This is the end of Volume One of Days

This is the end of Volume One of Days, which covers the period from 2004 until 2008.

Some technical difficulties, including pictures disappearing off this blog, have encouraged me to start a new volume.

Always loved a fresh start. Thanks to everyone for their interest in this often haphazard collection of material on whatever crosses my mind on a daily basis. It's been great fun and occasionally great therapy to do and I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it. I've also learnt a lot on the path. When this blog began I had no idea how to upload pictures and had never blogged before. It's been a fascinating adventure; and equally fascinating to watch the remarkable development of the blogosphere worldwide. I'm proud to be a part of it.

My story continues at:

http://daysvolumetwo.blogspot.com/

Get A Proper Job, Dog, he said to the parking cop

http://freshwilliam.blogspot.com/

Get A Proper Job, Dog, he said the parking cop







"I leave the bar feeling confident and excited by the prospect of checking into rehab. Back in my apartment, I strip off my clothes, change into some sweats, crack open an ale and drink it quickly. I play early Blondie on the stereo. The more I think about it the more I like the idea of this rehab thing. There's no telling who I might see there. And Jim's right, it is the sort of story you can laugh about for years."
Augusten Burroughs, Dry.


There were shadows he wanted to box against, shadows from a chaotic life which he fought back by simple routine, a rising tide of darkness. There wasn't going to be any straight answers. He dreamt of retiring; and that first Sunday, he always worked Sundays, going to the office, begging: I've made a terrible mistake. How am I going to survive? How am I going to feed the kids? What was I thinking? Why did I ever say I would leave? I need freelance work immediately. These were moments, these were days, of uncertainty, of chaos, of tragedy. Suzy was out the front of the house last night, crying in the car, worried that she will have to move and that the real estate agent won't sign a new lease. Borrowing money off Sammy. For once it wasn't just her, that's Sydney these days, pressure everywhere, difficult to survive, high, read outrageous, rents.

A city divided into haves and have no ts. Those who have their own homes and those who do not. The wages of a normal job just gets you absolutely nowhere. The mortgage belt is struggling to cope. They talk of a two-tier economy; and they're right. There's spectacular amounts of wealth; enormous stone piles perched around the harbour, luxury coating every bay, inlet and alcove. And then there's the 20 kilometres of featureless suburbs to the west, where people build their lives off from the freeways, sheltering from the choking traffic; in dead ends and forgettable streets nobody has ever loved; and mortgage payments have become impossible. The city has become more and more difficult to live in. Which is one reason, I guess, why I have a pathological hatred of parking cops.

They are everywhere in this town, vicious parasites out to get every cent they can. Over the last few years the signs restricting parking have spread further and further. The ticket only; which means you have to pay, signs have also spread everywhere. Essentially there's nowhere to park and a parking policeman, or dog as he thought of them, on every corner, waiting to pounce; lurking in back streets, watching, waiting. Their eternal vigilance made working in the inner-city almost an impossibility financially. When he finally left Sydney there was a string of fines which kept filtering in for weeks. His final job had been so demanding that he would often forget to move his car every two hours; meaning that the $80 he incurred in fines for the day made going to work barely worth the effort.
There's no way back to any semblance of normality. A tidal wave of anger whooshes over him, instant fury.

Get a proper job, dog, he snarls as he walks past one of the uniformed bastards.
Often they pretend not to hear. But although they are trained not to respond to abuse from the public it usually works; they usually bite.
He had, after all, years of experience at working out what actually got under their skin.
It is a proper job, they puff, feebly.
Only a dog would do that job, he snarls. You'd have to be a complete creep. Why don't you do something that serves some useful purpose, instead of going around ruining everybody's day. You must have terrible karma.
May this curse follow you all the days of your life.
And if the children are nearby, he loudly instructs them: whatever you do in life, don't become one of them, a parking parasite. He spits out the words; he doesn't care how irrational his anger.

It's sad, it's vicious and it's pointless. But equally pointless is the mayor lauching an army of parasites onto the citizenry, zooming around in their white ranger cars, puffed up with their unifroms; lurking around corners waiting for you to stop for a minute in a Stop sign.

Every taxi driver tells stories of getting a $200 fine for stopping to pick up someone in a wheelchair. Or for helping to unload someone who is injured or disabled.

His hatred, too, stemmed from the chaos they had created in his life. When Sammy came home from hospital we used to park out the front of the house; and get tickets all the time because we didn't have a residents sticker. When we went to get a sticker
we were told that wasn't possible unless we paid all the back fines; which of course were enormous. So on and on it went; and it didn't matter how we remonstrated with the parking cops, he she or it, they'd stand there writing the tickets; their arrogant passivity projecting contempt. It's a miracle no one has gone out and shot a few of these bastards. If it was America they would have. You see it all over Sydney; people arguing with them, hopelessly, because it's always too late, they've already started writing the ticket and there's nothing they can do; they say. The fines are vastly out of proportion to the working wage, you can easily wipe out a day or two's efforts if you get caught. I got one for $435 once; a disabled parking zone I admittedly parked in for about half an hour because it was pouring rain, I was feeling sick and it was after ten at night. Bang, got you. Dogs, they're all dogs. And my part in all this? Forget it. They're dogs.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/article.aspx?id=219365

Thousands of spectators lined the Sydney Harbour foreshore to farewell the QE2 ocean liner for the final time.

Sky News Reporter Terry Gallaway is a passenger aboard the QE2 and has shared moments of the majestical departure.

'I'm looking forward to a fabulous voyage and a fabulous departure from this city. It's the only city in the world that you can park a 84,000 tonne ship in the middle of the CBD,' Gallaway exclaimed.

'The QE2 is the last of the ocean liners. She's not a floating hotel like the others..... But she's a very capable ship. She's capable of 32 knots and cruises at 28 knots..., and is holding 1,800 guests,' he added.

First class passengers aboard the ship paid up to $250,000 for a ticket.

But as Gallaway revealed, first class passengers and 'sewage' passengers are both served the same food!

'Believe it or not, the menu is exactly the same,' confides Gallaway.

Earlier the 40 year old QE2 and its much younger royal sister, the Queen Victoria, made a historic passing of each other in Sydney Harbour.

The two giant ships saluted each other as they passed either side of Fort Denison with a sounding of their horns as Queen Victoria made her departure from the iconic harbour, and the QE2 took her place in Circular Quay.

It was a historic salute marking the two month old Queen Victoria's maiden visit to Sydney on her first around the world voyage and the final visit of the QE2, which made her first grand entrance into Sydney 30 years ago.

The historic passing comes almost a year to the day since the QE2 and the Queen Mary 2 passed each other in Sydney Harbour, sparking traffic chaos.

Queen Victoria's next stop is Brisbane, while the QE2 will head to Hobart and then Perth.

She will be decommissioned in November and will become a lavish floating hotel in Dubai.

Sleight of Hand Sleight of Fate

Wollongong Beach at dawn; near The Table of Knowledge.


Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham

"It is certainly in al-Qaeda's interest to keep American troops pinned down in Iraq, where their presence and their behaviour serve to radicalise people throughout the Arabic and the broader Islamic world: American soldiers have long been al-Qaeda's best recruiters."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.


There was the murky slides, the almost impossibly good-looking young men, the thump of disco music, the smell of sweat. I couldn't stand the self-exposure, he said. There's a new blog every eight seconds, I replied, no one pays the slightest attention. It's therapeutic; I've got that sort of head; a million tales, some perfectly well plotted, swirling around. Better to get it out. Better to tell the story. Exactly as: there's no use carrying a resentment if someone else can carry it for you. We were compromised, totally. The cruelty of it all, that is what he sought to expose. There were criminals lurking in the shadows. They used to score speed down the Kings Road in Chelsea. Richard used to help us. Handsome Richard we were all in love with. Conquest far off, everything paled. We really could dance. Bitter Lemons. The Alexandria Quartet. This life on the other side of the planet, far from where we were born.

It was the dancing, more than anything, that brought them close. His soul could have been repaired, but instead he coated it with alcohol. Comrades in arms, dancing till dawn. The buildings dark, too drunk to have even planned an escape route. The speed kept coursing through our veins; either torrents of thought or just one long thought. We were in love with each other, with London's dark streets, with the mysterious alcoves; with life itself. Never had we felt so exultant, so adventurous, so determinedly happy. The drinks flowed in fashionable bars. Richard was always getting a job as a barman in some fashionable place. When it came to mixing drinks he knew exactly what he was doing; he could run a bar like no other. We all loved him. We all got dressed up and went to filch free drinks. We all wanted to go there, but friendship would suffice.

