Friday January 30th 2009, 2:27 AM
Filed under: General
Leave Thorpie alone.
Daily Telegraph, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Carrying on the classic Judaeo-Christian tradition of poking someone in the side with a spear while they’re being hung out to dry.
You will bust this on him, fan the flames, and then if it bursts open and he crumbles before our eyes no matter what the truth of the story, you will write about how cruel it has all been for him, accompanied by grainy long-lens privacy invading photos that you paid for to show how much his privacy has been invaded.
You’re like schoolyard bullies with access to a newspaper.
DreadfulDan is a great photographer.
He snapped a few interesting shots at the Big Day Out in Sydney the other day.
I’d love to know your thoughts on his photos…
Me, I’ve had just about enough of Jingoistic Racism.
It’s not Patriotism.
It’s Nationalism and Jingoism mixed in with Racism.
I say this as a proud immigrant, and a proud son of immigrants:
FUCK OFF out of my country, you narrow minded Jingoistic Racist fucks.
There’s not enough room for the two of us.
Your politics and views go against everything that Australia stands for.
You may think you’re on the side of history, but you’re not.
You have to go.
Go on.
Fuck off.
The other option is that you actually read a book and learn a thing or two about this wonderful nation full of promise and opportunity that is open and available to those who embrace it.
Or you can remain wallowing in your festering, narrow minded ignorance.
If you choose this path, that’s fine.
Just don’t do it here.
Time to go.
Your with the utmost compassion and true patriotism,
Wednesday January 28th 2009, 4:06 AM
Filed under: General
Here you will find possibly the best thing the Queensland Government has done since upgrading the Pacific Highway.
As a child of two doctors who’d taken the Hypocratic Oath, we stopped at every road accident we came across. This was the days before mobile phones, and often (especially on our cross-country adventures from Brisbane to Adelaide) help would take hours to arrive. I saw more gore, blood, mangled humans, ruined lives and dead bodies by the time I was ten than most people ever see in their lives.
This didn’t stop me from sometimes driving like a fool in my earlier years, though through the grace of the universe I am here to tell you about it.
I may take to carrying this photograph around on my phone to help in my seemingly endless need to explain to Americans that Australia is really, really big.
They must teach them in school that the USA is the biggest nation on the planet or something.
This photo was taken about 80KM outside of Alice Springs, heading away from Uluru where pretty much nothing is out there.
And by nothing, I mean nothing.
Despite the colours, it was very cold, that biting desert cold, probably about 5ºC.
This is the reason why sometimes tourists die out here. They just start driving, taking no fuel or water, not realising that it’s a full day’s drive (at 140km/h) from help.
What’s equally amazing is that what is a barren and foreboding landscape to us whiteys was home to the planet’s oldest continuous culture for 40,000 years. They that lived out here for eons and had no problem getting by.
This is what I actually think about on Australia day, how this country would have been if Cpt.Cook had never found it…
Saturday January 24th 2009, 4:40 AM
Filed under: General
I grew up with this woman on the Radio.
I read her every week in “The Big Issue”.
I defer to her for an opinion on the CleenFeed.
“To those who fear their speech will be stifled, or their net access slowed, he [Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy] has offered a stubborn response: if you’re opposed to the department’s cyber-safety plan, you are opposed to the protection of children.”
Imagine you’re reading your morning paper, enjoying a nice espresso when suddenly a picture of yourself from thirty years ago is staring back at you. That’s exactly what happened to Nechama Kalech and her family a few days ago.
Last year I went to the suq in Jaffo to hunt for old cameras, and purchased an old Kodak that still contained film. I developed the film and went on to share the pictures with you, not only in hope of finding the people in the picture, but to ponder what it was to take a family photo.
It turns out that the two-degrees of separation theory about Israel is true, and in no time the family got in touch with the paper. One thing led to another, and I was thankfully able to speak on the phone with Nechama Kalech, a lovely and charming woman who now lives in Tel Aviv and works as a successful IT Consultant. Now a vibrant Grandmother who sounds as young as she looks in the photos, she was thrilled to have seen the pictures, and was kind enough to share with me about the time that the pictures were taken.
The photos are from the summer of 1977, the first year that her son Ron wore glasses. Ron and his sister Gal were crazy about animals, and in Nechama’s memory they traveled from their house in Ramat Hasharon almost every Saturday morning in the summer visiting the Tel Aviv Zoo, on this day with another friend’s daughter Adi.
She remembers that the all the kids loved the zoo, unlike the neighbours of the Zoo that had to put up with the noise and indeed the smell. One can only imagine what it was like to live next door to all those animals in the height of the summer!
In the winter, they swapped the Zoo excursions for trips to the forest to collect mushrooms. Of course eventually, the kids traded all of this for a life in the military, and since then they’ve gone to university and then raised families of their own. Gal is a successful lawyer in Tel Aviv and Ron has lived in Seattle Washington working for Microsoft for the last ten years.
Nechama has much in common with other grandmothers the world over, she is bursting with pride at her children’s achievements, full of love for her grandchildren, and insists that her son and his family should come back to Israel soon.
Having spent so much time in Israel, a country that has welcomed me and has become my home just as much as Australia is, I was interested as to what it was like to live there in the late 1970′s compared to where I grew up. Nechama remembers, “It was great, we were living in Ramat Hasharon. The children were free in the street, walking by themselves, and everything was so friendly and open.”
That’s pretty much how I remember the late 70′s. A world away, in Brisbane Australia, I too would wander off of the street into a neighbour’s house and be welcomed in and fed with a snack or a drink, I’d walk with my brothers for miles without my Mum being worried, and I recall never knowing what it was like to not know my who my neighbours were.
Of course with time things change, so too does society, and with a fresh group of kids in the house Nechama looks at things differently, “Now I have grandchildren I see the difference. I was born in a Kibbutz and went on to study in an agricultural school, so my background is of a very open democratic society. It’s very different from now. Most of the people are not my people. They are so extreme.”
Alas, I too feel the same way about the city which I grew up in. It might be that I chose simply to only remember the happiness of the time and not to remember the extreme aspects of Brisbane in the late 1970′s, which was a city plagued with political corruption and intense police brutality against protest and indigenous rights activists. It seems that indeed like our family photographs, we only remember the wonderful things about life from the past – that’s why there’s a whole album of wedding photos, but never any photos of the divorce court.
Perhaps, as we travel on life’s journey, “My People” become and ever-shrinking group of like-minded friends and family that eventually leaves you with a feeling of being outnumbered by a mysterious majority.
My original article was inspired by the nature of time, what it was to freeze that time when we take a photo, and how a few simple images of strangers could conjure such powerful feelings of nostalgia about our own lives. Considering the incredible amount of emotional feedback that the article received, I can be sure that I certainly wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
Maybe the country that Nechama feels has moved on from those more friendly times is actually still ready to open their hearts to strangers after all.
