I can count the number of my friends on the thumb of one hand

 

A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus crashed yesterday losing its entire load. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed.

Only joking, but if you suffer from monologophobia – the obsessive fear of using the same word twice – you reach for Roget's Thesaurus, published in 1852 by Dr Peter Roget who longed for order in his chaotic world and so, from the age of eight, began his quest to put everything in its rightful place, one word at a time.

Roget was not just a doctor. He was also a polymath whose work influenced the discovery of laughing gas as an anaesthetic, the creation of the London sewage system, the invention of the slide rule and the development of the cinema industry – as well as being a chess master and an expert on bees, Dante and the kaleidoscope. All of which showed up in the work that he christened a "thesaurus", borrowing the Greek word for "treasure house".

His Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” I've never made head nor tail of the system and always go straight to the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to use it as a book of synonyms even though Roget thought there “really was no such thing,” given the unique meaning of every word.

I've always thought that people who claim to have lots of friends probably couldn't spell the word 'acquantance' ... 'aquantence' ... 'acquaintenance' ... well, you know, 'friends'. Looking at their facebook pages, I was amazed at the number of friends some of my acquaintances have and promptly reached for Roget's Thesaurus to see if the words 'friend' and 'acquaintance' are synonymous. According to the good doctor, they are!

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Jeff Cole is no Tom Neale

 

 

Many years ago near Burril Lake, in a musty second-hand shop that has long since gone I found a book. Places like this seem to attract abandoned dreams because there, for a mere two dollars, I held in my hand the South Pacific dream, not abandoned, but lived out in 255 pages and 17 colour plates.

That book was Tom Neale's "An Island To Oneself". Published in the nineteen-sixties, with scant advertising support and authored by a man who had no literary reputation, it has worked its way into the hearts of many people, including mine, to become a lasting South Pacific legend.

Sitting then on my motor-sailer "Lady Anne" or now in peaceful and secluded "Melbourne", closing my eyes and dreaming Tom Neale's dream, I have often wished to be able to listen to Tom's words. My wish turned into reality when I discovered this advertisement of his audiobook.

 

Click here to listen to the sample

 

However, listening to the sample I was disappointed: not only did they pick a rather obscure part of the book - see pages 115 and 116 below - but the reader's voice hasn't even Tom Neale's New Zealand accent.

 

 

The opening lines are so much more promising: "I was fifty when I went to live alone on Suvarov, after thirty years of roaming the Pacific, and in this story I will try to describe my feelings, try to put into words what was, for me, the most remarkable and worth-while experience of my whole life. I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking ..."

 

 

Long after the last page of "An Island to Oneself" is turned, even after Tom Neale's name is forgotten, the story of his isolation, hundreds of miles from the nearest inhabited island, will continue to enrich the lives of its readers. As for the audiobook, I won't allow it to spoil my dreams.

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Go Woke, Go Broke!

 

When the time comes to write the history of the 21st Century, will today's new religions of race and sex have finally been consigned to the dustbin of history and this ridiculously mad wokeism not even get a mention?

Why did we ever allow all social, political, and intellectual discourse to become shackled and perverted by this insane phenomenon, initially known as ‘political correctness’, then given the more catchy name ‘wokeness’? Why did it take so long to finally cancel ‘cancel culture’? When did people wake up to the fact that wokeness offers nothing more than a vacuous, intellectually dishonest, stultifying, and ultimately counterproductive constraint upon any society where it takes hold.

For Australia, this mass awakening coincided with the Voice referendum. When the Voice eventually croaked, it was because a majority of Australians nationwide, as well as a majority in every state of the Commonwealth, recognised that they did not have to support a radically stupid proposal merely because the chattering classes told them it was the right thing to do. Challenged to use their innate common sense and wisdom, Australian voters made the only sensible decision, and they did so despite being told by the wokest of the woke that opposition to the Voice was explicable only by ‘racism’ or ‘sheer stupidity’.

No more terror of climate change; no more horrors of #MeToo; no more heinous treatment of so-called ‘first nations’ peoples; no more virtue-signalling; no more whatever-Lives Matter; back to binary pronouns.

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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

 

 

Ray Lawler's play is about growing up. It is about growing up and growing old and failing to grow up; and it throws into relief not only the hopes and failures of a dilapidated Melbourne household, but the character of a nation.