Oh pretty boy, why hast thou forsaken me? That was the cruelty, the dog tired cruelty, as the gritty bad speed ground out our teeth and we stayed awake for days; too afraid to go to sleep. We might dream. We might come face to face with ourselves. We might realise that our disaster prone lives were but just a flicker, our expat lives barely breaking the surface of an indifferent, ancient city. But at least we could stand at the back of the crowd at the packed bar, one of many through the "it" nightclub of the moment, we could catch Richard's eye and our drinks would be swirled into our hands while the mere plebs grew more and more exasperated.

That was the era of the giant dancefloor; cavernous clubs; massive mirror balls; "Don't you want me baby?" and the elgant twists as we danced and danced, our bodies lost. Boy George gave a concert and was always in the news. We followed all the eighties bands, a cynical twist, a drop wrist. It never occurred to us that there could be someone who didn't want to sleep with us. We were fabulous, as fabulous as you can get when you're from Australia; and we danced and we danced. I just wanted everything to merge together; the music, the cavernous club, the clothes, the cuties, most of all the music. There was nowhere else to be, nowhere else one could want to be. We smoked and we drank and danced till we dropped; and kept on dancing. It wasn't just the speed; it was the age, the moment, the place, the times. I wanted to be subtle, a fine interlink, but through all these nights the one thing I sought was oblivion, so that the black bourbon and cokes and my spooked, alcohol charged consciouness became at one with the club.

Later on there were the awkward grapplings. Everyone worth having was had. There was no doubt, just adventure. The lack of confidence, even libido, which crept across his old age had not appeared. That's what I ordered while I was waiitng for you, he said. This is history, our history, the best of times. The windy smell of rotting oranges. The clammy ecstasy which made us different to the masses. Nothing was legal. All was hidden, dark. I wanted it to last forever; but everyting fades, the lock clicks, we're done. He shrugged off the importance of the moment, the spooky buildings creaking in the early hours, Richard always up and welcoming, the only person I knew you could visit easily at two, three in the mornig and be guaranteed a welcome.

The news of his death was the saddest day. It was London I thought of, those giant clubs, his glistening dark brown eyes, the wild, appreciative laugh. I didn't want him to die, to follow addiction to its logical conclusion. He had gone back to Adelaide and lived with his mother in the final months, rarely coming out of his darkened room, always stoned. He didn't want to grow old with the rest of us, he couldn't think of anything worse. So there's nothing but fragmentary memories; a handsome face in a crowded bar, white shirt and black bow tie showing off his perfect features. He kissed me affectionately each time we met. I miss him. That's life now, missing people who didn't stay the course; hanging out with another generation entirely. I wish you could have come with me, I wish you were still here.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=acd5VTd9qeD8&refer=asia

Turkey Says 127 Dead in Iraq Battles; U.S. Urges Calm (Update1)

By Ken Fireman and Mark Bentley

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Turkey said the death toll in three days of battles with Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq reached 127, as the U.S. urged an end to the incursion.

The Turkish armed forces have killed 112 militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, including 33 today, the military said on its Web site. Fifteen Turkish soldiers have also died in the conflict, it said.

``We will continue the operation with the same determination and heroism until planned targets are reached,'' the military said, adding that jets, artillery and helicopters had hit 63 suspected PKK targets in mountainous northern Iraq since troops went over the border on Feb. 21.

The U.S., the United Nations and Germany have called on Turkey to show restraint in dealing with the threat of the PKK from northern Iraq. The Kurdish-controlled region has remained relatively peaceful since the U.S.-led invasion five years ago, and the U.S. military is relying on Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers to help battle insurgents in and around Baghdad.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Turkish army should wrap up the campaign, adding Turkey won't be able to solve the problem of cross-border Kurdish raids through purely military means.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/travel/city-bows-to-dancing-queens/2008/02/24/1203788147682.html

GIANT ships waltzed on the water, footballers tapdanced through a grand final, and on stage Billy Elliot learned the finer points of ballet. And as a month of Sundays were jammed into one, Sydneysiders were led on the merriest dance of all if they wanted to do the lot.

Fancy footwork was required, keeping time and dodging collisions in a traffic jam of hot, harried but eager pedestrians. The McLaughlin family, from Avoca Beach, set themselves the challenge, and barely missed a beat as they skipped from harbour to theatre to football stadium under a perfect sky. Others favoured a rhythm less frenetic, a simple jig in the one spot.

For many, that meant a quickstep alongside a dazzling harbour, where the foreshores were packed with spectators drawn by the historic rendezvous of the cruise liners Queen Elizabeth 2 and Queen Victoria, the one visiting for the 29th and last time, the other for the first time.


http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Recent events
Saturday 23 February: 20 dead

Baghdad: roadside bomb kills 1, Beirut Square; 3 bodies.

Anbar
Al-Shiha: suicide bombers kill tribal chief and 2 policemen.
Saqlawiya: gunmen attack police stations, kill 6 policemen.

Ninewa
Mosul: roadside bomb kills lorry driver; gunmen kill man in drive-by shooting; a child is killed during shoot-out between US forces and gunmen.

Salahuddin
Baiji: roadside bomb kills wife and son of Baiji Council member.
Samarra: roadside bomb kills 2 policemen.

25 unidentified bodies are buried in Baquba.



My mother in the 1940s.

Got a cigarette, brother?

"The political scandal over Wollongong Council exposes a culture deeply ingrained in the Labor Party, from its grassroots to the very top. It is a demonstration of how Labor's longstanding network of mates can go wrong when combined with the toxic mix of power and large sums of money."
Sulusinszky and Norrington

"We are returning to the pre-Howard era where logic and reason and facts are discarded as totally inappropriate and racist."
Janet Albrechtsen

"If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell.


"Got a cigarette, brother?" they ask as I walk past.
"Sorry mate," I reply in almost a single word, sorrymate, as after the official apology everybody says sorry now. People, standing in the cold at 6am waiting for the crowded bus to take them to their rotten day in a lousy factory, are fed up with paying taxes to support all the nonsense, fed up with the abuse, fed up with the privileging of sections of the community based purely on skin colour. They're sorry alright. As in, I'm sorry you keep dealing so close to our house. I'm sorry you've trashed all the houses down the blocks; 30 years ago all the neighbourhood used to come and stare at all the beautiful houses the government was building for the aborigines, now they've all been vandalised, almost all of them destroyed.

I'm sorry you keep calling us white cunts when we walk past. I'm sorry you keep robbing the tiny little Asian girls, dragging them along the street by their handbags. I'm sorry you don't go out and get a job and stop living off everybody else, because I know it's not good for you. And I'm sorry you've developed a sense of grievance and hatred fostered by white lefties, the Left Green, the Socialist Left, becasue I know it does you more harm than good. I'm sorry so many taxpayers are fed up with getting up and going to work to pay taxes to support and entirely tax payer funded lifestyle, all in the name of commmunal living and indigenous pride.

None of it makes sense anymore. I feel like giving them a lecture. You should give up cigarettes, they're not good for you. Instead of bumming fags in the street you should stand up proud; the cigs will only blacken your lungs and make you feel sick, leave you smelling of stale tobacco and contribute to an early death. In no other era would multinationals be allowed to addict millions of ordinary people to their poisonous chemicals, making them sick and leading to their early death, all for the almighty dollar. But threats of an early death, promise of a longer life, means nothing here.

And the politicians bend over to help the multinationals; spending hundreds of millions of dollars chasing down heroin importers while cowtowing to the tobacco industry. All for the taxes; greed and immorality. But instead of the lecture I just walk past, "sorrymate".

I've finally done it. My son Sam is desperately trying to get his hours up before he goes for his driving test. He's only got to get up 50 hours of supervised driving, he's almost there, over 45 anyway; but the law has just been changed to make it 120 so they're not going to be too inmpressed if it ticks over 50 on the way to the test. So we drove out to Newport; and went and checked out the house where I grew up all those years ago. My father paid 150 pound for the block, which was once a rubbish dump; and built the house. Now it's been completely renovated and turned into a double story dwelling. My father sold just before the property boom for $135,000. The new people said they paid something like eight times that. She was there, Susan, the new owners, and they were very welcoming, as my brother Warren had reported.

Much of the ground floor was open plan; it was all very smart, resembled nothing like the house I used to know. All around the same thing had happened, wave after wave of money and reconstruction had left few remnants of the way it used to be. The Macs house was still there, small, wooden, the ones who used to give us glasses of milk and biscuits and where we used to love to hang around because they were nice to us and we loved their cage full of budgerigards. The steep concrete driveway which had seemed so totally enormous when we raced our carts down it; was barely longer or steeper than an average drive. Joan's house was still there. I had a terrible crush on a girl who lived here, 40 years ago, I said to someone as they got out of their car. He laughed. I wasn't laughing at the time, I was mooning around terrified, wondering what on earth to do.

