Some mornings I feel like "Storm Boy"

 

 

Some mornings, sitting on the jetty with my first cup of tea, I feel like "Storm Boy", as I watch the pelicans paddle past "Riverbend". This morning, one of them looked almost like Mr Percival. I rushed inside to get the camera, but by the time I had come back outside, he and his companion had already leisurely paddled upriver.

Anyway, it was time for the Nelligen Village Markets, where gullible visitors from Canberra are always ready to swap a few dollars for stuff the locals no longer want, and the locals swap gossip with other locals.

 

 

With one eye on the book stall and one ear tuned to the local gossip, I saw books that even the recyclers had refused to pulp and heard of locals who had died and others who had sold up and left. I also met a woman and her pregnant daughter who would give birth soon and hoped the father-to-be would be out of jail in February for the happy event.

 

Click here

 

There wasn't much buying going on, so to help things along, I bought a pack of Christmas cards before we, too, will be forced to rename them. It has happened at Kaimhill School in Aberdeen in Scotland. We're not there yet - perhaps "Summer Cards" doesn't sound all that catchy - but our own multicultural and multi-faith mass migration is going so well that we now also need armed response anti-terrorism units in Sydney.

If you import the third world, you become the third world.

 

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I pay my respects to the British and European elders past and present and emerging, who introduced civil society and prosperity to my adopted country Australia.

 

Watch the video clip here

 

Australia's "Prime Mistake", public-housing-reared Albo, and his lapdog Chris Bowen refused to put on the floral head garland that was handed to them in a traditional welcome at Chris Bowen's vanity climate change love-in in Tuvalu.

 

Having sipped a few too many while 'lying' on the banana lounge by the pool?
You seriously can't make this stuff up, can you? It is beyond farcical.

 

What were they thinking? That they would look even sillier than they already do? Instead of committing this terrible diplomatic faux pas, why can't they refuse the incessant "Welcome to Country" which has been dividing our country since it began in 1976 and became standard in federal parliament in 2008. To say nothing of the constant "Paying our respects ..." messages preceding every public speech and broadcast.

To set the record straight, I have for some time now been adding "I pay my respects to the British and European elders past and present and emerging, who introduced civil society and prosperity to my adopted country Australia" to my email signature, which has raised eyebrows with some of my "Dark Emu" readers. To them, and anyone else who may be interested, I send links to these August 2026 articles in QUADRANT:

 

 

Before Settlement, a Blood-Soaked Land

 

Australian history has been distorted by lies, fabrication, exaggeration and selective evidence. Out of that distortion has emerged one overwhelming story: that the British arrived in 1788 and turned a peaceful continent into a land of violence, massacre and war.

The truth begins in exactly the opposite place.

The British did not enter a peaceful continent. They entered a continent occupied by peoples living in what, in the older anthropological sense, was one of the most materially primitive and socially fragmented forms of human organisation still surviving on earth: thousands of small, mobile, familial groups, without settled agriculture, cities, writing, courts, police or any authority standing above them capable of ending feud and revenge. It is difficult to conceive of a substantially simpler enduring form of human social organisation. Below the small local group lies little more than the immediate or extended family itself. But no human population could remain reproductively isolated at that level for generation after generation: sustained mating within such a narrow circle would inevitably produce repeated close-relative unions and increasing inbreeding. Survival therefore required some network of bestowal, female transfer, and contact between otherwise small and politically separate groups."    To continue reading the article, click here.

 

And there's more:

 

A Blood-Soaked Land: Part II

 

 

Cultural lethal violence was institutionalised in Aboriginal societies in a way that sustained warfare was not. Payback and retaliatory punishment could be socially sanctioned or obligatory, but there were no standing armies, permanent commands or institutions for sustained military campaigning. The deep record is therefore one of recurring lethal violence, not continuous war.

The same caution should apply to the frontier. Killing, reprisal and punitive expedition did not automatically become “war” merely because one participant was British. Yet modern revisionism increasingly reverses the categories: raid and reprisal between Aboriginal groups remain “feud” or “payback”, while analogous episodes involving the British are aggregated across decades and vast distances into “Frontier Wars”. In the process, scattered resistance is retrospectively endowed with a military coherence the underlying social organisation did not possess."   To continue reading, click here.

 

And it ends with the words, "Australia was indeed a blood-soaked country. The historical mistake was to imagine that the blood began to flow when the British arrived. That is where the History Wars should end and where a more complete history should begin."

As I always say in my emails, "I pay my respects to the British and European elders past and present and emerging, who introduced civil society and prosperity to my adopted country Australia."

 

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It hangs in every dentist's waiting room

 

 

Who hasn't seen this amazing image? It hangs in every dentist's waiting room. It's French photographer Jean Guichard's stunning photo of France's La Jument Lighthouse in a December storm. Look closely, and you'll see a lighthousekeeper standing in the doorway.

