet of Fire Vodka Bars. You cannot imagine what we had to promise the Daily Mail to suppress Barney's involvement. Suffice to say that his cameo in The Deathly Hallows is probably being excised as I write. I did warn him...

Someone please call 911

2010-07-27T19:18:00.013+10:00

Photo from Radioteleginenhaiti.com

Yo, what up? Just heard Wyclef Jean is contemplating running for President of Haiti. On the strength of his various charitable foundations' track records, he's well qualified for that post.

It may be slightly tougher to meet the other criteria. According to one's adored Guardian newspaper,

To enter the race, Jean would have to prove he has resided in Haiti for five consecutive years, own property in the country and have never been a citizen of any country other than Haiti.

Owning property is hardly likely to be a problem and, presumably it can be any five years, e.g. from age 0-5, but making US citizenship go away could be a bit tougher.

I don't imagine he'd do any worse a job than any of his predecessors. In Haiti, an elected president with no previous experience in politics is likely to be an advantage, at least for its beleaguered populace. Wyclef could raise the country's GDP just by buying a cup of coffee.

Here in Australia, we are also about to elect a new leader. I mean 'leader' in the
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin sense of the word. He was the one who said, 'there go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader.'

Our choices are not between people who have dueted with Mary J Blige. That would have been a much more interesting contest. Rather, we have a Prime Minister who can not exactly claim to be 'sitting', unless she is having breakfast at the time, and a man about whom the very image of seatedness conjures up rather unseemly thoughts of inappropriately administered Lycra.

The candidates, Muzga Lard and Mezda Rabbit might have been inventions of Beatrix Potter, although I suspect she would have been less than impressed with their recent animations. Last Sunday night, we were treated to 'a debate'. It was notable for its complete lack of any element normally associated with the term 'debate'. As I understand it, a debate is an exercise in which opposing ideas are tested by argument. This was more like a Dadaist Punch'n'Judy Show in which the objective was to remain aloof and avoid any possibility of contact or clarity.

The rolling pins had apparently all been pre-purchased by Masterchef, the finale of which was appearing on the same evening. This situation in itself created an entirely fanciful conceit in which Australians were pilloried world-wide for preferencing a cooking show over serious political 'debate'. I'd have to plummet Heideggarian depths for which I'm ill-equipped to give that choice matrix any credence.

Fortunately, the reality is more explainable. The cooking show had scheduled its finale for Sunday, 25th July at 7.30pm. Not because it's spookily clairvoyant but rather that it has tedious weekly cook-offs where the true sport is to bet on which melts first; the chef's nerve or the butter in his/her pan. The finale, I'm assuming because I don't watch cooking shows - they make you fat - provides relief that someone in the country is able to successfully complete a three-course dinner for six without having to self-immolate in brandy as a face-saving dessert.

The Prime Minister could have called an election any time in the next six months. She popped in to see the Governor General an Saturday, 17th July. They got out their diaries and settled on 21st August as a polling date. I haven't participated in an Australian election since 1980 so I'm not up to speed on tele-debate protocol but I'm guessing the timing of it is not constitutionally enshrined. I gather the tradition is that the 'debate' between leaders normally takes place at 7.30pm on a Sunday night on the national network, sometime before the election.

I'm further guessing that the PR people who scheduled the 'debate' took a look at the TV schedule and concluded that to compete with the finale of Masterchef would be to toss an oven mitt-shaped gauntlet to the people to make a lifestyle and death choice, however pointless a concept that may seem to anyone with a fully functioning brain. Again, we'd need Heidegger to sort out that mess. If that poor man had been faced with the idea of view on demand, his head would have exploded.

Fortunately, we were never placed in the emergency situation of having to Heideggerise our viewing, thanks to thoughtful PR people who are in touch with we ordinary Australians and our love for guava and custard apple snow egg desserts.

So, what will Wyclef do if he's elected President? I'm thinking the road to reconstruction in Haiti is not going to be a simple three-step 'from the hut to the projects to the mansion' thing. I hope he's got something else in mind 'cause there won't be no 911.

Gone fisking

2010-07-14T16:53:00.003+10:00

Barney's humble beginnings

We are taking a short break to refresh our souls, not to mention our ideas.

Back soon...

Blues, all colours

2010-07-13T18:40:00.008+10:00

Rhapsody in Blue by Pants

Last year I made a frantic number of digital photographs on the theme of blue. It's taken me a year to get around to looking at all of them as a series. It's a bit that way with me at the moment.

The long-suffering amongst you might recall that I endured a disastrous year at the Larrikin's End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macramé where I learned only to deeply mistrust anyone within a hundred-mile radius. I am still harrowed at night by the sceptre of the bearded ex-Canadian who screeched at us,

Don't underestimate the waink fuk-tuurrr. The waink fuk-tuurrr. The ferkain waink fuk-turrrr.

The innocence of my artistic youth was virtually raped away that day and my sanity is never likely to be fully restored. But I must do stuff. So I will do stuff.

My inability to calibrate my project cycle with the resources to hand may well be my undoing in the end. I didn't ever get around to 'photoshopping' these pictures while I had access to decent equipment. But it doesn't matter. None of it ever does.

I think of a song I often used to play and sing called All Blues. It's an easy piece. The tune, by Miles Davis, appears for the first time on Kind of Blue. It's one of my favourite records. The modal, 6/8 rhythm is the perfect platform for introspection. Oscar Brown Jnr. wrote mesmerisingly simple lyrics.

A colour, a colour, the blues is more than a colour.

I'm not much of a piano player but, to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara, I can hold a cross-rhythm if I don't have to shoot too far. You're playing a simple rhythm and singing across it and you can spice it up with rubato. You steal from the rhythm and it steals right back from you because the rules of music dictate that you have to both arrive at the end at the same time.

Many would argue that Miles Davis was the boss of that territory. I might throw in a vote for Thelonious Monk. Growing up listening to Thelonious Monk, or even Miles Davis, is probably not an experience too many Australian kids in the 1960s would have had. I am grateful for it. My road into this music began with the novelties that were standard fare for American jazz musicians wanting to reach the mainstream record-buying audience.

It began for me as I'm sure it did for many others with Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher. My father was brilliant at bringing home batches of second-hand vinyl LPs that contained novelties to keep the kids amused.

And then one day my Dad brought home Rhapsody in Blue. I think I can probably still sing the whole thing in my head. But right now, there are a lot of things my head needs to do other than hum Rhapsody in Blue all day long.

So, I'm going to take a break...

Medieval foodalism

2010-07-12T17:51:00.011+10:00

Comfort food by Pants

Few jokes I remember, but this one stuck with me. Three men walk into a bar. The first, a German, says, 'I'm so thirsty, I must have beer!' The second, a French guy, says, 'I'm so thirsty, I must have wine!' The third, a Jewish geezer, says, 'I'm so thirsty, I must have diabetes!'

I don't have diabetes, nor do I intend to get it. Or should that be 'them'. Diabetes. Sounds plural, doesn't it? Regular readers will recall that, although I know nothing whatever about health matters, that's never stopped me weighing in, so to speak. That may well be a medical condition in itself. Let's hope so. I would like, just once, to be injected with the fear of The Supreme Dalek for something remotely resembling a good reason.

The ubiquitous nutrition copeterie has been hounding us for decades about avoiding anything and everything that renders food edible. I dare not raise, yet again, my objection to governmental obsession with 'things that may never happen' while the people who are sick here and now languish on waiting lists for operations that would alleviate real, actual pain.

But, please note dear confidante, that I am thinking about that as I cannibalise my - I'm sorry, I need a moment with the smelling salts before I can type its unspeakableness - unsolicited and absolutely unwanted Government-issue stool testing kit - to refit it for its only decent purpose. And that would be as a piece of art which I will gladly leave in perpetuity in the hope that it might instruct future inhabitants of this planet after we've fucked it over completely.

Years ago, I nominally added diabetes 'type 2' to the interminable list of life-threatening evils I must guard against. I'm not so arrogant that I won't at least listen to a reasonable argument from scientists whose interests are not wholeheartedly vested in proving their own hypotheses. Should such scientists arrive in the Pantosphere, perhaps they'll send a card around to Seat of Pants, so we can receive them with due courtesy.

I do know that if I eat too much chocolate or drink too much wine I will get a headache. That knowledge works for me as a deterrent for over-indulgence in chocolate but has not been quite as effective with wine. I also hear that salt is bad for me. Well, I have low blood pressure. I keep a store of Free Trade dark chocolate very handy. I add salt 'to taste', as they used to say in the old recipe books because I'm prone to cramp.

Which brings me to my point. What I've wanted to say all along is that I have a favourite food item. It probably isn't, strictly speaking, the healthiest food option on the planet. But it only takes a few minutes to make and it contains all natural ingredients.

The potato fritter (above), is a dish my mother passed on to us. My version is spicier than Ma Pants's as I discovered that Spanish paprika tends to awaken the tango tendency in a shredded potato. The specimens above were probably the best I ever made. The potatoes are local baby desirees. Will I ever taste their like again? Please don't arrest me officer. My taste buds know not what they feel.

Sorry, I was waylaid enjoying good health, I completely forgot that I was going to tell you that our Government here in Australian is thinking of introducing one of these wonderful things they like to call a 'scheme' to manage the poor unfortunates who find themselves suffering from diabetes. Our good government proposes to pay a good doctor an 'incentive' in cash money to keep these poor unfortunates 'out of hospital'.

Just a wild, crazy guess, but does anyone else see the sliver of a chance that doctors might read this 'incentive' as a directive to limit hospital admissions? I speak as someone whose elderly mother collapsed on an ambulance concourse after being refused admission to a hospital when she drove herself to emergency because she was having a severe asthma attack.

Fortunately, the Australian Medical Association has done a survey of doctors and they're overwhelmingly against this scheme. It's a relief to have some glint of hope that our medical establishment is not entirely composed of automatons. Perhaps I do get a bit too caught up in the whole you know Who state of the universeness of things.

Oh, right. You want the recipe for those delicious potato fritters?

Pour a glass of wine. Shred three big potatoes or lots of little ones into a large mixing bowl. Wash or peel them beforehand if you can be arsed. Throw in a whisked egg and whatever herbs you have to hand. Spice to taste. As I've said above, a generous pinch of paprika works well for me. I also usually throw in a dessert spoon of powdered bouillon de légumes. Add a couple of tablespoons of self-raising flour and some milk and mix it to pancake consistency. You need to let it sit for about twenty minutes, so drink your wine.

Heat a large flat pan on the big hotplate at about eight o'clock on the dial if you have an old-fashioned cooker like I do. If you don't, you should be reading a different blog. Add a thin layer of olive oil. Pour another glass of wine. Check that the fritter mixture is pancake consistency. Add either milk or self-raising flour to correct. When oil is hot, drop fritter-sized portions into it. You should fit four into a big frying pan at a time. Fry for five minutes on each side. Keep drinking your wine throughout.

