Public holidays, in general, seem like a dry run for death – public services are suspended, there are no mail deliveries, places close down... – and Christmas is the most gruesome, and even grisly, of them all. No wonder that I begin to grimace about it in July. The fug thickens, and reaches its most toxic about now.

It’s not just the sham of almost all of it – the gross consumerism; the aping of rituals that never existed, or at least not in anything like the form of the mimickry; the extent of the exclusion of so many that xmas entails and inflicts... It’s not even just the absurdity of the whole basis of the event – the notion that this, the world, is the result of God’s becoming Man to save mankind. If this is salvation, or even just a provisional damnation, our gooses are cooked, xmas dinner or not.

Of course, most of the discomforts of the season are merely mundane, as the events unfold within the quotidian. One year, my Mum’s christmas pudding, the centerpiece of the annual meal of togetherness (typically registered in the tension and heartache that is almost inherent in family), was waterlogged – somehow the seal of the boiler was not tight enough. My dad made a big show of saving the day, scooping the sodden mess back into the bowl. “It’ll be fine,” he fatuously declared. Well, at least that was a rare moment of fellow feeling and supportiveness, for him, however unlikely the idea was that there was anything to save. My mum was most downhearted. Ever alert to strife, I had come from the dining room to witness the disappointment. Never mind; at least there was the christmas fruit cake – the ritual nature of the meal would hardly be sustained by skipping the pudding and going straight to the cake, but still...

The cake, of course, was inedible. After years and years of great successes, my mother had somehow omitted to chop the brazil nuts and walnuts before mixing them into the batter, with the result that the cake was rock-hard. It was not even possible to pretend it was edible, although of course I, ever my mother’s Red Cross Knight, made a valiant effort. Even a burned or too-dry cake can be salvaged by trimming or a little butter. My mum wept quietly – when life is hard, even a small mishap can loom disastrous.

All this was, predictably, enough to lower a thick pall of depression over the proceedings, at least as I registered them. The season was, in any case, particularly trying, that year. My younger brother, then in his late teens, had met a young woman (A) on his post-high-school wanderings about Europe, where we then lived, and had invited her for xmas. Apparently she had at one point in their short acquaintance been sufficiently intent upon him that he was quite intoxicated with her, but she had become, by the time she arrived in Geneva, some vision out of a fairy tale – a proper bee-atch. She tormented my brother with fake, syrupy, distancing sham friendliness, all the time snubbing him. Meanwhile she showered with a grotesque of affection our pre-teen sister, who gloried in the attention. Eventually my father and mother cottoned onto the weird dynamic, and in any case A was intensely annoying in a wide range of ways. Dad asked me – eh? – if I thought we should ask her to leave. I said that she certainly seemed to be making my brother quite miserable, and I wondered aloud why she would come visit, at all, if she was going to be so weird. I, then back in Geneva after my first year at university in Australia, was miserable, too, in empathy with my brother. I felt his pain, knowing it well both from experience and extensive imagining, and self-infliction.

However, my calculation had become quite delicate, because A had brought along, presumably for protection, a friend, R, and she and I had gravitated into a considerable attraction. We had sat up late, after everyone else had gone to be, reading. Slowly we presumed what would now, in the light of greater experience, seem obvious: that we liked each other. She was big-boned, buxom, Oregonian, and rather Rubenesque, although in a thin-hipped way. She said to me at one point that of course she was beautiful; I had said something that suggested, roundabout, that that was not a burden she had to bear – she was very striking, but in a way that would not qualify her as beautiful, in any conventional way, although soon after that, as even now, I recognized that she was completely correct.

In any case, A soon did depart, fortunately before we had to throw her out. In the process of acting as peacekeeper until she nicked off – again, the Red Cross Knight – I was in part self-interested: I wished to buy a few more days for R, with whom I had reached an understanding that that would be quite delightful. She did stay, and when she returned to the coast of France, where she was studying abroad, we arranged by mail to travel to Florence together, for a week.

