I first heard the term Invasion Day when I was living in Alice Springs in the late eighties and early nineties. I don't know if the place has changed since I was there, but in those days the people of Alice Springs would celebrate pretty much anything by drinking more than is recommended by the health authorities. This would usually be augmented with some half-arsed effort at providing a legitimate excuse for the gathering; such as a street parade, 'novelty' sporting event or a concert of some description. Indeed, most of the alleged concerts were better left undescribed. For some reason, there were also Philipino fast food stalls at every event.
More relevantly, at one Australia Day march/ concert/ novelty sporting event I was confronted by one of those professional aborigines who are so lacking in any other marketable skills that they have to eke out a living as victims of the evil white overlords. He started batting on about Invasion Day. I had never heard the term before, so I asked him what he was talking about.
He became most vociferous about the White Invasion of the sovereign Aboriginal nation and genocide etc., etc. He stopped when I started laughing. Became quite indignant, he did. When he asked me what I was laughing about, I said "Let's get this straight - you want me to feel guilty about being on the winning team? I don't think so."
I don't have any ill will towards Aboriginal people, nor do I doubt that there were a great many injustices perpetrated against them. You know what?
I. Don't. Care. Stop blaming all your woes on me and my particular demographic cohort. The battle has been won. The responsibility for your condition is now yours - and yours alone. How many Vietnamese refugees from the seventies and early eighties suffered loss and trauma greater than you (or I) could possibly imagine and arrived here to find themselves in the same sort of circumstances as you find yourselves in - and then built themselves a new life? Quietly and industriously and without begging for handouts or blaming Da Man.
While I'm setting myself up to be accused of being a white supremacist/ racist by all those who would preach the orthodoxy, let's address a couple more issues: until the 1960s, there was no Aboriginal nation. Or rather, there was a shitload of them. Some of them got on with some of the others, some of them didn't. Even when I was in the Alice, the Warlpiri people didn't like the Arrernte and vice versa. Nobody liked the Pintupi. There exists evidence to suggest that there were councils involving leaders of a great many different tribes and language groups. Some activists have suggested that this 'proves' that there was unity among Aboriginal people. To which I say "Iran and Israel both have seats at the UN."
Nor have I seen any evidence which would convince me that there was a genocide. Vast numbers of Aboriginal people were killed. This happens in invasions. Europeans had better equipment, better communications and were better organised. Therefore they were better at killing Aboriginal people than Aboriginal people were at killing them. In the majority of cases, when hostilities with the ousted occupants ceased, so did any killing. There were never any "Indian Wars" type campaigns waged against Aboriginal people. Not because of any moral superiority, more because of economic inability. We couldn't afford it. Nor - because of the lack of warmaking abilities of the Aboriginal people - did we need to. We could move them into the low rent districts with far less resistance and bloodshed. I make no judgement as to whether this was fair, just or even inevitable. But it happened.
So today, when I saw another professional Aboriginal at an Invasion Day rally on the news burn an Australian flag, I said "If you ever do that shit around me, you had better have something more to defend yourself with than a bottle of metho and a cigarette lighter, you cunt."
Why don't old blokes (or shielas) ever read the sports news?
