Another (Fri-)day in Paradise

"Head to the Moruya District Hospital Auxiliary's Book Fair
on September 29 and 30 at the CWA Hall in Moruya"

 

We've just come home from an early morning in the pool and a long day in the Bay and Moruya where we had a beautiful lunch of silverside doused in delicious white sauce. No idea how they can serve it for ten dollars but they did which left plenty of money for the chardonnay.

Reading the free local rag I found an advertisement by something called www.dontfretpet.com.au (more of this later) and about a big house on a tiny block of land at Mossy Point on sale within the range of $3,995,000 to $4,200,000 - click here. What's this "range" business anyway? Why would anyone want to pay $4,200,000 when the lowest price is already set at $3,995,000? But even more to the point, why would anyone pay anywhere near $4,000,000 for something like this? At least they've got the headline "Beyond Comparison" right because nothing else compares to it in price.

However, all of this was instantly forgotten when I read the notice on the "Your long weekend in the Eurobodalla" page that the Moruya District Hospital Auxiliary was running a Book Fair at the CWA Hall today and tomorrow. Full of silverside and chardonnay, we drove the few hundred metres across town to stock up on books: Stephen Fry's "Mythos - The Greek Myths Retold"; Hugh Mackay's "Turning Point - Australians Choosing Their Future"; "Incredible Journeys - Exploring the Wonders of Animal Navigation" by David Barrie; "Australian History in 7 Questions" by John Hirst; Daniel Smith's "How to Think Like Stephen Hawking"; Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Age of Reason"; Alan Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence"; and, to lighten up, the illustrated film companion to "Captain Corelli's Mandolin".

Before I get started on any of these books, I want to check out this dog-minding business. It seems like a clever business model: they charge dog owners between $65.50 to $90 a day to place a dog with some dog lovers like ourselves who receive nothing more than unconditional love from their temporary furry house guest. We would love to have a dog again for a while, so this may be the way to go as long as they only bark and not bite.

It's another long weekend coming up. Driving back to Nelligen, we were heading up against a bumper-to-bumper stream of Canberra cars coming down the Clyde Mountain. All those public servants wanting to relax at the coast after a week of hard work (question: how many public servants work in Canberra; answer: about half!) It looked like Invasion Day - no, not THAT Invasion Day! - but it's nothing more sinister than Labour Day.

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I will vote 'YES' ...

 

 

I will vote 'YES' if they change the referendum to ask, "Do you think there should be a full and transparent audit held into Aboriginal funding and into all the people who have so badly and for so long mismanaged it?"

However, there's much more to this con job than a simple feel-good 'YES'.

 

 

But I leave the last word to Bruce Alexander, someone I had never heard of before but who makes a lot of sense. Please listen to this to the end:

 

 

The Australian Human Rights Commission defines 'racism' as "... the process by which systems and policies, actions and attitudes create inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people based on race."
What a perfect definition of the proposed VOICE referendum!

 

Let's close this post with Kamahl's "The Sounds of Goodbye" which a then-girlfriend in Port Moresby in 1984 used to play day and night. Maybe she already knew something I didn't because by the end of that year I had said goodbye and was on my way to a new job in Burma. More memories!

 

 

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Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

Click on Watch on YouTube

 

There have been many places I've lived and worked in which at the time I was only too happy to leave again and yet which in old age I look back on and wished I had stayed a little longer.

Thursday Island in the Torres Strait was such a place which I hurriedly left when the big fish in a small pond I was working for became a tin-pot dictator who wanted to keep the pond small so he could remain big.

Another thing was that I was far too young and ambitious to join a community that languidly killed time like characters in a Graham Greene novel. Some of them liked to imagine that they're just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after several years of having avoided life's struggle they began to wonder ... would they ever leave?

I did leave which at the time seemed the right thing to do before I too, like some Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz, would succumb and doze away the rest of my life on this soporific island in a tropical sea.

So I'm not crying because it's over; I smile because it happened.

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Full Circle

Episode 5 - Borneo and Java

 

I recently picked up the paperback version of Michael Palin's "Full Circle" in which he travels for almost a year through the eighteen countries which border the Pacific Ocean. It complements the BBC TV series of the same name which is also available on YouTube.

Simply go to YouTube and type in "full circle michael palin". Enjoy!

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A letter from an ordinary Australian

 

This letter was written by an ordinary Australian (who shall remain nameless) about ‘The Voice' referendum. I believe it probably sums up pretty well the views of the 'quiet Australians' who don't answer telephone polls and remain quiet for fear of being accused of being racist:

 

I was born in Australia fifty-four years after the Australian Commonwealth was formed in 1901. Australia is my country as much as it is the country of any other person who was born here.

I haven’t stolen anyone's land. I have purchased legal title to the land I own and have paid it off with the sweat of my brow. To be forced to pay a reparation tax as rent or a special land tax on my land is abhorrent to me.