The glooming terror that I felt in confronting the place was gone; wealthy houses were jammed along the hillside; the bush where we used to roam now gone. The valleys used to be full of palm trees; allowing my greatest moment as a child, when I set the entire valley alight; fire engines everywhere, houses under threat. In terrible trouble; again. Beaten black and blue, again. But it was worth the thrashing, I loved that moment, the fire engines everywhere, the flames leaping from one tree to the next, the smoke, the chaos, the danger. They knew I existed that day.

Things were so much better then, the thought came unbidden, the whole of life was before him and he wasn't old.

I grew up in a silent war, I said again, this time to the new owners. I never heard my parents laugh, I never heard them cry, I never heard them argue. There was just this terrible silence. The huge besa block shed my father built, as big in those days as the house itself, was still there, but repainted and even it renovated. It doesn't sound like you have very good memories of the house, the owner said. As in: we love it here, we've just paid more than a million dollars for it, this is our family home and we never want to leave. It was all to do with my parents, I always liked the house, I lied. I didn't get on very well with my father, and I remember walking down this road crying just days after my 16th birthday. I never came back, not in all these years.

And now I've been there, and some terrible cycle has ended. Thank the lord; the cosmos, the passing of time.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/i-did-nothing-wrong/2008/02/23/1203467451888.html

Tripodi: I did nothing wrong

PORTS and Waterways Minister Joe Tripodi hit back at his critics yesterday, saying he played no role in securing a $200,000 government job for his Labor mate Joe Scimone.

But he admitted he felt the "weight of responsibility" for the crisis in which the NSW Government now finds itself.

Mr Tripodi said he hoped any investigation into Mr Scimone's appointment would be concluded quickly.

"There have been media reports that this could be resolved as early as this week and I sincerely hope this is the case," he told The Sun-Herald.

"Of course I feel bad the Government is in this position but I maintain I did absolutely nothing wrong. I had no role to play in his appointment and it would have been improper for me to do so."

Mr Tripodi said NSW Maritime, which appointed Mr Scimone to the job, had confirmed that he had played no role in the appointment, even though NSW Maritime falls under his portfolio.

Mr Tripodi said he had been unaware of the Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation affecting Mr Scimone at the time he was appointed.

On Friday, Premier Morris Iemma said he had asked ICAC whether it should conduct an independent investigation into the appointment.

Mr Iemma said Mr Tripodi "insists" he had nothing to do with the process and his gut feeling was that he was telling the truth. If Mr Tripodi wasn't he would be sacked immediately, the Premier said.




http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/the-early-word-hard-times-for-hillary-clinton/

The Early Word: Hard Times for Hillary Clinton

By Sarah Wheaton

Friday was a rough day for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought to dispel speculation that her closing debate remarks amounted to a concession amid the death of a police officer escorting her campaign – all while Senator Barack Obama was stumping around South Texas, one of her strongholds in the state.

The Times’s Michael Luo reports on others who are suffering from her campaign’s troubles – small vendors in the New York area worried that their fees will go unpaid.

At The Chicago Tribune, Jim Tankersley writes that Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio could be her “last, best hope” there. The Boston Globe’s Susan Milligan looks at Mrs. Clinton’s firewall of working-class voters in Ohio, “who say they don’t want to hear fancy words about changing Washington; they want to know exactly how the next president is going to bring jobs to their struggling communities and make sure their children have health care.”

The Chicago Tribune analyzes Mr. Obama’s stump speeches and finds, among the platitudes, just as much policy as the other candidates have, and Nedra Pickler of The Associated Press previews possible Republican attacks against him if he becomes the Democratic nominee.



James.

Corrugated Iron Roofs

"Morris Iemma has failed the leadership test today by not sacking the factional hacks and mates from his cabinet. We have too many of Morris' friends, too many of those he is indebted to, sitting in key portfolios, and too many problems across the state for Morris to have left them alone today. This is a bloke who displays inertia and a lack of energy even when the stench of corruption starts to hang over his government. If he is serious about ending the stench of corruption that hangs over the state's development industry, he should put in place a system that limits the amount of power that planning ministers have. We have a state that over the last couple of terms power has been centralised into the hands of the planning minister. Morris Iemma needs to commit to planning reforms to reduce the minister's powers, and he needs to commit to finance campaign reforms that cap expenditures on what parties and candidates can spend."
NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell as scandal subsumes the NSW government.


There were spasms of love at inappropriate times, moments of unrequited love so rare he had no idea how to cope; then an old age without love. The middle years were a slow, settling decline. The myths he had built up about his earlier life meant nothing to anyone else; they just added coherence to his story telling. I never had sex except for money until I was well into my twenties, the man said. The words gay sex went unsaid. It screwed me up, really screwed me up, he said; after he had finished saying how most of his friends from the old days were dead, overdoses or AIDS. He felt like a spy in a foreign country, a visitor in a strange land called the future, the sole survivor of a holocaust. But in reality it hadn't screwed him up at all; he gave little and was always drunk; and the cars, the money, the apartments he got in return were the part of the bargain he cared about.

There were people who had been screwed up, desperately screwed up, by what they remembered as the tendrils of evil crawling out from the Rex Hotel, in those far off days, 40 years ago. My gang hung around the fountain, before the park was renovated and for a long time the mysterious, muffled mystery of the place was filled with crains and piles of paving bricks. To the astonishment of us locals, trees were brought fully grown and planted. The barmaid Judy ruled us all with a rod of iron. If any of us misbehaved we were thrown out on our ears. We were only 16. I now have teenage children the same age as I was when all these things happened. The brand new two-tone commodore I was briefly driving, with its sheep skin covered seats and it's flecked gold burnished exterior, made me briefly the envy of my fellows, who never quite got it together to service a sugar daddy.

In contrast to the beautiful apartment I had, and which I often invited friends to during the day when there was no chance of us being sprung or compromised, the flash, rotating cars as I fell in or out with one or the other, the trail of I love you wreckage I left behind whenever they got too serious, the casual cruelty I adopted to survive the persona I had adopted, the confusing blasts of other words that swamped through what I almost regarded as an idyllic life; all these things had been established for protection. I remember to this day the crumbed concrete ceiling of the apartment in the Cross, crumbed concrete being big in those days. It was the height of sheak as far as I was concerned, exactly where I wanted to be. Except for the sugar daddy bit, and the things they wanted. I lay there. I wouldn't lift a finger. That would have made me gay; and was against our code. I lay there drunk and they did what they did, gobble gobble, and I just wanted the sticky moments to be over so I could go back to being fabulous at their expense.

In retrospect the sugar daddies I exploited so mercilessly, so intentionally, weren't that old themselves, unattractive men in their 20s, 30s, sometimes 40s, men prepared to pay for youth. Hugh, the old queen who always bought us drinks when we were short, he was the kindest of them. He was in his 70s and was a retired doctor or judge, it's become cconfused now in my head; but a retired professional man nonetheless. He'd always buy us drinks and was always kind, as he sat in the Rex sipping his scotch and water. Once we offered, me and Alan and Jack, to do something for him if he ever wanted. Free, we said; in exchange for being so nice to us all the time. Oh no dear, oh no, he said. You're all too beautiful. I would have a heart attack.

We all laughed and the day, the moment, the bar dissolved. History has solved everything. Time has swept away not just those people, but the bar itself. I remember vividly, years later, in a self-help group, some bloke talking about how damaging, how evil the Rex had been, how he had been in therapy for years to recover from what happened there, how evil seeped from the walls into the fabric of the place, the ancient gargoyle queens perched on the barstools, bringing out their wallets, the terrible exploitation, the terrible abuse. It wasn't like that for me. I just regarded it as a great adventure; a welcome change from the dreary suburb in which I had grown up, the nightmare silence of my family's home. Anything was welcome after that; and a bunch of drunken queens who would always buy you a drink and who all, seemingly without exception, wanted to sleep with you, that was adventure. The alcohol did more damage than the sexual transactions. It was a shrug, I didn't care, as long as they paid. We've always been welcome here in the future, we just didn't know it. My own kids are so straight, so nerdish, so willing to stay at home and not go out, that the contrast between them and what I got up to at the same age is almost total. We were compromised, our hearts were stained, there was a price to pay for being paid, there was moral compromise at the heat of every transaction; and he didn't care, not even now. How deep was the compromise, how soiled his soul, were all things he would take to his grave. Rent boy.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-games-up-premier-admits-rotten-donations-culture-must-end/2008/02/22/1203467390079.html

THE night before the federal election, four of NSW's most senior ministers starred at a Labor fund-raiser attended by a developer and a former Wollongong council manager who have emerged as key suspects in the corruption scandal engulfing the Iemma Government.

