This country is cooked

 

 

While the Sex Discrimination Commissioner agrees that a biological male (including a transgender woman) cannot physically become pregnant, the legal threshold hinges on an employer's unlawful perception about a person's reproductive capacity. You couldn't make this up!

 

 

In other words, if an employer refuses to hire a transgender woman based on an assumption or perception that she could become pregnant (or asks illegal questions about family planning), that behaviour can legally constitute potential pregnancy discrimination.

 

 

This country is cooked and needs a complete reset, starting with those three flags standing behind those senators. We are either ONE nation with ONE flag or we are laughable bunch of bickering tribes comprised of even more different sexes than those three different flags.

 

 

Here is a critical detail from the new Liberal leader Angus Taylor MP’s first press conference: instead of gathering in front of three different flags, he was reportedly insistent on standing in front of just one flag that unites us all: the Australian flag. Good on ya, mate!

 

 

As for that sex discrimination commissioner, I wish I got paid $500,000 a year to argue that discrimination should not apply to a lactating male.

 

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There's no more store like David Jones

 

 

The grand old dame of Australian department stores is on life support: David Jones has been put into administration over unpaid rent at some of its thirty-eight Australian and New Zealand stores, after an illustrious career that even saw a former prime minister (almost) work for them.

Having been elected to parliament at just 25, former prime minister Paul Keating spent most of his non-working life in politics, though not all of it. In 1967, a mere two years before winning the federal seat of Blaxland, he had a job as a shop assistant at the Bankstown David Jones' in Sydney. An "apparently surly 22-year-old", he was dismissed for being deemed "unsatisfactory", according to the retailer's official history published in 2013 as "175 Years David Jones'" by Helen O'Neill.

 

Listen to the ABC broadcast "175 Years of Retailing"

 

The book is very surprising, as it not just focuses on the start of the David Jones store (affectionately known as DJ’s), but also delves into its archives to find photos of a youthful Sydney CBD. There are wonderful photos of the GPO tower being built in Martin Place and photos of the first DJ’s on the corner of Barrack and George Streets, looking onto Martin Place. For the fashionista, there is in-depth coverage of the famous models who were the face of DJ’s, and colour plates of the glorious clothing imported by DJ’s from France after WWII. The human side of the store is illuminating too, with stories of David Jones taking a risk and immigrating to Sydney, his staff who worked all of their lives at DJ’s (and were immensely proud of their tenure) and the restrictions caused by shortages during both Wars.

What is not surprising, since everything at David Jones is expensive, is that the book is still for sale on ebay for as much as a hundred dollars.

 

 

To me, David Jones - or David Jones' as it was then - is synonymous with my early life in Australia when I sat at my desk inside the ANZ Bank and looked across Alinga Street to Canberra's David Jones' store front inside Australia’s first enclosed mall, which had opened only two years earlier.

 

 

It had saved me many Mondays after I had once again failed to put my dirty washing through the machine, and got to work in a dirty shirt. A quick dash across to David Jones' fixed me up with one of their "For Service"-labelled white shirts (no coloured shirts in them days!) which, despite the fact that one could still detect the tiny holes from the pins that had held it together in the package, looked a lot better than two sweat-stained armpits. Yes, "there was no other store like David Jones'".

 

Canberra's David Jones' in 1966 and David Jones now

 

So how did a once prestigious store get itself into administation? As digital retailing boomed, bricks and mortar stores began to flounder. By 2014, the department stores' profound challenges led David Jones and Myer to explore a possible merger. The talks ended when the South African retailing conglomerate, Woolworths Holdings Limited, acquired David Jones in April 2014 for A$2.1 billion. After almost a decade of frustrating results, Woolworths Holdings sold David Jones for just $100 million to its current owner, private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners. I have made similar investments in the past, although not on that scale, but with worse outcomes as I got no money back at all.

My own theory is that the rot set in when David Jones' dropped the cursive (that's joined-up, Des) writing and the possessive apostrophe in their name. While I concede that today's generation can barely write, let alone cursive, Australian's still absolutely love their apostrophe's.

They have them in meat pie's and pizza's when they're looking for the special's in the supermarket's on the weekend's. Even taxis in Batemans Bay display TAXI DRIVER'S WANTED in their rear window's. You deprive Australian's of their apostrophe's, David Jones, and you pay the price!

There's no more store like David Jones.

 

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P.S. As always, our resourceful government has found the solution:

 

A night and a day of pure Trumpenfreude

 

 

After a long night of pure Trumpenfreude, listening to the election results coming over the radio, I woke up to one of those "transgender" days which can't make up their mind if they're Arthur or Martha: one moment it was bright sunshine and I was looking for my sunnies, and the next moment I needed a jumper.