For "The Doll", as it came to be known, could only have been written in the 1950s which was something of a watershed of Australia's national consciousness: man pitting his strength against nature, mateship and freedom and alienation in the itinerant life this vast country offers, rugged individualism and the resilient humour that shrugs off despair.

The original play is set in the then shabby old Carlton whereas the film's Sydney settings - views of Bondi, lots of bridge, a romp through Luna Park - is quite alien to the spirit of Lawler's drama and its people. Unlike the play, the movie, shot in the heat of a Sydney Christmas in 1958, becomes no more than a rowdy, raw holiday fling by two couples in Sydney's pubs, Luna Park and ferries, together with their squabbles (and since when has Ernest Borgnine of "McHale's Navy" been an Australian?)

Still, I like it for the people and their accents, their dress code, and the scenery, all of which was still in evidence when I arrived here in 1965.

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The water is wide

 

 

Another perfect morning at "Riverbend". I am sitting on the jetty with a glass of retsina and listen to the Seekers. Remember the Seekers? Back in the 1960s I bought every one of their singles and albums even if they cost me then close to a week's wages. Good memories!

 

[Verse 1] The water is wide I can't cross o'er Nor do I have light wings to fly Build me a boat that can carry two And both shall row my love and I [Verse 2] A ship there is and sails the sea She's loaded deep as deep can be But not so deep as the love I'm in And I know not now I sink or swim [Instrumental Break] [Verse 3] When love is young and love is fine It's like a gem when first it's new But love grows old and waxes cold And fades away like the morning dew [Verse 1] The water is wide I can't cross o'er Nor do I have light wings to fly Build me a boat that can carry two And both shall row my love and I

 

Of course, you may not have been a Seeker fan - and boo to you if you weren't - so here's the even more haunting instrumental version.

 

 

Magical music to start another magical day in a magical place.

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I should've sold HERE!

 

Our biggest miner BHP reported yesterday, and its CEO came with a stack of warnings about China, unions and the Albanese Government. However, the ultimate test i.e. what the stock market thought about its future outlook, meant its stock price rose 1.25% to $41.35.

“For the record, BHP reported an underlying profit of $US13.7 billion ($20.22 billion) on Wednesday, beating consensus estimates by 4 per cent,” The Australian’s Cameron England reported. “Full year revenue increased 3 per cent to $US55.7 billion, while statutory net profit fell 39 per cent to $US7.9 billion, largely due to the $US2.7 billion write down of Western Australian nickel and a $US3.8 billion charge related to the Samarco dam failure.”

Ahead of yesterday’s report, company analysts tipped a 9.4% rise in the share price to a target of $45.25 against a current price of $41.35. The table below shows six out of six experts like the company going forward, with Morgans the most enthusiastic with a 18.98% rise tipped, while Macquarie only sees a 1.57% rise.

 

 

Despite the many challenges, the company looks set to do okay, even with iron ore prices down to around US$100 and the outlook more negative for prices. However, BHP is a long way down from its 52-week high of $50.84 in late December/early January when I should've sold.

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This time it's not for oil

Yours truly buckling up for a helicopter ride from Akyab to the oil rig in the Arakan Sea

 

The last time I was anywhere near a big drill - other than at the dentist - was in 1975 in Burma where my employer, the French oil company TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), was drilling for oil in the Arakan Sea.

The drillers are back, this time to bore a hole to connect "Riverbend" to the town's new sewerage system. They kicked off at the front gate ...

 

Okay, let's get it done by Ledonne

 

... and then gave it a second shot from the front lawn to the house.

 

 

I can't wait to give it a shot myself and test out the new pipes but ...

 

 

I won't uncross my legs until they have uncrossed those two pipes! 😄

 

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P.S. See also "Pushing s**t uphill".

 

How political correctness is destroying Australia

 

As we "splayd" into a post-jentacular piece of cake at the Catalina Country Club, I dipped in and out of Dr Kevin Donnelly's "How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia".

(By the way, which of the two words are you unfamiliar with? Surely not "splayd" which confusingly I used as a verb but which is the noun that describes that useful eating utensil combining the functions of spoon, knife and fork, invented by William McArthur in the 1940s in Sydney.)

 

 

But back to Dr Donnelly's book and the political correctness movement which has become an increasingly global phenomenon impacting on how we think, the language we use and how we interact with family, friends and work colleagues.

