Rubrica

  Humans are natural storytellers. Since our ancestors came down from the trees, we have been telling stories. The oral tradition of storytelling existed long before the graphic and written forms as a means of carrying our history. We learn from the past in order to build a future. Whether it’s a yarn told around a campfire, a tale told at Granddad’s table, or a hilarious anecdote in a wedding speech, our stories are our footholds to the future. The story of Australia is a long and very rich one. The oldest landmass on earth, it contains rocks dated to 3000 million years ago, preceding the evolution of homo sapiens by around 2999 million years. The ancient Gondwana landscape, the supercontinent that ultimately divided to form Australia, Antarctica, South America, South Africa and India, was home to towering rainforests and giant megafauna. The first humans arrived on what became the Australian continent around 65,000 years ago, and so began the naming of thin...

  “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.” In the Kubrick masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey , based on a short story, The Sentinel , by Arthur C. Clarke, the supercomputer, Hal, is programmed to take a spaceship with five astronauts on board to Jupiter. When things start to go wrong, two of the astronauts decide that if necessary, they will disconnect Hal and fly the ship manually. Hal, however, learns of this plan and cannot let human interference stop it from completing its mission as programmed. The computer thus begins to systematically kill the humans by turning off their life support systems in order to prevent them from jeopardising the computer’s mission. Four of the five astronauts are killed before Dave manages to dismantle the rogue computer. The movie was made in 1968*. The story on which it was based was first published in 1951. The concept of superhuman artificial intelligence was still very much in the realm of scienc...

I love this story that appeared on my social media feed last week. The two-man crew of a yacht sent out a distress signal when their rudder became disabled while sailing from Cherbourg on the French coast, bound for the southern tip of Brittany.  What the two sailors on the yacht were not expecting was to see an 18th Century East India Company wooden sailing ship looming towards them. Götheborg Under international maritime law, when a distress signal is sent, the ship closest to the vessel in distress must alter its course and go to assist. It just so happened that the closest ship to the disabled yacht in the English Channel was the three-masted Götheborg, the world's largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship. Seafarers are notoriously superstitious people. Myths and legends abound about ghost ships that appear and disappear in heavy seas or fog, monsters of the deep , mermaids and sirens that lure sailors to their deaths with their beautiful voices.  Then there are the mys...

  The death of Queen Elizabeth II last year thrust the issue of Australia’s future as a constitutional monarchy back into the light after two decades of shadow. According to polls, a majority of Australians now favour a home-grown Head of State rather than the monarch of the former colonial power, and King Charles’ coronation this weekend will be viewed by many as a foreign curiosity rather than anything to do with us. The lavish ceremony and celebration of the King’s formal enthronement is costing the British government around £100 million – that’s about $A190 million. Meanwhile, the post-Brexit, post-Covid British economy is in dire straits with homelessness and poverty soaring, food shortages, astronomical energy costs and historic low business investment. The British government is hoping that the pomp and circumstance of the coronation and its associated festivities will boost public morale in a country where the monarchy has been the foundation of both gove...

The early 20th Century US President, Theodore Roosevelt, is attributed with the saying "speak softly and carry a big stick." The president was apparently referring to an approach to foreign policy when he made the statement, but it could equally be applied to many areas of life. Like, for instance, golf. Golf is, in many ways, a metaphor for life. No, really. Stay with me here.  Part of the gallery on the 16th at Queanbeyan GC Obviously carrying a big stick, or several to be more precise, is central to golfing as kicking the ball is generally frowned upon, but being a golfer of woefully limited talent, I've spent many hours on the course musing on connections between life and chasing a small white ball around a few hundred acres of landscape. Perhaps if I spent less time philosophising and more actually focusing on the little white ball my ability wouldn't be quite so woefully limited, but I'm easily distracted. My approach to golf is best summarised as SOTFF*. I...

After my adventures in the land of folk metal music, a friend challenged me to find the musical and aesthetic opposite of the various metal bands I've been obsessing over: the Finnish band, Korpiklaani ; Mongolian band The Hu , and Indonesian metal trio Voice of Bacepot .    Never one to dodge a good challenge, friends, I think I've found it!   Here is the musical and aesthetic antithesis of metal, and it comes with a warning: you may need your sunglasses on to watch it. There is a lamentable excess of purple and orange in this video. Also an excess of teeth. The year was 1975. Cher had her own TV show, called, appropriately, Cher , and Donny Osmond was the teen heart-throb of the moment. Over the next couple of years Donny and Michael Jackson would go head to head competing for the hearts - and bedroom walls - of teenage girls everywhere*, but in 1975 it was all Donny and his big brothers. So who ultimately won the Donny V Michael contest in the 70s? In the short term, p...

