Most Australians
Apparently Prime Minister Howard thinks that most Australians find Muslim women’s traditional head-to-toe costume confronting. According to a report in The Age today:
“I don’t mind the headscarf but it’s really the whole outfit, I think most Australians would find it confronting,” Mr Howard told Southern Cross Broadcasting.”
and
“I don’t believe that you should ban wearing headscarfs but I do think the full garb is confronting and that is how most people feel.
Well for fuck’s sake!
Firstly, just for the record, I am Australian. I do not find it confronting.
Secondly if I did find it confronting I trust it would trigger some introspection about my own fears and ignorance not these veiled threats (pun intended). This smacks of ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’ (Or even ‘I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country’?)
And dressing it up in language that sounds more like an agony aunt’s advice on what to wear to the deb ball doesn’t help either.
But what really gets me is the way it is all layed off on ‘most Australians’. Have they polled this? Where are the results?
I wonder if we’ll hear the PM quoting these results from recent Morgan Polls:
- Most Australians (70%) think there should not be more uranium mines operating in Australia . (October 2005)
- Most Australians (61%) disagree with the proposition that the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations be handed an ‘Essential Services’ power to declare strikes illegal if considered a threat to public welfare or the economy. (October 2005)
- Most Australians (57%) believe the Government acted unethically over ‘Grain to Iraq’. (February 2006)
- Very few Australians (15%) view Federal Members of Parliament as having high or very high standards of ethics and honesty. (November 2005)
- Only 1% of Australians know the number of the Government’s National Security Hotline. (February 2006)
Pink puddles (Wilson’s Prom trip)
Just back from a weekend at Wilson’s Prom.
Bit of a false start on the way down on Friday evening with high temperatures, heavy traffic and a heavy load causing the car to boil over on the SE Freeway. We decide to rent a car and keep going which blows the budget considerably, but as Miles says to Joel in Risky Business “Sometimes you’ve just got to say ‘what the fuck’.”
On Saturday morning we take our first swim for the day. The water at Normans Beach is crystal clear, a contrast to the tannin-stained estuary of Tidal River. At the southern end of the beach the bright emerald of new growth is starting to soften the scorched earth and charred trunks of last year’s fires.
There are about thirty of us in all. Despite some initial trepidation and tentativeness (spending a whole weekend together is a big step up for friendships formed around school routines and events), we settle easily into a comfortable groove. As the day unfolds we expand and contract in shifting constellations spanning the river, the beach, the bush, a dead seal and a scraped knee.
The rain hits when we’re all back at camp and getting ready for dinner. The gear-freaks among us rise to the challenge and tarps, poles, pegs and guy ropes appear and are wrangled into a very impressive shelter that protects us all. Dinner preparation divides along gender lines- the men go off to barbecue the meat while the women prepare the salads. And where does the vegetarian male of the group fit in I hear you ask? I stay with the women, charged with grilling the vegetarian sausages, pumpkin, sweet potato, asparagus and onion. This arrangement works out well all round (my very limited supply of blokey camping conversation about cars, generators, etc was exhausted some hours ago).
The kids all go to bed early, exhausted from the day’s adventures. The adults stay up for a while enjoying chocolate, wine and conversation by the gentle, flickering light of citronella candles.
Morning breaks with golden light filtering through early morning cloud, bathing the surrounding hills in what I always think of as Eugene von Guerard light. We potter around the campsite, breakfast becomes a moving feast- fruit under the tarp, milo by one of the tents and pancakes in the picnic shelter. The kids spend a couple of hours deeply involved in collecting berries and crushing them into the puddles and staining the water a chalky pink. This will doubtless be one of their lasting memories of the weekend away and they carefully fill a bottle with the pink water to take home and share with classmates who weren’t able to come along.
A lovely weekend.
United by the moment
With the Commonwealth Games just under three weeks away Melbourne is really buzzing with excitement.
Forget the Winter Olympics, The World Cup, Wimbledon or the Tour de France… The Commonwealth Games is the premier sporting event of 2006. Australia VS India in the basketball will be a match for the ages and the much-anticipated clash of table tennis powerhouses Canada and New Zealand will be the stuff of dreams are made of.
