Adam Goodes...A Hero in our Time

This is an Australian of the Year-photograph by Paul Miller/AAP

And further more: What is their not to like about this man?

http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/after-the-furore-meet-the-real-adam-goodes-20160111-gm39aa.html

Tom Uren Memorial Fund and Review of Straight Left-Tom Uren's autobiography

STRAIGHT LEFT-TOM UREN Random House Australia (1994)

Having lived here in Australia only since 2008 I am still playing catch up with Australian politics and the history of the left in particular. One man seems to stand out-with few enemies-but undoubtably a warrior of the left. Tom Uren in his autobiography gives an entertaining crash course in Labor politics since the Second World War up till the 1990s. An Australian member of parliament for 32 years. Minister in the Whitlam and later Hawke governments but he is so much more than that. Mr Uren is a character in his own write! His chronicling of his growing up, his war service and internment, his attempt to forge a career out of boxing and then his slow growth into political animal is fascinating. I chuckled over his judging of character vis a vis what would the bloke be like to share a bag of rice with (from internment). But mostly I warm to his now old fashioned socialist politics when the left had a vision, a constituency which it wanted to represent and a belief in the basic decency of society and our responsibility to uphold and nurture this. There is sections where my eyes met in the middle (as with most autobiographies-which fascinate the writer more than the reader) but these passages are rare. Mostly I felt informed and came away from this book feeling both educated and reminded of how much socialism has been an integral part of my life. And that today, it makes me a dinosaur to so many and how much the political oxygen we now breathe is driven by free market and centrist ideology. Mr Uren you have balls and the world is a better place for you having done the work you have and forged the vision into something practical and tangible. I hope your book, will inspire some young mind to think things can and should be different from today and the reader can and will want to make a difference as you have.

"Utopia' a documentary by John Pilger

I remember John Pilger as an investigative journalist for the Daily Mirror when it still had socialist balls and investigative journalist meant summat. Informed us like. Talk to Australians today about John Pilger (although mostly living overseas he is one of Australia's sons-the generation who went to London to work and who grew up on Sydney's eastern beaches); they mostly loath him, dislike him or are indifferent. Shades of Chomsky-he can be intractable, uncomfortable and too often right. Unlike Chomsky-you will never die not knowing John Pilger's line of argument. He speaks straight, honed on journalism, his words bite but are as clear as bells ringing. Something of 'shoot the messenger' seems to dog his footsteps here in Australia. Lots of people tell me how often Pilger has got it wrong but are short on saying exactly how other than in minor detail how that is -he is an investigative journalist by trade and is an assiduous fact checker. The wrong is only when he launches into opinion, many of which he has, uses and is happy to put out into the narrative of colonisation and global politics. His documentary on Indonesian sweatshops producing labels of the 90s we all wore with pride was something else I remember, it stopped me wearing my favourite deep blue shirt, once I knew the true cost of its making. Then there were the 1989 book "A Secret Country" and the peeling back of the facade of Australia as a lucky country-for some but not all. Reading this then was a profound shock and realisation how far ahead New Zealand was in addressing biculturalism and the tragedy of European colonisation. (Not too far but in comparison...) The book apparently rose from his 1985 documentary of the same name.

And thus Utopia. Released in 2013 and 110 minutes.
This if anything is the story of the destruction caused to Aboriginal communities through the intervention and invisibility of Aboriginal people through mainstream Australia. "The universal theme of the film" says John Pilger, "is that the world is dividing into two groups - those who prosper in material comfort zones, as most Australians do, and those who are dispossessed because they are "different" and refuse to comply. It's a dystopian project that says indigenous people cannot live in their homelands - they can't live differently, they must be assimilated, they must be like us." (My italics and notes from Anthony Hayward). Utopia is the most disadvantaged area of Australia. No utilities, grinding poverty and poor access to services most of Australia takes for granted. This is the core of what makes movements like Reclaim Australia evil. The soft porn of Tory politics. And if anything in the two years since this was released parts of the rest of Australia are playing catch up-finding themselves "different"-dispossessed, engaging with fragmenting services that no longer provide a lifeline in adversity. Yet Utopia is a documentary which also portrays the courage in the struggle of resistance by the first people at the cost of too many early graves. It can inspire as well as crush. What it shows is the lies told and then held as truisms, peddle about how dysfunctional Aboriginal communities are. Or as too many red necks like to claim-"so much money is thrown at them and still they don't change-must be because there is something flawed in their make up that they can't accept (assimilate) White ways."  And no matter the evidence to the contrary, injustice prevails*. Being set up to fail inevitably results in failure. And why do we do that? Because accepting differences means our comfortable myths about ourselves...if only they would...ring a little more hollow in the face of the starkness portrayed in these communities we allow to fester and break up. These the representatives of one of the oldest civilisations on our planet, of whom we should be proud and celebrate and should support as core to being Australian. It is a powerful indictment but also a testimony to the people portrayed and to Mr Pilger for having the guts to still put this story out into the public domain.
10/10.