 

 

Despite the roaring storm, Théodore Jean Malgorn in the lantern room heard the sound of a propeller engine. Curiosity brought him down to the base of the lighthouse. When he opened the door, he spotted a helicopter flying over the rough waters of the Iroise Sea. From the air, the photographer Jean Guichard was watching the insistent way the Atlantic waves struck the Lu Jument Lighthouse. With surprising intuition, he clicked his camera at just the right moment with the lighthousekeeper standing there as a giant wave engulfed the tower.

The snapshot leaves the viewer on tenterhooks. Looking at it, you wonder about the picture without knowing what befell the keeper. Perhaps because of the uncertainty that it carried with it, it won a 1990 World Press Photo award. The story of the photo does end happily. The lighthousekeeper, about to be engulfed by the wave, closed the door just in time. The damage was limited to a scare and some wet feet.

 

 

After nearly forty years of service, Théodore Jean Malgorn departed La Jument in 1991, leaving a lonely, automated lighthouse behind him. He continued to live on the island of Ouessant, glimpsing from its cliffs the imposing silhouette of the tower in the distance and recalling the moment when the famous wave lashed le phare des tempêtes.

 

 

Meet Théodore Jean Malgorn. For him, it was more than just a job — it was a true calling. As he said, "When you're young and working in lighthouses, you always go through hell — that’s certainly what I did at La Jument; those are incredibly tough lighthouses. Because you never know when you’ll be coming down — since the storms make it really rough — they call it the 'hell of the lighthouses'". When asked, "What stays in your heart from those thirty-seven years spent at the lighthouse?", he relents, "Seagulls singing, the sound of the waves — even during heavy storms — it really is magnificent. It's really a life that if I came back to earth again, I would live again."

You don't have to be able to speak French to be a lifehousekeeper, but it would help if you want to listen to Théodore Jean Malgorn. Look out for him next time you visit your dentist.

 

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Selbst mein letzter Klassenlehrer bedauerte es

 

In den armen Zeiten war selbst das Briefpapier der Schule war nur ein einfacher Stempel

 

Selbst mein letzter Klassenlehrer in der Braunschweiger Volksschule Heinrichstrasse wiederholt bedauerte es, daß meine Eltern es seinerzeit versäumt hatten, mich zur Oberschule zu melden. So schrieb er noch drei Jahre später, als ich schon eine Lehre beendet hatte, in der alle anderen Lehrlinge fünf Jahre älter waren als ich da sie ihr Abitur gemacht hatten ehe sie Lehrlinge wurden.

Vom Versäumen kann da wohl kaum die Rede gewesen sein, denn für die Oberschule fehlte da einfach das Geld und auch die Zeit, denn jeder musste so schnell wie möglich aus der Schule raus um etwas Geld zu verdienen, denn selbst das kleinste Lehrgeld war eine große Hilfe.

 

DM86,-- pro Monat Lehrgeld im ersten Jahr. Die "guten" alten Zeiten!

 

Aber ich brauchte nicht lange an meiner fehlenden Schulbildung leiden, denn zwei Jahre später wanderte ich nach Australien aus. Dort konnte ich neu anfangen, denn niemand sagte "Sie sind ja nur Volksschüler!"

 

 

Jetzt im Ruhestand versuche ich, etwas von der fehlenden Schulbildung nachzuholen. Nach Thomas Mann und Hermann Hesse ist heute Hans Fallada an der Reihe. In der englischen Sprache ist er wohl am besten bekannt durch seinen Roman "Alone in Berlin" und den Film under dem gleichen Titel. Auch ich las das Buch und sah den Film in der englischen Sprache denn ich erinnere mich ungern an meine fehlende Schulbildung.

 

Deutscher Titel "Jeder stirbt für sich allein"

 

Ich hoffe ich habe noch genug Zeit alle seine Bücher zu lesen. An diesem sonnigen Freitagmorgen auf der Veranda mache ich einen ersten Anfang.

 

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See you latmj ikhfgfh lllplmnb ...

 

 

With so much reading to catch up with, I started my weekend on a Friday, which also happens to be the birthday of our favourite neighbour across the river, Elaine Ison, and Padma's previous boss in France, Jérôme Stubert. A 'Happy Birthday' to you both!

 

 

But if you think you'd get away with just listening to this Indonesian version of 'Happy Birthday', think again! I haven't been a forensic accountant for nothing, and so I did a bit more research into what was until quite recently the highest-royalty-earning song in history.

I was about to launch into a lengthy dissertation when I discovered a Youtube clip which is so much better, although, being as old-fashioned as I am, I was a little put off by the presenter's ring through his nose.

 

 

I was going to write more but the resident parrot keeps 'autocorrecting' everything I type and turns it into anghytrdl lluiih gqwertt nbvcxvv ...

 

 

See you latmj ikhfgfh lllplmnb ...

 

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