We did so. It was lovely, although initially traumatic in the way that even small steps in experience can be to the tender-footed, and -hearted. But overall it was a wonderful time.

So, there you have it. Thank you Jesus. ‘Tis the season to be jolly.

And this year, I have three likely warm and assuring events to attend, with good friends old and new.

But I still hate fuckn xmas.

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By the way, on the subject of mundane xmas memories, how could I forget that when I was about 8 or 9, I discovered where my mum had hidden the xmas presents (in her laundry linen closet, which always smelled so secure and inviting, so that you wanted to stick your head among the sheets and breathe) and found that they included some books of puzzles and connect-the-dot drawings. I had at those, with no plan – even a vaguely formed one – of how I would cover up the transgression. The books were complete two weeks out from the blessed day.

In fact, I seemed to have discovered the hiding places every year, out of some odd insecurity or apprehension. Fortunately, one year, my father issued a relatively low-key shot across the boughs, and that stopped the behavior cold.

Well, not quite – I took, instead, to getting up ridiculously early on xmas morning, to open all my presents carefully, and then reseal them, only to express appropriate surprise when they were dealt to me again, a couple of hours later, after the execrable xmas mass to which my brothers and I, as appointed “responsible boys,” were drafted as altar boys.

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Let it be noted here that, after 9 weeks of building up slowly, I am now swimming one mile each day – almost half breaststroke, half backstroke, and just a little freestyle, as I near drown whenever I attempt it, although less and less as I get apparent asthma under better control.
Riki has set a goal of a late-summer “triathlon.” Errr... maybe.

Dear AM, (Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I was listening just now to your coverage of the bombing of the American military installation in Mosul, and then to a brief item about what the event might mean with respect to the upcoming "election" in Iraq.

Why, can I ask, do you persist in interviewing partisan, ideologue cranks like Richard Perle, if you're trying to inform the public, rather than merely subject them to the propaganda of the very far right of the Republican Party, and of its satellite think-tank propaganda mills?

Sincerely,
xxxx


Dear Mr xxxx

Thank you for your email of 22 December 2004, regarding the AM report;
Terrorists attack Mosul military base.

The ABC has an editorial responsibility to provide the relevant principle
viewpoints on matters of importance. By providing a broad range of perspectives
on the war in Iraq, as the ABC has done and will continue to do, listeners are
able to consider each of the views presented and then draw their own
conclusions, as you have clearly done.

The ABC is satisfied that its coverage of the war in Iraq and associated issues
has been, and continues to be, the most comprehensive and balanced of any media
organisation in Australia, across television, radio and online.

Nevertheless, please be assured that your concerns have been noted.

Yours sincerely

K... D....
ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs

--------

Mr D....

Thanks for your reply. I agree that the ABC's coverage has been excellent. Your persistence in covering the appalling contempt for legal precedent exhibited by the American administration and its military, especially in the case of David Hicks, has been exemplary. It has also, I should say, stood in stark contrast to the kind of sanctimonious and crawling coverage of such issues here in the US.

As an Australian, and a journalist, I do take some heart from the islands of continued responsibility and integrity displayed in the Australian press, and by the ABC, in particular. I merely wished to point out that figures like Richard Perle, whose contributions can be predicted as easily as bush fires in the Brindabellas, really are not contributors at all - not, at least, to open, sincere debates. His arguments, like those of many like him, in and near the Bush Administration, simply are rolled out like sausage meat, and can be predicted by naming the subject. They also are famously duplicitous, self-serving (the gravy train of the pundit industry), and patently designed to serve some purpose of the Administration's henchmen and billionaire hangers-on - the very same people who fund the sorts of ultra-right-wing "think tanks" that provide shelter for utterly disgraced figures like the warmonger Perle.