From a secret country, secret agent Cockie spreads the seed

*And continues. See the excellent article by Helen Davidson-"Charlie's story: Life and death of the man forced to sleep rough while on dialysis." Saturday 25 July 2015, Guardian (Australia). Ask yourself when you read this man's life story-would prominent White Australians end their life in this way? Would we let it happen?

Bill "Bring It On" Shorten: A Point of Difference or Which Way is Left?

Here was an opportunity to redefine, learn from past mistakes and more importantly-focus on the future. The Labor Party Conference in Melbourne comrades. Bringing together enough intelligence, vision and passion to make a difference. New blood and calls for the way the party representing the left in Australia does business. And at a time when we need leadership, vision, commitment.

Why? Let me count on one ham fisted hand of gnarled knuckles the current issues we face:

• Children and women abused in detention prisons and it is not allowed to be called out as a crime
• Humanitarian whistleblowers could be prosecuted
• Refugees, asylum seekers and conditional refugees and detention; off shore processing NIMBY
• The stripping back of work place conditions, the relentless progress of casualisation of labour (Myers the latest cab to take this path-dont shop there!)
• Youth not able to get permanent jobs and completing education that leads to nowt
• And paying through the back teeth for the education or being at the mercy of private providers who teach them nowt
• The disenfranchisement of a generation who will not have permanent work, buy a house and have what little they can save taken in bills, gouging and rorting
• The shrinking of the social welfare safety net
• Work till your past seventy even if you are buggered and past it
• Go without health care because you can't afford it and turn up at emergency where you wait in a corridor to die; our health services swamped and struggling to deliver care
• Womens superannuation and pay scales still being less than mens
• Big end of town still being run by old white men
• The disintegration, privatisation of infrastructure and asset stripping
• Politicians spending expenses like there is no tomorrow while telling the rest of us we have to tighten our belts and make efficiencies
• A public service being gutted (and that includes fireies, ambos, nurses and teachers) while CEO  pay rates still soar
• The underfunding of health, education, public housing, disability services, mental health and aged care provisions
• People with mental health issues living on the street
• The disgrace that passes for support to indigenous communities and services
• The intervention and the strangling of resources to remote communities
• The disgrace that passes for in 2015-violence against women and children is still prevalent
• Not enough legal aid
• The rise of fascism (Reclaim Australia is a fascist movement)
• The selling off of our food bowl regions for mining
• Not supporting long term investment of our waterways for irrigation
• No planning on climate change, or to manage for consequences of extreme weather patterns
• The lack of affordable housing (And where have the obscene amount of dollars taken from selling Millers Point in Sydney gone towards public housing Mr Baird?)
• The inability to fund alternative energy resources such as solar panels and wind farms
• Letting banks and big business pass on costs at the expense of increasing poverty in basics such as utilities, health insurance fees, food (yes and the States hunger to introduce GST)
• Allowing the poor to become poorer
• More roads not more and more efficient, user friendly, affordable public transport
• Disproportionate taxation (how can big companies and banks get away with not paying a fair tax take when they asset strip by way of huge profits gained from unfair gouging such as credit card fees, Telco charges)

So is and will this conference provide leadership on how to tackle the above? To oppose the current mob? Can Labor still call itself the party of the disenfranchised, the dispossessed and as Fanon said so long ago "The wretched of the earth"- those where hope is lost and they are sinking to become unheard and unrepresented-victims of the free market and capitalism who are not seen as consumers (can't afford it) and jettisoned out of that equation because they can't pay their way. No instead we have factional positioning, union arm twisting votes, Julia aprons, stage managed presidential leadership cringe and the suffocation by faction of change. Its the same old, same old. Deals! Deals! Deals! And outside the doors, the same injustices, inequality continues...

"Bring It On" Bill claims he can win an election fought on climate change, just as long as Labor agrees to a policy supporting turning back the boats. In a rush of breath so fast it was almost unheard-of course we would increase our refugee intake. Tanya apparently got the concessions. After all we have to be electable by the definition of "The Telegraph" and its skimmers.