They go with everything. And they freeze well. I know, I know. I can't help thinking that we ought to leave something nourishing for the aliens...

Leunig-tic fringe

2010-07-11T15:58:00.003+10:00

Leunig by Pants

I've waited ages for an opportunity to publish this photo of Australian cartoonist and official national treasure Michael Leunig. I snapped it on the campus of The University of Queensland sometime in the mid-seventies. I guess that is obvious from the Fair Isle vest he's wearing. History does not record what Pants had on but it could easily have been something of a Fair Isle nature.

The excuse is to link to this exquisite rant in The Age today, to which I can only reply, 'so it's not just me, then'.

Spelling Beef

2010-07-10T11:29:00.009+10:00

Age of Unenlightenment by Pants

My grandfather was a carpenter. He used to say 'only a poor workman blames his tools.' A British academic has told a conference that the English language is too difficult for young children to learn, according to The Telegraph.

Yes, well it is a bugger, we all know that. The beauty of schooling, however, is that you get about eleven years to master a working knowledge of the language. You're at least sixteen before you're confronted with any forms to fill in that require a binding signature. And in any case, these are almost always written in a language that no one is ever taught and is as far removed from literary English as Tumshuqese.

Granted, there are many irregularities in English that possibly don't make sense if you haven't ever seen home-baked food and therefore expect everything in the world to be explicable only in the context of bureaucratic uniformity.

Fortunately, English has a built-in antidote for difficulty which is called 'degree'. You start out with simple words and progress through to the more complex ones. The irregulars you memorise at the leisurely rate of a few dozen a year. I know we mostly think of memory as a remote function that lives in a thing called Google, but we have a perfectly decent one parked in our heads that is capable of compiling a compendium of essential homophones over time.

Teacher-turned-author, Masha Bell does not share my confidence in our native language's uncanny ability to inveigle itself into our collective consciousness. She suggests that sweeping reforms are needed to the spelling system to improve children’s linguistic skills'. She explains to The Telegraph,

'The antique, inconsistent spelling system of English is probably the main reason why the UK has a far longer tail of educational underachievement than any other European country, why more of our young people are Neets (Not in Education Employment or Training), why many end up in jail, and why improving their chances of re-offending while in prison is much more difficult too.'

Oh gawd, I think we need logic cop. Ms Bell rather neatly skirts the requirement for pesky old empirical evidence here with deft deployment of the word 'probably'. The words 'jumping' and 'shark' might find themselves in the same sentence if it were up to me alone but logic cop is on the case now.

It is true that there is a disproportion of people in jails with low standards of literacy. It is also true that a lot of those people have either a recognisable learning disability or have grown up and been schooled in an environment of multiple disadvantage. It is more true than ever that the poorest areas of Britain in socio-economic terms are where you will find the worst schools. And guess what - they have the lowest attainment levels in English and Maths.

A study by The Dyslexia Institute published in 2005* reviewed the incidence of hidden disabilities within the prison population in Yorkshire and Humberside. The study determined that just over half of the 359 prisoners surveyed had literacy difficulties severe enough to hamper their work and life chances. Around twenty per cent of the sample group had an identifiable literacy disability such as dyslexia or dyspraxia. Half of the male prisoners surveyed had been excluded from school and a third had been regular truants. The research also found that around two-thirds of participants had low levels of numeracy. That's right. More prisoners had problems with Maths than English.

From my days working on educational programmes with under-performing London schools I recall that the attainment stats were very often even lower for Maths than they were for English. So how come the lowest attaining British children do even worse in a subject taught in a universal language? Anyone want to propose bad teaching as a possibility?

Public education is a one-size-fits-all affair. It can't really be done any other way unless the rich people in Britain demean themselves and pay some tax. Why would they? They can afford to send their children to the best of the fee-paying schools.

Most people manage to get through your bog-standard state education provided the teaching is adequate. Even in the prison population, where the incidence of learning disabilities directly affecting literacy is known to be a huge magnification of the occurrence in the general population, the figure is only twenty per cent. Surely it makes more sense to maintain good standards generally and supplement the needs of struggling children with high quality, one-on-one remedial tutoring.

The disaffected minority who are underserved by education now might be a problem but it will be as nothing compared to the anger that could result from a generation of young people who wake up in the near future to discover their access to the wider world has been barred for no good reason. They may discover that most of the interesting things about the world, like spiders and trains and general fiction were prohibited from their experience because their parents and teachers were caught up in some weird paranoiac illness in which they somehow thought that a child's experience should never actually be direct, but rather an extension of the parental or pedagogic imagination. I sure don't want to be around for that tsunami of realisation.

As it happens, this week a suburban couple was reported to Social Services in London for letting their children aged eight and five, ride bicycles to school along a safe route. It was the children's school who dobbed them in. London mayor Boris Johnson has something to say about it in his Telegraph column. I know I've mentioned this before but I can't help it. Every time there is a story about Boris and bikes I just have to relate the time I nearly ran over him in my BMW in Islington. He was doing circles in Liverpool Road. Some might say he was asking for it.

I'm probably not the best person to comment on child protection as I don't have children. When Niece Pants, then aged nine, came to London on her first ever overseas trip, I immediately went outside and grabbed a couple of kids who looked about her age. It's not like they were complete strangers. I'd seen them around. Anyway, I brought them in and introduced them to Niece Pants. From then on they were all out every night playing on the streets and in the parks of Hackney (i.e. the most dangerous place in Britain to live). Niece Pants came in, as instructed, at sundown. It was the middle of summer so that was about 9.30pm. Guess what. No harm came to her.

At that same age (9), Niece Pants's mother Sis Pants, won a place in a class for academically gifted children. The school was way across town from our home. She caught an open-backed double-decker bus into central Sydney and then a train out to her school every morning without escort. The following year, she was getting up even earlier and going to swimming training every morning. I think Dad might have driven her to the pool on his way to work but she would have had to get herself to school on time after training. I don't even remember the detail. That was a kid's life back then. If you wanted extra-curricula activity, you organised it yourself. I personally dragged a 'cello all around Sydney on a bus or train and had to find my own way, from the age of twelve, to the far reaches of the city every Saturday for hockey fixtures.

I've got a bit off the point. But, not entirely. These two ideas are linked by one word 'adventure'. It is abhorrent to me to think that children could ever be prohibited from the experience of discovery. I may not have had kids myself but I have plenty of friends and relatives who have. I remember that three-year-olds can memorise the name of every single dinosaur that ever was, and not because they have to. If there is something wrong with school, it's not to do with the content of the knowledge bank because children will withdraw anything that is available to them. Their minds are made that way.

And before I depart entirely from the subject of growing up in Sydney, immigrant kids would land in our primary school class on a regular basis bewildered and without a word of English. They'd have come from Greece or Italy. Teachers didn't mollycoddle in those days. The newcomers were chucked into the lowest class in their age group. They had to work their way up from there. If they were lucky, someone might mimic the Australian crawl motion to let them know what was happening to them. Their parents were not of an educated class, yet those kids would be speaking fluent English in months, if not weeks.

The article in The Telegraph also throws up this gem,

'According to academics, children in Britain normally take three years to read to a decent standard.

But in Finland – where words are more likely to be pronounced as they look – children can read fluently within three months.'

Which gives Finnish kids plenty of time to learn English, which they do in their multitudes. Around ninety per cent of Finns can speak and read English to a communicative standard. Finns can also speak Swedish and most likely French, German and Italian. Now many people do you know who can speak and/or read Finnish or indeed French, German and Italian?

I count myself very lucky to be a native English speaker. It is already the global language of international travel and business, not to mention blogging. Should English spelling be rationalised? Yes, undoubtedly, but not because some Nanny McAcademic says British kids are too dumb to learn it. What's that saying to the wider world of English speakers who've been able to master it as a second, third or fourth language?

British magazine The Economist has begun a debate about whether or not American English should be adopted as standard. Well, it's only marginally less irregular than Standard English. I think I could probably live without the written distinction between 'check' and 'cheque'. I'd even be prepared to give up 'practise' as a verb. I'd be less comfortable with 'different than' because it doesn't make logical sense but it doesn't matter.

It will not be the Anglophone countries who define English as she is spoke and writ in the future because we're already in the minority. Those whom our ancestors presumed to conquer will have their revenge by colonisining our language. The cohort of English speakers who vastly outnumber we native-tonguers will sort it out, over time. Of course, I would love it if my adoptive god-parent the OED grasped guardianship of the venture in the short term. The new version of the Oxford Dictionary website I cannot praise enough. Now you don't need to know the exact spelling of a word to get it to talk to you. It's like Google but with brains.

My grandfather could read perfectly well even though I doubt his formal education went beyond the age of ten. He taught me the language of music and read to us from comic books. These two things I regard as major pillars in my formal education. I draw on his teachings now, as much as I ever did. Mene kuva - that's 'go figure' in Finnish.

* I've tried to add the link but there is something wrong with it. You can get to it easily enough if you're interested via a key-word search.

A kind of blue

2010-07-09T15:50:00.003+10:00

Blue ray by Pants

I seem to have a winter malaise. It's very cold where I am in eastern Victoria, although not as cold as in other parts of the country, or even other parts of Victoria. I've lived in colder places, but not without double glazing and gas-fired central heating. I do have a very efficient combustion stove which heats the whole house. I really can't bear multi-climate dwellings. An even temperature is a minimal comfort requirement for me. I'd rather have it uniformly cold than have to wrap myself around a pathetic little heat source with less commitment potential than Lindsay Lohan.

I don't want to waste wood though so I wait until the sun goes down at 5pm to light up. I then I pull all the blinds and build a fire hot enough to forge steel. It works. The heat quickly travels up the flue. After I've stuffed in more logs than Captain Kirk racks up on a typical Enterprise mission, I close off the damper. While the house is toasty warm, I get around and attend to anything that can't be dealt with in 'the office'.

Although it makes perfect sense to stay in bed all morning, which I do, it doesn't quite seem right. Instead of dragging myself out of bed to face the world, I haul the world into bed with me. The laptop is the radio, TV and all the newspapers rolled into one. It's also the mailbox, the phone and, occasionally, the workstation. Unfortunately, I have not yet trained it to make breakfast.

Actually, I've always been a breakfast-in-bed person. There's nothing I love more than to scramble two of our fine Larrikin's End eggs into which I sprinkle a generous pinch of chives and parsley from the garden and a few strips of clearance Tasmanian smoked salmon. I pounce on it when they mark it down as it freezes exceptionally well and you only need a little bit to imagine you're live a life of pampered luxury. I decant a full pot of coffee into a thermos flask and crawl into the double-duvet 'office'.