But, as you say, your interests are in balanced coverage - if you now air the opinions of someone like Osama bin Laden's mother, or Saddam's torturers (who have a lot in common with people like Perle who are happy to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of civilians to their sham goal of "democracy"), I will be satisfied that you really do do that.

Regards,

The Editor, The Sydney Morning Herald,

Phillip Ruddock said on December 11, 2004, that the claims by David Hicks that he was being tortured and generally abused by his US military captors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, did not appear credible. After all, said Mr Ruddock, Mr Hicks had earlier said that he was being treated well.

Mr Ruddock’s statement is clearly disingenuous, unless it is merely ignorant – unless he doesn’t read the papers, let alone the confidential US reports to which he has, if at all responsible in his role as Australian Attorney-General, demanded access.

For example, on December 7, the Associated Press reported that FBI agents had told their superiors that they had witnessed prisoners being tortured at Guantanamo Bay as early as 2002; the FBI had complained to the Pentagon, and then complained again when the Pentagon did nothing to stop abuses.

The FBI complaint confirmed what prison workers, human-rights officers, and US military and government personnel had repeatedly reported. But what proofs of US abuses would Mr Ruddock need, when top US officials have said all along that they do not consider themselves bound by the Geneva Conventions, and that they are routinely severely interrogating – torturing – prisoners? The abuses are so far beyond doubt that Mr Ruddock’s shuffling is pathetic.

And, so, today (December 21) the New York Times reports that FBI memoranda describe US abuse and torture of combattants and civilians in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. The documents, report Neil A. Lewis and David Johnston, attest to such abuses as beatings, chokings, placing lit cigarettes in prisoners’ ears, and contorting them with chains for up to 24 hours at a time.

Mr Ruddock’s statement, on December 11, that he would refer Mr Hicks’ claims to American authorities, is revealed as the height of disingenuousness. History will, in due course, reflect his and his fellows’ immorality, cynicism, and cowardice. Mr Ruddock might reflect on that himself, now.

Sincerely,

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade, the only armed uprising in Australian history – at least, that’s the way it’s always put, because the national consciousness readily allows for ignoring any efforts by Aborigines to stem their demise at the hands of the Europeans, both with arms, although hugely inequal, in hand.
In 1854, hundreds of miners gathered at Ballarat and took an oath beneath an improvised flag, a blue background with silver cross tipped by stars resembling the Southern Cross constellation (this flag, which may have been inspired by the Quebecois flag) is often advocated by Australian republicans as a fitting emblem for a state freed of monarchy): “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly to each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.”
The password used by those manning the Stockade was “Vinegar Hill,” a reference to an earlier armed uprising, by Irish convicts, in New South Wales in 1804.
About 25,000 miners had arrived in the goldfields from around the world, and were subjected to inequitable and exploitative government regulations, primarily a licensing fee that was payable regardless of the miners’ success. This caused great resentment, particularly as it was enforced, rather than agreed upon by the British rulers and the miners themselves. The Victorian governor – the queen’s representative in Australia – imposed stringent license checks twice a week. It is very easy to see both colonial presumption and racism as his motivators.
The “diggers” objected to the governor’s predations, and also to widespread corruption in officialdom – the usual colonial graft and favoritism. Dissatisfaction boiled over when a miner, a drunk Scotsman, was beaten to death by a group led by a publican who was in deep with the local magistrate in Ballarat, the town at the center of the mining district.
The publican’s connections spared him being charged, so miners burned his pub down.
On November 11, some 10,000 miners met and demanded the release of three of their number who had been charged with the arson, and imprisoned. They also demanded the vote for all males, and the abolition of the gold license. On November 29, even more miners met, and agreed, under the Southern Cross flag, to burn their licenses.
The Gold Commissioner ordered a license check the next day. Miners responded with a second mass burning of licenses. Peter Lalor then led the miners to an area named Eureka due to gold discoveries there, and built their stockade, a wooden barricade that enclosed about one acre. Over the next two days, they armed themselves with firearms and pikes.
They objected, then, to petty officialdom, and the lack of agency. (Ironic, given how much Australia is, today, ruled by all kinds of petty regulations, to which Australians on the whole bow without so much as a whimper.)
At dawn on Sunday, December 3, 1854, British Regiment detachments reinforced by Victoria Police mounted and foot police attacked the enclosure, at the order of the Gold Commissioner, Robert Rede.
The troops and police found the stockade lightly manned, as it was a Sunday. The Stockade was taken within 20 minutes. Twenty-two miners and five troos were killed. Lalor escaped, wounded, but 120 men were captured at the Stockade. Of these, only 13 were tried. In a rousing act of juror activism, Melbourne juries the next February refused to convict them.
Martial law was imposed, but three months later, the government agreed to the diggers’ demands. They were given the vote, and the license fee was slashed. Peter Lalor became the first Member of the Legislative Council for the seat of Ballarat.