As the Sydney Herald editor calls it:
"Yet Shorten's argument was as sound as it was courageous. He concluded that stopping deaths at sea by stopping maritime attempts in unseaworthy boats via people smuggling, is the right policy setting. "
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/bill-shorten-shores-up-his-position-with-strong-alp-national-conference-win-20150725-gikfp6.html#ixzz3gxSJeOBT

Oh really? We don't know as we are not told, the conditions under which people have been turned back and to where. It is just a decision based on getting elected. So as not to be condemned by history as 'unelectable for having vision and balls (but we will be condemned by doing nothing and not taking an opportunity to go to the community and say boat turning/detention and hiding what we do off shore is just plain wrong. Labor so scared of the shade of Ms Gillard or Mr Rudd. To be unelectable is such a Blair whinge. What happened to debate? To convincing an electorate on the strength of what is right. This leadership is saying they don't trust their electorate. In reality, they are not out there in the workplace, the streets and communities talking, listening and giving leadership to addressing the issues currently ripping us apart. Listen to English Labour talking about electing a truly left wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Seen as a rank outsider, he is now emerging as a serious contender. Why? Because people know the point of difference with Cameron. They know what he stands for as demonstrated by those MPs supporting his leadership push.

 "They say Labour did not lose the election because it was too leftwing, but because it “failed to challenge the fundamental economic consensus on austerity. This cost all of us votes.”


It was not inspiring earlier this week to hear future Labor leader in waiting Tanya Plibersek parroting stale Nat/Lib rhetoric (as above with Shorten at the conference) to support this motion... "to prevent needless deaths at sea." And then give her vote over so she didn't have to take a stand. At least Albo raised his hand and said accepting turning the boats back as Labor policy was a red line we should not cross. What a man! And good on those people leaping on the stage to oppose this shameful piece of deal making. And Bill Shorten as a credible leader or a wind-up-doll? Stage managed to seem stronger than he has been, to me he is still a presedential style wind up doll saying Vote for ME! Vote for ME! Labor, you've sold your balls for votes. And where is your point of difference with the NatLibs? Buggered if I can see it from this one!

The Loneliness of RECLAIM AUSTRALIA-the rally in Martin Place-SYDNEY 19 JULY 2015

On the way in on the train, I encountered four large, close cropped headed men and their female equivalents heading into Martin Place. One with his XXXL black hoodie with a logo on the back 'Isis Hunting Team, Royal Australian Infidel'. The words surrounding a bullet shattered, grinning skull. At Town Hall, the lads all needed to find a dunnie to relieve their excitement at making the parade. Hitting Martin Place, at least this time I was not being drowned like a fish but I was quickly identified by polite questioning from boys in blue that I was not there to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Reclaim Australia at the top of Martin Place. They were kind enough to let me through to take some photographs but with a reminder if I caused any trouble...                                                                                                            

Off to invade NZ... fush and chups?

The boys waiting for their parade

The Party for Freedom seemed to dominate the posters and slogans for Reclaim Australia. 'Say no to Sharia Law', 'Immigration the elephant in the room', and 'Its a foreign invasion'-only a few hundred years too late on that one. 'Assimilate or Leave!' Ouch! There was a home made sign 'No bacon, no boobs, no beer-no one will be happy.' I guess they were upset at Hooters going into liquidation. Then there was the freedom of speech banner 'Marxist Scum off our streets'. Our streets? A woman interviewed claimed "I believe we are under threat from possibly Sharia Law coming in, or Muslims getting their demands met." Possibly? By what means? The front page of the Telegraph? And which demands will Muslims be getting met? The ones to be vilified in rallies such as these, or the right to be told they are not real Australians until they behave a bit more whitely, sorry Australian as defined by right of reclaim. Ned Kelly made an appearance-reclaim our bank robber hero! And what about the group of four lads dressed in Ulysses clobber? I heard a wee lad ask his father hopefully "Dress-ups?" Then it was identified they were Spartans! Of course! The same Spartans of my book learning who liked nothing better than boot camp like marches with no kit on, followed by a bit of nudie wrestling. Then there was the man from United Patriotic Front with his lolly stick crucifix and the slogan 'Aussie Pride'. If Jesus, a jew and brown was at your rally he would be asking you where is your compassion. Actually,  the police would have grabbed him and marched him down to the other mob, long haired zealot that he is/was. A few hundred had turned up by 10.30am.

