The ABC reports:
The Queensland Government is calling for better leadership on Palm Island in the wake of a riot that has destroyed the police station. The violence erupted when the north Queensland Indigenous community heard the details of a post-mortem conducted on a 36-year-old man who died in police custody last week. The report says that Cameron Doomagee had a ruptured lung and broken ribs. Police say Mr Doomagee died after a scuffle with police during which he and an officer fell onto concrete steps. Premier Peter Beattie says the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) is investigating the death. He says the violence may not have occurred if the island's council leaders had explained to residents that there would be an independent investigation.


Mr Beattie

How moving to hear of all your concern for the police on the riot-gripped island. How inspiring your leadership is in denouncing those who would so inexplicably plan to violently express their hostility towards the police. And how typical that neither you, nor any of your ministers, has expressed any concern that a man has died in custody, wih broken ribs and other injuries.

Nothing really changes in Queensland, does it? How fortunate that naming stadiums "Nigger" would reflect only a mentality of former times.

Wake up!

I'm in Neddy's room where I can answer my email. He's listening to Motorhëd's music inspired by the World Wrestling Federation, and improvising battles by his favorite stars. He's standing on his desk and jumping onto a blue star-shaped pillow that represents his adversaries, but when he has finished tormenting it with all the most dastardly moves, including knuckling it as it lies helpless, jumping on it elbow first to pulverize it, and ripping at it with imaginary barbed wire from the cage that has been lowered over his epic struggles, he creates its final finishing off and three-second pin by rolling on the ground and grabbing his own leg with his right arm – he has a bicycle glove on his hand. He's wearing just a pair of red silk boxers, and pausing occasionally to dance to rap tunes.

Fish and chip shops used to be the province of Greek and Italian immigrants to Australia. It never occurred to me, way back then, that these hardworking family entrepreneurs, slaving away over vats of bubbling lard, were not cooking according to any recipes of their own, or even any overall approach to cooking. Rather, they must have learned the ropes from a previous generation of small family entrepreneurs, and they must have been English. Only the colonial masters embraced the kind of cuisine that fish and chips were: pieces of old shark, dipped in heavy beer batter, and then deep-fried in animal fat that seemed to have been in use for months or even years. The chips that accompanied them met the equivalent fate, and if you were lucky, about 15% of them were overcooked, so they at least were crisp and quite tasty, even if only because saturated with fat. For special treats, one could also buy potato scallops, as they were, and are still, called. These were round slices of potato, dipped in the same batter as the fish, and fried the same way. Tasmanian scallops, prepared the same way. In Canberra these did not appear always to be particularly fresh, although my parents, both Tasmanians, did eat them when they thought a splurge was in order. Prawn cutlets, so-named for reasons that are not apparent, also were available, but were generally considered beyond the reach of our budget. Then there was the crowning glory of Australian cuisine of the time, the chiko roll. Why "chiko," I have never seen explained. I must research the issue.
Well, here is a full explanation edited from an entry at www.upfromaustralia.com/chikoroll.html

The humble Chiko roll made its first appearance in 1951 at the Wagga Wagga show in New South Wales. Its creator, a Mr McEnroe, was a Bendigo boilermaker who combined fresh vegetables with meat to create a unique Aussie snack. It was conceived as a hot snack to be eaten with one hand leaving the other free for the cold beer stubby. In appearance, it resembled a giant Chinese spring roll wrapped in its quintessential trademark serving bag. Contrary to public opinion, its ingredients do not include chicken! This misconception stems from the fact that Chiko rolls were originally called chicken rolls. Today the Chiko roll is exported to Japan. The Chiko is usually sold from the fast disappearing corner milk bars and fish 'n' chip shops. As far back as the 1950s, Chiko roll posters featured female models in suggestive pose perched on a motorbike. This has continued with their latest outdoor campaign featuring a leggy blonde with an abundance of cleavage sitting on a Harley-Davidson with her hand strategically placed in front of her crotch. After receiving several complaints from the public, this poster has been withdrawn.

In any case, these days fish 'n' chip shops are almost all operated by a new generation of immigrants, this time from Asia. The new owners have retained all the old food offerings, and introduced none. They even make steak sandwiches, which more usually are sold in milk bars and country cafes than fish'n'chip shops, without innovations. This means: a small, usually gristly piece of steak between two pieces of toast, with tomato sauce, lettuce, tomato, a little onion, a slice or two of beetroot (yummy), and perhaps a little bacon, and a fried egg, which I always decline. Eating them is a challenge, and usually requires sacrificing at least some of the skin on one's palate.

I ate one, with some disappointment today (the city version never equals the country one) after swimming 20 laps of 50 meters, which seems the minimum necessary to avoid putting on weight due to my failure to avoid the foods of my wretched childhood and youth. Finally it's genuinely hot here – 93 or so, with hotter on the way for the weekend. Unfortunately, this means that the pools are crowded with particularly nasty youths who don't seem to suffer at all for scoffing at the regulations against pushing people into the pool, dunking people, and generally acting the goat. Some of the more spotty of them seem to have discovered, as I certainly did not at that age, that they can attract the affection of the bikini-clad females of their age and limited intelligence by saying completely ludicrous and obnoxious things to them, apparently much to the young ladies' delight. I must make sure that Harry is aware of this odd feature of the teenage female mind.

Highway robbery, Australian style.
Ned Kelly, the vaunted bushranger, was shot 150 years ago, but his spirit of redistributing the wealth of the rich to himself has been adapted, with a telling alteration, by state governments in this upside-down land.
Here’s how it goes down – or, rather, went down yesterday, at my expense.
I weas driving in a law-abiding fashion into the center of Melbourne, intent on doing an errand assigned by my sister-in-law, to the benefit of my charming nephew Neddy, 7. Proceeding along a main road past the mighty Melbourne Cricket Ground, in the left lane, as I was proceeding cautiously, as a tourist. As signs on the roadway insisted I must, I turned left – I had no choice, for a second reason, too: a lane of cars proceeded quite rapidly on my right, towards the central station.
Alas, upon finding myself on the roadway to the left, I was confronted by large signs saying Toll Road, You Must Have a CityLink sticker or day pass to be on this road... or something of that kind. “To avoid a traffic fine, call 13 26 29.”
I drove on the road for approximately 100-130 yards, then exited at my earliest opportunity.
That night, upon dire warnings from my brother about the consequences of not calling, I did. I learned that I had a choice: I could risk getting a $40 ticket, and this was a near certainty, because all cars that enter the roadway are photographed; or, I could purchase a day pass.
Well, how much is that?
That’s $9.80.
Say what!?
$9.80, but that pass is valid for 24 hours from the time you first drove on the road.
Explanations, as above: Useless.
Well, who can I complain to?
I dunno. We’re just the company that runs the system; we don’t make the laws or set the fees and the fines.
Well, who does that?
The government.
The government? Like, the governor, himself, or some department...?
Yeah, some department, I guess. The government. I dunno. But you can pay for the ticket here, by credit card.