Celebrations are marking the sesquicentenary. Not surprisingly, romanticization and smug nationalism predominates over any remnant of the militancy that motivated the miners.
Eighteen months or so ago, when the conservative Howard government joined the cowardly butchery of the Iraqi population with less than 10% approval of the Australian electorate, there was little but a whimper from voters.
Twenty-nine years ago, when Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam was forced from office in a parliamentary coup, he offered to stand on the steps of parliament house and rage against the heinous acts, but his colleagues whimpered away, and the voters soon followed suit.
The recent fourth election win by Howard’s mongrels is attributed to the economic stability that Australia has enjoyed for a few years. The conservatives appealed to Australians’ greed - which even the government is happy to acknowledge, as long as greed is stated as “the economic wellbeing of Australian families...” As in the US, the complicity of the voters, re-electing a mob who have obviously and even proudly lied and cheated their way for 8 years in power, is attributed to “fear” – fear of the unknown next stages of “global terrorism” (as if the worst of it is not being committed by the US and its pathetic allies). But in reality, I think the real motivating force is not fear, or even greed, but really a lamentable lack of imagination. The bourgeois hoardes of the American-led coalition simply cannot conceive of safety and wellbeing as anything but military and economic. Forget values, forget creativity and social expansion. Those are no longer the wages of economic success and plain good fortune; they are instead now branded as indulgences by the decadent, unpatriotic left.
Eureka, indeed!

I fear that I shall vent, this evening. A few days back in Canberra, and my wits are at their end. The place drives me to intense distraction. Not that I’m complaining.
Cyndi noted last year when she and Bob were here that in this wretched city, everyone moves at the same pace - the vehicles all do, too, regulated closely by constantly changed speed limits on wide avenues and thoroughfares that appear to be designed for speeds at least 50% greater than those posted. Then, speed cameras are places in subterfuge all around the town. Everyone, virtually, gets tickets; there’s no alternative, other than to drive at ridiculously slow speeds, in which case yobos in pickups and SUVs haul up right behind you and, if it’s night, turn their high beams on and try to run you off the road.
A couple of weeks ago, when collecting Paul from the airport, I was apparently going 92kph (about 50mph) in a zone suddenly posted 80kph, so a ticket awaited me when I returned to Canberra. A fine of $125 had been levied by speed camera - with no accompanying proof, of course. It was a stretch of road that in any other country on the globe would have a posted speed of at least 110, but discretion is not part of the calculation of the local-government employees who are charged, essentially, with raising a random tax to make big roads on which they can raise more random tax.
My friend Brendan told me this evening that he recently got a ticket, also $125, for going 69kph in a 60kph zone – this amounts to going 5mph over the speed limit. Is a $125 fine for that conceivable anywhere else in the world, save Singapore? The whole thing is made more creepy by the dehumanized technologies in use here, and by the adoption of legislation that frees local governments from any obligation to prove anything. The tickets come in the mail, with no human witness involved in making a judgment, at all - other, presumably, than in some office where some pathetic creature decides that driving 5mph over the limit, while keeping your eye on the road rather than the constantly changing speed-limit signs, warrants branding someone a tort faiseur.