Kneeling at the feet of Bronwyn

By this stage even I had outstayed my welcome and asked the kind policeman if I could leave the Reclaim Australia and move down into the counter rally. They were kind enough to let me through to take some photographs but with a reminder if I caused any trouble... And I went to take a photograph just behind the thin blue line when an over zealous fifteen year old weighed down by acne and too much riot equipment hauled me out by my backpack and instructed me 'To get on the other side". Looking like a juvenile RoboCop he must have got the message from a wiser, more senior officer to put his testosterone back in its bag and talk nicely to the old man. 'Would you mind moving down behind the line sir?"

 

Socialist Alliance, Red Flag, the Anarchists were present and a range of Indigenous speakers. It appeared the counter demonstration had tried to engage Reclaim Australia and been pushed down towards the bottom of Martin Place.
One speaker noted three people had been arrested during this including an elder. The younger speaker made the point that Aboriginal opposition to fascism is not new and the tactics of arrest and beatings have been the result of their history of activism. In amongst this a Reclaim Australia supporter pushed his way up through the crowd. Although he had balls of brass-it was met with him being surrounded and confronted. Likewise where I stood an old man making his way up to Reclaim Australia was followed, identified as a racist and taunted. There was heat, some of it unnecessarily aggressive (the old man) but it was defused when an older Aboriginal speaker reminded people not to act in a way which would lead to the anti-racism movement being dismissed because they are violent. Another speaker said let them come down here and debate their understanding of history, test their view of history against Aboriginal history. The speaker was clear who would win. But then even though a few had the balls to walk through the crowd, they did not have the balls to debate and test their views, well, even expose their views to daylight. Which seem to be a call to arms to defend a White Australia, free the streets not just of Marxists, Anarchists and anyone who opposes their narrow view of the world but to make an Australia cleansed of muslim and free of foreigners. It smells like, and behaves like old fashioned fascism. The drums are beating and we have been warned, the fascists are on the rise!
As for Reclaim Australia it is at heart just another conservative movement of people who want to go backwards into what they think were 'better times'. Like the forces opposed to Italian, Greek, Maltese, Lebanese and Pacific Island migrants in the post Second World War up to the sixties and more recently before muslims of multiple nationalities were targeted, the Asians-anyone from India to Indonesia, the Philippines and China. Although Reclaim Australia believes it supports Indigenous people, it is not evident in their rhetoric, more assimilate, be like us not like you and it explains why there was a large number of Indigenous speakers in the counter rally. And like similar conservative movements, think USA 'Tea Party', they are afraid of the future. They think if we were all like them, we would be a better society. 'Assimilate or leave!' And despite banging on the drum of not being racist, or nazis, their fellow travellers, white supremacists, were made welcome at both rallies.

AND THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Admire the spirit comrade!

                                       

Grannies for anarchy

It must be lonely living in fear of difference and the threat that we might not be part of the master race after all. Smells like fascism...

Postscript 1 August 2015: Awoke this morning to hear the English Defence League had marched in my home town of North Shields. One hundred of the mongrels, with their hate infested views. They were counter rallied by over three hundred anti racism supporters. See the pictures in the Newcastle Chronicle on line. Love my people!

Book Review: The Urban Village: Ponsonby, Freemans Bay and St Mary's Bay (2008) Random House New Zealand

Auckland, New Zealand: A History Lost and Found

Now Belgo Geordie was fifteen when his rubbery shoes hit Auckland and just sixteen when he went to live in Freeman's Bay. In a rickety one bedroomed flat at the top of an even ricketier three storied house close to the pub The Sussex (on College Hill) described in this book as "a mess, fights, beer thrown around".

(Left is an image from the book taken from Auckland City Archives-Freemans Bay as it was). Now for goodness sake all the houses were made of wood-to eyes fresh from England, like a stage set for a spaghetti or Saturday morning western. And even up on the third floor, there were rats, and rat sized holes gnawed through the kitchen cupboards. Cupboards that had seen better days back in the Second World War years. Not to mention the small holes made by borer (a small beetle that could reduce wooden furniture to dust). The bath, brown stained enamel was fed by a contraception (an empire era caliphont) like a metal melted tea pot that spewed more steam than water and dripped when not in use. 
At least it wasn't winter and cost the sum of NZ $15 (at that stage half my wages) but it was home, mine and safe, or so I thought. Putting Groundhogs "Split" on the single unit record player (speaker in the lid-needle able to darn socks if required). Putting my few clothes including bri-nylon moss green y-fronts, diamond patterned blue socks and dark blue jeans, chunky and rolled up at the ends. Setting out my bag of books-Bobby Seale's "Seize the Time", next to "Cider with Rosie". Settling into the sagging single bed and its crust hard, kapok mattress setting an alarm to make a 6am shift at the central post office I fell into sleep with the stale smell of cooked lamb and root vegetables, the murmurs and crashes of languages that were not my own. Maori I thought, Samoan I learned later. It was after midnight when I heard heavy steps pounding up the stairs, past the first floor, not pausing on the second but growing louder as they raced up the narrow staircase and with barely a pause my front door crashed open, splintering the entire frame. I am not sure who was the most shocked. Me or the Samoan man with a huge Afro, who stood breathing through his nose, fists clenched by his side, stinking of beer, cigarettes and angry sweat.