My paternal grandfather was shot through both legs fighting to defend this nation; my great-grandfather was killed by a shell in the same struggle. My maternal grandfather and two great uncles on both sides gave up four years of their lives to defend Australia against the Germans, who had colonised New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville and Samoa. Twenty-five years later, the Japanese invaded these countries. My mother served in Bougainville, patching up Aussies who had been shot by the Japanese. My father and two paternal/maternal uncles gave up six years of their lives to fight off the Germans and Japanese, with Dad spending three-and-a-half years as a POW in Germany and coming back weighing eight stone.

Every road, building, home, farm, mine, school, hospital, airport, port, railroad, city and town that exists in Australia was built by European settlers and their descendants. Hunter/gatherer Aborigines built nothing prior to 1788 and have contributed very little to modern Australia. Their hunter/gatherer lifestyle became redundant after European farming and technology arrived here and as the benefits of the first and second industrial revolutions spread through the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, no one in the world chooses to live a hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

Now that the Australian nation has been developed, some aboriginal activists want to take control of it. They are not content to have an equal say in government with the rest of us Australian citizens. They claim they deserve more power, in perpetuity, because some of their ancestors were born here prior to 1788. They label anyone who disagrees with them a racist. What chutzpah!

As currently proposed, 'The Voice' is a blatant con job to replace the government of the people, by the people, for the people, with a race-based veto on everything we do. This will be exercised by twenty-four unelected Aboriginal activists supposedly representing the 3% of the population who claim Aboriginal descent. The effective veto comes from the power of the Voice to delay or hinder the government through the threat of litigation.

Votes in parliament will be traded for the support of the Voice in return for other programs or legislation favourable to the activists who dominate the Aboriginal Voice. In this way, the Voice will be a shadow government able to make demands of the executive, the parliament, the public service and independent statutory offices and agencies not available to any other Australian citizens. It offends the crucial democratic principle that everyone should be equal before the law.

Less than one-third of the 3% of the population who claim Aboriginal descent are living dysfunctional lives in remote areas. We Australians spend $39.5 billion each year trying to fix this problem. The solution is straightforward, although not easy. These Aboriginals need to limit their alcohol intake, provide a stable environment for their kids, and ensure they go to school. Do this every day for twenty years, and the gap between the dysfunctional Aboriginals and the rest of us will disappear. We don’t need to change our constitution for this to happen.

Not only am I fed up with being welcomed to my own country, I find the implication in the 'Welcome to Country' ceremony and in the proposed 'Voice' that I and my family are somehow not entitled to be here as equal, legitimate Australian citizens offensive and insulting.

I acknowledge the early settlers who came to this land which had stood undeveloped for over 50,000 years and who, in less than two hundred years, transformed it into one of the richest countries on Earth. Together, let’s enjoy and build on the legacy they left us.

 

Catch of the Day

 

I've been sitting on the jetty all morning with my catch of the day, Jeremy Paxman's book "The English - A Portrait of a People", which tests the veracity of the old saying that God is an Englishman.

When I came to Australia in 1965, the country was almost a mirror image of England where everyone knew their place, where delivery carts, driven by men in uniforms, brought milk and bread to the front door, where everyone stood for 'Good Save The Queen', where people were decent and as industrious as was necessary to meet comparatively modest ambitions, didn't make a fuss, drank tea by the bucketload, and where there were things which were done and things which were definitely not done.

My immediate impression then was that anyone who was born Australian had won first prize in the lottery of life. I didn't know it then that Cecil Rhodes had said the same thing about the English fifty years before. Of course, the only constant in life is change, and since then we've had multiculturalism and metric measurements but also political correctness which now seems to stop us from debating openly and fairly the changes a Labor government wants to impose on us on Saturday, 14th of October.

A constitutionally enshrined VOICE will impose a reverse apartheid on this country. If the VOICE succeeds, our development as the world's most successful multicultural society will come to a . I hope it won't happen!

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PNG's Independence Day 16 September 1975

 

It was in the dying days of 1974 when I received an urgent telegram from TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles to fly to what was then called Burma to take up a new position as chief accountant in their exploration office in Rangoon.

I was at the time working in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea, putting the finishing touches on Air Niugini's internal audit department, as the country was hurdling towards independence the following year. When the then Chief Minister Michael Somare - soon to be Sir Michael and Prime Minister of the independent country of Papua New Guinea - heard of my impending departure, he expressed his regrets that I wouldn't be there for this momentous occasion. "However," he said, "the least we can do is make our Independence Day the same as your birthday."

And so it came to pass that my birthday and Papua New Guinea's Independence Day are celebrated on the same day each year.

P.S. Of course, if you believe this, you'll probably spend the rest of your life doing a convincing impression of a cabbage! ☺