In Victoria, plans are under way to implement random drug testing of drivers, to augment the long-standing practice of random breathalyzer testing, in which scores of cars are channeled off a road into some large parking lot, where all drivers must submit to a test, and where all drivers of cars with, say, a broken turn signal, may be given a ticket for lack of roadworthiness.

In general, this country can really give me the pip. The values that occasionally peeked through the mire of bourgeois complacency and torpor in the mid-1970s – led by the great prime minister Gough Whitlam, before a parliamentary coup with assistance from American spy agencies forced him from office – are long gone. In the place of a cosmopolitan openmindedness that valued intelligence and creativity as much or more than filthy lucre have come greed, aggression, smugness, and more greed. Sounds like the US, but it’s not quite a tawdry as that. At least we retain something of a free press here, despite the arsehole Rupert Murdoch and his mates, who are compliantly, and fearfully, aided by the Howard government, which is intent on pushing out any discerning and dissenting voices. They have help in this. Some papers, particularly The Australian, are hell bent on kissing the conservatives’ arses and doing their muckraking and dirtbagging for them. Today in parliament the leader of the opposition Labor Party accused a journalist at the paper of calling his office and threatening his staff because one of them had dissed an article she had written. It seems plausible.

But as I was saying, anal retentiveness also holds much sway. Often one seems to be in Singapore, only with smugness replacing the more severely punitive aspects of Lee’s vision of polity and comity.

Speaking of which, I’m really fed up with driving around Canberra’s centrally planned streets and suburbs, culminating in “town centers” with no “there” there, just such result of visionless town planning as artificial lakes that attract virtually no human beings, but plenty of ducks.

Before I came back up to Canberra, I went to Harry’s first swim meet, which was a scratch event - that is, it consisted only of heats designed to permit competitors from the various clubs to establish benchmark times for future competitions.
Harry had set a time of 35 seconds for 50 meters, but had never competed before, and was very nervous. He thought he might slip or fall off the blocks, and later admitted that he almost did, while climbing up on them.
With all that, and without a warm-up of any kind, he swam the 50 in 38 seconds, which placed him about midway in the whole section of about 35 swimmers (the best times were just over 30 seconds). Unfortunately, however, he came last in his heat, which is all that he used to gauge his performance and overall worth.
Neddy, however, forgot as soon as the boys hit the water what kind of cap Harry’s club wears, and strained expectantly to follow his brother’s fortunes down the pool. He cheered as the race neared its end, thinking that Harry was in the lead. He was quite sobered to learn a little later that he had been backing the wrong horse.
Still, I’d have to say that Harry did well, considering that my best times, to date, are 30 seconds in freestyle, over 25 meters, and 35 in breaststroke. Today I struggled to outpace a 9-year-old in the latter. I’d given her 5 seconds start, so as not to make it too obvious that I was using her for comparison; I finished about 4.5 seconds after her.

I drove up by the coast, around the southeast corner of the country. The road east from Melbourne is largely though quite boring gum forests, but when you arrive at the southeast corner, the road readily accesses the beaches, including one that is 80 miles long. I had a pleasant sit on some rocks looking back to the west as the sun set, with the beach all to myself as far as I could see in either direction. South is the Tasman Sea, and Bass Strait; Tasmania is 200 miles away.
Then it was dusk, and I drove further east, beginning to head north through temperate rainforests and more gums that closed in on the two-lane highway. The air was full of bogong moths, which are a variety that one can eat, but no thanks – not while whizzing along just below the oddly low speed limit. To the east was the ocean, or an illusion of it, through the eucalyptus boughs.
Fortunately, no kangaroos jumped in my path, and no wombats, which do a car even more damage, crawled across or idled on the roadway.