I can't imagine why I thought there was something wrong with me. This seems like a perfectly sensible way to live now that I think about it. It's the blues Jim, but not as we know them...

On matters of life and death

2010-07-08T15:14:00.006+10:00

Death mask by Pants

I have been thinking about death a lot lately. I'm not in any great hurry mind, but I don't like to think of it being a long, protracted thing. I've never been ill, so I don't have any experience of medication - well not that kind anyway.

These days you virtually need a degree in pharmacology to have a conversation with a doctor. I only know about this from talking to my mother, who has a habit of reporting verbatim the contents of consultations she has with various health professionals. There are a lot of words ending in 'ine' and 'ol' and 'test' that I don't recognise.

Ma Pants was recently in hospital and shared a room with a nice old lady of 99. This lady had a condition that hampered her circulatory system. In times gone by we might have called this 'slowing down' and accepted it as a natural phase in the end-of-life cycle. But no. The nurses would wake this poor dear up in the morning and make her sit in a chair all day which distressed her deeply. All she wanted to do was get back into bed and go to sleep. The nurses wouldn't allow it. What if she died! The horror. Gone at 99. What a waste!

It distressed Ma Pants and it distressed me too. For the old lady's sake. For Ma Pants's sake. For everyone who is ever at the mercy of a hospital policy's sake. Ma Pants worked out quite quickly that the lady wanted to lie down and die peacefully, in her sleep. Surely she'd earned that right. She was apparently clever enough not to state that desire openly. Talk about a red rag to a bull. You never, ever tell a health professional that you've enjoyed your stay on earth but would like to check out now please. They hate suicides almost as much as they hate the senseless, senseless deaths from motoring accidents. We're talking one-way ticket to involuntary life support. It means they'll keep you alive until you contract something statistically insignificant.

I don't normally think about death unless it happens to someone close. You think about it if a friend or relation has just died. That's natural. You're not supposed to be preoccupied by it all the time. But talk of death, or rather the deceiving of it seems unavoidable if you engage with any media at all. You're either supposed to be fighting off whatever viral enemy presumes to deprive you of the term of your natural life or adhering to some food conglomerate interest's version of an appropriate diet regime. I've never bothered with a healthy lifestyle and I've never been sick.

Which is sort of why I'm worried. I figure if I'm ever going to get sick, it's bound to be when I'm old and senile and unable to deal with the harrowing world of 'ines' and 'ols'. By that stage, anyone who does get sick will be in everyone's bad books because we'll have had twenty or so years of indoctrination about how to avoid illness and so it must be our fault if we succumb. About the worst fate I can imagine is to be 99 and not be allowed to just lay down and die.

Remembrance of bad things past

2010-07-07T22:17:00.006+10:00

Blast by Pants

Five years ago today I was on my way to work at Wembley Town Hall in North London. I wasn't on my usual route, which might have started out on a No. 30 bus from Hackney Wick. The driver might have been George, a cheerful fellow who had a habit of welcoming passengers. A No. 30 bus was blown up that morning by a terrorist bomb. George was the driver. Happily he survived. Thirteen of the passengers he no doubt welcomed aboard did not.

I was not coming from Hackney Wick that morning. I had spent the night in Watford, where I had been at my cousin's birthday party. While we were making merry, the announcement came through that London's bid for the 2012 Olympics had been successful. I wasn't exactly jumping for joy as my home was right next to the site. My departure would be two-and-a-half years away but I already knew I was going to be selling up.

In the morning I was a bit the worse for whiskey which may explain why I got on the wrong train from Watford. It roared past Wembley Central in express mode to Kensington Olympia where I arrived at about 8.30am. I was annoyed with myself. Even though I was resigned to travelling all the way across London to get to work on a daily basis, I much preferred it before the middle of the rush hour. I would have been at work by now if I hadn't stupidly gotten on the wrong train. There I was, smack in the middle of the worst crowds at the worst time, with almost a whole journey ahead of me.

Even though no bombs had yet gone off on the London Underground, the first route I tried was suspended. I managed to squeeze onto a train to Edgware Road Station, probably about fifteen minutes before a bomb went off there. From Edgware Road I travelled around to Baker Street and then onto the Metropolitan Line for Wembley Park Station, the nearest to work.

The first of the three terrorist bombs was probably going off as my train was pulling away from Baker Street. I had no idea. I was just relieved to be back on a familiar path. I opened my book. I remember very clearly that it was Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. I never finished it. In fact I returned it to the library with only a dozen pages turned. I just didn't feel like it after what happened that day. Incredibly, I borrowed that very same book from our local library on Monday, before I knew I would write this post. I will read it this time.

I got to work just after 9am, my little overnight backpack still strapped on. My colleague Brian gave me that 'and what time do you call this?' look. We were the early birds. We both commuted from Hackney. I explained the Watford express fiasco. He laughed. We moaned about the Olympic win, to get it out of the way before everyone else got in.

We knew something serious had happened when the boss phoned in. I took the call. Owen's suburban train had come into King's Cross. The passengers had all been herded out of the station and onto buses and then off the buses soon after. He and was trying to get a cab and thought he might be a while. Then we got an internal email. Something very serious had happened. Brian and I went downstairs to the staff canteen where they had a big television. These days we would all immediately go online at our separate workstations but five years ago it was different. You wanted television. You wanted the BBC. You wanted company. You needed them.

My mother likes to watch television at night. I didn't want to risk the possibility that she might be confronted with a startling 'all hell breaks loose in London' banner. I went down to the newsagent and bought a phonecard. I dialled the council switchboard and explained that I wanted to call my mother in Australia because she would be worried and gave them my phonecard number. I called her, just like I had every other time there had been a bomb in London. Just like I had when the King's Cross Station fire had happened. Just like I had when we'd had the terrible storm in '87. Just like I did every time I returned from a holiday abroad.

The first hour or so after the bombs was a very controlled version of chaos. There were bombs on trains and buses, nobody knew how many. All public transport was suspended. The word 'suspended' has particular resonance for me because it perfectly describes how my mind responds to these events. I understand the draw of disaster tourism, although I certainly don't approve of it. Closely observed calamities or events in which you may only be peripherally involved pull you into them in a base human way. You're either inexplicably inert in someone else's reality or actively participating in your own dream. And you can't tell which is true. You know you can't immediately help, you don't want to risk being a hindrance and you keep looking at your hands to make sure you're still alive. Armageddon has to happen sometime, right?

I remember thinking as we watched lots of pictures of police vans whizzing about and strap headlines begin to appear below them announcing 'possible terrorist attack', just how very British it all was. We had yet to see the terrible sight of the No. 30 bus with its upper deck blown off. The bus, as we were later to learn, was a mistake. The bus bomber couldn't get onto his planned Underground train. If it weren't for his panicked improvisation, there would have hardly been a visual memory of this horror. Most of it happened deep beneath the city.

Four years previously, on the day that will be forever known as 9/11, I had been working in the bowels of Islington Town Hall in London when two planes struck the World Trade Centre. I had sequestered myself in a silent basement room to assemble a huge batch of consultation papers without fear of interruption. When I emerged mid-afternoon, a colleague said, 'hey, the Twin Towers are on fire. It's terrorists'. I thought he was joking.

I walked across the road and caught a No. 30 bus home. I remember looking out the window and thinking, 'Mark must have been kidding because look at everyone going about their business. Nothing's changed.' I guess I really thought something like that should resound around the world. When I got home, I turned on the TV. The resound was much, much slower then than it would be now, but everything had changed. I had been in New York City almost exactly a year earlier. As I watched into the night the endless replays of the Twin Towers collapsing, I remembered how beautiful New York City is in September.

As is London in July. By the time Owen arrived at work, at about 11.30am, we knew a little more. Everyone called everyone they knew who travelled on the tube. The council's HR team swung into gear. By lunchtime, they'd figured out that people would be stranded as all public transport had been suspended indefinitely. I hadn't thought of that. Brian and I went downstairs to the staff canteen again and met up with the liaison officer who'd been assigned to match people up with lifts.

Just after lunch my closest friend Geoff phoned me. He said, 'don't worry. He isn't hurt, but Tom was driving one of the trains.' I remember that very clearly because, although I had known Tom for around fifteen years, I didn't see him very often. He was Geoff's friend and I only saw him on Geoff-related occasions. It was and is so like Geoff to be thinking about how best to tell me something like that. Tom was driving the Piccadilly Line train. Twenty-six people were killed on his train. The bomb went off in the first carriage, the one directly behind his cabin.

Brian and I got an email at around 3pm to say that Alan from Finance would drive us in his car to Archway. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if no one had given us a lift. Nisha had already kindly offered accommodation at her house which was nearby. Fortunately, Brian had left his car in Islington that day and taken the overground into work. That was very lucky for us. It only took us about 45 minutes to walk from Archway to Canonbury Station, me wearing my overnight backpack. I didn't realise at that stage what an enormous role the backpack had played in the day's events.

I was lucky that day. I didn't lose my life. I didn't lose any friends. I didn't ever seriously run a 'sliding doors' scenario, although it did occur to me that I skidded a good deal closer than I might have if I'd had my act together and scrutinised the departure board at Watford Central more closely.

The next day, most of the public transport system resumed normal operations and I went to work. Fifty-two people had died. Many more had been physically injured or emotionally scared or both. Countless families and friends were still searching the hospitals or awaiting news of someone who hadn't been accounted for.

Two weeks later there was nearly a repeat of the nightmare. On July 21st, four backpack bombs failed to detonate successfully. Three were on the Underground. One was on a Hackney Wick bus, this time the No. 26. I was already at work when the news came through. Alan from Finance again gave us a lift to Archway. The buses were running again by the time we arrived. We got on a bus to Highbury and the driver greeted us with a cheery, 'don't let the bastards grind you down'.

I'm relieved to have avoided being directly involved in these awful events but I am also grateful for the experience of being quite close. People on the fringe of disaster become incredibly calm and throw themselves into admin mode. Things do not fall apart. Of course, London does have that blitz-coping heritage, but I think it must be true of people everywhere. We seem able to deal with whatever confronts us, when it's important.

Tonight I think of that day. I think of Tom. I think of all the other people who are living with the consequences of what happened in London on 7th July, 2005.

And death shall have no opinion

2010-07-06T19:48:00.004+10:00

The dying of the light

The other day I heard a XXGenYer on the radio blithely quip that there would probably be no old age pension by the time she got to retirement age. What age might that be by mid-century - 103? She intended to invest for her retirement, at, like, some point. The words 'as' and 'if' slowly formed on my pursed lips.

Why would anyone think it was acceptable to deny fellow humans the guarantee of dignity and decency no matter what misfortune awaited them? Have we not read our Dickens? Just because we're all such firebrands for risk management these days, don't mean shit don't happen.

I heard about the Depression and the War from my parents. I was always aware that torment on a global scale could be ignited from almost nothing. War and depression have almost happened again so many times in the last sixty years. It's not cleverness that has contained them. It's luck.