I can’t even begin to list my favourite memories of the Manchester Commonwealth Games and I expect Melbourne to be no different.
If the responses to the Karak Lookalike Competition is any indication of the what we have to look forward to then we are set for an unforgettable two weeks of sport.
I’m off the TAFE - Week 2: Fruits of labour
Ok, so you have been listening to me going on about liberty, creativity, youth being wasted and all that. Here’s some of the stuff I have been doing in design classes. The shoes morphed into small 5×5 square designs that were copied and then glued together (badly - must learn to cut straight) in repeat patterns. You might see me in a shirt that looks a bit like this in future:
or this
or this
Feedback not necessary!
Purchase of the century
My friend Hamish just purchased a beautiful old Malvern Star bicycle on ebay for $20.80.
In Australia in the 1950-60s Malvern Star bicycles were the bike to ride on the race track. Nowadays any vintage Malvern Star in good condition is worth quite a bit. Certainly more than $20.80.
I am jealous.
Bloody ridiculous
Why are the media so bloody stupid that when someone launches a new advertising campaign that has a slightly controversial tagline we plaster it all over the pages of newspapers, post it as a newsworthy item online and feature it in the 6 o clock news ahead of 90 seconds of the clearly insignificant ‘world’ wrap complete with a story about the rescue of an overzealous kitten in St Petersburgh.
Meanwhile the campaign evaluation staff at the overpriced ad agency responsible are popping the top off a few bottles of equally overpriced champagne as they watch the earned ink meter tick over with the speed of a Las Vegas jackpot tally and the PR department are preparing the next award submission.
Why do we have to reward such blatantly unoriginal campaigns with predictable conservative middle class responses. Don’t get me wrong I am not even remotely offended by the campaign and in writing this have negated my argument with hypocracy, but what does drive me completely insane is that in doing so we are handing unwarranted kudos to someone whose business card would be the perfect visual reference to the word contradiction in an illustrated dictionary.
In time I could be proven wrong, obvously I am not the target market but lets look at the visitor numbers before we declare it a bloody success. When you were a child you realised pretty quickly when someone was only visiting you because they wanted to swim in your pool and, more often than not, ended up urinating in it anyway - damn shame the highly educated people that are responsible for what we see and hear are not quite so evolved. Then again maybe that’s just the point, they don’t really care if the majority of us are having to swim around in someones reconstitueted lemonade just as long as we are using their pool.
Bicycles and newspapers
5 days in Bright. My activities go something like:
- Ride my bike with Richard – climbing several thousand vertical metres.
- Read the newspaper
- Have a swim – in the crisp, clean Ovens River
- Consume – chips, coffee, pies and pasta
- Sleep
- Visit some of Victoria’s more stylish tourist attractions.
I don’t know how I managed to fit it all in.
Rich enjoying the view from Tawonga Gap
Victoria’s highest peak Mt Bogong - 1,986 metres (6,516 feet)
Me looking rather tuff in Glenrowan. A fantastic destination for tourists of all ages!*
*Not!
Blowing smoke
New design good. Giantchimney.com shifting paradigms again. Nice one BB.
Fuck you and your H2
I am a cyclist so for obvious reasons I really dislike 4WDs.
I appreciate that some 4WD owners need their 4WD but the reality is that most 4WD owners simply want their 4WD. Why? Because they are selfish and consider their needs and rights more important than yours or mine.
Now clearly I am over simplifying things here but I don’t care. Naomi Robson over simplifies stuff all the time.
I digress.
As with widescreen TVs, Telstra shares, Delfin developments or really, really fat people, the proliferation of 4WDs on our roads is a fitting symbol of what is fucked about Australia.
That is why I enjoy Fuck you and your H2.
The H2 is a gas guzzler. Because it has a gross vehicle weight rating over 8500 lbs, the US government does not require it to meet federal fuel efficiency regulations… So while our brothers and sisters are off in the Middle East risking their lives to secure America’s fossil fuel future, H2 drivers are pissing away our “spoils of victory” during each trip to the grocery store.
Up yours 4WD owners and stop eating so many cookies!
Changes to the site
I am making a few changes to the site over the next few days. Forgive me if things look a bit strange or don’t work exactly as they should. Basically I am experimenting and making things up as I go.
All will be fixed soon.