I did.
But this morning I called again, eventually spoke to a government department - Civil Infractions Division. Then I spoke again to CityLink, where a friendly and happy young woman informed me that there really was nothing I could do. I explained the event, again, and she said, Oh, yeah, we’ve had a lot of complaints about that bit of roadway. In fact, we’ve had so many complaints that the operators here have told our supervisors about it, and they’ve told the government, and I understand there are moves under way to do something about it.
But nothing can help me.
I requested a copy of a receipt for my $9.80 payment. Oh, no, they can’t send out receipts; in fact, the government gave them a special exemption so they don’t need to send receipts for any amount less than $50.50.
“But I’m planning to bring a law suit for extortion, for arbitrary governmental action, for highway robbery!!!”

According to Narelle, or whatever her name was, I should have simply stopped just stopped my car in the midddle of the intersection, blocking all traffic behind me, and waited until it was possible to move over to the right.
But there were no signs even announcing that I was about to enter a toll road, with no alternative but to stop traffic or ram into cars on my right.
Oh, yes, there are signs, there, sir.
Saying there’s a toll road ahead and that it’ll cost me $9.80 to drive on it for 100 meters?
No, they say CityLink. Whenever you set that sign, and it’s in different colors from the regular road signs, it means that it’s a toll road.

Someone please tell the Victorian Department of Tourism.

Apparently, when the former government - the Liberal (conservative) government of the arsehole Jeff Kennett, negotiated the contracts with CityLink (who surely must have handsomely lined someone’s pocket to get the gig), he allowed for tolls on roads that were the only ones that accessed certain city buildings, parks, and so forth. As the result of some uproar, that was eventually changed, but the ongoing revenue-raising exercise that is the downtown toll road raises barely a wimper from the dutiful Australian public. This is the people, right, who are supposed, in their reputation abroad, to be predominantly rebellious, individualistic, and outspoken. That’s a laugh.
Planning on attending the 2006 Commonwealth Games, for which this whole section of Melbourne is being dug up, spruiced up, and sported up? Take my advice: When you get there, walk. Or take taxi cabs. Even at the exorbitant rates charged in Australian cities, they’ll get you there a lot more cheaply than the deceptive, extortionist roadways.

Just to show that the passivity of the Australian consumer extends more broadly: When you log onto public hotspot services, they erquie prepayment by credit card – at the exorbitant rate of $14/hour – but they don’t return any unused credit to you, and you can use your time only in that one log-on period.
And, when you park downtown in machine-operated pay parking, the chargs aren’t posted until you get in, and they’re $6 from sun-up to 5:30, and that charge is for one second or 12 hours. If you decide you don’t want the service under those ludicrous conditions – because, say, you’re intending to be there only for 10 or 20 minutes – too bad, you’ll still have to pay $6 to get out of the lot, even if you leave within 15 seconds.

Neddy, 7 (and a half) believes he and his mate Angus are the first children ever to realize that you can make farting sounds by sticking your hand in your armpit and cranking. He also is adept at doing it with both knees at once. For this maneouvre he needs to roll onto his back and stick his knees in the air, and then crank those with his hands back of them.
He isn’t the best at doing the farts, he has to admit. Angus is the best. He can also do them with his two hands cupped, and with his neck, iby a procedure that Neddy has not yet figured out.
No, he’s not the best, Neddy admits. But he’s going to be soon, he promises.

My nephew's computer is extremely aggravating because it's infected with all kinds of nasty things - spyware, and the like. And all of a sudden nasty images pop up that even a curious 13-year-old shouldn't have to confront. But the state of his computer makes me think that the saturation of all personal computing with commercial spy and advertising programs will be through teenagers, and then the legislation that will be enacted, making it a capital offense to remove the programs, or to hack commercial sites, will be enforced on their parents.
That's my dystopic thought for today.

I'm in limbo at the moment, because even though it's a great pleasure to visit my brother Paul and his lovely family, I don't really know when I'll get back to see my mum, because her treatment has been postponed by thrombosis, which forced her into hospital, as a precaution, over the weekend. Now she may not resume her chemo until two weeks from tomorrow, which will be almost the time I'm booked to return to the US. To make matters more confusing, the doctors are not at all forthcoming about the course of treatment, nor the likely prognosis as it proceeds.
While I'm circling here, I can be working, but so far that has proceeded indifferently. I have finished a couple of articles, but I have several more half-done, and I interviewed two interesting Melburnians the other day who have made a non-fiction film about Heidegger and the problem of determining when or whether evil infects philosophy, and other related questions. I could set out and wander about in my dad's car, taking in the scenery and working here and there - sitting on the beach, perhaps. But that has its limitations, and is rather a lonely business, particularly for someone with little social reach.

Last night was the final of Australian Idol, which is worth mentioning only because it is a huge event down here. The final was a 3.5-hour extravaganza at the Sydney Opera House, with satellite events in the 2 final finalists' home towns. The winner was a rather rotund 16-year-old young woman from a poor suburb of Sydney. Her gathered friends were an interesting mix of white and aboriginal. Nice to see, and it's pleasing to imagine that Australian tv watchers voted for her over the anodyne, diminutive music teacher from Melbourne. The show is, generally, just as plastic as the American version, but it's interesting just because it plays out very differently in public. The final, live episode was extensively reported in all the papers today - on the front pages, too.

For some reason, I'm beginning to slip into a downward slide, mood-wise, which may stem from being away from my friends and habitual, secure surroundings, or maybe it's just a function of being here in limbo. I fit here, a little, but more obviously I'm superfluous. People are pleasant here, but, as anywhere, they have their daily, even mundane lives to occupy them, and I'm left a little in the lurch. Perhaps the east coast isn't such a bad idea. But being alone, out there even more than here, leaves me very vulnerable to eating terribly -- reverting to 14-year-old anxious, needy eating, whole packets of chocolate biscuits at a time. There certainly are some beauties here. And cake shops on every block.
Fortunately I'm keeping up the swimming, doing 600-1000 meters a day, although not exactly all at once. I drag from one end to the other of the 50-meter pool. Fortunately, today I located an outdoor, heated one, so I don't have to be the only person brave enough to enter the outdoor, unheated one just near my brother's place. It's bearable after the first 30 seconds of near-hypothermia, but those initial moments are quite agonizing. The water has been about 60-63 degrees, which it often used to be when we were kids at the Manuka Pool in Canberra. A lifeguard at the unheated pool yesterday, who was outside on behalf of yours truly, alone, was msot impressed that I'd been in three days in a row, literally the only person to enter it on two of those days. "Good on'ya," she exclaimed.