 

 

I retreated to my library which is cool on a hot day and warm on a cold day. With Bali Spa Piano & Gamelan playing softly in an endless loop, I reached for Polly Samson's "A Theatre for Dreamers" to take me back to one of my favourite islands - no, not Bali, but the Greek island of Hydra.

 

Polly Samson's book resting on my camel saddle; a touch of Lawrence of Arabia

 

The year is 1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.

Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.

 

 

More than twenty years later, I repeatedly visited this little island paradise by simply jumping aboard one of those diesel-belching Russian-built Flying Dolphins that departed regularly from the marina just downstairs from my apartment at # 2 Boudouri in Piraeus.

 

The book that made George Johnston famous

One of several collections of short stories and essays by Charmian Clift

 

Before I had ever read any of George Johnston's books or Charmian Cliff's even more compelling essays or heard Leonard Cohen sing, I stood outside their house and sipped a glass of retsina at the Douskos Taverna.

 

Charmian Clift (right) and writer Charles W. Heckstall (in glasses) listen as Leonard Cohen plays guitar in Hydra, Greece, in October 1960, under the olive tree outside the Douskos Taverna. James Burke/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

 

Those were the days, my friends; I thought they would never end, but end they did in 1985 when I decided to return to Australia after having misdiagnosed myself with an acute case of homesickness. More fool me.

 

 

Fast forward another forty years, and here I am in my own paradise, my library, my sanctuary from the big bad Trumpian world outside. And all that Trumpenfreude has paid off, because BHP finished the day up an incredible 6% to $59. It's a long way from its 52-week high of $68.77, but it's a start. Goodbye Trump! Get back under the rock whence you came!

It's been a night and a day of pure Trumpenfreude.

 

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P.S. For all those misguided readers who still want to call a German shepherd an Alsatian and wouldn't stop in Hahndorf even if they were given free beer and pork knuckle, let me explain that "Trumpenfreude" is a clever play - well, at least I think so - on the word "Schadenfreude", which tells you all you need to know about Germans.

 

For fifty-five years she had grown old in what is every German's dream, an "Eigenheim".

 

For fifty-five years she had lived in what is every German's dream, an "Eigenheim".

 

We were fellow-articled clerks in the early 1960s. We sat at desks opposite each other, and all that gazing at each other must've done something because on the last evening in town before I was to board the train to Bremerhaven where I would board the ship to Australia, we had our first and last night out.

I wrote to her from Tilbury, then from Curaçao at the Panama Canal, and again from Papeete in Tahiti and Auckland in New Zealand. Once I was settled in Australia, I wrote to her from Canberra, telling her that I had started what looked like a promising career with the ANZ Bank.

It wasn't the thought of her that made me decide to return to Germany after two years, but rather the feeling that I wasn't quite ready yet to shed my "Germanness". I had written to her throughout those two years, and I wrote to her again from every port that brought me closer to Germany, where I arrived in the middle of winter in December 1967.

Few people in those days had a telephone, and so I stood on her parents' doorstep unannounced. Luckily, I had completely forgotten to buy a bunch of flowers which would've made me look even more foolish when her mother took me into the lounge room where she was sitting next to a man whom her mother introduced to me as her daughter's fiancé.

The rest is all a bit of a blur but I don't think I even sat down, but beat a quick retreat into the cold night outside. I stayed for some nine months, during which I worked for three different banks in three different cities, earning more at each one than I had at the previous, to save enough money for my return fare to Australia. It was never quite enough, and so I took a job in South West Africa for six months to top up the kitty.

I was back in Canberra in April 1969, and back at the same bank. Having picked me up from where I had left them a little over a year ago, they weren't too happy when I decided to leave again at the end of the same year to go to New Guinea, and on from there, and on and on and on ...

Never during all those subsequent years, when I lived and worked in a dozen different countries, did I ever think of writing to her again, but while I lived and worked in Greece, I heard that my father was seriously ill, and so I flew back to Germany to sit with him for a couple of weeks, and then returned for the last time for his funeral in January 1984.

I was totally unprepared for the funeral and inadequately clothed for the German winter. Yet, I had to sit it out to meet all the family I had always avoided to meet and never really known nor liked before. The feelings must have been mutual because even my brother, older than me by thirteen years, whom I hadn't seen since he left the broken family home when I had just started school, never even shook hands.