I like sports. As long as I don't have to participate, that's too hard. Time was that you couldn't stop me from competing in pretty much any sport - as long as it was a contact sport. These days I get knocked up looking for the remote, but I'm still prepared to put in and do the hard yards to flick over from the proper footy to the league, or vice versa if the boys aren't up to the level of conflict required. I am more than somewhat slightly perturbed, however, by the way that the word 'sport' has been bandied about without regard to it's heritage. 'Prostituted' is a term that could could be applied to the way that 'sport' has been degraded. I'll illustrate my line of reasoning with a few examples: Running is a sport. Walking is not a sport. Wrestling is a sport. (NOT pro-wrestling) Gymnastics is not a sport. Weightlifting is a sport. Poker is not a sport. Tennis is a sport. Motorsport is not a sport - despite the name. To qualify as a sport, an activity must fulfill three criteria: It must involve an above average degree of physical prowess - which fucks poker, but allows that skinny Japanese guy who keeps winning hotdog eating competions to stand next to Cathy Freeman and The Don. Success is measured statistically, i.e., faster, heavier, more goals. Bye bye gymnasts. Success is dependant primarily on the abilities of the participant. The quality of their equipment should not significantly alter the outcome of the competition. Sorry revheads. Although I have had the argument mounted against me that motorsport, despite the accolades awarded to people like Schumacher and Jeff Gordon (The Federer of NASCAR; how can somebody so talented be so boring?) motorsport is, in fact, a team eandeavour and the quality of the equipment is due the effort of the team. To which I say "Fuck off you first year philosophy student." Which is not to denigrate any participants in poker tournaments, gymnastic umm..., competitions or motorsport types. Just stop calling yourself sportsmen. Especially if you're a chick. That's just wrong. Above all, a competition should not be decided by a judge arbitrarily deciding whether or not you are sticking to 'form'. Hence, freestyle swimming is a sport, the form strokes aren't. Imagine what would happen if you tried to take away Marice Green's gold medal because he was holding his arms at the wrong angle. Of course there is one glaring ommission to this, which is cricket. 15º? What a wank. You take the most blatant cheat in the history of the game down to the lab and prove that he is capable of playing within the rules which were modified to allow him to remain in breach of the original rules ('coz we don't want to discriminate, do we, you white supremacist?) What that has to do with what happened three months earlier, in an actual match is beyond me. It's kind of like getting Mike Tyson to punch out a bunch of interns and then saying he is just misunderstood because the whole time he was beating up nerds he didn't once rape anybody. Fuck, he didn't even bite them. It reduces the fine sport of cricket to a mere pastime. As does all the other technological bullshit. No third umpire, no video replays and especially no hawkeye. There are two umpires out there; support them, I defy anybody to show me an obviously biassed official. You got a bad call? Wear it. They even out.
They say that if you are attacked in New York you should yell "Fire" because that is the only distress call that New Yorkers pay attention to
Well, it's that time of year again, I guess. Bushfires are happening all over the place. I've been caught in a few fairly fierce fires frighteningly frequently before without having to resort to alliteration to escape them and it's never fun. I'm a bit worried about the Moondarra fire, in particular. It wouldn't be very difficult for a blaze to become practically unstoppable in that country; it's steep, with few access trails and plenty of fuel. I guess it does have whatever they ended up calling that Thompson River Dam (Bluerock?) for those water dumping thingummies. Bugger's probably empty.
Which has nothing to do with the scariest fire I was in-
I was working at the time for a chappie who was (and still is) one of Australia's largest private landholders and one of the two blokes who vie each year for the biggest acreage of wheat. He grew 96,000 acres the year I was working for him. As well as about 5,000,000 acres of cattle country and 20- or 30,000 acres of cotton. He's got a few other odds and ends, too, like a transport company, a soft-drink company and apparently he has a slice of the Star City Casino, too. Although that last one might be a non-urban myth. Tight as a fishes arsehole, he is. Nice bloke, though. One of those old fashioned 'salt of the earth' types. For a fella who makes it into the whatever magazine it is 'top several richest people in God's Country' list every year, he's still just a bloke from Coonabarabran.
I wouldn't piss on his kids if they were on fire, though. Arseholes, every one of them. One of his sons was running the place I was working on. I was driving the fuel truck - an old petrol powered four wheel drive Acco army truck with a couple of 1800 litre tanks on the back. I used to shift 90,000 litres of fuel a week with this old clunker - keeping thirteen headers, about a dozen tractors and a few pumpsites full. As well as this, I was spending fifty to sixty hours a week with a great bloke getting his (the wheat tycoon's) workshop going and all his old pieces of shit operational.
Because it was a petrol powered truck, I used to fuel the headers up at the side of the paddock - wheat stubble burns fairly well.