The Treasurer, Michael Costa, the Minister for Roads, Eric Roozendaal, the Minister for Health, Reba Meagher, and the Minister for Ports and Waterways, Joe Tripodi, all attended the champagne-and-canapes function with Labor apparatchik Joe Scimone and property developer Glen Tabak.

At the same event the year before, Lou Tasich - a developer later found to be corrupt by the Independent Commission Against Corruption - sat at a table with Mr Roozendaal. Six months later, on May 2, 2007, Mr Tasich tried to bribe a Wollongong council officer during a discussion about his proposal to buy a piece of council-owned land. He passed the officer a hand-written note: "30K 4 U."

These events offer a powerful illustration why the Premier, Morris Iemma, was forced to act yesterday. He pledged to reform laws governing political donations - including introducing possible bans on donations by property developers - in the wake of the Wollongong sex-for-development affair.

Developer donations to the NSW Government totalled $13,180,793 between 1998-2007, while developers gave the Liberal Party $8.2 million over the same period. But Mr Iemma said "change needs to happen" and promised it would occur well before the end of the year.

He also said Mr Tripodi could be stood down next week. If the commission found there should be an investigation into NSW Maritime's appointment of Mr Scimone, Mr Tripodi's mate, to a $200,000-a year job, then Mr Tripodi would be stood down. If the commission made an adverse finding against Mr Tripodi, Mr Iemma said he would be sacked.



http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/22/1203467342250.html

Senator Hillary Clinton – desperate to claw back ground after losing 10 primaries to Senator Barack Obama – today received a standing ovation to top off her debate with her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The gloves came off in the 90-minute Texas debate between the pair, with the New York Senator lambasting her Illinois opponent’s reliance on words — which she accuses him of plagiarising.

Senator Obama won the draw and elected to go second in the 90-minute CNN debate at the University of Texas.

Before the rapturous finale, he seemed to have won the majority of applause, while Senator Clinton landed the first real blow in the debate.

The March 4 primaries in Texas and Hawaii are seen as make or break for Senator Clinton, who lost contests in Wisconsin and Hawaii this week to Senator Obama.

Asked about the competition between her and her opponent, Senator Clinton took a swipe at his much-lauded oratorial skills and emphasis on the importance of words — a line her campaign team has accused him of plagiarising.

"Words are important and words matter, but actions speak louder than words," Senator Clinton said.

The CNN moderator then asked Senator Obama directly about plagiarism claims over several lines, which he has repeated in recent speeches, that bear a striking similarity to those first uttered by his friend and ally, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

Obama defends borrowed words

"There are two lines in speeches I've been giving for two weeks," Senator Obama said. "I've been campaigning for two years."

"The notion I had plagiarised from someone who is one of my national co-chairs, who gave me the line and suggested I use it, I think is silly.

"This is where we get into (the) silly season in politics and people start getting discouraged about it."




Henrietta with her Aunt Penny in Lismore

My First Ever Front Page

The Farm.


"A new breed of missionaries is trying to convert the world. Evangelists of unbelief say religion is a relic left over from the past and stands in the way of human progress. Once the world is rid of religion, immemorial evils such as war and tyranny can be overcome, and humanity will be able to fashion a new life for itself better than any known in history. Such is the creed of anti-religious missionaries such as Richard Dawkins. While the myths of religion express enduring human realities, the myths of secular humanism serve only to conceal them. It may be a dim sense of the unreality of their beliefs makes militant atheists so vehement and dogmatic. One searches in vain in the company of militant unbelievers for signs of the creative doubt that has energgised many religious thinkers. While theologians have interrogated their beliefs for millenia, secular hmanists have yet to question their simple creed. Evangelical atheism is the mirror image of the faith it attacks - without that faith's redeeming douibts."
John Gray.

Everything comes out of the torrents of the past; always disturbed, always flung to the four winds, good times non-existent. The world was a flat, monochromatic place, leaden grey. A terrifying place. There was no coherent, single personality. The leaden grey was all that he knew, all that he had known for years. Comfort came from the familiarity of despairing routines. If he sought wealth, it was purely to fritter away. He had no belief in a brighter future, such an idea would have been laughable, if it had ever occurred to him. The cringing, sad person that he had become evolved over years, decades. The chaos arose from a doomed lifestyle. He wore his depression like a cloak, a protective armour; leaves blown on soggy ground, swirls of dark colours, orange sludge, the despair of the landscape, reaching up to melancholy. That was about the range. He wandered into the job out of these doom laden winds with no ambition, no hope of a career, just a sad determination to see our promises made a long time ago.

Somehow, out of sheer persistance, he began getting the occasional shift at the city's leading newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. He was perfectly happy to work Sundays, it wasn't as if anything else was going on in his life, no happy family, no picnics with friends, clothes dank with addiction sweat. The story would not normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. I was doing casual shifts in the wan hope of fulfilling a dream of becoming a journalist. Through the kindness of strangers, basically, secret comrades in arms, sharing inner defects and fatal flaws, I was doing casual shifts at the paper. It was working Sundays that did it. Sooner or later they noticed that I kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't too badly written. In those days there was always a scrabbling desperation to know what was in the paper the next day, a lot of pages to fill and really, in a city the size of Sydney, not that much going on.

There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs, the chief of staff said. Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more of everybody elses money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet. Anyway, we're desperate for tomorrow, see what you can get. We're desperate for a pic story; try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke. So I headed off to the meeting in inner-city Surry Hills with Steve, the most foul mouthed and crude of all the photographers.

Soon enough we find ourselves sitting in the middle of a room jam packed full of extremely butch looking women; we're virtually the only blokes. We didn't slot right in. I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. Before the corruption and bias of our family law system ruined my naive university-derived belief in feminism. There was nowhere to sit in the jam packed crowd, the air full of righteousness and the muggy smell of 200 women crammed into a small space. Eventually they cleared a spot for us; and we sat cross legged; completely surrounded. We were late, as always, and a woman was up the front pounding on about the injustice of the government's failure to continue the funding their directory of women in unorthdox jobs, yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep women in the kitchen.

"There's no picture here," Steve whispered, loudly enough that at least 20 of the sisters around us could hear everywhere. "They're as ugly as sin. I'm out of here, I'm going to find something else. There's just not a shot here."
"I've got to stay and listen to this," I said.
"Well I don't, I'm gone," he said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd.

On and on the speaker went. In those days, before my head had cleared, I took copious notes on everything, the colour of the walls, everyting the speaker said, spontaneous thoughts on the atmosphere. I was always afraid I would forget something important.

By the time I got back to the office I had extensive notes from the speakers and various people I had interviewed, a woman carpenter, a plumber, an electrician; they were nice, although I wasn't so sure about their separatist plea, a woman wants a woman, they don't want men in their house. How is that not sexist?

Back in the office, I wrote up the story on the anitquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as my fingers rattled across the keyboard that the sorry would never get a run. It might have been important to the people involved, but it wasn't earth shattering. Journalists are always being targetted by groups whose funding has run out; noble cause after noble cause.

Next day the story was on the front page, my very first front page story. It was the picture that did it, of course, and I learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging an otherwise nondescript story onto the front or higher in the book. A large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop dead georgeous young woman, maybe 23, adorned the page. She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background. Her white overalls were stained delicately with paint; the uppper flats just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city; nothing short of an absolute spunk. Can I help you carry that? a hundred thousand voices asked. Can I lick the paint off your breasts. Can I see what's under those overalls, the delicate tracings of signs of labour.

I never got a thank you from the organisers of the Women In Unorthodox Jobs Directory; funnily enough. But later that day the chief of staff leant across the desk and shook my hand; congratulations, you've got the job, he said. I was a full time journalist. It was one of the proudest days of my life.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.newstatesman.com/200802210016

News that Cuba's Fidel Castro is stepping down brings an end to the longest, and most controversial, presidency in the world.

The 81-year-old leader, who has been ill for some years, said in a letter published on a state newspaper's website: "It would be a betrayal of my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer."

The final words of his message promised "I will be careful", possibly a wry reference to the more than 600 assassination attempts he has survived since becoming president.

Fidel Castro Ruz has ruled Cuba for 49 years, despite unrelenting efforts by the US to kill or overthrow him, and has outlived most of those who led the Cuban revolution with him.

His legacy is fiercely disputed: clearly a man of charisma and courage, he has always understood getting and retaining power better than the art of government. Having led a nationalist revolution against a brutal dictatorship, he instituted a more effective one of his own.

Castro seized power in 1959 in a country that had one of the highest per capita incomes in the Americas. Today it lags behind most of the hemisphere. But he has left it with a rate of infant mortality lower than that of the US, and health and education systems that support a long-lived and literate population, albeit one restricted in what it is allowed to read.

