A bracing conversation with a scholar who has an incredible breadth of interests and knowledge

 

In his 448-page book The Dying Citizen, Victor Davis Hanson warns that American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish. And what goes for America applies equally to Australia. I could listen to this man for hours, and will certainly buy his new book.

 

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The Strange Death of Europe

 

Riveting, depressing and discombobulating - just to confuse you, Des, that means 'confusing' - "The Strange Death of Europe" is recommended reading - if you like scary Stephen King novels, except that Douglas Murray didn't make it up.

By the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world they called home. This is not a comfortable book to read – which is probably the best reason for doing so. Here's the Introduction:

"The Strange Death of Europe" is a cannily Cassandra-like prophecy that your grandchildren will weep to read. 'How could they not know?', they will say. 'It was so obvious. How could they not do something?'

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P.S. As much as like reading online, there's nothing like holding the actual book in my hand. Here's my order with booktopia.com.au:

 

A million dollars is the new normal

For more details of the property, click here

 

A friend in Canberra mailed me this cutting but no surprises here: real estate prices are away with the fairies! Mind you, it's in the nation's capital and on a massive 2089m2 block opposite parkland and the Prime Minister's Lodge.

What is surprising is that the whole country is now in the grip of a real estate frenzy. Even down here in little Nelligen and nearby Batemans Bay and communities up and down the coast, two full hours' drive from Canberra and four hours from Sydney, what was once expensive at half-a-million has now become a cheap one-million dollars - and the rest!

Take a squiz here at the sheer ordinariness a million dollars buys you these days: houses which have four bedrooms because the bedrooms are as small as bathrooms, and the two bathrooms are as small as toilets, on blocks of land which are now typically less than 750m2, and more often closer to 500m2, with the house's eaves touching the neighbours' eaves.

And while you need a fat wallet - or a very understanding bank manager - to buy any of these architectural wonders, you want to be very slim or else walk sideways along your house to reach the backyard. And the hours spent in the bosom of your family be better spent quietly, because with neighbours so close on all sides, it's a matter of "Feind hört mit!"

When will this madness end? No one seems to know! Will it end! Most certainly! Will it end in tears? For the FOMO-driven johnny-come-latelies it certainly will! In the meantime, the agents are loving their bigger commissions, the state governments are loving the higher stamp duty revenue, and the banks are loving their ever-increasing mortgage-books.

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"Genau wie der Alte"

My father's photograph sometime in his early fifties

 

Which is what my youngest sister exclaimed - I'm the youngest of five; my parents kept having children until they found one they liked - when she discovered me amongst the crowd waiting at the bus terminal.

I was going to drive her down to newly-acquired "Riverbend" where she was to spend Christmas 1993, but this was no sentimental journey: she had flown all the way from Germany to Sydney and endured the bus trip to Canberra to get me sign over my share of our father's inheritance which she and the other children were fighting over with my stepmother (our parents had not been of the until-death-do-us-part persuasion).

I had left a dysfunctional home when I was fourteen, and I had left a still starving Fatherland when I was nineteen (no one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off to Australia!"), and I wanted no part in this desperate fight. I signed whatever she put in front of me, after which I never heard from her again (although I did hear from her lawyers who demanded I pay them for my share of their legal fees for the share I had signed over to her).

I was forty-eight years old then, and approaching my father's age when his photograph was taken. Being almost the spitting image of him had prompted my sister to exclaim "Genau wie der Alte!", a reminder that we are a product of our genes, and those first few years of our lives.

My father had been injured during the war, and after the war we eked out a miserable living on his "Kriegsverletztenrente", reluctantly doled out by a still very much struggling government of the new Germany. My resentment of all kinds of government hand-outs and a determination to look after myself have stayed with me ever since those early years.

With this total lack of money, receiving any sort of pocket-money was totally out of the question. I managed to earn a few coins from little jobs around the neighbourhood which never amounted to much, which made me resort to "crime": as the youngest in the family it was my job to daily collect a pint of milk from the dairy shop, which I did in an old battered aluminium can (no bottled milk then!) and which on this one occasion I ask to be filled up only half, pocketing the price difference.

Back at home, I made up the shortfall with water, but, not yet being a "hardened criminal", I failed to mix it enough because my step-father (that dysfunctional family again!) spotted the deception immediately. The subsequent questioning and the involuntary blushing of my face the very moment I tell a lie have stopped me from telling lies ever since.

My next brush with "crime" had to do with my passion for philately (although at that early age I was better at the German habit of compounding nouns than at Greek and French, and I simply called it "Briefmarkensammeln"). Germans are a nation of stamp-collectors which perhaps has something to do with those long winter nights, and I was no exception. Even big department stores like the then KARSTADT had a philatelic section with assorted stamps in small cellophane bags hanging from hooks on display carousels on the counter. One quick tug removed the bag containing the stamps of your desire, after which you would present it at the cash register for payment - or not, as a more worldly-wise schoolmate demonstrated to me by deftly dropping it in his pocket.

My schoolmate promptly vanished into the crowd while I finished up being taken through a door marked "Staff Only" where a senior person reduced me to tears with a very stiff dressing-down. Luckily, I was only ten years old and he took pity on me, and I haven't stolen anything since - with the only exception of quick glances at some pretty girls perhaps.

As Ernest Hemingway once said, the seeds of our life are there from the very beginning - if we bother to look. And which my greedy sister had so clearly recognised all those thirty years ago with "Genau wie der Alte!"

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I spend a lot of time in the garden - radio.garden

 

We've all been spending a bit more time at home lately but this doesn’t mean our wanderlust has dimmed. So, if you like to listen to the language and music of another country, there is always radio.garden.

The Radio Garden is a map of the globe and all the radio stations on the platform are there as a green light. You simply click on an area which interests you and the radio stations in that area will be listed for you.

Once you’ve done this, the feed automatically starts to play, showing you the name of the station you're listening to and where it is. You can listen to stations from anywhere. They can be in Europe, Africa or Asia – it's all your choice.

You can also click the search icon and type in the name of the country you'd like to listen to and the most popular stations for that country come up. Scroll through them, sample them, until you find one which interests you.

For music lovers it's a feast. You can scan the globe to find a pop station in New York or a reggae station in South America. Because music is the universal language, it still communicates so much even when you don't know exactly what the words mean.

And is there any greater way to brush up on your language skills? If you learnt French at school and like to listen to 'le francais', then type in 'France' and scroll down until you find a station speaking in French. Or if you've learnt Spanish before, do the same thing, only this time search for Spain or South America.

Radio Garden was launched in 2016 by the Amsterdam-based studios of Puckey and Moniker. What started out as a temporary project run by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has now grown to 30,000 live radio stations, and the number is increasing every week.

Click here to join me in the garden for a spate of listening!

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