The welfare ethic that developed in most western countries after World War 2 was born of an earnestness to alleviate human suffering. The proponents, although victors, had seen far too much of it to feel they could walk away without securing a fundamental change in the way we treat each other.

Is it really possible that this marked advancement in our collective consciousness could be completely dismantled within a generation or two by compulsive shoe shoppers who couldn't be arsed to speak out against the hostile takeover of our common wealth by private interests? Has anyone looked at the American example of health and aged care lately? Why don't people believe in universal welfare anymore?

The idea that you put a percentage of the money you earn into a state-run scheme that will take care of you if you are ill or live beyond your capacity to work for a living is, I suppose, unfashionably Marxist. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs', is how he put it. He didn't include women because women didn't work then. They just starved, along with their children, if their husband died and couldn't provide for them. Or they were all sent to the workhouse.

Australia has a compulsory workers' pension scheme called Superannuation. I don't know anything about it because it came in after I left the country. It seems enormously complex, so I'm quite glad I don't have to learn it. I have gleaned that the Government doesn't run it. It is a profit-generating industry.

Today the Government announced some proposals for improving it. One of them is a directive to Superannuation fund managers that they 'must act in the interests of customers'. Would you trust your decrepitude to someone who needed to be ordered not to fuck you over?

The other proposal is that the Government set up a safe and simple scheme for the large numbers of people who don't understand what is happening with their retirement savings. Let's hope that one gets up. Since no political jurisdiction anywhere in the world has yet demonstrated it has the muscle to knock down the thugs who treat people's life savings like a poker stake, I'd like to see Australia get beyond 'please sir can I have some more' in its negotiations.

I have a British state pension entitlement, which I now won't get until I'm sixty-five but that doesn't matter much because I'm sure I'll have learned to live on thirty pounds, ten shillings and sixpence a year by then. The British National Insurance scheme I understand perfectly well. Every working person contributes a percentage of his or her salary to a national fund which pays for both the National Health Service and the State Pension. The employer pays a contribution as well.

The important thing about this scheme is that it pays for everyone who is sick, no matter how sick they are and it pays for everyone who is old, no matter how old they get. If you never get sick but drop dead at sixty-four, you don't get anything and neither do your descendants. This is the nature of universal welfare. It deals with the basic requirements of the living. The guarantee you have is that if you are ill, someone will try to fix you and if you get old, someone will feed you and wipe your bum. And you will not ever have to worry about how you're going to pay for it. Simple, although perhaps not pleasing to your vile and snivelling grand-nephew.

The inequality of NHS treatment is another matter and any friend of Pants will know that I've had plenty to say on that in the past. Bad administration and poor training are separate and distinct problems. Their existence doesn't dilute the basic soundness of the universal care ideology. If anyone really thinks private industry provides superior medical care, they might like to take a close look at the American model.

People in Britain and elsewhere in Europe where decent social welfare systems are more common than not, accept the fundamental principle. They give 'according to their means' so that the 'needs' of the universal 'each' will be met. An almost unnoticeable subtraction from their monthly pay will not only protect them and their immediate dearests but guarantee that they will not be sideswiped by some unexpected kin calamity - like having to sell their family house to pay for their father's triple bypass surgery. That's why they call it National Insurance.

I believe in it. I believe in paying a portion of whatever I earn to a state-run scheme that prioritises people's needs on the basis of equality. Call me old-fashioned but it seems like the most efficient and cheapest way of looking after everyone. In almost all respects in health and aged care, one size does fit all. One size of comfort, one size of nourishment, one size of compassion, one size of humanity.

Turn and turn a-boat

2010-07-05T12:05:00.006+10:00

Still waters by Pants

I'm about to participate in my first Australian election since 1980. Not that I know when yet. I suspect it's coming soon as our new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has opened the last and most complex file in her 'fiendishly hard' basket - the vexed question of our national response to the small but very visible number of asylum seekers who take the short but scary journey from the Indonesian island of Java to the Australian territory of Christmas Island by clapped-out boat.

The arrival of boat people was an issue thirty years ago too as I dimly recall. Refugees were still trickling in from the 'fallen' South Vietnam. The general rule of thumb hasn't changed since those days - if you make war on countries, you tend to create a situation where a lot of people want to leave. It remains the case that most people who try to get to Australia have found themselves on the weaker side in a deadly conflict, whether they be Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghan Hazaras or belong to a persecuted religious or ethnic minority in one of the civil warring African nations.

Australians have a long history of invasion anxiety that is quite irrational but is probably an acquired neurosis trailing back to the Second World War and the well-founded threat of attack by Japan which was immediately followed by the far-fetched yet prolonged spectre of the 'yellow peril' during the Cold War. That neither of these scenarios eventuated makes the virulence of the condition even more curious. Australians feel picked-on and some seem to think that the raggle-taggle of wretched asylum seekers who make it here are actually an advance guard for a full-scale seizure in the near future.

The reality is much more prosaic. Flight is a response to crisis which is why there are sometimes lots of people doing it and sometimes hardly any. This is worth remembering because the political orthodoxy in Australia would have it that asylum seeking is a direct result of government policy - i.e. if the government is 'soft' the boats will come. Refugee routes grow organically as a response to a need and use whatever resources are available. Ten years ago persecuted Chinese were fleeing to Britain in the vast lorries used to transfer produce across Europe and displaced Kosovans were concealing themselves in Dover-bound trucks at Calais. Boatloads of men row to the Canary Islands from West Africa. Cubans still make the 90-mile journey across the Caribbean to Florida.

Australia is one of the cheaper destinations for Middle Eastern refugees, which suggests that the operation is a comparatively trouble-free one with an abundance of options. The only way to get here without valid entry papers is to bypass the customs system altogether. That means coming on a boat. For Afghans, say, the process is relatively straightforward. If they make it to neighbouring Pakistan, they will find conveniently bribable officials. They can then fly to another Muslim country, Indonesia without a problem. Christmas Island is less than 200 nautical miles from the Indonesian island of Java. It's not exactly a fun cruise but neither is it a completely crazy endeavour either. Most of the very small number of people who undertake it, make it. Australia isn't being 'targetted' in any kind of ideological sense . It's a question of optimalisation.

But the fear of porous borders persists and has caused election havoc before, most memorably in 2001. The Prime Minister has not yet announced a policy-shift from the current position, which is dangerously stalled in the territory of cluelessness. Currently there is a suspension on the processing of asylum claims from Afghan and Sri Lankan nationals. The Government is under pressure to get down off the fence.

Yesterday, Julia Gillard made a statement in an informal setting clearly calculated to give notice that she is about to do something. In this statement, she appears to validate the idea that there are two clearly defined 'sides'.

"For people to say they're anxious about border security doesn't make them intolerant, it certainly doesn't make them a racist, it means that they're expressing a genuine view that they're anxious about border security."

That would appear to be Team A.

"By the same token, people who express concern about children being in detention, that doesn't mean they're soft on border protection, that just means that they're expressing a real human concern."

That would appear to be Team B.

And then she said this,

"People should say what they feel and my view is many in the community should feel anxious when they see asylum seeker boats and obviously, we as a government want to manage our borders."

'Many in the community should feel anxious'? Why should they feel anxious? If the Prime Minister is encouraging 'open debate', as she claims to be, (although what the point of that might be on the eve of a policy announcement is anyone's guess), why would she want to prejudice that 'open debate' by validating what is basically an inexplicable fear?

And where exactly is this 'community' of the many who should feel anxious? If she's talking about the marginal Labor seats where there are concentrations of refugees living whose claims were accepted and who are now no longer asylum seekers but citizens of this country, and I suspect she might be, then aren't we talking about a completely different thing? These hypothetical people who 'should feel anxious' would not be concerned with 'border' protection. They would be concerned with 'culture' protection, surely. Racial tension must be recognised for what it is, not buried under a metaphor.

At times like these the quality of Australian discourse appears to flee from the middle ground faster than you can say, has anyone seen my nuance? When you've been out of the loop for as long as I have, it's all a bit confusing. It's not that I haven't experienced societal division over asylum-seekers before. The British tabloids certainly fretted a lot about Kosovans. It never really reached the level of hand-wringing insolubility that it inevitably does in Australia though and I think isolationism plays a big part in that. I was most relieved to read this finely considered piece in The Sydney Morning Herald by Adele Horin confirming my hopes that the hysteria is indeed an anomaly. She says the national narrative is completely at odds with the national character and I hope she's right.

On the question of 'what should we do about the boat people coming?' I would say nothing, or at the most, nothing much. There is very little worthwhile action the destination country can take when there is such an efficient enabling operation in the transit countries. A senior police officer in London once told me that the police never imagined they would stop drug distribution because there were just too many resilient vested interests in the chain to break it. His focus was on managing the consequences. He was careful to be seen to be doing something though because drug trafficking was, after all, illegal.

And this is what we should do. Expensive crackdowns and confrontations have been a public relations disaster both nationally and internationally. By all means make some threatening noises in the direction of Pakistan and Indonesia and maybe even toss a little money at assisting them in rounding up some of the 'people smugglers' and corrupt officials. It might be useful to concentrate on the seediest ones so that at least the asylum seekers, who will always try to come here if they can't stay where they are, have a better chance of making it in reasonable physical and emotional shape.

But let's not waste billions of dollars on navy patrols and detention centres. This is not money well spent. Once asylum seekers have made the journey, let's get them off the boats, through the immigration system and back into normal lives as quickly as possible. It's the least we can do for people who have risked their lives in pursuit of the highest human goal - to live free.

Where there are tensions between new arrivals and host communities, let's tackle that openly and honestly, and in the context in which it actually belongs. We still haven't had the policy announcement. It won't change the way I vote. I just hope it's not insane. It's my first Australian election for thirty years. I'd like to be able to vote with conviction.

Shelf life

2010-07-04T22:56:00.007+10:00

Before by Pants

For the last two years my 'study' has looked like this. It's a study in name only as I never do anything vaguely reminiscent of study in there. In fact I rarely do anything in there except search for things I invariably don't find.

This has partially changed.

After by Pants

I now have one entire wall of bookshelves. I say partly changed because this is really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of book storage requirements. I will need another one of these and some smaller units as well. But it's a start.

The paper mountain is being slowly tamed into box files or archived for the shed. It's not that I'm one of those weird obsessive people who keeps every scrap but one does need to keep tax records for seven years after owning a business.

It took me about three months to save up for these shelves so I've already started to put money aside for the next lot. And the car needs to be serviced as well. I'm just glad the local library discontinued its monthly book sale. I've cleaned out the local charity shops of anything decent so I don't think I'll be acquiring any more books for a while.