I'm reminded, being here, that I'm an exceedingly single person. How exactly that has happened, and how that state has filled most of my adult life, and the years before then, too, for that matter, is worth considering. Actually, I have considered it, long and hard, both alone, in relative confusion, and through guided counseling, where some clarity has emerged, but no actual, tangible results. It's not a state to esteem, although many encoupled people seem to think it must be a life of Reilly, free of the pestering of partners. Little do they know how lucky they are, or at least may be.
Nothing new there.

People keep asking me how things are in the US, and then often they imagine out loud that, well, they're probably just as bad as they are here, now that the Liberal-National coalition has up to another 3 years of rule, after 8 already. No, I say, they aren't as bad as here; they're about 20 times worse. Even that might underestimate it. Here things are bleak. The conservatives are finding plenty of opportunity to be smug, and to lie through their teeth about their agenda, trumpeting how beneficial it will be for all Australians, when in reality they're shaping up to be complete arseholes. Nothing new there, either.

My dinner with Dinah has been had. My, my, it provided some revelations, and was enjoyable, too. She's a straightshooting individual, and clearly a strong character. She worked in television for several years after school, and then in a variety of roles, most recently administrative jobs at the ANU. Lives back in Canberra in part to look after her mum who has Alzheimer's, and partly to be able to afford a house.
I had forgotten how short a time she had spent in Canberra during the time I knew her. She was at a boarding school 65 miles away when I first met her on her summer holidays, through her brother, my friend Richard. I was then in 4th form (10th grade). It must not have been until the next year, when she was at school in Canberra, that I ineptly asked her to come to Civic with me, and waited for her at the bus stop on Caley Crescent, as the 6pm and 6:30pm buses arrived without here, and I ended up taking the 7pm alone, only to see her later walking down the main shopping street under the arm of one of my classmates, as I awaited the last #29 bus home, at 11:10pm.
I have long suspected that she didn't even realize that I had asked her on a date. A little later on, I saw more of her, at the parish yough group. She often came with her beautiful and delightful friend Maggie (the daughter of the only Aboriginal recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest recognition for bravery in war – theirs was one of the very few Aboriginal families in Canberrra, at that time). She and Maggie came to the youth group, and I'd thought they must have come on several occasions. But when I think about it now, I realize it was probably only 6 events, or so. Or perhaps they came only to the barn dance we held, with live music. I danced with her quite a bit - an accomplishment for me, as I felt particularly pathetic while trying to dance in the modern modes, and as I was, in any case, ridiculously shy. But then, I thought we were friends, and so forth, and that her being friendly to me, at that point, even after standing me up on my Very First Date, meant that she must like me, at least. Of course, I couldn't possibly have asked her, straight up. The unsuccessful date was quite traumatic, and memorable. I still can play the whole thing over in my mind with cinematic verisimilitude.
So, I did wonder, going into the dinner tonight, whether the subject of our feelings about each other, at that time, 30 years ago, would come up.
I was a little surprised to learn, then, that when I had contacted Dinah last year, after coming across her name and email in an Australian Naitional University publication, she immediately called Richard because - because – she didn't remember who I was!
So, tonight, it turns out, I learned that, with all her foreign travel and boarding-school attendance she remembered very little from her childhood, at all. Drinking a lot, since then, may have played a role.
I was not perturbed, now, and almost amused. It's not like I've spent the 30 years of the interim obsessing about that first date, but it certainly was part of the formation of my expectations about romance, and of my self-image.

When I was sitting in Garema Place today, it struck me that recent immigrants must feel odd about their place, or lack of it, in Australia, and then I thought about my own lack of place. And, in reality, no European or Asian Australians really should feel any great sense of fit in the place. Virtually none of us has the faintest about the realities of the land. Europeans have been in Australia only 217 years, about 50,000 fewer than Aborigines.

Stopped on the way from Canberra to Melbourne at Holbrook, a small highway town in southern NSW with an excellent swimming pool, about 35 yards long, and crystal clear. Had it more or less to myself, as school hadn't got out yet.
It takes forever to drive the 400 miles as, even though the roads are almost all excellent, now, the speed limits are low and their enforcement is brutal. There are speed traps all over the place, with cameras and radar, and unmarked police cars also are out and about. Fortunately the cricket, Australia v New Zealand, was on the radio so I could imagine it as I drove along. It's not the same as it used to be, because the commentators have settled on a style that panders to idiots who aren't able to listen just to cricket. Limerick competitions via text messaging, that kind of things.
Neddy (who is seven – "seven and a half," he says), was excited to see me and rushed up with a big hug. He told his parents when he got up yesterday that it was going to be the best day of his life, because I was coming (which I was) and he was going to Jamies (which he wasn't, until Saturday). He insisted that I sleep in his room, on the floor, underneath his loft bed, a double bunk with no lower level. I got him to promise not to get up until Harry came by to say it was time to get up, at 7. That bought me an extra hour of sleep, at least.

They’ve taken away the convent where the Dutch nuns lived – the ones who tried their hardest to miseducate us all. They lived in the house from about 1961 to 1989, or so, when they gave up and went back to the Netherlands. In that time, they managed to recruit only two novices, and at least one of them was off her nutter – I know this, because I knew her. In fact, she may have been the strongest candidate, in my own overactive teenage mind, for my settling some early-life traumas induced by nuns by seducing one of them. Come to think of it, that’s still, however remotedly, my very occasional fantasy. Something about combining the desecration of a sacred vow of celibacy with unleashed and perhaps unrivaled passion. That, plus the adventure of workign with all that white linen and then skin completely untainted by the light of day.
Well, I guess it is just an idle fantasy, now as then, really. But this particular nun, who was only a few years older than I, was given to speaking in tongues, and generally was a happy space cadet, but quite an attractive thing, even in her swaddling and camouflaging habit and veil. I recall that on one occasion, she, my kindergarten teacher Sister Emmanuel, and I and one other youth from the short-lived church youth group went to a pentecostal gathering, to see what it was like, and she ended up delivering a long, ecstatic prayer of bliis and ecumenism, which clearly took the Jesus Jumpers aback.
I wonder if she went to Holland with the nuns.
But they’ve knocked down the convent, which had special significance to me, as I somehow was never able to beg out of being an altar boy there, at least a couple of times a week, at the very crack of dawn, at the masses they had in their own chapel every morning. This time of year, that chore was particularly onerous, as it meant walking down Capt. Cook Crescent, at the crack of dawn, the 400 yards to the convent, in the direct flight path of bombarding magpies. They have the habit of protecting their nests – or so they thought; in reality I had no intention, ever, of climbing 100 feet up a pine trees to swipe their babies. First thing in the morning, they were particularly deadly accurate on their bombing runs.
So, even before I arrived at the convent, I was already traumatized and fearful. And then I had to face the ignominy of being laughed at by the nuns, as I am sure I was. I was so nervous working with my back to them that I frequently dropped or spilled from the cruits of water and wine, and I couldn’t even manage the usual accomplished clear, crisp ring of the handbells. The nuns were quite keen on incense, too, so it’s a wonder I didn’t burn down their house.
But the most painful aspect of the services, for me, was particular moments of shame that occurred whenever I was there. I wish I could report that it was that several of the nuns winked at me, and that one or two of the younger, more comely ones took to luring me into the habit closet and ravishing me quickly with all manner of sacramental bliss. But, alas, it was nothing so pleasant to later recall. It was simply that genuflecting, and even kneeling, tended to make me fart volubly, and on several occasions I am sure I heard a nun or two snickering from their pews. Nothing could prevent the escape, perhaps again due to the earliness of the hour. How was I to know, then, that such venting is only natural and healthy upon rising.
Now the convent is gone. Condos or a twilight home replace it.

