Like Trump's Mexicans, Canberra's overpaid and underworked public servants are again "invading" the coast, as they crawl, bumper to bumper, down the Kings Highway, to spend another weekend on the sunkissed shores of the Gulf of Canberra.
Which gives me a perfect excuse to keep my head low and the gate shut as I read my newly-acquired book by Paul Keating's one-time speechwriter Don Watson, "The Bush - Travels in the Heart of Australia", an excellent piece of travel writing and history, footnoted and documented as Watson squirrels into unanticipated corners where he describes native flora (botanic names abound) and fauna, farm machinery, climatic variations, human occupations, cattle and sheep breeds, minute details that would be sedative in the hands of a lesser writer but are utterly mesmerising and entrancing when retold by him.
I first came across Don Watson when I discovered his books "Death Sentence" and "Weasel Words" which are all about words and linguistics, and followed it up with his biography of Paul Keating, "Recollections of a Bleeding Heart". What I didn't know until this morning when I looked up his entry on Wikipedia is that he also wrote the script to the movie "The Man Who Sued God". But let's stay with "The Bush" for the moment:
Its four-hundred densely packed pages will keep me going for all of this weekend and perhaps even the next, by which time our "friendly" neighbours from way up north, the Chinese, will, hopefully, have ended their military practice runs in the recently renamed New Zealand Strait.
