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Today's quote:

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

This post will be published again in 2030

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has narrowly retained office, obtaining just over two out of every two votes in the recent national elections. It is a disappointing result for Mr Putin, who won 117% of the vote at the last election.

In a speech to the nation, Mr Putin said he wanted to govern for all Russians, even those who hadn’t voted for him, whom he urged to COME FORWARD IMMEDIATELY.

Former US President Donald Trump congratulated Mr Putin on his win, but pointed out his winning margin was bigger.


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I couldn't have said it better myself

 

 

Peter Lacey does a wonderful job in publishing "Recollections", an online magazine about the history of our local area. In his latest issue he has added the first of what I hope will be many articles on 'hot' topics.

The first 'hot' topic is about the "Welcome to Country" message which now precedes every event and even radio and television broadcasts. As he prudently adds, "These views do not necessarily reflect the views of the South Coast History Society"; however, they closely reflect mine.

 

Click on images to enlarge

 

If you wish to receive "Recollections", send an email containing the message 'Send Recollections' to southcoasthistory@yahoo.com. It’s free!


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Monday, March 18, 2024

Is it already six years ago that I lost a good friend?

 

born 9 December 1938 - died 18 March 2018

 

I always visit bookshops, so when I toured the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland in mid-2011, I called in at the Spencer & Murphy Booksellers in Yungaburra which was minded for a few days by Helmut Brix, a fellow-German who'd come to Australia and also passed through Bonegilla in 1961, four years before me.

Being almost seven years older than me, Helmut immediately settled in Melbourne and finished up with a wife, children, mortgage, the lot - or, as Zorba the Greek called it so fittingly, "the full catastrophe".

Fifty years later, he said goodbye to his grown-up kids, told his wife he needed time to himself, and travelled north. In Yungaburra he found friends and a free flat in exchange for looking after several more, and I admired (and envied) him for the ease with which he had escaped from half a century of domesticity. Lotus-eating in Bali or Bora Bora next?

It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him. And so, even though I only stayed at Yungaburra for a couple of days, I kept in contact with Helmut, and our emails became real meetings-of-the-minds.

As it turned out, Helmut never made it to Bali or Bora Bora. We are all creatures of habit and so, only months after our meeting, he told me he had bought a house and turned domestic again! Would he have done the same if he had known that all he had left were another seven years?

 

Helmut (on right) and I raise our glasses in June 2011 at the Lake Eacham Hotel

 

Rest in Peace, my friend, and I'm glad we had those beers together.


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Sunday, March 17, 2024

Bulldozed - Niki Savva's brutal assessment of Scott Morrison

 

When I arrived in Australia in 1965, Robert Menzies was our Prime Minister. As soon as I became an Australian citizen in 1971, I became a rusted-on Royalist and Liberal voter, only to witness the relentless slide from Menzies to Morrison, from "I did but see her passing by and yet I love her till I die" to "I don't hold a hose, mate".

After Menzies' resignation on 20 January 1966, after he had served as Australian Prime Minister for a total of 18 years 5 months and 10 days, it's been political mediocrity ever since, with Bob Hawke setting the benchmark for the single greatest achievement by an Australian Prime Minister by skolling a yardie. This feat remained unchallenged for more than two decades until Tony Abbott munched an onion like it was an apple, and was finally topped off by Hillsong-attending Scott Morrison believing in miracles. We're paying the price for it now with a new Labor government that's led by a Prime Minister who tears up every time he recounts how he grew up in social housing and who's hellbent on repeating the Whitlam years without repeating their PR mistakes.

 

Listen to an audiobook preview here

 

Niki Savva, Australia's renowned political commentator, author and columnist, revealed the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, that led to the ascension of Turnbull, in "The Road to Ruin". In "Plots and Prayers", she told the inside story of the coup that overthrew Turnbull and installed his conniving successor, Morrison.

Now she lays out the final unravelling of the Coalition at the hands of a resurgent Labor and the so-called teal independents which culminated in the historic 2022 election. With access to key players and her riveting accounts of what went on behind the scenes, "Bulldozed" is the final volume of an unputdownable and impeccably sourced political trilogy.

Fascinating reading!


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Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Narrow Corner

 

There's nothing like the pitter patter of rain drops on a corruagted iron roof to send me off to sleep, so after my lunch of what Padma calls her "home-made pizza" - slices of salami and shredded cheese on a piece of Lebanese bread lightly toasted - I doubled down on my retirement by retiring to "Melbourne" for an afternoon snooze.

Woken up after an hour or so by the rustling of leaves and something else rustling somewhere under the floorboards, I was reluctant to return to the "real" world and grabbed the nearest book within reach which transported me once again to another and even more exotic location.

 

 

W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Narrow Corner" is set "a good many years ago" in the Dutch East Indies, where a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy. A quote from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells", gives it its title.

In addition to drifting away from the here-and-now, the story allowed me to fantasize to the many possible "what might have beens?" had I stayed longer in New Guinea, settled on Thursday Island, retired - as I once thought I might - at Port Dickson in Malaysia, or never left Greece. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living", which Adam Phillips, the Freudian existentialist, countered with "The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?"

Playing the "what ifs?" is not a gratifying way to live. And it is definitely not the way in which to have a positive attitude toward the life we now have and have lived. It is the exact opposite of a life of gratitude for simply being alive. And yet it is, I am sure, what we all do late in life.

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." There go about half the things I used to feel bad about. As for the rest, I take consolation from the fact that so many of the extraordinary characters I encounters in my life seem to have finished up just like me: holed up in deepest domesticity and with no more "what next?" ahead of them - well, except for the most obvious one (which some reached already).

The human mind - at least mine - tends to work from the concrete to the abstract, from personal experiences to principles suggested by these experiences. I am sure that if I sat in the lotus position for days on end on some remote mountaintop and tried to come up with a meaning of life, my mind would soon turn toward something concrete, like the rumbling in my stomach. I would probably then declare that life is another slice of "homemade pizza" washed down with a cold beer.

I leave you with a YouTube clip of the radio play, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Segal, and broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre on 1 April 1989, with Garard Green as Dr Saunders and Douglas Blackwell as Captain Nichols, as well as a copy of Maugham's book to read here.


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Postscript: Sometimes I buy the same book again for no other reason than that it has a better cover than the one I already own. Padma keeps chiding me, "But you already have this one!" Well, I've just found the perfect excuse for next time she tells me this because when I came to chapter twenty-one in "The Narrow Corner", I found that pages 117/118 were missing from the cheap paperback. Luckily, I have a beautifully bound hardcover edition with all its pages intact in my other library.