I don’t do sport here all that often…

…but I am fascinated by the Andrew Johns business. The Footy Show interview has been YouTubed:

Friday Australian poem #4: Judith Wright

This poem has been a favourite of mine for over forty years. It brings back nights by a roaring fire listening to old relatives out in Wellington NSW telling their young city cousin tales of the old days, as only these country people could: shuffling “the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards.” Thunderbolt (Fred Ward) was a bushranger of the New England area. That’s him on the right.

Wright shows a rare skill in this poem capturing an authentic Australian speaking voice and making poetry out of it in such a way that the more clearly poetic frame of the story both stands out yet also blends in. The voice of old Dan gains resonance from its setting. And that closure: wonderful.

The title: Judith Wright was living in Queensland when she wrote this poem during World War II. First published in Meanjin around about the time I was conceived it appeared in Wright’s first book, The Moving Image, in 1946. New England* was thus “South of her days” at the time.

Guest entry: David from Michigan

Make sure you read the comments!

This arrived as a comment, but is so important that I have promoted it to entry status. David is referring to point 5 in yesterday’s entry Vital Reading.

Anyone who thinks that America is “full of” the likes of Philip Atkinson [a British expatriate, I see. -- N] obviously doesn’t live here and is, I would suggest, a little dangerous themselves (it’s like the left-wing version of “all Arabs are terrorists” and it could be used to justify anything.) You can find some useful background to this article from the right-wing antiwar activist Justin Raimondo. Raimondo, who sees Neocons as a “pestilential sect” arising from the cold war (a small minority, but a highly influential and dangerous one in Washington) describes Atkinson and the Family Security Foundation as “at the outer limits of neocon kookery” — in other words, a minority of a minority. However, some of the tropes in the Atkinson article (particularly the half-based classicism) are common ones in Neocon fantasy, and Raimondo fears that this may be revealing of what “lies behind the mask” of Neoconservatism.

Vital reading

1. The Herald series on migrant workers continues to unearth disturbing stories: A lonely death among the pines and Calls for action to save foreign employees. Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews adopts the legalistic Mary Poppins position: “the workers could freely complain about their employment conditions.” That is making several assumptions about the actual power such workers have culturally, socially and linguistically, and is ignoring on-the-ground factors such as access to such mechanisms and isolation.

2. There is a real stoush happening in Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s electorate over the Gunns pulp mill project in the Tamar Valley in Tasmania. Opposition spokesman Peter Garrett is also in the frame. You may read the article that inspired Geoffrey Cousins to take on the Tasmanian Government, the Howard Government, and the Rudd Opposition at The Monthly: scroll down to Richard Flanagan’s “Out of Control” (May 2007) — and stay on that site to read some other articles while you are there. I am so glad The Monthly now gives free access to some of their excellent essays.

3. Through an ad on The Monthly site I went to High & Dry – that is a generous extract from the book — by Guy Pearse.

Yea the great and terrible day of The Bush is nigh…

…and the Moon hath turned to blood seen even unto Surry Hills…

Government careers down path of superficial idiocy on citizenship test

NOTE: Updated. I now give the resource book a qualified . Remarks below offer some qualifications, while others, especially about the TEST, still hold.

The singularly unimpressive Kevin Andrews was told how stupid this is over and over again. Go there and download whichever you choose; naturally I recommend (PDF) ATESOL’s contribution on behalf of ESL teachers — I can hardly improve on it. But The Garden Gnome wanted it and Andrews delivered and so the country is stuck with an English test that masquerades as something to do with benchmarks for attaining a successful Australian citizenship.

The Book of Knowledge (in English of course) does not appear to be available online yet*, so I have had to rely on the version presented today in the Sydney Morning Herald: I pledge allegiance to ? the Don. Nothing in there, it would appear, about the Eight Hour Movement or the Harvester Judgement, whose centenary occurs this year, but that is hardly surprising. Meanwhile not one person who represents any kind of threat to the Australian way of life will be deterred by this fatuous yet discriminatory exercise. But the government will seem to be doing something significant, and that is all that matters perhaps.

The Herald does provide these sample questions:

Inside Iran

Last night Compass presented Part 1 of Rageh Omaar’s Inside Teheran, a significant counterweight to the rhetoric of politics there or here. You get the idea from this edited extract:

Eating the national icon…

Sirdan and I had roast pork at The Dolphin today; some of the scenery was nice, the pork was good, but the additional cost does not seem justifiable when you compare it with The Shakespeare.

Afterwards we went to Woolies in Riley Street, where the prices are very competitive. And I bought some kanga bangas: yes, kangaroo sausages! Low in cholesterol, high in protein, and more sensible as a meat animal than beef in the Australian environment. Cheap too…

What’s a billion dollars, mate?

The government’s special brand of tiger repellent, known as The Pacific Solution, has cost one billion dollars since 2001; processing refugess and asylum seekers onshore here in Australia would have cost 3.5% of that. So Oxfam reports in (PDF) A Price Too High: The cost of Australia’s approach to Asylum Seekers.. (See also the coauthors of the report, A Just Australia.)

Yes, but, no, but… it has stemmed the flood of undesirables washing up on our shores, hasn’t it? Well, maybe. There are arguments to suggest that other factors are also involved here, and that the Pacific Solution itself may or may not have been an essential element. The “tiger repellent” argument is, you may recall, as follows, so nicely told here on God of the Machine:

Guy’s out walking in Manhattan when he sees a street vendor selling unmarked aerosol cans. He’s curious and asks what’s in them, and the vendor says, “Tiger repellent.” The guy points out that there are no tigers in New York City, and the vendor replies, “See how well it works?”