What, no haka?
I’m watching the start of the blockbuster Australia v New Zealand 2nd netball test match, on telly. I guess only the Kiwi blokes do the terrifying war cry.
Netball is one of the most popular sports in both countries, in terms of participation, which is female, only, after about age 10. Before that, a few little boys play before they get the shit kicked out of them by the yobos for being pansies, which they probably are, lord bless em.
Netball is a variant of basketball in which each team has 6 players, but only 5 can be in the front two-thirds of the court, and only two can enter into a 15-foot scoring arc. Only two defenders can be inside the arc, too, and they can’t jump to defend a shot, nor come within about a yard of the shooter. The hoop is just a hoop, no backboard. In open-field play, you can’t take more than one step, and you can’t dribble at all.
The two umpies look frightfully like your worst recollection of a woman gym teacher, in white blouse and pleated skirt. The players wear skirts too, with matching knickers that are featured every time they get flattened to the floor by incidental contact. (The Kiwis, to their credit, wear black bodysuit-style outfits, with snug skirts that don’t flounce around like it’s still the 1930s.) Contact isn’t permitted, but it happens all the time, aided by the fact that the penalties that result don’t mean anything but a stoppage and possession to the fouled-against team.
Australia won the first test, in Sydney, in front of a record crowd for a women’s event in Australia, 14,000 people. This, even though the Kiwis are aided by a forward who is about 6’3” and, within the very narrow limitations of the game, a thug.
The game doesn’t have any of the lesbian-sisterhood feel of women’s basketball in the US. (It’s more a big, broadshouldered-gal kind of deal; lovely.) Nor, I notice, does Australian women’s soccer - on the other channel there’s an Australia-Thailand women’s game, in which the Australians are whoopin their opponents.

This morning I attended the painfully long musical-theater presentation by the kindergarten-through-6th grade students at my sister’s kids’ school. It’s a Catholic school of 530 students, demonstrating that there’s no danger, alas, of Catholicism dying out in the coming few decades.
The show was billed as St. Anthony’s on Broadway. I imagine it was not much different from a billion other school presentations – they would all make me happier never to have become a teacher.
The selections were from Mary Poppins, Oliver!, and Grease, with an additional hommage to Australian native son Peter Allen, whose most famous song here was the emetic “I Still Call Australia Home.”
The whole event, in fact, was a tribute less to him than to Milli Vanilli – the whole thing was quasi-lip-synched to original soundtracks, played louder than the voices of the few students who bothered to sing at all.
It was three hours long, and hardly worth spending more time on. But some of its notable features were:
- With no hint of a sense of why it might be inappropriate, a child-as-Peter Allen appeared in blackface, which is how the real Allen appeared when he won a talent show in Australia early in his career.
- A zillion pre-school-age kids were in attendance watching their big sisters and brothers, plus parents and grandparents.
- There was excessive recourse to a dust machine, which was used because last year, at the school’s ballet recital, they opted for a smoke machine that set off all the smoke alarms, and then the fire brigade arrived in force, and the audience had to leave the hall
- The school has apparently been listening sympathetically to the Howard government’s recent call for increased jingoism in schools (little Johnnie wants the national anthem played each day, and the flag flown). The Peter Allen, and the Grease (originally with Olivia Newton-John) were chosen for their Australian connections; there was the obligatory rendition of “Waltzing Matilda,” and at one point a hundred or more of the kids were given small Australian flags to wave. Vomit.
- Only one, perhaps two, passably dishy mums

Tonight I’m going to dinner with Dinah W, my first great love, at 15, who I always thought stood me up on my first-ever date, although I suspect that she never perceived it as a date, and so was unaware of why I was so mortified to see her, later that evening, under the arm of one of my classmates. I was, at the time I saw her, waiting for the last #29 bus home, 11:10pm, from Northbourne Avenue in the center of Canberra. A very dismal day. Then I got to know her platonically the next year, again, as we attended the St. Benedict’s youth group, which was initiated by my kindergarten teacher, Sister Emmanuel, who was very tall and very kind, not at all suited to keeping company with those other harridans. Dinah’s brother Richard was a friend of mine at school. He wasn’t there for long, because his father was a diplomat, and they spent time in Japan. Richard was a character, effortlessly subversive and idiosyncratic. After school he joined the merchant marine, but eventually had to quit because he contracted a severe, prolonged case of seasickness - months and months on end.
Their mum has severe Alzheimer’s disease, which is why Dinah is back in town. I spoke to her on the phone last night, and she sounds quite the same, which is weird. As I say, I was quite smitten by her in my mid-teens, so we shall see how sentiments go, now. She told me earlier that she had omitted to get married, or have kids. Well, we have that in common.