When you spend a day sorting novels into alphabetical order, you do begin to see the point of Kindle. I don't objectify books. I don't think of them as particularly beautiful things. I like the practicality of them, especially their resistance to breaking down. I prefer to limit the number of items in my care that can go wrong because there are usually cost implications.

Books require very little in the way of ongoing administration, once the initial housing crisis is solved. When you've settled them onto their shelves you can forget about them. They lend themselves so easily to organisational order as well. If there's one thing I really hate, it's devising filing systems. There are always so many exceptions to bedevil any categorisation you come up with.

There is a certain satisfaction to seeing these books released from their shipping cartons. The prolonged business of settling into Seat of Pants has done nothing whatever for my mental health. I have spent too much time surrounded by cardboard boxes.

Adams bomb

2010-07-03T19:35:00.002+10:00

Phillip Adams, ABC

Revered and beloved, (by anyone half-way decent), Australian journalist and broadcaster Phillip Adams announced in his newspaper column today that he won't be renewing his Australian Labor Party membership this year, after fifty years of loyal support.

I knew this was going to happen. In fact, I knew the exact wording by which the blow would be delivered. No, I'm not a spookily word-perfect clairvoyant. Phillip Adams himself sent me a sneak preview over a week ago, on 25th June. It's not that we're best buds or anything. I listen to his radio show every day - in fact it is one of my great pleasures. Occasionally he asks listeners to proffer an opinion on matters arising from important events. I did so by sending him a link to my blog post on the demise of the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, published earlier that day.

As events go in Australia, it doesn't get much more earth-shattering and I'm sure he received hundreds of emails after he first aired his personal views on the routing of Rudd on his radio show, Late Night Live, which goes out at 10pm. I was listening to the next-day replay at 4pm on 25th June and sent off my email a few hours later, at 8.39pm. I received mail back from Phillip at 11.38pm and then the 'sneak preview' a minute later.

I expected to see the contents the following day in Phillip's column in The Weekend Australian. That didn't happen. Instead, it appeared today, over a week later. I'd like to dwell on this a moment because I think it says a lot about the type of open and trusting person Phillip Adams obviously is. As I said, we are in no way best buds. I've never met him and have only emailed him a couple of times before. He doesn't even know my real identity. I am Ms Pants to him, as I am to you reader of indeterminate character of whom I am deeply suspicious - but that's just me.

The first thing I want to say is that the wording of Phillip's piece in The Weekend Australian today differed not one comma from the email he sent to me. He had obviously written it immediately and spontaneously - not an especially astounding feat for a seasoned journalist of his calibre you might surmise. But a lot of unpleasant information about Kevin Rudd emerged during the intervening week. A gaggle of newly unmuzzled underlings have staggered from under the paperwork mountain to debrief about the horror of working for this apparently mild-mannered megalomaniac. Yet, Phillip Adams stuck with his gut assessment of his man, his friend. I'll return to that loyalty later, because I do believe it's something we should never entirely lose.

However, I think Phillip is wrong. We had an email exchange over the contents of the 'sneak preview'. I took issue with this statement,

'The right to dismiss a PM belongs to the electorate at an election, not to a drunken Governor General or factional bullies drunk with power.'

And this is how I responded,

I can't agree with the analogy of 'the dismissal'. GG [Governor General] does not have the authority to remove a PM, which is what Kerr effectively did, albeit through a mechanism within his jurisdiction. Caucus does have that authority and indeed duty to remove a leader whose fitness to lead is in doubt...

... In either case (dismissal or Rudd roll) the electorate was not deprived of its rights. In 75 there was still an election and there was still the opportunity to vote for Gough. It could be argued that Kerr's action significantly influenced the result, but not that he prevented the electorate from exercising its right. Same deal here. There will be an election. Kevin Rudd was PM by virtue of his status as leader of the Labor Party, not the other way around.

I found myself in the unnatural situation of having to resort to nerdy old rules and regulations to make my point. Now I don't feel so bad about it. I have worked in the public sector. I have been in good, earnest teams nearly destroyed by Captain Queegs. I have cowered on policy planes piloted by barnstorming adventurers who could have dispatched me to mortgage hell simply by raising an eyebrow in my direction. I know how all of the people who are now spilling their guts feel.

I'm in awe of Phillip's graciousness in sending me a preview of a statement that might have, and indeed did, make big news in Australia. It has been one of the five picture-box stories on The Australian's website all day. His trust in me was well placed. I forwarded his email to only one person, someone I knew would respect the unrequested embargo. Phillip never asked me not to pass this on and I never asked the one person to whom I did forward it not to splash it all over the internet. I just knew that trusted person wouldn't, just as I didn't.

Maybe Phillip Adams knows more about human nature than I give him credit for. I certainly hope that's true. But he isn't right about how things are at this very moment in time. A capable woman, whom he dismisses as 'Barbie Doll or Boadicea (sic)', seems to have been keeping our government's administrative apparatus from collapsing over the last 'two-and-a-bit' years. We now understand that public servants waited until Kevin Rudd left the country so that they could get routine government business signed off by Julia Gillard, who seemed to understand the rudiments of basic governance, unlike her boss.

One thing I would like to say to you Phillip - in defiance of the Baz Luhrmann worldview, I do try to see things as they are, rather than puzzle my way through a maze of opinion-formers' ought-to-be scenarios. I admire you for putting your faith in people Phillip. I was honoured to be given the opportunity to live up to that faith.

There will be an election soon and, as much as I would love to vote for Julia Gillard, I will not get the chance. The Labor candidate in my Akubra-belt electorate has as much chance of winning as I have of baking a decent scone.

Coal comfort

2010-07-02T19:12:00.011+10:00

Mineral Wealth by Pants

John Paul Getty's famous formula for success is, 'rise early, work hard, strike oil'. He's also the wit who quipped, 'the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights'.

It's always amazed me that a form of theft has been universally sanctioned because none of us, including Pants, likes to be cold. A buccaneering class has been allowed to trample untrammelled over our shared space and snuffle up whatever takes its fancy. Great wealth and respect have accrued to the prospectors who tear up our Earth for profit.

The knock-off guys who used to bring goods from the back of their friends' cousins' lorries to my door when I lived in Hackney enjoyed much the same social standing in my neighbourhood for similar reasons. They delivered what people wanted - cheap and with no questions asked. I never bought anything from them except books. Backdoor guys bringing books just seemed like a brilliant subversion to me.

Today, Australia's new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has 'struck a deal' with the nation's 'miners' to have a percentage of the profits from our mineral wealth returned to the public purse. The details, together with an almost implausible spectrum of views thereon, is available absolutely everywhere and I'm not going to go into any of that here. I can't be fannied to study it properly and, in any case, my intuitive guess about these things has always been a better-than-even-money stab in the dark so I'm sticking with that strategy.

A month or so ago, Kerryn Goldsworthy over at Still Life With Cat published a brilliant post slagging off our lazy media for accommodating the mining barons' self-branding as 'miners', enabling them to credential their billionaire arses as 'working people'. She says,

'Miners are the people that Margaret Thatcher brought to their knees in the 1980s. Miners are the dudes with the pickaxes, the dirty faces, the high mortality rate, the not-high-enough salaries and the really really terrible lungs.'

Kerryn remains the only commentator, as far as I can see, to spot the value disjunct. I was living in Britain during the period of the miners' strike (1984-85). I was in a band and we played at benefits where genuinely impoverished miners in authentically soiled donkey jackets wept real tears as punters who were on the dole themselves put pound notes into plastic buckets. I stayed for a generation so I also know that a lot of the communities destroyed by the pit closures of the 1980s took that long to recover, if they ever did. The spectacle of Australian mining magnates squealing over a possible prosciutto-shaving off their morbidly bloated personal hoards shames us all.

But let's not pretend this isn't how the world works. The deal that has been achieved today is neither here nor there in terms of its capacity to enshrine a fair distribution of national wealth. In any case, I would argue that these days we ought to be thinking more in terms of how we use our mineral resources to equitably benefit the whole of humanity. The words sparing and sharing come to mind. I lived in Europe as dozens of countries were crawling painfully but hopefully towards common economic ground so it's incredible to me to hear Western Australia proclaiming its desire to secede from the rest of the federation purely on the basis that its small population literally controls a commodity bonanza within its pencilled boundary. Fine, but don't come crying to us when your citizens are rioting over their broadband speeds.

In 1984, (and believe me, the irony is not lost), the British Government owned the nation's coal resources. A government that goes to war with its own lowest paid employees in an industry that is both financially and socially profitable is morally and organisationally bankrupt and quite possibly criminally insane to boot. Yet, retrospectively Margaret Thatcher is hailed as an early bell ringer on climate change. If so, she is surely due a Guinness Record in the category of biggest sledgehammer to crack smallest nut with most devastating social consequences. And possibly a Mystic Meg Magic Marker as well. I'm reasonably sure she wasn't thinking of saving the environment as she was fucking over the miners and their families. Is it any wonder that after Thatcher people didn't trust the people to manage the people's resources?

Now, instead we have a much better system. We let half-a-dozen wankers who love helicopters, themselves and whomever they happen to be with when the share prices are announced decide whether the real miners, the people who physically do the digging, will have jobs or not. We also extend to them the invitation to harangue us at every opportunity with the argument that any prosperity we have somehow managed to scratch out for ourselves is, in fact, due to their efforts.

Julia Gillard has created bubble'n'squeak out of the dog's dinner Kevin Rudd left behind. I expect it's the best that could be managed in the circumstances. It was crazy to introduce any kind of new tax in the last few months of a first-term government's tenure. The price is a weaker deal for the Australian people than the one that was originally proposed, for the moment. Breaking the resources oligarchy in this country will be a long and clever game. I don't know if we'll ever have politicians who'll be up to that challenge. I'm still reeling that these vital resources ever got into such a cabal of greasy palms in the first place - that's how retro old Pants is.

What we at least have now is a Prime Minister who is not of the sulky persuasion and who does seem to be capable of thinking outside of her own moment. Let's hope it lasts.

Prize Twat

2010-07-01T20:33:00.009+10:00

Jasper Jones, Allen & Unwin

I read this book last week. I wasn't planning on writing a review of it because it's a stiff. It has, however, just been declared the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year.

The 25-year-old's writing has been widely compared to Mark Twain's and his winning novel as the Australian version of To Kill A Mockingbird, according to national broadcaster, the ABC. Really? Not by anyone who's read any Mark Twain or To Kill a Mockingbird I'll venture.

I'm sorry, but this is just embarrassing. This book is devoid of any moral centre, much less purpose - a mandatory attribute for any book being compared with the great Southern traditions of American literature. It's disjointed and almost autistic in its failure to offer an emotional connection of any kind. Instead it profers crude and superficial 'links' to substantial works (like To Kill a Mockingbird) that are no more than name checks. The narrative crawls up its own arse in the first chapter and then spends the interminable remainder trying to find its way out again, with questionable success.