History tells us that totalitarian regimes whether communist or fascist are able to gain and maintain power by denying free speech and freedom of thought. While Western societies like Australia have not yet reached the same level of indoctrination and control it's obvious that political correctness represents a clear and present danger and that it must be opposed if the liberties and freedoms we take for granted are to prevail.

 

 

As Dr Donnelly writes in his book, "Political correctness is also responsible for restricting free speech and open and dispassionate debate. Everyday conversations and interactions are closely scrutinised by the thought-police to ensure nobody offends in aeras like gender and sexuality, ethnicity, physical appearance or social background. Unless, of course, you are a white, middle-class, older male with Christian values and then you are ripe for attack."

A book to be read by every Australian; either that or let them eat cake!

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How much does it cost to rewrite history?

 

 

If you’re an avid reader or book collector, you will have at least heard of the Folio Society which has been printing retrospective illustrated versions of classic books and literature in the traditional folio format since 1947. It's latest offering is a beautiful reprint, priced at $105, of Robert Harris's "Fatherland", a gripping thriller set in an alternate history where Nazi Germany emerged victorious in WWII.

 

 

It was also made into a movie which disappointed the author. "My first novel, Fatherland, was made into a very bad film. By the time it was shot there'd been so many artistic compromises – in particular two fundamental changes in the story – that it ceased to have the feel of the novel. Some people like it but I have to say that I don't", he said.

I've watched the movie and dipped in and out of the online book, and must admit the plot of the novel was extremely simplified in the movie. Perhaps the radio play is more satisfying:

 

 

I have paid my price to the Fatherland by way of a miserable post-war childhood, and will hold onto the $105 and just read the online book.

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P.S. An audiobook on ebay - click here - has a promising audio sample.

 

Here's another t-shirt I've Hartley worn

 

The Hartley story is a little-known tale of what might have been and, as this old t-shirt shows, I played a very tiny part in it when in 1980 I worked with Hartley Computer which was one of the first mini/PC computer vertical market successes in the world, with ultimately 250 staff and 3,000 sites in seven countries.

David Hartley became known as ‘the father of computer client account-ing’ when he and his team developed HAPAS (HArtley Professional Accountants’ System), the only software in Australia designed specifi-cally for small accounting practices. He also designed SHEILA (System by Hartley for Entirely Integrated Ledger Accounting) for large businesses.

The operating system was called RT86, a true pre-emptive multi-user multi-tasking operating system for the 8086 chip. It was launched in 1980, fifteen years before Windows PCs had that capability.

When IBM launched the IBM PC, it decided to use the Intel 8088 (an 8-bit external bus sister chip of the full 16-bit 8086 used by Hartley). Looking for someone to supply the operating system, they were introduced to Bill Gates, who did not even have any Intel chip-based soft-ware at the time. Bill rushed out to buy what became MS-DOS for $50,000. And so MS-DOS was inflicted upon the world – at a huge cost compared to what might have been with Hartley's far superior RT86.

While with HARTLEY, a company on Bougainville Island, MORGAN EQUIPMENT, asked me to come back to Papua New Guinea and soon my wanderings began anew. Another what-might-have-been story.

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The Sense of an Ending

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up” recalls Tony Webster, now 60ish, middle class and middling, the ideal narrator in this book. He is bright, but not too bright; likeable but not a saint; and a survivor confident that he has stumbled upon most, if not quite all of the answers. “We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.”

He is resigned to his ordinariness; even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. On harsher inspection, "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was." Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that "the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss", that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change.

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him . . . Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?”

Who are you? How can you be sure? What if you're not who you think you are? What if you never were? These are the questions this book asks. You arrive at the end of this book breathless and befuddled, duped into the idea that a life's conclusion brings some kind of wisdom. Not always. Apparently sometimes there are simply just more questions.

Cleverly, Julian Barnes compresses a story with long temporal sweep into a scant 150 pages. (You can imagine a younger or a less confident author taking about three times as long to make the same points.) The cleverness resides not only in the way he has caught just how second-rate Webster's mind is without driving the reader to tears of boredom but in the way he has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory; on not getting it the first time round - and possibly not even the second, either. Barnes's revelation is richly ambiguous.

Read this book. It may help you to make sense of it all, or at least realise that it doesn't make sense.

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P.S. ... and it was made into a movie. Watch it here before it disappears again.