As a student in the 1950s, Castro shared the widespread discontent with the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the army officer who had dominated Cuban politics since the 1930s, first as kingmaker and then as millionaire dictator and mafia henchman. Fidel thought of standing for parliament, but became convinced that anything short of armed struggle was futile.

His claim to be a hero of the revolution is based on two disastrous revolutionary expeditions. The first was the assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago on 26 July 1953. Fidel and his brother Raú led 160 rebels in a misconceived and bungled attack that even lost the element of surprise when Castro crashed one of the cars in the convoy: 61 rebels were killed and most of the others, including Fidel, were captured. Many were summarily executed.

Fidel escaped the death sentence and was sentenced instead to 15 years in prison. Amnestied 15 months later, Fidel and his younger brother Raú went to Mexico where they met the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara and plotted their return. This was his second disastrous military expedition. Castro and 81 followers crammed into a motor yacht, now enshrined in a large glass case in Havana as one of the world's more unusual revolutionary monuments, and sailed for Cuba with the aim of starting an armed uprising. Within days, 70 of the band were killed, wounded or captured. The survivors, who included Fidel, Guevara, Raú and Camilo Cienfuegos, made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains where, with the support of existing peasant movements, they finally succeeded in launching a guerrilla campaign.

Castro's guerrillas never numbered more than 1,000, but he appropriated credit for a revolution made by many hands: socialists, social democrats, trade unionists, students and democratic liberals - a coalition so broad that, in 1958, the US recognised the hopelessness of the Batista regime and withdrew military support. On 1 January 1959, Batista fled. Castro's moment had arrived. By February, he had been sworn in as prime minister.



Maxine McKew before she unseated the Prime Minister.

Out The Window

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.
- John F. Kennedy

An email doing the rounds:

When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard.

"Heavenly Father, We come before you today To ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good," but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called
it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of speech and expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

"Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!'

"The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest."

Can't imagine why this email caused so much fuss.

When we're there, peering out the window during the long struggle, skating out from beneath threatening waves, clinging to fragments of knowledge and self-defnition that had long been eroded, these were the fragile times, not just when nothing was of comfort but when we could know no other path. The catastrophe was deep and immediate. The pain seemed eternal, the depth charges barely touching the ocean of lead, the deep floor on which he scuttled, trying to survive in the leadan atmosphere of the planet. There was nothing he could do but hope for a brief consciousness. There was certainly no way to live a normal, happy life. Sex was distorted, everything was distorted. See yourself as God sees you, went the instructions, and all there were were flimsy souls on the surface of a toxic planet. We were only suh forms of intelligence.

These despairing thoughts were his bread and butter, the soul he had made in a self-destructive life, a glimmering of distorted consciousness that was so quasar like in its rapidity and short-life, its scientific mystery, its obscure beauty and its fleeting smallness against a giant cosmos; these things were so fragmentary that even now he found it hard to gather strength, to marshal the forces, to survive.

If anything, the renewed efforts to be a fuller self were failing. There was little that could be said. There still seemed no way out. He was still expecting calamity. The brutality of it all was just as unkind. The size of things was just as out of proportion, the giant skidding thoughts, the complex plot lines, the screaching well of discontent; all were insignificant in the face of a broader truth.

He scuttled along the surface. The houses had been washed away. He instinctively sought somewhere to hide, as he had always done, but there was nowhere. He was being crushed by the weight of the atmosphere. He needed a protecting shell but it had been blasted away in a previous storm. He cried out for help but the sound would not carry through the leaden atmosphere. His consciousness flickered, he dashed around in the search for shelter, he tried to survive; and then, promptly, he was gone, disappearing as rapidly as he had been born.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/politics/20cnd-campaign.html?hp

Senator Barack Obama decisively beat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucuses on Tuesday night, accelerating his momentum ahead of crucial primaries in Ohio and Texas and cutting into Mrs. Clinton’s support among women and union members.

With the two rivals now battling state by state over margins of victory and allotment of delegates, surveys of voters leaving the Wisconsin polls showed Mr. Obama, of Illinois, making new inroads with those two groups as well as middle-age voters and continuing to win support from white men and younger voters — a performance that yielded grim tidings for Mrs. Clinton, of New York.

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington State. All but assured of his party’s nomination, Mr. McCain immediately went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding “eloquent but empty” calls for change.

For Mr. Obama, Hawaii was his 10th consecutive victory, a streak in which he has not only run up big margins in many states but also pulled votes from once-stalwart supporters of Mrs. Clinton, like low- and middle-income people and women.

Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher line against Mr. Obama — a recognition, her advisers said, that she must act to alter the course of the campaign and define Mr. Obama on her terms.


My brother Warren visiting Sydney University after being away from Australia for 17 years.

Virulent Warning

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
- Nora Ephron

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
- Gracie Allen


"The savage looting that swept Baghdad after the fall of Saddam was a measure of how angry and alienated working-class Shias were: totally impoverished, jobless, and alternately patronised and neglected by the Shia political and religious establishment. They didn't trust the religious hierarchy in Najaf, they didn't trust the exiles coming back to rebuild the Shia religious parties, and they certainly didn't trust the Americans."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.

The remnants of the last government hung over us like a shroud; we were caught exposed in instances of our own making. My brother is now staying down with our mother for a couple of days, jamming everything they can into a fleeting visit. A jam packed life. It would be great if you could come over. He laughed; ideas falling over each other in his brimming brain. Those dark images of deteriorated drunks skulking in the cities corners kept clutching at his eyeballs; as if assaulting him with memory, confronted by what could have been. It was always the dark side that clawed away at him; the wealthy houses, the other side, was now so remote a possibility they did not even offer a reproach. He resented the rich; that was it. Flat, unproductive emotions, if they could even be called that. He leapt back through time to the origins; confused it with Origin in Star Trek, Ian woke up sweating from a nightmare that his son had died; his subconscious clear that his boy was in danger. Beware. They are watching. The world closing in; those haunted fragments flailing in a dank wind.

We were taught that the world was going to end in 1972, then when that didn't happen, oops, we got it wrong, just slightly, that it would end later in the 1970s. No wonder he had grown up with a sense of calamity; that all was going to end. That he would never grow old. That there was no point planning for the future, because it would be so different, so harsh, that the end time of judgement was just around the corner. Prepare to meet your maker, literally. I was crushed by this overwhelming sense of doom. We stored bottles of water in the cupboard, waiting for disaster to strike. We urged control and got chaos, an absolute abandonment. He'd get that click in his head, beyond which there was no memory and a good time was had by all. Bourbon and coke; the black drink. And the night would end in chaos, in someone's bed, somewhere.

Not much comforted him for years, decades to be truthful. Signposts were everywhere and he paid heed to not one. There were warning messages lining each side of the highway and he couldn't read any of them; the words indistinct, his eyes playing up. Ahead he could see the giant open floor, his feet crunching on the broken glass, the discarded syringes. Above the vacant sky. He kept moving forward, bnt even here, he wasn't sure why. His life had been so shrouded, so full of misery, his heart cloaked, his spirit exhausted, clutcing his sense of calamity, impending doom, the certainty of disaster, moving step by step as if nothing could stop him, compelled, forced, one step at a time, towards the light.

These chimaeras hasd dominated his life; gloom lasden but stoic, doom laden but heroic. He had never expected to live long enough for his body to fail him. He had been crunching through the broken glass, sadly determined to make it through this time, when he spotted a waterfall of colour cascading from one of the low, featureless clouds. He headed towards it automatically, fascinated by this outbreak of activity on a featureless plain. His mood shifted into exultation, step by step, as he moved towards it. Flashes of coloured light streaked past him on either side; and as he moved closer he could hear the noise from the torrent of light. He could see the portals that were opening up inside it; each leading to a happier future. He could feel the forces behind and the lures in front. He was frightened, always frightened, but still he moved forward. He thought he caught glimpses of other souls, just beyond eye's reach; and he was increasingly scared witless.

If only we had known there were these ways out, if only we hadn't wasted so many years. If only the alternatives had presented themselves earlier, before his bones began to creak. Step into the light, a cornball voice said, and he laughed as he walked directly into the waterfall of colour and streaming light; and saw the portal open up into a different, happier life. Almost unconsciously, barely thinking at all, he crossed over into a solid room, green fields and open sky, his memory of how he got here being deliberately erased. He woke up startled, looked up through freshly innocent eyes, smiled in gratitude at having been saved from so much self-imposed tragedy. And reached out a hand in a new world, laughing with delight. Come with me, a new voice said, you will be happy.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23244904-662,00.html

The farce of our state government continues:

A CLOSE friend of NSW Government minister Joe Tripodi who is facing corruption allegations before the ICAC was given a $200,000 a year job in the minister's department just four weeks ago, despite a cloud hanging over his character for the past 18 months.