This gushing over clever young things and their vacuous and shallow inventions gives me a frightful attack of the cultural cringes. I was fourteen in 1969 when this book is supposedly set and let me tell you Craig, we had not yet discovered English words like 'bollocks' and we certainly didn't refer to each other as 'tragics'. And it was quite a few years before Vietnamese refugees started to show up, even in cities. Whatever happened to creating a believable world? Ignorant. Lazy.

But then I thought The Slap was excrement and I think Alex Miller is positively unreadable so what would I know from the scribblings of show ponies and the airheads who fawn over them? I suppose I've been spoiled by Tim Winton. I've been conditioned to expect quality prose by a writer who really does know his Mark Twain and who has enough professional skill and respect for readers to paint an authentic picture of Western Australia in any era he chooses to animate.

C Minus poor fella my country - must try harder.

Mad about the toys

2010-06-30T15:25:00.013+10:00

Disney/Pixar

Toy Story 3 - Review

You don't need me to tell you it's good. The critics are hardly divided. I've read a grumble or two about the gender imbalance in the power structure - like that don't reflect real life. The stereotyping is an in-joke that is far more toy related than gender specific. Ken does squeal at one point 'I am not a girls' toy' but turns out to be far more vain and vacuous than Barbie. It's not going to make little girls feel like they don't belong in an adventure and I'm not going to waste my feminist angst on number crunching over a series I absolutely adore.

This last Toy Story film pulls together every thread from the first two with meticulous care. It's Pixar so you know it's going to be witty and tight and play your emotions like they were Mozart. But it's also much better than that. There is not a cynical pixel in this film. It is made with great respect and affection for the children and adults who will see it and the world they share with their toys or their remembrance of toys past. It's quite a radical film because it introduces small children to a number of sophisticated and complex social concepts.

Andy's toy box is both a functional workplace and a healthy democracy. Woody the cowboy is the nominal head by virtue of being Andy's favourite toy. But he's not a viceroy. He's the one who calls meetings and makes suggestions but decisions are always made by consensus. If Woody fails to convince, as he inevitably does to serve the drama, he defers with reasonably good grace. Everything these toys do is the result of talking a problem through and facing its consequences together. They are a community of equals whose common concern is to preserve their 'village' from external threats.

The first Toy Story film (1995) begins with the toys facing an annual threat - Andy's birthday. The older toys fear obsolescence, and with good reason in a throwaway society. There is also the possibility that any powerful new presence could disrupt the social harmony. High-tech toys that could potentially corrupt the affections of a child are being produced all the time. The difficulties occasioned by Buzz Lightyear's appearance may well have justified the military precision with which the Andy's birthday offensive was carried out. The genius of the Toy Story trilogy is that the anxiety played out in this long exposition is sustained over the three films.

When we meet these characters, Andy is young and the toys are new. They survive a house move in the first film and a garage sale in the second. By the third, the toys have have been through an awful lot together and have experienced the loss of a number of 'good friends' who are mourned with some poignance. They are still a strong team but they are aware that they face their greatest challenge yet - redundancy.

Toy Story is an Upstairs/Downstairs melodrama. The characters are in service to a master who, in their case, is benevolent. As in the Harry Potter series, parallel worlds intersect but only one is aware of the other. It echoes the tales of Coppélia and Pinocchio who come to life initially to assert their own identity but ultimately contribute to the betterment of humankind. Andy's toys have a decent but not uneventful life. In the first film they come face-to-face with Sid, the evil kid from next door who cannibalises toys. They are moulded by this experience to always look out for each other.

Andy is on his way to college at the beginning of Toy Story 3. He must clear his room for his younger sister Molly. There is a certain disgruntlement amongst the toys as they are no longer played with and, although a toy box is safe, it ain't exactly purposeful. The toys retain Andy's affection but not his interest. The great Toy Story conceit is that there is always a diasporic separation beginning with a misunderstanding, followed swiftly by an accidental fall from a window and completed by the meteoric capacity of Andy's mother to produce cardboard boxes.

The challenge in Toy Story 3 begins in the traditional way, with a cardboard box and a black marker destination. But the stakes are higher this time because there may not be an actual Andy to get home to. The toys arrive in a dystopic day care community ruled by a very large and exceptionally damaged strawberry-scented bear.

Abandonment has been a theme in Toy Story from the start. The favoured toys hide or protect the broken or less played with as well as they can. The second episode focuses on Jessie's betrayal by her beloved Emily but is resolved when she is reunited with her 'wood' family. The final chapter deals with a much darker cause and effect scenario. A trio of toys is left out in the countryside where their young owner falls asleep. Their leader Lotso, the strawberry-scented bear, guides them home to find he has been replaced. He pushes the trio on until, soiled and battered, they find shelter at a day care centre.

Lotso imposes a regime of abuse tempered by his own experience. Andy's toys are sent to a room where they are shocked to find themselves in the 'age-inappropriate' hands of toddlers. Some commentators have chortled at the supposed middle-class outrage expressed by the toys but why shouldn't they object to a) being treated badly b) directly observed poor management? They don't tolerate it for a minute. They immediately organise and act. This is a great message for kids.

The crisis is just about as fearsome as a crisis can be and the resolution just about as satisfying as a resolution can be.

The spy who came back from the mall

2010-06-29T15:23:00.005+10:00

The Drop by Pants

Now this is a job I would love to have had. Eleven Russian 'sleeper' agents have been arrested in the USA. Apart from the odd cold warlike assignment, all they had to do was live like Americans. You know, eat only take-out meals, go to baseball games and pretend not to know where Asia is.

In the age when one assumes all spying is conducted by pimply computer hackers in darkened bunkers it is refreshing to know that there is still a little old-fashioned espionage going on. According to the New York Times, FBI agents who'd been tracking the sleepers for about ten years, (another doddle of a wage packet there), observed,

Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train station stairway. An identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports, messages sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible ink. A money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.

Invisible ink! Shortwave radio. Oh happy John le Carre. Hang on, the question Why is tugging at my sleeve. What is it? I'm trying to write a blog post here. Oh, yes, good point. The question Why would like to know how come the Russians didn't just hire a Rolling Stone reporter if they wanted American military secrets. They could have saved themselves a lot of money.

It does seem as if some of these deep-cover spooks were stringing their employers along a bit. The FBI intercepted a couple of 'please explain' memos re expenses such as US$1,125 for 'trip to meeting' and US$3,600 for 'education'. Hey, the wily spies wrote back, you want authentic American, that means conspicuous consumption. However the spymasters don't seem to have bought the efforts of one enterprising family to blend in by acquiring real estate with this reasoning,

“From our perspective purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solving the housing issue, plus ‘to do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.”

Pull the other one Boris, it's got Beluga caviar on it.

It is all quite curious. Perhaps it's an exercise in nostalgia, like the Russian equivalent of setting up a Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

So you think you can can-can?

2010-06-28T21:27:00.012+10:00

Kodaked from youtube by Pants

A French exotic dancer thought it would be a nice tribute to Aboriginal people to strip off on Uluru.

I pay respects to the Anangu people who have been offended by what's happened.

I really don't know why anyone would be shocked that foreigners have no respect for Aboriginal sacred sites. Has anyone looked at the Tourism Australia homepage lately? It features a blonde, Caucasian woman in a white singlet top looking very sexy with Uluru as a backdrop. If you search for information about Uluru on the site, you'll discover,

Uluru / Ayers Rock is Australia's most recognisable natural icon. Standing 348 metres high, the monolith has a great cultural significance for the traditional Aboriginal owners, the Anangu people.

'Great cultural significance' is not exactly a red light if you know what I mean.

Pants is not without sin. I have been in a state of similar undress in any number of countries where I felt my need for a spontaneous swim overwhelmed any requirement to conform with local protocol. I would not have done so, however, if specifically requested not to.

It's time to respect the Anangu people's demand for a total ban on climbing Uluru.

Big Country, Small Minds

2010-06-27T16:30:00.007+10:00

Illustration by Sir John Tenniel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The table was a large one but the three were all crowded together in one corner of it. "No room! No room!" they cried out when they saw Alice coming. "There's plenty of room!" said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

This exchange from Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland entitled A Mad Tea-Party, is a useful lens through which to view Australia's relationship to the outside world. Despite the fact that there are almost as many people living in Beijing as there are in the whole of Australia, many residents think the country is 'full' and that adding even a boatload or two of desperate asylum seekers is 'unsustainable'. No one's bothered to consider that refugees don't tend to have big appetites.

An announcement has come today from our new Prime Minister Julia Gillard, (for whom I have not yet thought of a clever moniker - suggestions on an e-card if you think you're hard enough). Ms Gillard says,

''I do not support the idea of a 'big Australia' with arbitrary targets of, say, 'a 40 million-strong Australia' or 'a 36 million-strong Australia'."

There is something about Australia that makes it resolutely averse to living in the present. We are either obsessing about past events that we can't change or stressing about things that may never happen. It's either 'I bought some shoes I don't like and couldn't afford but can't take them back because I've worn them already', or it's 'we must prevent young people from encountering alcohol or strangers or the internet or Europe.

Only in Australia, the land where everyone knows the exact number of annual motoring fatalities and the alcohol content of every single eligible beverage including mouthwash, could there exist a notion that an isolated island, that is almost impossible to get into if you weren't born here, needs to concern itself with population targets.

Britain is an island nation. Actually, it's made up of quite a few of them but most Britons live on the big one. People keep telling me it can fit into the state of Victoria five times, (although I seriously don't believe that - and draw your own conclusions about the battiness of the assertion in this particular context). It has three times our population. You can safely swim to Britain from Continental Europe, although I personally prefer the Eurostar. That's the Europe, by the way, from which every single EU citizen has the right to emigrate to Britain permanently without notice if they so desire. Even in the present circumstances, Britain is not twisting up its knickers over population the way we are.

"Australia should not hurtle down towards a big population. We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia," says Ms Gillard.

Okay. Everyone, stop fucking right now! No more babies until the government has set up a task force to work out how we're going to feed the poor mites. Ah, 'sustainability'. What an insurmountable challenge for a country with no arable land, no mineral resources, no habitable coastline, no wind, no sun... I can't go on, it's just too depressing.

''If you spoke to the people of western Sydney, for example, about a 'big Australia', they would laugh at you and ask you a very simple question: 'Where will these 40 million people go?' '' Ms Gillard concluded.

My maths is a little rusty but I'm thinking that if we already have 22 million settled then we only need to find shelter for 18 million more on these figures and they probably don't all want to live in western Sydney. I know I wouldn't. In any case, these projections are for 2050 aren't they? A handful of Amish could build that many homes in forty years. But what about infrastructure? you cry hysterically.