I trudged around Civic, the shopping and office area in the middle of Canberra, looking for free wifi. Unlike Seattle, the city doesn’t have a wealth of such opportunities, but I did locate one source in a handy spot. If you sit at any of the six or seven outdoor cafés in Garema Place, a square at the center of Civic, you can pick up one signal clearly.
I sat there answering email and generally doing the Seattle thing. After a week, I’m the only person I’ve seen working on a laptop in public. There’s a great business opportunity here for a Zoka’s-like café.
While I was sitting there, I looked up and saw, strolling by, was Anthony, my best friend from kindergarten to grade four, and then into our teen years, when we played footy and cricket either together or on different teams, but practiced constantly together at the oval opposite his house. We also played golf constantly. His dad took us out to Queanbeyan, a scrappy town adjacent to Canberra, across the border of the Australian Capital Territory, into New South Wales. They would pick me up at an ungodly hour, for me, 6am, as daylight began to break, and we’d be on the first hole as the sun came up. At either end of summer it’d be freezing until the sun warmed things up, but the air would have a stunning crystalline quality. My favorite hole was always the dogleg 6th, where you had a choice of going to the green via the fairway, or cutting the corner, which entailed hoiking the ball over a gulley at risk of losing it forever. Or, you could drive straight but with a huge slice, so that if you had the range, you’d follow the curve of the fairway and be safe and close enough for a long chip to the green.
Anthony’s father approached golf, like cricket and everything else, with tireless purpose. On Saturday afternoons in the summer, Anthony and I would often go and watch him play cricket. He always had small, round, crumbly mints in his glove box, as he drove a lot for his job, and we helped ourselves. His dad was much older than most dads, and very fit. He died a few years ago at 87. He played club cricket until he was 70. He had been one of the Rats of Tobruk, during the long siege of British soldiers there in the Second World War.
Anthony and I used to run around at his house for hours on end, playing “chasings” with his younger, twin brothers Chris and Geoff, who are identical and apparently remain hard to tell apart, even now.
The four of us were involved together in such famous incidents as the Fat Daddy adventure. One day we lobbed tomatoes from two backyards away into the backyard of Fat Daddy, as we called a short, rotund gentleman who had recently arrived from Italy with his family including two large and fit-looking sons. The Fat Daddies were infamous, in the context of neat-and-trim Narrabundah, and Canberra as a whole, for taking the unimaginable (and, per city ordinances, illegal) step of planting not just their backyard but also their front yard with veggies. The horror! (They were clearly a rural family. One day I heard a terrible squawking coming from their yard, and looked over the fence to see Fat Mama wringing a chook’s neck and then cutting its tongue with a pair of scissors, to bleed it. Am I just imagining that she then hung it upside down on the Hills Rotary Hoist? (Virtually every Australian suburban home has one of these: a square rigging of clotheslines that sits horizontally on a pole and can be raised with a crank.) At least, Fat Mama seemed to be cutting its tongue, if chooks even have tongues. Maybe she was slitting its neck. In any case, the sight made me quite queasy.)
But as I was saying, there we were, squeezed between the Herridges’ fence and the shed of the family next to them, tossing tomatoes. The efforts of the other tomato-lobbers failing to have much success, I carefully aimed one, handgrenaded it, and it landed right on the face of Fat Daddy’s shovel as he lifted it to fling away dirt. The tomato hit the shovel with a resounding squish, and he immediately dropped the tool and headed to his front yard, clearly intent on retribution. We tore out from behind the shed and took off running, across Capt. Cook Crescent, into the stand of pines around one corner of Jerrabombera Oval. We saw Fat Daddy’s large sons, who must have been about 20, emerge from their house, and look around Anthony’s place for us. They were big, country boys who’d apparently grown up hefting sacks of potatoes and turnips, or goat carcasses.
They gave up, after a while, but we thought it wise to remain hidden for a couple of hours, until Anthony’s sister Claire came over and told us what a pack of cowards we were. Fine for her to say.
I crept home later on, taking a long route around Anthony’s block.

So, I had a nice chat with Anthony. His mum is 80, now, and something of a shut-in. She sees only Anthony or his siblings when they call, other than the meals-on-wheels people and the gardener who comes once in a while.
Coincidentally, while my mum was in hospital last week having the chemotherapy “port” inserted in her chest, Claire, who has been a nurse for over 30 years, popped in to say hi, having seen mum’s name on the register.
She’s on her fourth husband, apparently. As the daughter of her mother, and of her inspiring father, I doubt that she would tolerate clinging men, so I was not surprised to hear that statistic. (I remember that she provided my first-ever awareness of the issue of circumcision and penile health: while she was a nursing student, I heard her talking to her mother about how absurd the practice was, and how poorly based in health considerations. How right, I’ve always thought, she was.)
Anthony’s other, oldest sister Jenny suddenly turned out at the ANU to have amazing abilities in languages. She graduated top of the whole class of her graduating year, and got a lucrative fellowship to go to Indonesia with the Australian government.

Some more observations on the Australian swimming pool:
At a good number of the pools, it is striking to see how many old – and I mean, really old – people are swimming, or merely getting exercise in the water. Then there are the water aerobics classes, some of which are for the young-ish – almost all women – while others are for the geriatric set – I mean, even older than me, by three or four decades.
Then there are the droves of tiny schoolkids or young club swimmers who come in on most days, in huge numbers, and with countless instructors sending them in squadrons down the lanes, doing the crawl or breaststroke or even backstroke and butterfly. And many of the kids, only 7 or 8, are really good swimmers. It’s amazing to see some of the clubs practicing – they use three or four lanes, which look like a salmon run when each lane has several kids belting away in close formation.
Then, today at the Civic pool, Canberra’s first Olympic pool, swim clubs practiced. Teens, mostly girls, were belting up and down the 50-meter lanes at an incredible clip. I thought my backstroke was getting to be decent, but some slip of a teen zipped past me and then instantly returned doing the butterfly. I noticed underwater that that stroke, done properly, features an amazing undulating wave of the whole body, and again the propulsion made me realize how decrepit my strokes are. I still can’t manage to get quite all the way down the pool doing overarm. I almost suffocate, lose the rhythm of my breathing, and next presumably would be drowning. Backstroke is OK, and certainly breaststroke, but even then I have to pause at the end of almost every length. Today I was contemplating asking the 10-year-old boy in the adjacent lane to tell me what was wrong with my kick, which seems to be next to useless. My legs just drag along, and provide next to no forward momentum. Still, I’m definitely improving little by little. I seem to have the breaststroke rhythm down, and I am quite accomplished at floating down the pool on my back, recuperating.

I went to dinner with Brendan at a place call The Chairman and Yip - part of the new Chinese chic for Mao. There was a huge electrical storm and downpour – an inch in a couple of hours. Later we went to Brendan’s office at the Australian National University, a little way from the center of the city, which I attended from 1975-78. He is a professor of environmental science, and has become quite prominent. He has three or four research assistants, and works on natural resource issues using a lot of data obtained from NASA - amazing maps that show things like the density of vegetation in Australia over time; historic patterns of water flow over the whole continent; and so on.
I haven’t yet had the characteristic Canberra experience of being attacked by magpies. Every spring they protect their nests by bombarding anyone who comes within a couple hundred yards of their nests. The “maggies” aren’t the same as elsewhere in the world, but a larger species about the size of crows. They’re regal-looking and cold-blooded.

Just to show how close Australia can come to a police state, and how blithely, yesterday a mob of police stormed a two-person National Indigenous News to search for documents that several newspapers have been using to demonstrate that the federal government (whose Dept. of the Prime Minister and Cabinet orchestrated the raid) had lied when it said it had the absolute right to disband a national indigenous-affairs NGO and replace it with a body of its own. Needless to say, no raids seem likely on, say, the offices of Rupert Murdoch publications.
On the couple of occasions when I’ve been present at random breath tests of drivers, I’ve had a sense of the proximity of police-state elements here. You can be driving along a city street or country road, and suddenly all the cars are being diverted around the back to a large parking lot, or a side road, so that every driver can be tested. Then, as you proceed through the gantlet, they check your car for improprieties, such as broken or inoperative tail lights, and give you a ticket for any breaches of their precious laws. The breathalyzers are benign enough, taken in isolation, and considering the number of boozers on the roads (being caught brings quite severe penalties including suspension or loss of license), but the latter part of the procedure is creepy, and the whole practice strikes me as just a little too close to rehearsal for far more draconian measures.