Joe Scimone, a senior NSW ALP official, is facing allegations that last year he paid $30,000 to conmen posing as ICAC officers offering to destroy evidence against him.

A delegate to the ALP National Conference in April last year, Mr Scimone was appointed to a senior public service job managing property within NSW Maritime on January 14 this year.

He is believed to have been under investigation for more than a year. Mr Tripodi yesterday admitted that Mr Scimone, who narrowly missed out on being selected as the federal Labor candidate for Cunningham in 2002, was a friend whom he had known for a long time.

He denied he knew of the allegations against Mr Scimone when he was appointed as an executive director of NSW Maritime's property division.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23243426-662,00.html


THE Coalition has performed a stunning about-face on Australian Workplace Agreements, ending its support for the controversial Howard-era contracts.

Opposition MPs yesterday agreed to pass legislation to axe AWAs in the House of Representatives, dumping the last vestige of WorkChoices from Coalition policy.

The move represents a humiliating backdown for Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson and his deputy, Julie Bishop, who wanted to keep AWAs.

The capitulation came as Dr Nelson made history with a record-low 9 per cent approval rating in the latest Newspoll. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd enjoyed a record-high 70 per cent rating as preferred PM.

Ms Bishop, the workplace relations spokeswoman, had argued hard, with Dr Nelson's backing, for the Coalition to retain support for AWAs, but colleagues rolled them.

Mr Rudd had threatened a double dissolution election if the Opposition blocked Labor's dismantling of WorkChoices, but Ms Bishop said this had not influenced the decision.

"That is irrelevant to our considerations," she said.



Sam with his friends Bill and Tom

Gnomes In Dark Reaches

"At root PC is an attempt to bring about a political goal by pretending that it is already a fait accompli - the ultimate elision of 'ought' and 'is'. It involves lying about what pertains in the present in order to bring about what is supposed to be inevitable... A liberal heresy whereby an argument is put forward not for its rationality but for its appeal to emotion (especially the feeling of virtue of those making the argument); it's at its strongest when this involves the suppression of any opionion that is at odds with PC. In a nutshell; it's the 'dictatorship of virtue'. This would be bad enough if the virtue was real, but...the supposed virtue PC promotes is itself far worse than a vice. The picture PC paints of disadvantage and oppression is not merely false; but regarding the sub-group that PC most despises (men) it's the diametric opposite of the reality."
Steve Moxon.



There were glimpses in the corners of other lives, the what ifs, the sad melodramas that encroached upon our own sanity; the shifting sands of what was in the end all too short a life. Suddenly they were old. We visited my uncle Barry last night; my mother's brother, the one member of my mother's family who had done well in life. Multi-millionaire was the term, or used to be. His three story house with its white arches and balconies overlooking a bend in the Georges River, the giant gums reaching up to the swimming pool perched on the side of the cliff; this by now almost old fashioned wealth in sharp contrast to Redfern where we live. I picked my brother, visiting form America, up from the Four Seasons Hotel at the bottom of George Street, overlooking Circular Quay. In the eighties, when it was first built, considered Sydney's best hotel. The status didn't hold. We craved darkness and we could see the gnomes hiding under the overpasses; sleeping in the sides of building, the smell of urine strong.

I picked him up and we spent the day, which I had off from work, looking over Sydney university, where he studied. I gave a lecture here, he said, standing in one empty lecture hall, it's much smaller than I remember. I had just come back from Adelaide and was meant to encourage them. We found an old lab attendant, sitting quietly in his alcove, preparing for the onslaught of students next month. They swapped notes on who was around back in the eighties; the man with the high voice who always wore his academic robes, a cloud of chalk coming off him if you went near. People do go on to have careers from here, my brother said. I've made tens of millions of dollars. My daughter, who had taken time out from school for the day to be with her cousin from America, as she boasted on the phone to a friend, pricked up her ears. Like all girls her age, she's 15, she wants to be rich and famous but doesn't quite know how to achieve it. She'll get there, she's a very determined miss.

After lunch at the pub, the cheapest place for a decent feed around these parts, and a trip to the bottle shop to get something to take for the evening, even though most of us don't drink anymore, just so as not to show up empty handed, we drove out to pick up my son from school. The kids were left back at my house playing on the computer, my 15-year-old daughter and his 14-year-old son. And then, as we waited in the carpark for school to end, he told me the problems he was having with his son, one of the main reasons behind the trip. His smarks have plummetted. He's been hanging around with a bad crowd. He's been smoking dope. He thinks we're all a bunch of fuddy duddys and we don't understand. We're just straight and useless. I don't know if you've got any advice, he asked.

There aren't any happy endings, I said. What's clear now, which wasn't in my day, was the parabolic arc of addiction, the rise and the fall, the path from intitial exultation to the plateau, to the final slide into jails, institutions and death. I've never met anyone who knows so many dead people, someone said to me recently, and I relayed this to him. We all thought we were going to change the world, every puff was a step towards revolution, and instead the world changed us. And so many of my friends died. So many. Fourteen is young to be starting out; but typical for an addict or alcholic. It's quite possible he has the alcoholic gene, I said. At least one of our grandfathers was alcoholic. He said he was worried about the meth, speed, which was also apparently at the school. They age ten years in a matter of months, I said, we see them all the time around where I work. The new stuff, the ice, shaboo in Thailand, I don't know what they call it in America, the new stuff drives them crazy real fast. Then there will be trouble with the law. And everything will slide.

He's grown up with everything, there's no shortage of anything at our house, possessions. His mother wants to move the whole family to Austin, Texas, to get away from it all. But I went for a walk down the music section, the nightclubs, and there are probably drugs everywhere there, too. Everywhere, I confirmed. There's no point doing geographicals. He'll find it if he wants to. I wish he could hear this conversation, he said, just put a tape on what you've been saying for the last ten minutes and play it to him. Maybe the kind old souls in AA or NA could help him, or at least show him the future. There's twelve step programs for young people now; typically they're the ones that bottom out early, 17, 18, 19, and go on to get their lives back together. Is there any way to halt the slide, to step off the path before it kills you?

There they were, the dark gnomes, hiding in the shade of buildings, a different species of man. They may once have been like normal men, many of them had, but the cool darkness that had gripped our sliding souls, the flimsy link with any normal life path, the sad sad look that grips their faces, a far off gaze, that haunted look, the tears rolling spontaneously down their cheeks as they take another swig, everything that had happened in the tumult of their lives, the simple inability to say no as they slid into alcoholism and addiction, a normal happy life a far off thing they could never reach, these crippling impacts which left them diseased sub-humans in the shadows; there wasn't any way to reach out. It's all in front of you, he thought, catching that sad little look for a fleeting second; it's all in front of you and you're unlikely to survive. Few of us do. I don't know what to say to you, I don't know how to transmit any message; except to say what you cannot see, that those people begging for money, in their ragged clothes and smelling of urine, they were once exactly like you: a young boy from a nice family, with the whole world in front of them. If only you hadn't chosen the path to derelection and despair, to a chaotic and unhappy life; or if only the path hadn't chosen you.

THE BIGGER STORY:


http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSB4868

Feb 18 (Reuters) - A suicide bomber targeting a foreign military convoy in Afghanistan killed 37 civilians in an attack near the Pakistan border on Monday, the interior ministry said.

Some 11,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan in the last 18 months.

Here is a chronology of major bomb attacks mounted by suspected Taliban or allied militants in Afghanistan since 2002:

Sept. 5, 2002 - A car bomb explodes near Kabul's Information Ministry killing at least 26 and injuring 150 in the worst bombing since the Western-supported government came to power.

June 13, 2005 - A suicide bomber wearing a police uniform kills 20 people, including a police chief, in an attack on a mosque in the southern city of Kandahar, as mourners gathered to pay respects to an assassinated anti-Taliban cleric.

Jan. 17, 2006 - Taliban suicide bombers kill at least 20 people in the town of Spin Boldak, bordering Pakistan.

Aug. 3, 2006 - A suicide car bomb attack aimed at a convoy of NATO troops in Kandahar kills at least 21 people.

June 17, 2007 - A Taliban suicide bomber blows up a police bus in Kabul killing 24 and wounding dozens.

Sept. 29, 2007 - A suicide bomb attack on an army bus kills 28 Afghan troops and two civilians in Kabul.

Nov. 6, 2007 - More than 70 people, including at least five Afghan lawmakers and many school children, die in a suicide raid and suspected gunfire by police in the northern town of Baghlan. The Taliban insurgents said they were not behind it.