Ah yes, the infamous 'infrastructure'. That mysterious phenomenon that we've forgotten how to manage for the last sixty years. It's really very simple. Most 'infrastructure' comprises buildings that are a variation on 'a house'. (See Amish, above). It's basically a box with a roof and it's a different size or a different shape or has different things in it depending on its purpose. Most of the rest is 'cables' which are long bits of wire or 'pipes' which are long, round tubes of plastic and 'roads' which are flattened bits of land over which is poured little chips of stone mixed up in a hot liquid called 'tar'. If you need a recipe, ask the nearest Ancient Greek.

And then there's public transport, something regarded as both essential for achieving this mythical 'sustainability' and more difficult than intergalactic space travel. Again, not completely pie in the sky. Quite a lot of short-range public transport can be achieved via something called 'a bus'. It's a bit like a car, only bigger. And then there is the holy grail of public transport puzzles - the railway. Horribly tough this as it requires slabs of wood to be placed on the ground and strips of iron to be laid across them. You can see why governments run screaming in horror.

"Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad we've begun asking riddles."

All quotes by Julia Gillard from The Age (27/6/10)

Up in the air

2010-06-26T11:10:00.007+10:00

Flying into a shitstorm by Pants

The sheer volume of political shenaniganery of the last few days has given me a perpetual headache - and a larger than average phone credit, er, deficit. Sorry, we poor people have to budget everything. I will return to the subject of politics soon as it seems to have plenty of juice left in it and I have at last found something in Australia to be interested in. I was afraid I was going to be snap frozen in 1965 there for a moment. But today I just wanted to talk about something idiotic. Here's a little Pants tip for you. It's possible to lock onto the very finest idiocy to be found anywhere in the world at any time by simply googling 'Ryanair'.

Everyone's favourite post-apocalyptic fantasy of an airline is forever finding new and inventive ways to make headlines. It's an interesting service they offer. You pay them 99p and they lock you in a tin box with lots of screaming kiddies and torture, starve and mug you for an indefinite period then deposit you at an airfield which is hopefully reasonably close to the border of a country you wish to visit. Much better value than paintball.

Faced with slowly escalating tension occasioned by a four-hour tarmac wait at Glasgow's Prestwick Airport and passengers, many of them children, getting a little thirsty and peckish what did Ryanair staff do? They considered the barrage of refreshment trolleys containing food and drink they had lined up specifically for this eventuality of course. But ah, in regulatory speak, because the trolleys have alcohol on them, this makes them technically 'a bar'. Airline rules prohibit the 'opening of a bar' until the plane is in the air because, clearly, it is much safer to have people getting drunk while the plane is flying around than if it is parked on the ground.

No problem. Someone just called the authorities and got permission to remove the couple of bottles of booze off the top of the trolley effectively 'de-barring' it, right? Well, possibly, but since it didn't happen, I'm guessing not. So, with that option scuppered they moved on down the list, right? There's a contingent of ground staff, most of whom presumably have functioning legs. There's airport catering and there's an entire food court a few feet away. A few phone calls, a couple of signed chits and no deaths from dehydration, right?

Apparently not. Faced with a dilemma rivalling that of the good burghers of Leningrad during the Siege, the staff seemingly became catatonic with the enormity of it all. Fortunately, the passengers provided the slap of reality in the form of a threatened but sadly unspecified 'mutiny'. So someone made an executive decision and broke out the trolley - booze and all, right?

Err, no. They called the police. It is nice to know you can rely on the cabin crew to make calm, logical decisions in a crisis isn't it? So, the police told them to stop being so daft and break out the wee trolleys, yes? Err, again, no. They sent a response team to WH Smith to buy water and chocolate for all the passengers, and they paid for it themselves. If you have shares in Ryanair, I congratulate you. You have made a canny investment. This airline will never waste any of your money on preventing little children from suffering.

Prestwick Airport's slogan is,

Pure dead brilliant

They might want to rethink the 'dead' part if they plan to continue with Ryanair.

To be fair Ryanair is not the only airline making headlines this week in Britain for reasons of newsworthy idiocy. British Airways has been in court after a male passenger sued it for treating him like a 'child molester'. Mirko Fischer was told he could not change seats with his pregnant wife as this would place him next to an unaccompanied male child and the airline 'has a policy' disallowing this. You never know what a man will get up to surrounded by hundreds of people and with his wife sitting right beside him. Isn't that just a tragedy waiting to happen? Mr Fischer won his case and donated his settlement to charities who support the victims of real child molesters. You know you've completely lost it as a culture when you need a lesson in common sense from someone who hails from Luxembourg.

Ruddy Hell

2010-06-25T14:02:00.008+10:00

Kevin Rudd yesterday, ABC News

Everyone is talking about Kevin, (thank you very much Lionel Shriver), but no one is stating what appears to me at least to be perfectly obvious. The man was having some kind of personal and/or professional, stress-related meltdown.

I once worked in an arms-length government agency where the boss flipped out. It happened quickly. By quickly, I mean over a period of months. She had been an extremely capable, highly qualified and mostly efficient boss. She appeared savvy with the media. At least she was when we were getting good press. She was a good team communicator, when she remembered to be. She could be a bit short with you if she was under stress but there were usually flowers on your desk in the morning if there had been a temper spill the night before.

And then a few really disastrous things happened in a row. Some flagship projects sank. Some of it was our fault, but mostly it was due to the turbulent political environment in which we were working. Government ministers change. New ones often want something different. That's just how it is sometimes. The local press not only turned but grossly overreacted to what they perceived as mismanagement. The board, (who were mostly lay people), imploded. There appeared to be embezzlement by a board member. We were suddenly working alongside forensic accountants.

Our boss appeared to be coping well at first but nothing she did to get us back on track was effective. She started to withdraw from the staff, appearing to trust no one. Her instructions became vaguer and vaguer and then stopped altogther. Her occasional forays outside her office would either be punctuated by gauche explosions of confected cheerfulness or suicide-inducing portends of doom that would have us adjourning to the nearest pub to swap notes on our latest personal exit strategies. Outbursts of seething rage were no longer tempered by floral apologies.

It's a horrible situation to be in because there is nothing you can do about it, except to enquire pointlessly, 'is there anything I can do to help?' You can only hope for a deus ex machina to descend and deliver you from your daily misery. In the meantime you concentrate on getting your CV around and worry that it will be forever tainted if you don't get your butt out of there before the inevitable moment when the excrement collides with the cooling device. And all the time this is happening, absolutely no one is functioning at any level of effectiveness. Not the boss, not the staff, not the board. You're working in a vacuum with one purpose only - to get through the day.

Eventually, our boss was signed off on long-term sick leave. An interim manager was horrified to find her office in chaos and her personal assistant in tears. The poor PA had not been allowed anywhere near any paperwork for weeks and had been sworn to secrecy. We had hoped against hope that our boss had been locked in her office all that time working through our difficulties, trying to get us help. But she wasn't. She was sitting in there quietly turning into a puddle. The interim manager arrived in the nick of time. Sanity returned surprisingly quickly. The mess was not nearly as bad as it seemed.

Why am I telling this story? Because I think this is what was happening to our former Prime Minister. Kevin Rudd was fine and effective in an approving political environment but not so brilliant at fire-fighting in a hostile one. A good leader needs to be both. There's been all sorts of squealing about 'political assassinations' and 'disloyalty' today but we're not living in the era of the mad King George here. A Prime Minister showing signs of paranoia cannot be propped up out of misguided politeness. It was terribly sad to see Kevin Rudd publicly humiliated but no one forced him to give that speech. It is perhaps an indication of just how precarious his mental state was.

The first duty of a government is to maintain itself. It's not likely a political party is ever going to say to the opposition, 'look, we've ballsed-up here. It's only right that we hand over to you.' The public will be the judge of who seems most fit to govern. There was a very narrow window of opportunity for Kevin Rudd to be replaced cleanly and efficiently, and it was opened and shut decisively. Frankly, I would have been much more worried if the party hadn't had the bollocks or indeed the skill to get him out once it became apparent that such action was crucial to its immediate and future prospects.

You don't have to go back very far for evidence of how bad things can be if a wobbly PM isn't successfully deposed before an election. Compare and contrast the atrocious goings-on in the UK in the year before that recent election. Everyone knew Gordon Brown had completely lost it. It's no time to lose your nerve.

Julia Gillard has had to jeopardise her own political future by taking up this challenge. If she loses the election it's unlikely she'll get another shot. She'll know that only too well. She'll be aware that such an eventuality will also set back the chances of another woman being electable for some time too. These are big odds. Not that she had much of a choice, mind. It's a brave decision and she's to be admired for setting her own long-term interests aside to take on this risk.

I've seen claims today that Kevin Rudd is the shortest-serving PM in our history. Not so. That honour belongs, I believe, to Arthur Fadden (Aug-Oct, 1941). In the unthinkable scenario that Gillard loses the election, she probably won't suffer the ignominy of that fate. Fadden's record of forty days would be hard to beat. It's also worth noting that the PM he deposed, Robert Menzies, was retained in Fadden's cabinet. He later became Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister.

There you go Kevin. Come to your senses, stop playing silly buggers and that could be you one day. In the meantime, straighten up and fly right.

Julia Seizes Dais

2010-06-24T20:09:00.006+10:00

Photo by Mark Tsikas/Reuters

Australia is a funny place. Nothing interesting happens in politics for months and then you wake up one morning and suddenly there's a new Prime Minister installed. And it's a woman. Our first woman Prime Minister. And she actually seems like someone who is not in imminent danger of disappearing up her own behind. What's going on here you may well ask.

But no. It seems real enough. There is a human at the helm. My goodness it's refreshing to see someone there who looks like she genuinely belongs. Kevin Rudd had the appearance of a man on temporary secondment, one who never truly believed he was worthy. Julia Gillard has the confidence of a woman who has had to fight like Boudicca on Benzedrine for every advancement in her career and who knows she deserves to be where she is. And she can verbally string whole sentences together the old-fashioned way - you know with a verb and a subject and an implied full stop at the end. And she confines herself to words that actually exist. That makes a nice change.

She's childless and unmarried. Her live-in (male) partner is a hairdresser. Her hair always looks nice, and normal. She comes from working-class immigrant family. She doesn't wear insane clothes. In fact, she seems notably sane, and normal. It isn't until someone with a natural demeanor comes along that you realise just how mechanical and invented most politicians seem to be.

This is good. It seems correct in an almost karmic way. All she needs to do now is get herself elected. She's not taking any chances. She's refusing to move into the PM's residence until she wins an election. Maybe she's superstitious. God, I hope so. I never trust people who aren't superstitious.

No one seems to know how it all came about. The media was caught off-guard. Kevin Rudd's departure speech was excruciating - clueless and sad. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's been in the throes of some kind of emotional breakdown. He's been acting like a man who's completely lost it for weeks. It was unbelievably gloomy.