My 10-year-old niece Jessica got back from an overnight class trip to the bush, where they stayed in some kind of bunkhouses and experienced the great outdoors (where it was pelting down rain). She said the menu was Roast Cow, Spuds, Rabbit Food, and Mud (i.e. gravy), then, for dessert (which she scoffed had been misspelled ‘desert’) Frog in Jelly (a small frog-shaped chocolate called a Freddo Frog, in jello).

Report #1, from somewhere over the Pacific, three hours or so from Sydney, in what might otherwise be the middle of the night.
The planeload is in some deep torpor, relieved only by a cattle feeding every 6 hours or so, but even though I’m in the plebs section, where I rightly belong by birthright, I’m not too zombified, thanks to years of training in not getting much sleep at all.
As I lined up among the cheery travelers, shuffling their way through security checks, I couldn’t help registering that probably well over half these people were sufficiently fucked in the head to have voted for the Abject Moron, and to have plunged their mighty nation into the biggest decline and jeopardy since the Civil War. Nor could I help disdaining them, fearing them, and hating their mindwashed, greed-driven guts. I imagine you don’t get far if you walk up and down the aisle of a transpacific flight denouncing fellow travelers for their stupidity, gullibility, and craven self-interest, congratulating itself as fostering economic growth.
It has to be said, the voter is a moron. So much for 150 years of universal education in the wretched country. And onwards they trip, salivating over what they can do with the tiny percentage of tax “relief” – $500 or $5,000 or $50,000 for the real intended beneficiaries of these cuts – that they reap while advancing the cause of a permanent Republican majority.
Not to be a doomsayer, but let me declare right now that the Democrats cannot win in 2008 (the Hilary notion is fundamentally misbegotten, because it assumes that Americans will vote for impressive figures, rather than craven politicians) and in any case there’ll be little worth winning by 2012. Perhaps the voters will ordain Jeb, or Jenna. If principled Republicans, like the nonetheless patsy Colin Powell were to stage some kind of opposition from within the Republican Party, imagine the shit that would be heaped on them - in Powell’s case, blatantly framed in racial, racialist, and racist terms.
It struck me the other day, as it does from time to time, that the large part of the 25 years I’ve been in the US have been years of the Rule of the Morons, Liars, and Panderers to their friends and own bank accounts. The next four years, I’d predict, will see the greatest looting of a nation in the history of the globe. Forget the Central African Republic, we’ll see a huge collapse of the mortgage industry, which will cause the innocent-bystanding citizens – or not-so-innocent – to wring their hands for all of about two months. The perpetrators, like those of Enron and a thousand other lootings of the Reagan-Bush era, will string out their sham trials for a few years, and then be forgiven as Bush exits in blithering-idiot’s farewell gestures to the raping of the country and the subversion of civil rights, constitutional foundations, and American security wherever Americans go and wherever they reside.

Surviving the next four years, and beyond, is going to require of the sane and less-then-100% greed-driven that we reorient ourselves towards the culture as a whole. For starters, we’ll have to adopt a parsimonious diet of the blithe, spineless, complicit media coverage that will oil the Bushwackos’ skids. One thing is for sure: Unless we who think the rest of the world has rights, too, want to sink in despair, frustration, and anger, we’d best find venues in which to come together for solidarity and solace. We had best not dwell on what cannot, now, be stopped - the pillage of the world, the reintroduction of the draft, the overturning of Roe v Wade, and much more. The blatant lies will continue, and the promises will continue to be broken, unabated, because the American voters have signaled, yet again, and now much more strongly, that they are willing to be lied to and fucked over if only there’s 500 bucks in it, for them.
This is a time for cynicism and disgust, but it’ll get a lot worse.

That off my chest, at least for a few moments, I now am ready to arrive, and deal with whatever awaits, in Canberra.

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On the flight from LA to Sydney, a garrulous woman from Las Vegas decided to move from the row in front of me to take up the aisle seat, spoiling my three-seats-to-myself dream, my promise of stretching my legs and avoiding the heebie-jeebies. Instead I had to do the ten-minutes-of-pleasantries deal – the one that’s followed by 14 hours of discouraging further conversation.

I read, as always, about 6 pages of my book before succombing to having barely slept for the days leading up to the trip. For the first time, however, I took a day flight from LA; it left at 1pm and got to Sydney at 11pm the next day. The food was decent; the entertainment system was bleak. Nothing to watch, really, other than an episode of Mr. Bean and the feature film Arthur (of the Round Table) with Clive Whatsisname, the heartthrob of the moment. The film was remarkable only in the depiction of Merlin and his English as 19th-century-style dryadic mystic warriors, constantly saving the day by popping out of the greenery to launch thousands of arrows toward the Saxon dogs. But that image was updated spectacularly by having Guinevere don torn and tiny Danskins that made her comely bosoms bulge forward so boldly that Xena would appear demure by comparison. This, as she ran raging through the Saxons slicing them with her sword.

The reception at Australian customs and immigration typified how things can be more civilized and dignified here than in the US. No long lines, cattle-yard style. Just a smooth, open, friendly approach with plenty of staff and a gentle approach to questioning, with little beagles to sniff out the naughtyboys.
After I arrived at 11pm, picked up a rental car, and drove a short way to hotel, I experienced a further show of civility – a comfy bed made with real cotton sheets. I slept very soundly, reinforced by Ambien.
The drive to Canberra was beautiful. Gorgeous spring day with sun and clouds and wind. Not one billboard along the highway. The only distress is due to the low and tightly monitored speed limits that make the excellent roads somewhat of a taunt. But everyone drives to the left unless overtaking, a habit of courtesy that could save the US billions every year in highway-contruction costs.
I stopped for a swim in the Olympic pool at Bowral, but struggled to make it the 50 yards at a time from end to end without reverting 2/3rds of the way to strokes other than a crawl. My backstroke is progressing nicely, and may actually be close to surpassing my crawl, which doesn’t at all suit my short breath, nor my fear of being drowned, which is not quite as strong as the nightmare of being buried alive.
The Bowral area was one of the richest in New South Wales for much of the 20th century – as well as the birthplace and home of Donald Bradman, the greatest-ever batsman in cricket – and the handsome properties there by now have been bought up by tv personalities and other scum on the societal pond – although one, at least, is owned by Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, who is now a member of federal parliament, a Labor member, of course, and who with any luck may steer that mob back onto the left of the aisle. I was surprised to learn from my parents, though, that he’s a parishioner at Bowral’s Anglican church. But he also came by the Bowral Jazz Festival, so he remains a Great Shavenheaded Hope.
Ten miles down the road in Moss Vale, I stopped to buy a lovely apple pie for myself, and some roses and a native plant from Western Australia for my mum. The plant is a kind of bush with soft-ferned branches and eventually with red bottle-brush flowers. It grows to 9 feet wide and high tree in the arid West, but ideally will stop well short of that in my parent’s yard, among their other, almost exclusively native plants, which attract native birds – rosella parrots, large magpie-like currawongs, and occasionally cockatoos, as well as a variety of small songbirds.