    I woke up this morning conscious of a new quality to the light in the bedroom. Like it was shining through a filter, which, as it turns out, it was. Without warning, the ash tree outside my bedroom window has suddenly turned golden. Sometimes autumn sneaks in quietly, leaf by leaf until you realise that yes, the mornings are cold and maybe it's time to order the winter firewood supply. Other times autumn explodes in one massive display. Night temperatures plummet and the trees all say, "Gosh! We'd better get our autumn on!" Trees are generally polite and well-spoken so as not to offend the bees, and would never declare, "Fuck me but that was a bloody cold night! Better get our twigs* out!" While it hasn't been a particularly hot summer, autumn has arrived suddenly. Maybe not explosively, per se , but it's certainly made a memorable entrance. The ash tree outside my bedroom window was clearly coasting along thinking that late summer was just getti...

Having recently tripped over the concept of Finnish folk metal, I thought I'd dive further into the world of metal in cultures other than the mainstream Euro-US traditions. Well. Korpiklaani is only the tip of the Scandi iceberg! I'm not sure what it is about Scandinavia, but they seem to have produced some amazing metal bands. Cold weather? Long winter nights? A lot of vodka* and schnapps? Who knows?  The long, cold, winter nights theory doesn't really hold up when it comes to Asian and Middle Easten metal. Yes, it's a thing. And made even edgier by the fact that a lot of Middle Eastern metal bands are actually breaking their country's laws simply by being Middle Eastern metal bands. One such is the Saudi band is Al-Namrood , who can't play live gigs in their country for fear of being arrested and executed. Yep, executed. Their music is heavily anti-Islamic, which is a crime under the fundamentalist Islamic sharia laws of Saudi Arabia**. They are also critical ...

  ** As readers* my editorials in Braidwood's Changing Times will know, I tend to bang on about the importance of the arts quite a bit. The arts, from the individual participatory level right up to the major national theatre companies, orchestras and the National Gallery itself all suffered during the years of the Morrison government. Not only did the government strip funding from the arts across the board and abolished the Arts portfolio in government, but it also promoted, through its jobs'n'growth mantra, the notion that no activity or pursuit has any value beyond making money. This attitude has infected us to a crippling, but not, I hope, terminal degree. I live in a town where the arts are celebrated. There are about 25 published authors living in and around this town, as well as award-winning visual artists, acclaimed musicians, arts administrators and film makers. Yet, in a conversation with a local friend the other day, he told me he'd heard a local business ow...

  Actually, my dahlias aren't humble at all. They're a riot of colour, a magnet for bees and the focal point of my garden. They demand attention and bask in their own glory. Absolute divas, every single one of them. Dahlias and dahlia-growing are addictive. You start with one in a lacklustre corner of the garden, then come winter, you lift the bulb to find you have half a dozen more bulbs. So you buy some more, just to vary the colour scheme. And so it goes. This year I've had 47 separate dahlia plants of about 18 different varieties.  Got home from shopping this morning to find a council truck parked outside my place. As I pulled into the driveway a large bloke in council hi-vis work gear got out and approached me. Oh, shit, thinks me. Did I put out the wrong bin? Was it not recycling week? Am I to be publicly castigated for crimes against garbage integrity? Large bloke introduced himself as a fellow dahlia grower and wondered if I'd like to swap a few bulbs with him o...

  Autumn. The nights are getting cold, although no sign of frost yet, and the early morning joggers and dog walkers are appearing in beanies and gloves. My maple tree, which I planted in the summer of 20-21, is in full autumn livery, although the oaks and elms in the park over the road are only just starting to turn. I watched my kitten this morning while she was watching a leaf blow along the verandah. My cats are strictly indoor cats, so Suki is only ever going to be able to dream about pouncing on skittering leaves, in the same way as she will only ever dream about catching a flame robin or a crimson rosella or one of the little skinks that sun themselves on the wooden decking of the verandah. Such is life, Suki. It doesn’t always follow that indoor cats don’t get to hunt. My cats have access to an outdoor enclosure via a catflap in the kitchen door. I once came back from a week away, during which time the cats were fed twice daily by a wonderful local girl...