The Son decided that was taking too long and told me to drive out into the paddock to fuel them up. This worked well for a few days - every time I came out of the paddock I would clear all the stubble from around the exhaust and all was right with the world.
Until it wasn't. I was filling a header one afternoon and saw smoke coming from under the cab of the truck. I ran over, opened the cab door, but the flames were already roof height. I ran back to the header and got old mate driving it to bugger off. He'd only gone about 100 metres when the tanks caught fire. No expolosion, but the filler caps blew off and flames shot about sixty metres in the air (they saw the smoke thirty kilometres away) Before long there was a crowd of people forming a perimeter and keeping the fire contained to the immediate area. Just when we were relaxing the petrol tank on the transfer pump caught fire. One last hurrah.
The next day, The Son blamed me for it. I reminded him that it was his idea to drive into the paddock. He told me that no, he he had in fact, told me to drive into (another) paddock. Which had the same variety of wheat in it.
The judge has called for the print to decide whether I quit or was sacked first.
Don't tell anybody, but I pinched this workplace relations related document from the Universal Motorcycle Riders Club*:
I, the Penis, hereby request a raise in salary for the following reasons: 1. I do physical labour. 2. I work at great depths. 3. I plunge head first into everything I do. 4. I do not get weekends or public holidays off. 5. I work in a damp environment. 6. I work in a dark area that has poor ventilation. 7. I work in high temperatures.
8. My work exposes me to diseases.
Dear Penis,
After assessing your request, and considering the arguments you have raised, the management denies your request for the following reasons:
1. You do not work 8 hours straight.
2. You WORK IN SHORT SPURTS AND fall asleep after EACH brief work period.
3. You do not always follow the orders of the management team.
4. You do not stay in your designated area, and are often seen visiting other locations.
5. You do not take initiative - you need to be pressured and stimulated in order to start working.
6. You leave the workplace rather messy at the end of your shift.
7. You dont always observe necessary safety regulations, such as wearing the correct protective clothing.
8. You will retire LONG before you are 65.
9. You are unable to work double shifts.
10. You sometimes leave your designated work area before you have completed the assigned task.
11. And if that were not all, you have constantly been seen entering and exiting the workplace carrying two suspicious-looking bags.
Not much, really. Firstly, a few pieces of seemingly unrelated family trivia.
My paternal great-grandmother was born in North Melbourne in the early 1870s. The only time in her entire life that she ever left the Melbourne metrpolitan area was when she took a train to Sydney to check out the family of my (prospective at that stage) grandfather. He was born in Redfern in 1894 and was a grocer by trade. I use the word 'trade' advisedly as in those days you had to serve an apprenticeship to become a grocer. He became a grocer because his family weren't all that well off and you didn't have to pay your master for the privilege of working for him like you did in the first year of being apprenticed to other tradies like carpenters and painters.
Not long after he was married my grandfather enlisted in the army and got the shit shot out of him in Europe. When he came back he had shell-shock. If he had been in WW2, Korea or Malaya, he would have had battle-fatigue. From Vietnam onwards they called it post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a much murkier phrase that requires some deciphering, but it has four times as many syllables and therefore imparts much greater authority to anybody using it.
Upon his return he established a small grocery business in the town of Warragul. He went bust during the depression and he moved the family to Donvale. At the time Donvale had eight (8) houses scattered through the apple orchards.
During this period he would, to use my father's phrase, get a bit snaky; which meant that Dad and his sisters would camp at a neighbour's for a night or two. Whilst at Donvale, my father was playing with one of his sisters on the roof of the chookshed, she pushed him and he slid off the roof. One of the roofing nails had worked its way out of the timber about an inch or two. This nail ripped the back of Dad's leg open from his ankle to his arse. Seventy years later the scar is still visible.
His Dad got a bit snaky and pulled the chook shed down.
Which marks the end of the preamble.