Lots of dead kangaroos along the roads, in the Illawarra, approaching Canberra. Splayed this way and that. Once bowled over their tails become their predominant feature. I
even saw a couple of roos on the dry, lushly green bed of Lake George, which is currently a huge, weird, spectacular oval of green about 15 miles long and 8 miles wide, but sometimes is full of water – generally for about 10 years on, 10 off.
In Canberra, my sister looked out her front window recently and saw a kangaroo on the front lawn, peering in. As my sister watched and beckoned to her kids to come quickly, a joey poked its head out of the pouch.
In fact, she’s seeing roos all the time, lately. They have to come through a few blocks of housing to get to her lawn, which suggests they’re really hurting for water and feed – the drought has lasted three years now, although it’s still relatively green in the countryside.
Elsewhere in Canberra, kangaroos have attacked a couple of people. They can do quite a bit of harm with the feet, which are pointy and extremely strong. But at least one of the two reported recent cases has involved a woman walking with a dog that apparently was stupid enough, as dogs tend to be, to start worrying the roo, which responded accordingly and appropriately.

When I see my mum, she looks gaunt, and her energy is depleted, but she has been in hospital overnight with a neighbor making a racket from dusk to dawn, so has lost sleep. She was having a valve inserted in her upper right chest – her chemo treatment will involve having the gunk flow into that port from a bag she’ll carry around for two days every second week for at least five weeks. Then they’ll see if the tumor in her liver is shrinking and seems controllable before determining on a new round of a different chemotherapy, or presumably something else, like surgery, although they now try not to operate unless they must.
Dad seems well and fit, all things considering. At the moment he is aging less rapidly. It was striking, though, to stand with him and Michael and realize how grey we all are, and now even Michael is losing his hair in front. It’s his 50th birthday on Wednesday.

I brought along presents and touching cards from Marge, and Rainer & Mary. My mum was very moved and pleased by them. She loved the 2005 calendar that R&M made with photos of me on various recent jaunts – Baja, skiing in Canada, hiking in Mazama... Marge, the kindest and loveliest of any ex ever, sent my mum a beautiful bowl and a big round selection of Dilettante chocolate-covered dried fruit. Mum and Dad and I each tried one, and my parents were both in raptures about how tasty they were. But they only had one – with a discipline that they did not, alas, hand down to me.

The first night I went to bed at 10:30pm and slept like a log – on and off, rolling around – until 6am. It was freezing in the room, with the window open, but that may have helped wake me up occasionally, and I remembered three dreams, which hasn’t happened to me in my living memory.
The first was that R&M and I and some others were on one of our trips here or there, and its main features were that Rainer was mentoring some 18-year-old runaway waif, imparting to him the wisdom of his own dissolute youth. Also, rather than walking in the conventional fashion, we were eventually all moving on stationary legs like skiiers coming down slopes.
In the second dream, I was frantically searching for an airline confirmation printout that was taking me somewhere, if only I could find it. I was en route to somewhere to prepare an article about something relating to French studies. I vaguely recalled that I’d made arrangements, and knew when I was supposed to leave, but eventually couldn’t remember whether I’d really finalized the appointment. A lot of the dream took place in an airport where for some reason I was wearing only a towel that kept almost falling off. I went through absolutely all my pockets and several coat pockets and backpack and computer case and so forth and realized what an enormous clutter I labor with... Rose suddenly popped out of a coffinlike box full of lettuce and screeched in delight so loudly that I nearly lost the plot and told her repeatedly how close I was to cracking under the pressure.
A call to feng shui?
Then, in a third dream just before waking up, I witnessed a cop struggling with and shooting a motorbike rider, who then stood up not yet dead to be frisked and taken away, even though he was clearly about to expire altogether. I muttered something derogatory about the cop, and then the cops coming to his aide – I’d called out Don’t shoot him, don’t shot him, and then said or wished that he would perhaps just wing him or shoot him in the leg, but he’d gone for the kill. The cop heard the muttering and came after me, and I had to make up some elaborate story about what I’d really said, in support of him. It was very realistic. But then it was morning, the birds were all going at it outside, until the airconditioning generator outside kicked in and chased them all away.

It’s odd to be with your mum and not know yet whether it’s to be the last time, or she’s to recover with the chemotherapy, and live on. At the moment I’m thinking it’ll be the latter, but perhaps that’s the easiest and most natural thing to think, while the next few weeks will impress other possibilities on me.

There was an evening party at Anne’s to celebrate Jessica’s 10th birthday. The inlaws were there – Frank’s family. His mum and dad say virtually nothing, although they can speak English to some degree – they’ve been in the country well over 40 years, but clearly linguistics has not been their greatest skill. Frank speaks Hungarian with his mother, and Serbian with his father. It’s not clear how much communication there is, father to mother. Not a lot, I expect. Vera sits quietly in a perhaps culturally generated position of subservience.
Frank works with his brother Tony, who’s about the same age, and a card, highly amusing. His gorgeous wife Natalie was telling him that he really should come with her to ballroom dancing lessons, and he was telling her she should go without her because he could already dance, as he’d demonstrated at weddings and other events, didn’t she remember? He stood up and showed how all he needed to do was stand there twirling his partner, this way and that way.
He likes to joke about how good he looks, for his age. And he does, actually. His missus, too; after three kids very attractive and lively. A character like Tony. Together they have their schtick, as do Tony and Frank, quipping constantly at each other’s expense. Their father smiles quietly, so he gets it, apparently.
Their sister Aron is only 47 but has a 30-year-old daughter, a Serbian knockout, Liz, who was there with her boyfriend Bruno, an electrical engineer and Canberra boy. She’s like something out of a movie, laughing constantly and overbrimming with energy and optimism.
Anne hugged me in a way that suggested not just sibling affection, but a certain sense of impending doom, which at this points seems a premature fear. Her kids were well, though. They seem happy and healthy. Jessica was in the 5th day of birthday celebrations of various kinds, including a trip to a paintball center that afternoon.