 

Heart of Darkness

 

Padma gave me a thermos full of lemongrass & ginger tea and a playlunch - well, a packet of chocolate-coated diet biscuits, to be precise - and I took my memories and a memory stick to spend a peaceful day down by the river in far-away "Melbourne".

I suffer from what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant - always spoken of with his first name to avoid any ambiguity - called 'unsociable sociability' (ungesellige Geselligkeit) and I need my regular dose of solitude like others need their food and drink. Spending time away in far-away "Melbourne" in silent monologue with myself and my thoughts feeds my 'unsociable sociability', and I will spend more time there more often as the weather begins to warm up.

What memories my solitude will throw up is always unpredictable but the memory stick I took along held a 90-minute BBC Radio dramatisation of "Heart of Darkness" - click here - which I had heard several times before.

It made the perfect background sound as I reclined on the daybed and, watching the thousands of flecks of dust dancing in the shafts of sunlight coming through the window, I drifted off to a long and satisfying nap.

May there be many, many, many more sunkissed days like this!

 

Sitting outside "Melbourne" at the end of the day and reflecting
on "The horror! The horror!" of old age and gum boots and all that.

 

 

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A short commercial break

 

In the beloved Australian film "The Castle", Darryl Kerrigan famously acknowledges the serenity while staying at the family holiday house in Bonnie Doon: "Ah, the serenity. So much serenity."

One look at "Riverbend", and you'll be thinking the exact same thing. This one-of-a-kind absolute waterfront freehold property offers serenity and tranquility by the bucketload. Located on the edge of the picturesque village of Nelligen, "Riverbend" is a private paradise only ten minutes away from the bustling resort town of Batemans Bay with all its amenities.

This truly unique property with a massive two-storey brick residence set in parkland totalling some seven acres stretches for over 400 metres along the Clyde River. The land is mostly level and takes in an entire bend of the river.

After owning this incredible property for over thirty years, the present owners are ready to say their final goodbyes in the hope that it will attract a buyer who will also treasure this slice of paradise. "It's a place of true beauty and discovery, and for making new magical memories, and we will absolutely miss it for many reasons", they say, but old age is forcing them to downsize. "We now wish to pass this slice of paradise onto someone else to enjoy this incredible lifestyle."

As for the price (which is negotiable and the owners will even toss in a copy of "The Castle"), most residential properties sell at a price ratio of 75% for the house and 25% for the land; "Riverbend" has an inverse ratio of 25% for the house and 75% for the land (already two years ago, the Valuer-General's Land Valuation of the LAND ALONE was $2,637,000) because, as you know what they say about land, "They don't make any more!"

Land valuation and price aside, what the property is all about is location, location, location! The tranquillity, the absolute privacy and beauty of the river draw you to it. If you are looking for an idyllic lifestyle where the only alarm clock in the morning is a bunch of kookaburras, where you can sit on a huge verandah overlooking the river and watch amazing sunsets, and where you are serenaded to sleep at night by the sound of frogs, you will love it here. If you thought that it was no longer possible to find paradise on earth, think again!

For some photos, click here.

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Become a subscriber to "Confidential Daily"

 

A friend who knows my tastes but also my distastes for all that false wokeness that's all around us now, sent me this article about what "Confidential Daily" calls the pathetic, ill-founded, vomit-inducing "Welcome to Country" message - click here. Don’t forget to boo loudly next time you hear it.

So who is behind "Confidential Daily"? None other than Cory Bernardi, former Senator for South Australia from 2006 to 2020 and leader of the Australian Conservatives, a minor political party he founded in 2017 but disbanded in 2019. He ends the article ends with this plea: "I need every Australian, yes, even you miserable greens, to write, email, and text to their local, state and federal politicians to stop wasting our money with this unnecessary grievance industry. It makes our country look weak. It dispirits, disheartens, and depresses our young people against starting or retaining a small business, knowing that any bedwetting malcontent can trigger expensive litigation via a team of well-funded, weak bureaucrats who could never survive on their own skills in private enterprise."

Registering with "Confidential Daily" is free. All subscribers receive the famous "Weekly Dose of Common Sense" email every Wednesday. To register, click here, enter your name and email address, and choose your type of membership. You will be sent an email to confirm your details with a secure link. When you click on the link within that email you will be registered and automatically signed in.

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