As I was driving the tractor the other day I was listening to the ABC and they had an interview with Neil Harvey. He was rabbiting on about playing cricket as a kid in the cobbled laneway behind his house and how the uneven surface caused the ball to leap about erratically off the pitch, which improved his reflexes and eye-hand co-ordination. The interview was cut short to broadcast a one day match between Queensland and the Sarfies. Which disappointed me. Neil's yarn reminded me of two things; firstly a time when some people stole all the paving from a laneway in Parkville and secondly and unexplainably, a trip to Undera speedway I made with Dad.
I was living in Edithvale at the time, about two blocks off the end of Edithvale Road. Dad picked me up and we headed up Edithvale Road, which turns into Springvale Road at some stage after it crosses the whatever it's called Freeway. Eventually, it crosses Mitcham Road in Donvale, which turns into Doncaster Road, which is the direction we were taking. We were approaching this intersection when Dad changed from the left lane (the one to be in to go the way we were headed) to the right lane. "I'll show you where I got that scar on my leg." he said.
At the Mitcham Road intersection (I think) there is another, smaller road going off at an angle to the right down a hill to a creek. It was lined with sixties era brickveneer delights - except for one block, which still had the twenties weatherboard jobbie on it. Next to this house was a pile of rusty tin. Dad started laughing uncontrollably. When he got his breath back he pointed at the pile of tin and said "That's the fucking chook shed."
After reading Major Anya's lament on the imminent departure of Robert Hill, I thought that I had better do some research into the pervability, or lack thereof in the female side of Federal politics. You will note that I do not refer to anybody in negative terms; I do not wish to score cheap points by making disparaging remarks about the usual stock subjects for ridicule. For those of you with idealogical tendencies, I have arranged the photos according to political allegiance. Here goes:
←Kate Ellis
Judi Moylan→
←Tanya Plibersek
Sussan Ley→
←Dana Wortley
Fiona Nash→
I think that if you were in the business of breeding show pollies, you'd be more likely to invest in red pups than in blue ones. Particularly Ms. Ellis. I'd cross the floor for her - should I happen to find myself on the other side. If I were an MP they'd have to give me castors on my chair, or a skateboard. However, as with most competitions of this sort, Best Of Breed only gets you into the final round of judging and quite often the Grand Champion will come from one of the exotics; one of those breeds which, while they look good, serve no practical purpose, such as the Deludocrats:
Natasha Stott Despoja is the only polly whose homepage has a gallery. She knows what her best asset is. I am somewhat surprised to note how tanned she is - that isn't orthodox PC at all.
You may remember that just before christmas I spent a few days lamb-marking. In what seems to be a trend emanating from urban centres and the Jerry Springer show, quite a lot of the ewes are very poor mothers. Indeed, some of them desert their young altogether, which means that they are farmed out to uncaring, exploitative foster parents such as myself. In this photo, for instance, you will see part of my vast army of underage gardeners hard at work keeping my lawn manicured and my trees trimmed. The one on the left appears to be somewhat recalcitrant. He should be working, not looking at the camera. Anybody know how to make mint sauce? I don't keep all of my charges slaving away under the hot sun. Oh no no no no. I keep some of them slaving away over a hot boiler. Here you see Lulu about to bring out another load of washing. Chubby little thing, isn't she? I may have to cut back on her rations. And water the lawn a little bit more often.
And if that doesn't make you go "Aaaah." then may I present, in the tradition of bumfights, laydeeez annd gemmen, iiit's..., kittenwars !!!!
How clever am I? Tonight, at the same time, I: Cooked marinated pork steaks (remember these guys?) Had a MSN conversation with Hooch Downloaded some software called 'Recover My Files' (Kudos to Hooch's friend Pete who put me onto it) Failed to recover the accidentally deleted Hotmail type email I tried to recover Watched Sri Lanka beat the Yarpies Marveled at the stupendous number of files I managed to recover, including several blogs I don't recall ever reading Watered my lawn.
The upshot of all this is; if you are the dude who sent me the email regarding the satirical newsletter - wanna give it another crack? Huh? Puhh-lease?