Download the report. Think about it.

Book of Job

My eccentric following of the US Book of Common Prayer Lectionary has moved on from the mixed blessings of Judges to one of those books everyone should read at some time in their lives: The Book of Job. There are many wonderful translations: J R R Tolkien had a hand in the Jerusalem Bible version, but I am reading mainly in the odd but powerful mid 20th century Catholic version of Ronald Knox, a truly inspiring work of English, especially in this book which reads like something out of the Arabian Nights. It is I am sure a work of fiction, but none the worse for that. It stands beside King Lear and Oedipus Rex as literature and has famously inspired many, such as William Blake. I will share some snippets of the Knox version later.

I found the following art work on Jasongraphix. (His Principles of Beautiful Web Design would appear to be well worth looking into; he certainly practises what he preaches.)

Good news from The Rabbit; update to Haneef post

He has not shut down his blog. He is in fact renovating and will launch it later on with a very large Menindee entry.

ON QUITE ANOTHER MATTER

Surry Hills is a free speech zone? And the horsies have the lurgy…

Once upon a time they may have made something of the fact that a lunar eclipse will precede the arrival in Sydney of George W Bush. No longer, of course, are we so superstitious. But it does seem that eclipses of another kind will accompany his visit: Stand by for Bush’s travelling circus.

…advance teams will have been in Australia for months consulting NSW and federal police.

Their job has been to study the routes Mr Bush will travel, ensure bridges and viaducts are secure, and organise the huge secure zone. Each venue is meticulously assessed for security and to ensure there is an escape route should anything go awry…

Scotland NSW

I was struck by a remark Thomas makes in Part 1 of his Menindee story — an entry that appears to have done his stats no harm at all… “I had been watching the scenery, trying to compare it to the various places around the world I had been to. For a short while I was reminded of Edinburgh, though that was only when we were going into the mountains. But certainly, for this leg, that was the only comparison I could make.” That not only struck a Presbyterian chord in me, but I recalled — my God! — driving much the same leg in 1970 in my Mazda with Chris, a 21-years-old colleague from Dapto High. Chris was from the UK, and we had dissuaded him from trying a solo trip up the Birdsville Track in high summer; instead I volunteered to show him the Central West of NSW. That was the trip that took us towards Cobar…

We were driving through country just over the Blue Mountains, and he’d stopped asking when we when we were going to get to the desert. He had also pointed out that in the time we had been driving we would have passed through a couple of counties and several major cities back home in England. And then he said, “This reminds me of Scotland…”

Well, you judge. One is the Lowlands of Scotland, the other is towards Oberon in the Bathurst area of NSW*. I guess place names like Lithgow and Kelso didn’t arise by accident…

Information control in this digital age

From 2009 students in the NSW HSC Standard English Module C Texts and Society Elective 1: The Global Village will have the option of closely studying Wikipedia. That, I think, is an excellent idea. Intelligent critical study of this extraordinary (and still extraordinarily valuable) resource, and of other aspects of the internet, seems to me something that should be mandatory rather than elective.

Here in Australia we have just been told something that really should not surprise us: PM’s staff edited Wikipedia.

STAFF in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government.*

A new website, WikiScanner – which traces the digital fingerprints of those who make changes to entries in the online encyclopedia – points to the department as the source of 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer, Peter Costello…

Defence computers were found to have made more than 5000 edits to Wikipedia entries, including to articles on the “9/11 Truth Movement”, the Australian Defence Force Academy and even the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers.

Friday Australian poem #3: A D Hope, “The Death of a Bird”

Loved this ever since I first read it over forty years ago! I first saw him at Sydney University in 1964, already at that time a man with an enormous reputation as a poet, critic — he called Patrick White’s prose “verbal sludge” — and enemy, in most respects, of modernism, while really being thoroughly modern in content if not always in style. “The Death of a Bird” was inspired by an article in a scientific journal. Hope said it was at one stage abandoned, only being taken up and completed some years later. He wondered if people could see where he had broken off.

You could have knocked me over with a feather…

I was just now adding the finishing touches to my Friday Oz Poem #3, to appear as if by magic just after midnight, when I thought I would check Sitemeter to see who had visited lately, and to look at my little collection of WordPress friends who appear in a list at the dashboard behind the scenes here. Sure enough, Thomas has begun his account of the Great Drive, but when I checked The Rabbit to see what he had to say, his blog had gone behind a log-in. Perhaps a result of his new professonal role? Perhaps he is just renovating*… I’ll miss his blog, even if there were moments… So will Sirdan, Aluminium, and a few others who have been reading Mr R for some time. There was some very good writing there, after all, and I have been reading him for years!

THURSDAY NIGHT AND FRIDAY MORNING

I decided to cut the Rabbit links, and the Rabbit tags, here and on the Big Archive since it would be annoying to readers if such links went nowhere. In about an hour I was able to modify the relevant posts, delete most cross-links, delete the occasional post, and do some major surgery in The Big Archive. I have also updated Who’s who accordingly but have kept a link open there, just in case. Some of the surgery on my sites was well overdue now, I think — as an act of friendship really. He’ll know what I mean… I am happy to have done it.

I sincerely hope it isn’t the last we see of The Rabbit, those of us outside his immediate circle that is. This comment on Thomas’s blog suggests he may reopen, in which case I will (if it’s OK by him) note it here. But it may also be he has decided to limit his readership to those concerned.

Take care, Rabbit.