I knew no-one else in my old hometown except ... and so I looked up her parents in the phone book. Yes, they had a phone by then and, yes, her mother answered it. "She no longer lives here", she told me, not knowing who I was, and gave me another phone number under another name. I rang, and what followed was an excited conversation during which she told me that she had got married to that man who had sat next to her, had given birth to two sons who were now in their teens, and would I come over for a champagne breakfast in the morning.

Next morning I took a taxi to what was a far out-of-town suburb where she and her two boys and her husband and her husband's mother lived in what was every German's dream, an "Eigenheim" on its own 500 square metres of land. It seemed she had married well. Her husband was at work and the boys at school, and her mother-in-law in her own room upstairs, and we talked as if the last twenty years had never happened.

Before I called a taxi to take me back to the city, she said she would ask her husband if she could go out with me the following evening, which we did, first to a Greek restaurant where I impressed her with my few words of Greek, then to a bar, then to another bar, and then we went for a long walk through the old city which had gone dark and quiet.

She told me that her mother had lied to me when, all those twenty years ago, she had introduced that man who was now her husband, as her fiancé, and that she had often wondered how her life might have turned out had she followed me to Australia. I didn't have the heart to tell her how miserable those penniless first two years had been, and that the thought to take her with me had never occurred to me.

A few days later, I was back at work in Athens, and more than a year later, I was back in Australia, going through the turmoil of trying to find my feet in my old home. During all that time, we kept writing to each other, right into the age of computers and the internet and WhatsApp.

Then, fast forward another twenty years, came her surprise: would I like to see what I had written to her from 1965 to 1967, and again from 1984 until what by then was 2015 or thereabouts. Every postcard and every letter I had ever written: she had kept them all while living in that "Eigenheim" on the outskirts of the city, raising two children, preparing school lunches, doing the laundry and the dishes and cooking dinner, and perhaps dreaming all the time of being somewhere else.

 

 

A month later a large DHL-parcel arrived with a covering letter which read, "This is just the half of it. If you want the rest, let me know." This wasn't so much a time capsule as a timebomb! The real bomb arrived some years later, in late 2022, when one of her sons sent me this email:

"Hallo Peter, hier ist der jüngere Sohn von ....... Ich habe die traurige Pflicht auch Dich zu informieren. ...... ist am 23.11.22 verstorben. Die Beisetzung fand in ...... statt. Ich hatte deine Nummer in Ihrem iPhone gefunden, konnte Dich als den Auswanderer zuordnen und eine kurze Suche brachte mich auf eure Website." For a translation, click here.

For fifty-five years she had grown old in what is every German's dream, an "Eigenheim". Now I have also grown old in my Australian "Eigenheim".

I realised I'd grown old when I read that my first girlfriend had died!

 

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The Cats of Australia

 

 

An old friend - in every sense of the word - sent me this email: "My day was interrupted on Tuesday when I had a bad fall. I dislocated my shoulder and cracked two ribs. Currently in hospital", to which I replied, "So, tell me, what happened?" His answer wasn't long in coming:

"Went running down the hallway to break up Zoe attacking Maisie. My foot got caught up in the runner in the hallway. I lost my balance and fell over. The result was a dislocated left shoulder and two cracked ribs, also on the side of the left shoulder. I called the ambulance and I am now in hospital, pumped full of painkillers and antobiotics, so very quiet for now. I am not sure how long I will be here."

I didn't know he'd shacked up with two females who had been fighting over him! However, it turned out that Zoe and Maisie were his two cats. Cats have nine lives, but he at his age to crack two ribs is bad news.

Almost a week later, he's still in hospital because, as he writes, "I have no idea how long I'll be here. They keep pumping drugs into me but the pain is still pretty constant when I move." Still, to judge by the video below, he seems to be enjoying his time with all those nurses.

 

 

If he stays there much longer, I may have to send him something. Should I send him a walking stick or a book? Let's start with something he can read while he's still flat on his back. "The Cats of Australia" should do.

I've already inscribed it with the words, "Dedicated to Zoe and Maisie!"

 

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P.S. Is this postscript an erratum or an errata? It's definitely an erratum because I made ONE mistake; it may be an errata because it involves TWO animals: the owner confirms that he does own two cats, but this little incident - little for them, big for their owner - involved Maisie, one of the two cats, and Zoe, a pedigree German shepherd. So why am I not surprised? As always, they blame it on a German - but, at least, the Germans made the trains run on time (to say nothing of the autobahns!)

Maisie, the cat, down to eight lives.

Zoe, the (always) guilty German. (I can almost read it in her eyes: "They might as well also have given me a decent German name to go with it, like Brunhilde.")