In a day of action which totally demonstrated that Islam is an enlightened religion and totally not a collection of primitve superstitions, the other day in Saudi Arabia three hundred and something pilgrims on the Hajj got spread out like Vegemite as they were piffen yonnies* at three pillars which represent the Devil. Or something.
Some of these pilgrims are Doctors, scientists and chemical engineers - and they do this shit. Matter of fact, it s apparently compulsory. Dickheads.
Not that I would be throwing too many stones if I were a Catholic - ritual deicide, anybody? Lie, cheat and steal all week and go to heaven anyway 'cause you said "sorry." to God. But you don't even get to play until some kiddie fiddler in a dress sticks your head in a bucket of water.
I am so going to start a cult.
*That's 'chucking rocks' for those of you not familiar with the northern suburbs of Melbourne
There's a movie doing the rounds at the moment called Brokeback Mountain. You couldn't get me into a cinema to watch this turkey at the point of a gun. Not only is it based on a story by Annie Proulx who inflicted 'The Shipping News' on an unsuspecting world, but the screenplay is by Larry 'Lonesome Dove' McMurtry. Be that as it may, I don't really understand why people are getting all het up about it. Apparently the movie is about a couple of bum-punching cow-punchers. So now it isn't going to be shown in Rockhampton or Townsville. Rocky, just like people who are called Rocky, is a primitive organism with a fifties outlook on life. It is also the beef capital of Australia. However, as far as I know, it does not have all that many ringers or stockmen within its environs. Not that it would make much difference if it did; the boys would be down at Lee Kernaghan's pub riding bulls or at the Criterion chasing skirt and probably wouldn't even notice the movie drift by.
Townsville is even more baffling. I like Townsville. In fact, I wouldn't mind living in Townsville. Dunno 'bout the humidity in summer, be alright if you were near the beach I expect. Anyway, I would have thought that a thriving university/tourist town would have been sophistimicated enough to put up with a couple of gay cowboys. Apparently not.
Personally, I suspect that the scrapping of Townsville and Rocky, along with similar ocurrences in the You Ess, eh, to be nothing more than publicity stunts by the distributors, much like the EMS crews stationed outside movie houses screening 'The Exorcist' in the seventies.
I should put something here about Paris Hilton's beaver, but I won't
Nobody is completely evil. Even scrawny super-skank and 'star' of low grade porn Paris Hilton has some redeeming features. Like this, for eggs ample. The enemy of my enemy...
First up a disclaimer; I got up at 4:30am yesterday and started work at 5:30am. I finished work at about eight o'clock this morning, which adds up to a fairly scattered redneck, so this little piece of prose - while it will still have an innate elegance and charm - may be somewhat jerky in its narrative flow. I heard a lady on the steam powered wireless in the tractor (the Case bloke came and put new stereos in the new tractors during the week, still no mp3 players, but) this morning piss and moan about some wind storm she had the other night. She don't know shit. None of yers know shit. Hurricane Katrina? Pfft. A gentle zephyr on an autmn afternoon compared to some of the stiff breezes I've seen.* I recall one time in 1998 when I was zipping about the farm on a quad bike, irrigating (I'm quite a zippy chap) when I spotted a bit of a dust storm coming, so I went and hid in a convenient machinery shed. There was a row of tractors lined up outside the machinery shed; two of them got roofing iron through the windscreens, although I didn't find that out until later, visibility was down to about three metres. The other bloke who I was irrigating with got caught out on a head-ditch and had to hide behind a diesel engine on an irrigation pump. His bike got blown into the channel. Another time, on the same farm, myself and a couple of other chappies were having a bit of a Sunday afternoon dip in the pool near the single men's quarters. We all had our lunchbox eskies with us with a few beers in them and were just floating about, looking at the interesting cloud formations. It just occurred to us to wonder why the two cloud formations were travelling in opposite directions when they bumped into each other. As soon as they touched, it began to hail golf ball sized chunks at us, coupled with an instant dose of 125kph+ winds. The pool was a hundred metres from the nearest solid building, no way were we going to run that far, so it was stay in the pool and use our esky lids as helmets. One of the blokes,who was a sheep fuckermerino molesterSouth