Feb. 17, 2008 - A suicide bomber kills more than 100 people in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. The Taliban distanced themselves from this attack.

Feb. 18, 2008 - A suicide bomber targeting a foreign military convoy kills 37 civilians in an attack near the Pakistan border.

Source: Reuters; (Writing by Nagesh Narayana)



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/world/asia/19pstan.html?ref=world

LAHORE, Pakistan — Fearful of violence and deterred by confusion at polling stations, Pakistanis voted Monday in parliamentary elections that may fail to produce clear winners and could result in protracted post-election political skirmishing.

A number of clashes among polling officials and voters resulted in 10 people killed and 70 injured, according to Pakistani television channels.

Voter turnout was low; in the North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the lawless tribal areas, turnout was only 20 percent, according to election officials. In Peshawar, the provincial capital, Islamic militants prevented many women from voting. Election officials estimated that only 523 of 6,431 registered female voters at six polling stations cast ballots.

In Lahore, the political capital of Punjab province, lines were thin, and many voters complained they could not find their names on the voting lists.

But as the polls closed at 5 p.m. local time, election officials said that nationwide voting had been relatively calm compared with past elections.



Me and Joyce down at Broadway.

Backlash

"Proud to be a white Australian:

There are Aboriginals, Torres Strait Islanders, Kiwi Australians,
Lebanese Australians, Asian Australians, Arab Australians and boat
People from all over the place.

And then there are just Australians. White Australians, ordinary
Australians, who love their country. Australians who don't really care
About the skin colour of others - until they find themselves on the
Wrong end of abuse because they happen to be white Australians.

You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You call me
'Australian Dog', 'White boy', 'Cracker', 'Honky', 'Whitey', 'Caveman'.
And that's OK. But when I call you, Blackfella, Kike, Towelhead,
Sand-Nigger, Sheep Shagger, Camel Jockey, Gook or Chink, you call me a racist.

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the
Aboriginal suburbs such as Redfern and Muslim and Asian suburbs such as
Lakemba, Bankstown and Cabramatta the most dangerous places to live?

You have Invasion Day. You Have Yom Hashoah You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi.

But if we had a 'White Pride' Day, you would call us racists.

You want us to study Aboriginal history and indoctrinate us to believe
That we are ruthless invaders. You want us to say sorry for something we
Did not do. But, because we want to teach history as it happened, we are racists.

If we had an organisation for only whites to 'advance' OUR lives. We'd be racists.

If we had a university fund that only gave white students scholarships, we'd be racists

There are many indigenous organisations that are only open to
Aboriginals. Are there any organisations that are restricted to whites
Only? Of course not, because if there were, we would be called racists.

Australia has a flag that represents everybody. Aboriginals have a flag
That represents only them, but they don't think that's racist. However
If white Australians dared to have a flag that only represented white
Australians and white athletes who won an Olympic event ran around
Draped in such a flag, they would be condemned as racists.

If you are not white, you can march for your race and rights. If we
Marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists.

You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you're not
Afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.

You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police
Officer shoots a Muslim gang member or beats up a Lebanese drug dealer
Running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist.

I am proud. But you call me a racist. Why is it that only whites can be racists?"

An email now doing the rounds.


For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. We get called white cunts round here all the time; car windows smashed, robbed. Every single window in this house has a grill on it. It's impregnable. We had never been robbed until I left the backdoor open one night a few months back, the first time in the years I've been here, I got home from work, had a cigarette on the back step and bang, wallet keys phone gone, play stations gone, my son's wallet, gone. They're like cockroaches, someone said, when I started talking about how even though I had left the back door open the place was very difficult to get into anyway; a large back fence, a narrow side path.

They're very light fingered. Another said: they used to wander round this country picking up things and they're still doing the same thing. But nobody apologies to us. There's a bit of white in me and I apologise for that, I heard one of them say when addressing a rally a few months back. There are convoluted contradictions in the apology which will play out in the next few months in no doubt odd and interesting ways. I was on a radio panel with an indigenous government minister recently; and I felt like saying, or thought about saying afterwards: you're a member of a government that has proudly increased the rate of removal of children from troubled families, all in the name of child protection and that most dishonest of all phrases, the child's best interest. You don't bother working with these families and all they have to do is have a disagreement with a DOCS officer to lose their kids.

That leftwing icon the Family Court removes kids from a parent, usually the father, every day of the week. After leaving that court half those kids won't see their dad more than once a year. Yet it was the left which championed the apology to indigenous people and so effectively wedged the Liberals on the issue. And now that it's happened, now that we have passed through the sound barrier, the apology barrier, what next? People dedicate their lives to these issues, these noble social justice causes, finding a noble victim and campaigning for them for decades on end, caught in the intense emotional drama, railing against the racist whities infesting our land, those that are left after decades of multiculturalism has deconstructed the mainstream culture as best it can.

They're like cockroaches scuttling away from beneath a lifted board, afraid of the light, the proponents of noble causes who now don't know where to go. Talkback has run hot; with caller after caller claiming there was no such thing as the stolen generation and condemning the public displays of hysteria and self-flagellation. Soon there will be nowhere to hide. Everyone knows the chaos going on in remote aboriginal communities now. The Liberals, after ignoring what was going on for a decade, decided foolishly to take action in an election year and make it an election issue, hoping to gain votes. It was the wrong thing to do on so many levels, but to do nothing following the Little Chidlren Are Sacred report was also impossible.

My brother Warren has been in Sydney for a few days from near San Diego where he lives with his family. He left here decades ago to make his fortune in silicon valley, and would never have done very well if he had stayed here. There's just not the same opportunities. And here, multiple layers of government parasites and crippling multiple layers of laws and regulation make progress impossible for all but the fortunate view; who prosper astonishingly. The rest of us are left working week to week. He went out to Newport, to the house where we grew up, an act I've been putting up for years; reluctant to confront the emotional chaos of the past. We're crimnals, we're scooting on the edge, we're dark shadows in the city's night bars and nothing can rescue us, nothing can make the cruel past go away, nothing can stop the festering of past pain which had so distorted his life.

You wouldn't recognise the place, it's double story now, and some new people have just moved in. I bowled up and said: this might seem strange but I grew up here, and they were very welcoming. I live an hour and a half away; and I'm yet to do that simple act: confrontation; those terrible beatings. No wonder I don't want to go there.


THE BIGGER STORY:

Police Media:

Nine arrested following fights in Sydney CBD

2008-02-16 14:31:45

Police have arrested nine people after two fights in central Sydney this
morning.

Police from The Rocks and City Central Local Area Commands and the
Public Order and Riot Squad (PORS) responded to numerous calls to
'Triple Zero' reporting a brawl involving 15-20 men at King Street
Wharf, in the Darling Harbour precinct, about 12.15am today.

A PORS officer used a Taser stun gun during the arrest of a 19-year-old
Willmot man who was allegedly pinning a male officer to the ground.

The decision to use the Taser was based on the extreme violence
displayed and the probability of injuries inflicted upon the officer.

The man was arrested and taken to City Central Police Station where he
was examined by NSW Ambulance officers before being charged.

As a result of inquiries:

* A 19-year-old man from Willmot was charged with
affray, resisting police, resisting arrest, and assaulting police. He
was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail Court today.

* A 19-year-old man from Bidwill was charged with
resisting police, refusing to comply with a police direction, and
offensive language. He was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail
court today.

* A 19-year-old woman from Bidwill was charged with
resisting police, refusing to comply with a direction, and offensive
behaviour. She was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail Court
today.

* A 19-year-old man from Blackett was charged with
two counts of resisting police, and one count each of affray and
assaulting police. He was refused bail to appear in Parramatta Bail
court today.

* A 19-year-old woman from Rooty Hill was charged
with affray and resisting police. She was refused bail to Parramatta
Bail Court today.


* A 20-year-old woman from Whalan was charged with
affray and assaulting police. She was also refused bail to Parramatta
Bail Court today.

* A 16-year-old Tregear youth was charged with
affray and resisting police. He was granted conditional bail and is due
to appear in Bidura Children's Court on March 10.

* A 17-year-old youth from Tregear has been charged
with two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and one count
of affray. He was granted conditional bail to appear in Bidura
Children's Court on 10 March.

A female police officer suffered facial injuries after allegedly being
elbowed in the face during the scuffle, while the male officer suffered
a wrist injury. They were treated at the scene by ambulance officers.

Two men were taken to St Vincent's Hospital suffering head injuries
after allegedly being assaulted by the group. Police are still to
interview the two injured men.

Police have also charged a youth following an unrelated assault in
George Street, in central Sydney, this morning.

The incident happened about 3am, when an 18-year-old Merrylands man went
to the aid of two other people being assaulted. Police will allege he in
turn was attacked, suffering facial injuries.