=====

The next morning: It’s bloody cold, but the cockatoos are screeching, the rosellas are flitting through the garden and the sun is up so soon it may be possible to get to the pool and see if this time I can make it all the way up a length without having to switch to breaststroke, or to I’ve recieved a timely email from my friend Brendan’s wife Jonquil’s sister Janet, who is an aspiring writer, and for whom Jonquil hopes I shall be the suitor of the ages as written in some Book of the Fates. I’ll be contacting her and Brendan and Jonquil, and a few other local acquaintances – including my primary-school best friend Anthony and the woman who stood me up on my first date, Dinah, to try to get some kind of steadying social outlet set up here, as soon as possible, my mum’s response to the chemo permitting.

Sunday
I went to watch Ciaran play hoops in a huge hoops barn by a large shopping mall, one of the few in Canberra as in Australia generally. It has 6 courts, and is one of three or four in the city that is used from 9 in the morning to 10 at night on weekends, and I’m sure during a lot of weekday evenings. Very nice facility. Ciaran’s Weston Creek team walloped one from the Canberra Church of England Grammar School, old enemy of the Monaghans. I was gratified. Hate those smarmy bastards, although these particular ones seemed like nothing but innocent young 13 and 14 year olds who can hardly be blamed for their descent from the bloody Pommie empire.
Then I went to the gym and swimming pool, where I was shocked to see that the American-style obesity epidemic has struck Australian kids, too. Lots of tubbies. The pool was huge, and kiddie pools and play pools and the like adjoined. (I heard on the radio today that the average American has increased in weight by 20lbs since 1990, and that it costs the airlines some astronomical amount each year.)

At dinner Dad, Mum, and I wandered into politics, for a moment, and I was gratified that Dad and Mum are as incensed about such issues as the imprisonment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay as I am, and Mum in particular is disgusted by the Australian government’s policy of mandatory detention of refugees, which has had the effect of imprisoning boat people from Afghanistan and other places in remote, razor-wired facilities – men, women, and children. For years, now, in many cases. The refugees are being used blatantly as an advertisement of the Liberal Coalition’s toughness on illegal immigration – humanity, be damned.

Dad made the point, too, that the Australian voters have become almost as ignorant and self-interested as the Americans – prime minister John Howard, just reelected for the third time, has learned the methods of dissemblance that the Americans and British constantly use, but his string of lies, and repeated demonstrations of callous disregard for human dignity, and rights, is simply not processed by the electors. Like Bush, Howard can simply lie as much as he likes, and practice more subtle forms of dissemblance. The father of David Hicks, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for over 2 years, reported recently that his son was close to losing his mind after prolonged solitary confinement and harassment (probably torture, which has been clearly demonstrated in the case of another Australian detainee, who is of Afghan birth). The Australian minister for foreign affairs Ruddock proclaimed that as far as Australian authorities were aware, and concerned, Hicks was fine, but that if the Hicks family had concerns, they should address them to the Australian government, which would pass them on to American authorities. This, after two years of such expressions of concern, during which the Howard people have done nothing but kowtow to Bush & Co.’s agenda of terrorization.

Even the tightwad Liberal/National coalition parliamentarians are having to contort themselves to fit the expectations of their leader, prime minister John Howard, and the Bush administration to which he is trying his hardest to kowtow – as part, no doubt, of his pathetic conceptions of statesmanship. The most pathological, at this point, is the attorney-general Philip Ruddock, who was formerly the minister for immigration, in charge of locking up refugee families in razor-wire enclosed facilities in, for example, the middle of nowhere in the arid South Australian outback. He has reduced the complex arguments about immigration into such notions as law abidance and its rewards, law breaking and its costs, and political opportunism by anyone who opposes his regime’s treatment of even children whom they have locked up for over two years, now.

I wrote to my high-school mate B’s wife J’s sister J, and await her reply about getting together. B's J seems certain that the match has already been made in some place in the great book of life, and all we have to do is meet. So, I’ve had to ask her direct, without B&J as intermediaries, to meet for lunch or dinner or somesuch. Otherwise, says B'sJ, J will withdraw and go all quiet. So, perhaps, now, J will suggest that we get together with B&J, but that’s OK, because some mysterious family dynamic is maintained, or avoided, or something.

Today I swam 20 lengths of the 50-meter Tuggeranong swimming pool - not without breathers at the end of each length, and not all freestyle, to say the least. In fact, I can’t make it 50 meters without having to break into breaststroke. My backstroke is now pretty good, however. I can do that for quite a while. Something about not half drowning with every stroke. Half of the pool is roped off for swimming lessons for little kids. There are hundreds of them flailing about, some barely able to dogpaddle 6 feet, some belting away at the water, up and down the lanes.

I’m encouraged to keep swimming, I must admit, by the commencement of the young-ladies’ water-aerobics class. Each time I arrive at the shallow end, I can see underwater, through my goggles, the odd sight of 20-some bottom halves of slender things bobbing up and down, doing odd contortions underwater.

I’m taking my mum and dad to the hospital in the morning for the start of Mum’s treatment. She seems calm. But I notice that I get from her an impatience with illness – with the tedium of having to sit around. I suggest that she try to be a bit patient, because after all, so far she’s had just the preliminaries to the main event.
Several people have rung to wish her well – old neighbors, jazz-club friends, sons and other loved ones.
I’m calm, too - something has changed in the last few years, because before that I would have wrestled with fate, while now I simply settle on fighting it to the degree reasonably possible, and ultimately settling for what it dishes up.

To the Australian Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, on the news that David Hicks, imprisoned without charge for the last 2.5 years in Guantanamo Bay after being taken captive as a member of the Taliban in Afghanistan, is now fast approaching a mental breakdown.

Ruddock,

Your representative suggests that your government is ensuring the welfare of David Hicks, while inhumanely prolonged solitary confinement is steadily and certainly driving him insane. You seem to have a fetish for cruel treatment of hapless individuals, whether they be misguided young men from Australia, or desperate boat people who somehow survive your barbaric treatment of them.

Your representative says that if Terry Hicks has any relevant information on his son's condition, he should pass it on to Australian authorities, who will make sure it gets to US officials.

What a crock of dissembling and utter bullshit. Why don't you just come right out and state plainly that you and your fellow cronies in the Liberal government have decided to sacrifice David Hicks, and apparently his father, to your arsekissing relationship with the mongrels in charge of the American police-state-like manipulation of the Guantanamo situation?

Why not admit that you are trying to exert no principled Australian policy, at all, but are merely making the same kinds of depraved, expedient calculations that the El Qaida mongrels are making.

You all deserve each another, but regular citizens of the US, Australia, and Iraq pay the enormous price, both in terms of their wellbeing and their dignity. Your callousness towards David Hicks father is all the more disgusting for your pretence of giving a damn about him, and of providing him with sound advice on how to remedy his anguish: Tell you and you'll pass it on to your American masters.

Well, thank you very much, you gutless man.

With appropriate disgust and disdain,