Sea Pom Kiwi, thought that he would hide behind the shed that the pool pump and chlorine, etc. was kept in. Worked, too; until the shed blew away. The storm only lasted a few minutes, but it took weeks to clear all the mess away. One of the demountable units in the single men's quarters had blown over onto its roof; nobody in it at the time, fortunately. Two houses had extensive roof damage, another lost the entire roof from the top of the walls up. Another house, whilst not itself damaged, was moved about an inch and a half on its stumps. The verandah of the farm office was blown off. We found most of it a week later, about seven k's away on the other side of the storage. Speaking of the storage, the wind had whipped up some pretty good waves in there. The tops of the storage wall are normally thick enough that two standard sized four wheel drives can pass each other comfortably. After the storm you couldn't ride a quad bike around the far side of cell two (capacity:10,000,000,000 litres, or roughly every olympic swimming pool in Australasia***). If you want proof that God exists - and drinks beer - here it is. All up there was several hundred thousand dollars damage (don't know what it cost, atcherly), two injuries requiring medical attention and no broken stubbies.
*The very first double entendre I ever understood was in an Alvin Purple movie I saw at the pitchers when I was about eleven. It was a very hot day (in the movie, dickhead) and Alvin was in a little store in a little country town. The store was operated by Abigail, a.k.a. the worlds least sexy sex symbol, who was complaining about the duration of the heatwave. As country store propietors are wont to do, she bent over in a very sort miniskirt to get something from the lowest shelf, exposing her ample buttocks through a pair of see-through knickers. As she did this she said "I haven't had a stiff breeze through here in months." Snerk, snerk. ** Toenote to the footnote. One scene in the movie caused great debate amongst the predominantly pubescent mail audience. Some actress whose name escapes me stood up from behind a desk to reveal that she had - wait for it - TRIMMED HER PUBES!!!!!!We couldn't believe that such depravity existed. Mind you, we were quite pleased that it did. ***I made the pool thing up, but it sounds about right.
to let anybody know that has emailed me in the last month or so that for reasons which I don't understand I can't access one of my email accounts. It was the one in the sidebar, so I've changed that link to a new address, which is connected to one of those MSN messesnger things. I don't know why. If you've emailed me in December to let me know of a vast fortune that I've inherited, then send it again to the new address, otherwise chill, baby, chill.
Well, well, well. Q. How many wells does it take to make a river? A. One, if it's big enough. So life is going along merrily when my computer starts to become unreliable. In fact my computer becomes downright uncooperative. I will go so far as to say that my computer ceases to function at all. I try talking nicely to my computer and it refuses to commence operating once more. I use language against my computer that will cause me to remonstrate most severely with a person who uses such language against me and my computer gives me plenty of chill. I will go so far as to say that if my computer is a doll, it will be such a Judy as is apt to serve me up large quantities of the back of her neck. Now I am not in a thriving metropolis. I am not close to a thriving metropolis. In fact it is quite some distance to a town that even bustles, and maybe further. Therefore, it takes me some time before I am able to remedy the situation. I visit several stores which are purveying computing devices and they do not cause me to become optimistic about the health of my computer. In fact, they tell me that it will cost a large quantity of potatoes to even tell me what is wrong with my computer, and probably more. This is not the kind of scratch that I like to flutter with. I do the figures and get the Iranian guy at the computer purveyors to construct a fresh machine for me instead. This means that I have lost all the data which is on my computer as of course I never back anything up because these things do not happen to me. Naturally this means that HIV sufferers will have to wait a bit longer for a cure as I am repeating a lot of my research, to say nothing of the common cold, which really is quite common. Contrary to rumours, I have not gone MIA, in fact I am not in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area for several years, although if there are new women there, I will be on the next bus to Griffith. One thing I am doing in the computerless era is re-reading Damon Runyon. Can you tell?