A 17-year-old youth from Dharruk has been charged with one count each of
assault occasioning actual bodily harm and affray.

He was granted conditional bail and is due to appear in Bidura
Children's Court on 10 March.

Police are waiting to interview the victim of the original incident.
That person was taken to hospital suffering serious eye injuries.

Inquiries are continuing.


The neighbours.

A Frothing Exultation

"I followed him to a room on a floor I didn't know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.

"The thinner man drew out a small new radio, said something into it, and straightened his stiff jacket over his traditional shirt. I didn't need to see the shoulder holster. I had already guessed they were members of the Security Service. They did not care what I said or what I thought of them. They had watched people through hidden cameras in bedrooms, in torture cells, and on execution grounds. They knew that, however I presented myself, I could be reduced. But why had they decided to question me? In the silence, I heard a car reversing in the courtyard and then the first notes of the call to prayer."
The Places In Between, Rory Stewart.


There was a great turning of the page; change the Prime Minister and you change the country, went the saying, first coined, if memory serves correctly, by former PM Paul Keating. John Howard used the expression once during the last election, and then immediately shut his mouth on that particular topic. Because everyone went: yes, yes, yes. Everything changed overnight. The openly lesbian, Chinese origin Penny Wong, taking her partner to Kyoto for the signing and the talk-fest. A woman, Julia Gillard, as Deputy Prime Minister and already on a number of occasions acting Prime Minister. A former rock singer, Peter Garrett, as environment minister. Perhaps it will all end in tears. All impossible under the previous "conservative" government; conservative in quotes because most of his social ideas were stolen from Labor as he gazzumped every policy they dreamed up, a demonic helicopter buzzing over them, hoovering up everything they came up with. During his time government control over our lives spread ever and ever deeper; and privacy legislation has shrouded many things in even greater secrecy.

There's some spectacular talent gaps; Simon Crean as trade minister, Steven Smith as foreign, Jenny Macklin as indigenous affairs, but things have moved on, the bolts have clicked, and Australia is a different place.

He felt, in some strange way, a frothy exultaiton he could not explain. Was it happiness? With his brother visiting from America, there seemed even greater emphasis on that far off house common to their past, that far off place that neither of them had seen for many years, but still held some terrible sway over their imaginations. Unprompted he said he wanted to go out to see it; and couldn't find the time. There was so much to confront. Perhaps it was the only way through.

Just as the nation has officially apologised there has been a police crack down on anti-social behaviour in the street, and suddenly everywhere you look the police are hassling street drunks and making life difficult for the vulnerable exposed on the streets and drinking in the parks; those who don't have penthouse walls and mansion gates to hide the world's prying eyes; to prevent exposure in their final decline; the drinking, the dereliction, the bad behaviour, the shouting, the dealing. And of course it's our indigenous brothers who are most affected by any crackdown; and those linked together by the alcoholic gene; their diseased frames and halting gates everywhere in this city; what happens to you if you keep on drinking.

In the end you're not a nice person, no matter who you are, no matter what the talents, how good the motivations were at the beginning of the cylce. They all end in the same place, become the same person. He marched thoroughly through the darkness. He made mistakes, oh so many mistakes. He remembered those great exculting moments of his childhood, when he managed to set the whole valley alight and the sheer beautiful chaos of the screaming fire engines, the spectacularly beautiful leap of flames, the wonderful sense of event and confirmation, it all made the belting afterwards worthwhile. He would endure almost anything to hear the sound of the fire engines, see the panic in the face of the adults, see the flames leaping from one tree to the next, the smoke billowing across their neighbour's houses.

He called time repeatedly, but this wasn't the end. He might have been left a cormorant on a rock, watching a world that was no longer his, a world full of young people, vibrant, enthusiastic, kids who couldn't care less anymore what the adults thought, the aging adults. The baby boomers had finally passed the flame; age and time had got the better of them. They drifted now into retirement, washed away in an instant. There wasn't much to be said, in the end, for a time that had been so self-indulgent, beliefs that had been so radically wrong, creeping dogs who were gone now, their power bases exposed as flimsy, houses on bamboo stilts. The streets throbbed with a new life. No one's older than you, his brother ribbed, sitting on the internal balcony of the fading 80s hotel they were staying in; and everything marched forward in a great surge; a paradise of fresh hope, a truly magnificent fresh hope. It was an entirely new world. He could only be grateful, in his own hobbling way, to still be alive. And that is how he summed it up: At least I'm alive, he said. That's more than you can say for a lot of people I've known.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-rudd-identity/2008/02/15/1202760597274.html

The Rudd identity

Tony Wright
February 16, 2008

SELDOM has Australia witnessed a defter illustration of the political art. As Kevin Rudd wove his spell on Wednesday over the gathered peoples of the old land we inhabit, granting with finely crafted words a symbolic rebirth to the lost and the found, he tossed a rope to Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson.

It was, however, both an instrument of deliverance and a lasso.

Nelson had no choice but to sit there, nodding sagely, as Rudd proposed that he and the Opposition Leader jointly head a sort of war cabinet to tackle — as a start — the lack of housing in remote Aboriginal communities. Nelson had no clue that such a gift was coming his way, and thus could neither refuse it nor accept it. He was, in effect, rendered politically impotent.

Rudd's gesture, though, was so dexterously crafted, he could receive only plaudits. His stature growing by the minute as an inclusive prime minister catching the mood of the country, who would be so meanly disposed to detect a hidden motive, let alone criticise such apparent generosity of spirit?

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23221746-5007146,00.html

With respect, Rudd grasps the moment

By Laurie Oakes

February 16, 2008

IT'S an extraordinary start. Kevin Rudd becomes Prime Minister and, well within his first 100 days, walks straight into the history books. That is the truth about his parliamentary apology to the stolen generation.

And it is not only in Australia where the bipartisan "sorry" vote has made an impact.

The event was world news and Rudd got a flow of positive overseas feedback, including congratulatory text messages from high-level diplomatic contacts and a phone call from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Had John Howard delivered the apology in 1997, when it was first recommended in the Bringing Them Home report, the outpouring of feeling would not have been nearly as great.

Howard's decade of intransigence magnified the importance of the gesture. Rudd saw that and used it to put his own stamp on the prime ministership in spectacular fashion.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23226367-5000117,00.html

Worst of jobs for Libs leader
Sunday Herald Sun

Glenn Milne

February 17, 2008 12:00am

THE man who was most diminished by Wednesday's national apology to the "stolen generations" wasn't there.

While Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson were enhanced both as politicians and as human beings by their contributions, John Winston Howard refused an invitation to attend the event.

Before we deal with Howard, a word on Nelson and his role in this symbolic act of national reconciliation.

While there's been much made of people turning their backs on the Opposition Leader, the fact is there is an activist core on this issue that will never be satisfied with the Coalition's position on indigenous issues. And for that, Nelson has Howard to thank.

The truth is that at some of the outdoor broadcast venues on Wednesday spectators started turning their backs on Nelson before he opened his mouth. This is a display of political prejudice rather than a principled stand in support of an apology.

What people fail to appreciate is that Nelson represents the conservative half of Australia on this question. The new Opposition Leader's achievement, after more than a decade of Howard-led recalcitrance, was to get his party inside the apology tent.

The fact that he did is deserving of applause. All the rest is simply nitpicking.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/emphasis-on-the-truth/2008/02/16/1202760661102.html

Emphasis on the truth

Simon Webster
February 17, 2008

Kevin Rudd is treating the office of prime minister with contempt. Ignoring a noble tradition established by 25 previous prime ministers, Rudd is making a mockery of history and insulting the Australian public by doing what he said he would do.

"No, no, you don't understand, Kev," a senior adviser told Rudd last week. "All that stuff we said in November, we were just kidding. It was a joke. Bit of a chuckle. It was the beer talking. Once you're in, you're in. You don't actually have to do anything useful. Look at Morris up in Sydney."

A steely glint came to Rudd's eye. He turned to the window and gazed out over the manicured expanse of lawn at Parliament House. "My word is my bond," he said. "As it has been since my difficult upbringing as a fair dinkum dinky-di ridgy-didge Aussie battler with an accent that is a cross between Outer Hebridean and Punjabi. I shall do great things for this great nation. And I shall make important speeches that will make the great hairs on the great necks of our great people stand up, even if my emphasis is sometimes in the wrong place, and I sometimes mumbleoverbitsandfinishsentencestooquickly."

The adviser fired back: "But the tax cuts, Kev. Surely we don't have to go through with the tax cuts."

"Honesty is the best policy, my faithful adviser. Atleasthat'swhatmumalwayssaid."


A man at the Royal Easter Show.