Everyone seems to have quite cheered up, and with good reason. Julia, you go girl!

Another fine mess, Stanley

2010-06-23T19:10:00.012+10:00

Desert Storm by Pants

I've just read the full Rolling Stone piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal by Michael Hastings. You will all know its contents by now. Any given precis will have furnished you with a more than fair summary. It's worth reading the whole article for the studious context that is the signature of Rolling Stone at its in-depth best.

The title of the piece is The Runaway General. The long subtitle reads,

Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.

Is anyone surprised that the US military is composed of good ole boys of a calibre that even Stanley Kubrick would have been hard-pressed to imagine? Is anyone vaguely perplexed that a general with a reputation for waywardness would turn out to be a pftr-baitin', nggr-hatin' redneck? Does anyone even think President Obama didn't know what this guy was before he put him in the job?

I am in the same age bracket as Stanley McChrystal. Rolling Stone was huge to our generation. It was our lone voice back then. Even growing up in Australia, I lavished some of my babysitting and milkbar-tending earnings while I was still at school on airmailed Rolling Stone. If you wanted to know what was happening beyond your comfortable, middle-class upbringing, you went to Rolling Stone. It was the place where every important edge got cut. Rolling Stone was the outlaw of journalism. It went for power's jugular, and often struck like a vampire of truth.

There is no way, even if he had been brought up in a bunker, that General McChrystal could have not understood the possible implications of having a reporter from Rolling Stone embedded in your Paris hotel suite and subsequent sortie to an Irish bar where generous amounts of alcohol were apparently imbibed and lips loosened accordingly. McChrystal can only have wanted this confrontation.

The grenade is now in President Obama's court. Like he's got nothing better to do right now. Very obviously he has two choices, neither of them particularly pleasant.

If he sacks McChrystal, he'll need a better general standing by. Someone he can trust and who can potentially prove more competent as the military commander in Afghanistan. He's already sacked one - two might not look good. If he does have that ace in that particular fox hole, now would be good time to play it.

More likely, he doesn't have that dream general in his pocket. If he forgives McChrystal, he'll have to find a way to do it that triggers a paradigm shift in the way Americans perceive strength and weakness in leaders. It could be a golden opportunity, albeit cast in an extremely narrow band.

McChrystal has pegged Obama as someone who is 'uncomfortable and intimidated' in the presence of the military establishment. Hell, who wouldn't be? Imagine having a skinny, scowling man in full camouflage gear come and sit on your sofa for an informal meeting and pierce you with his slate-blue, drill-down eyes. Dubya loved to get all tostie with the military but that's not Obama's style. Yet, he's McChrystal's boss and, indeed, the boss of everyone in the military.

What President Obama can do, and I hope he knows it, is deploy the one great power that he really does wield in this situation. He has the opportunity to exercise tolerance in his dealings with a subordinate. He has the authority to chastise with kindness a man of lesser character. And most importantly, he has a chance to change the 'kick ass' nature of the power dialogue that he's been so tragically drawn into by the Mexican Gulf oil disaster.

He's the President - right here and right now. Maybe he can use this opportunity to step forward and say, 'you know what, wouldn't it be great if we didn't do stoopid as our default response to absolutely everything?' It is one of those times when changing up the language might really matter.

Plane Sailing

2010-06-22T21:39:00.006+10:00

Larrikin International Airport (LAX) by Pants

We are blessed in Larrikin's End to have a fine international carrier. I speak of none other than Larrikin Airlines. LA International has a fine accident record. I believe it averages about two serious incidents per flight. You won't find too many other airlines able to boast that level of excitement. There's Aeroflot of course but it relies quite heavily on blizzards.

Plenty of people travel on LA International purely for the fine in-flight service. As you can see, a high priority is placed on ensuring there is enough rough red to go round. Some of the finest red you'll ever get in a cardboard box comes from this region. We are truly blessed. Once the casks are empty - usually about a half-hour into the flight, someone blows up the bladders and we take turns in trying to kick them between the pilot and the copilot, whose heads make very good goalposts.

The cuisine is, of course, superb. You won't get it fresher on any airline in the world. While passengers are clearing customs, the aircrew chuck a line into Lake Larrikin and pull up a couple of gummy sharks to barbecue on the trip.

Customs can take a while. It's not that Snr. Sgt. Bullox from Larrikin's End Police is a particularly thorough customs agent. He's just a little lacking in the numeracy department so counting up the bribe money can be a lengthy business.

Just before takeoff, someone rushes over to McDunny's and picks up a pot of steaming super-spicy 'neeps. Regular readers will recall that shark'n'neeps is our world famous local dish.

I read today that Thai International has branched out into the takeaway food business. I expect they'll be starting record companies and flogging condoms soon too.

Thai Airways will start selling seven ready-made curry sauces later this month at its Puff & Pie Bakery shops in Bangkok, Phuket and Chiang Mai, marketing director Kasem Sriprapakara said.

It's aiming for the business traveler (sic) who had a good in-flight culinary experience but has no time to whip up tasty Thai food at home, said Kasem.

'The business traveller who had a good in-flight culinary experience'? Mmm. That would be a niche market.

It's also a way to help the airline recover from losses due to recent political unrest in Bangkok.

I see. I guess selling sauces could be seen as a form of liquidation.

The airline is also trying to standardise its Thai curries after passengers on inbound flights from Europe complained the food lacked the Thai touch for balancing sweet, spicy and salty.

Now that does make good economic sense. You get passengers to do free market research for you.

The new line includes favourites like Massaman, Penang and green curry sauces which - like airline food - are designed to last.

"It has a one-year shelf life," Kasem said, thanks to an innovative pouch that eliminates the need for preservatives and enables the curry to taste almost as fresh as in a restaurant.

Ah. Now this is becoming clearer. All those delayed flights. All that unused food. 'Almost as fresh as in a restaurant'. Isn't that, like, the best USP you ever heard?

"It definitely tastes almost the same. I'm sure you cannot recognise the difference,"

No, no, Kasem. Stop, now. Victor Kiam is dead, man.

McDunny tried using an 'innovative pouch' once. We had to tell him to stop as it was quite disconcerting having to upend a wallaby to get at the sauce. Quite put you off your 'neeps. We're much more comfortable with liquids dispensed in cardboard. We're a cardboard culture.

I think there could be a business opportunity here for McDunny though. He has certainly solved the sweet/salty/sour balance problem. I'm sure he won't mind if I let you in on the secret. Truckloads of sugar, mountains of salt and handful of BP shares.

I can see McDunny's stalls being set up in airports all over the world, hawking our fine shark'n'neeps, putting Larrikin's End on the map. Now that would be a feat, as it's never been on a map before...

All quotes from The Australian.

Ring cyclone

2010-06-21T18:41:00.012+10:00

Eagle and Wolf by Pants

Last night I dreamed I'd turned into a surrealist. It's probably no more than I deserve. Just lately I've had a bit of a concentration breakdown. I've had to rethink the way I do things. Not the basic stuff. I still cook on Sunday, wash on Monday and rule the Independent Republic of Barnswalia on Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternate Fridays.

Once I was like that guy in Nick Hornby's About A Boy. I was able to compartmentalise my activities into modules comprising multiples of hours. In an hour-long block I could go for a jog or respond to emails or get in a handy amount of gardening. Two hours was a decent amount of time to play the piano, execute a drawing or create a blog post. I needed half-day blocks at least to write or paint. I use acrylics and you have to paint until you've used up what you've mixed, otherwise it's wasteful.

I used to operate on strict(ish) regimes that at least paid lip service to my physical and mental optimality. Depending on where I was, I would always jog for an hour. If I was staying with Ma Pants in Noosa in the middle of summer, I would get up at 5.30am to do that, otherwise my Reeboks would have melted into the pavement. Here in Larrikin's End, I go out about 11.30am in mid-winter. I'm almost defrosted by then.

Until recently, I was able to switch reasonably effortlessly between disparate tasks. I guess I've been conditioned to work like this since secondary school. I could always get through Maths knowing it was followed by double Music. Sport was considered a reward rather than a punishment when I was at school. I looked forward to hockey practice. It was only an hour. I used to take a weekly tennis lesson. I loved it. I looked forward to it.

I don't know what's going on with me now. I just know that I can't put down a book and pick it up a week later and remember where it is I left off. I know that I can't make notes one day and make sense of them the next in quite the way I used to be able to do. I know that I must make changes to the way I do things, and I will.

I'll still jog every day because I need the exercise and I enjoy looking at the birds and fishes, but I've decided to ditch the modular approach. Instead, I'm devoting whole days to whatever needs a whole day's concentration. I'm not saying I haven't worked this way before. When I've been absolutely absorbed in a project, I've hardly drawn breath. I'm saying I can't shift focus like I've been able to do in the past.

What am I talking about? I've no idea. The eagle has landed on the wolf and it wasn't pretty.

Image problem

2010-06-20T18:57:00.010+10:00

Marilyn and Maf the dog by Pants

I was listening to an interview with Andrew O'Hagan in which he discusses his latest book The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe. I made a mental note to fill in a request form at the Larrikin's End Municipal Library. I hope it arrives before I lose my marbles, or the ability to read, or both.

It sounds like an interesting book. I wonder if Maf's view of Mistress Marilyn deviates substantially from that of, say, Norman Mailer. I was thinking about this as I was listening to this man regurgitate the classic Marilyn fixation thesis. She's been dead for nearly fifty years, yet represents an enduring ideal of womanhood, even to men who were born long after she died.

The thing about Marilyn that appears to fascinate O'Hagan is that she is a creature entirely of her own invention, a collage of acquired aspirations. Perhaps the source of her enduring attraction to men is that she somehow invites completion. She was never quite able to put a life together in a demonstrably viable way.

Since I've been back in Australia, I've had to reacquaint myself with this country's broken egg of an ego and it strikes me that the popular version of DIY Marilyn is a bit of a template for looking at my birth-parent nation. It too is beautiful to look at and does something dazzling often enough to divert attention from its inner turmoil and inability to confront all the nasty bits of its past.

The bad things don't go away though and this week some internal rot has broken through the glossy veneer. Two football personalities delivered up racial slurs about black players. We're not talking slightly dodgy stuff here but full-on confrontational insults that leapt from the speakers' lips straight onto every news website in the country.

And the Government's response? The Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, ambled out a few days later, after having presumably drawn a short straw, to offer a vaguely stern rebuke. Did he counsel the offending men to confront their inner arsehole? He did not. He advised them to think before they spoke in future. It's okay to be a racist in this country, as long as you don't voice it. You never know when potential tourists might be listening. Image is all that matters.

Marilyn Monroe was a child/woman. Australia is a child/country. It isn't enough to dress up and smile beguilingly whenever a camera is turned on you. Marilyn Monroe may still be worshipped and adored but she actually had a short and mostly unhappy life...