Now I should explain Belgo Geordie was not then the fat balding oldie he is now. He was a skinny white boy with shoulder length brown curls, with white legs like pipe cleaners. A bit like the chap in this picture but far more handsome. But then already in me short stay in New Zealand, I'd been mistaken a number of times for a girl. Which was why Belgo junior was given the job of sorting mail with the wahines and a few alcoholic men with the shakes, rather than working unloading the large mail bags from the back of the cavernous white framed Bedford trucks with big strapping Maori men-who kept asking me for a date and laughing hysterically. 

So, I thought I was in for a hiding and without knowing why. But, in the moonlight on my side of the door and a bare electric bulb providing a backdrop to his Afro, the man decided I was obviously not the one he was looking for. He turned and as quickly clattered off down the stairs. I comforted myself with a small observation-he was wearing steel toe capped boots. He satisfied his frustration with being thwarted by slamming the front door so hard the handle fell off and rattled down onto the wooden porch like a poorer cousin to a church bell. I was left to climb out of my bed, shaking like a new born colt and leaning the door up into some sort of order against the shattered frame. 
I moved out the next morning and was docked a days pay as I went looking for somewhere else to live and found it six streets away, in Ponsonby. It was suburb love at first sight and lasted me until it was no longer practical or affordable to live in the area.

Georgina Street 1971 by Mike Pritchard

So picking up this book of the photographic history of the area and plenty of images from those heady seventies days is a great reminder for someone who came to adulthood in the streets around and surrounding Ponsonby and rubbed shoulders with many of the characters captured in this book. It is almost 450 pages of photographs, stories and personalities. An urban history, a shrine to my era, an area which was run down, poor, full of amazing houses and a mix of people that made it exciting to live amongst and be part of. 

Such as the great waterside union man Jock Barnes and his communist mates-always good for a bit of crack. The fiery but big hearted and unpredictable Betty Wark and her docile almost Buddha like side kick-Fred Ellis.

Betty Wark by Gary Wark

Anyone needing a meal Betty would feed and anyone stepping out of line Betty would belt. The great parties held by the Polynesian Panthers and Nga Tamatoa where the trotskyists from Resistance Bookshop inevitably took a hiding for telling Will and co how to radicalise and organise. And Roger Fowler, People's Union stalwart, peering through his John Lennon glasses, butter wouldn't melt expression belying a blow torch political mind. He almost caused me to be arrested in the Gluepot for underage drinking (I was 17) by the police task force or Dawn Raid squad-Fowler pointing at me across the crowded pub telling them I was only 15. A diversion to let some of the Polynesian boys make their escape before they were asked to produce identification.

Image: John Miller

Filling paper rubbish sacks with fruit and veg and coming across fruits never seen before and veggies with no idea how to boil, roast or use as cricket balls. The veggie/fruit co-op hippies sharing bottles of beer with the Ponsonby Rugby Club players in the big dirt floored, tin shed off John Street-all joined by a love and passion for rugby and as long as there was no talk around religion or politics both sides rubbed along fine. The fences in their seedy cluttered shops along Ponsonby Road dealing in stolen goods and charging an students an arm and a leg for junk and then buying it back for tuppence!. Warrick Broadhead turning up wild man and bearded deported from Canada and then in full drag at the University and his colourful asexual sister Mary dressed as a boy, knowing all the lyrics to "Hunky Dory".

From Inner City News

I tell people of Belgo Geordie's arrest for obstructing the footpath outside Osborne House-(in the picture on the left) and there is a photograph in this book of the demo-we picketed it for weeks to try and keep it as a hostel for old men who had nowhere else they could afford to live-rather than flattening it and turning it into an agricultural goods warehouse.  Then on the one night/early morning we had a minimal picket the demolition team moved in and it was all on. Five of us were arrested for sitting in the driveway including Mr Fowler. But it is a Maori boy Tony Ormsby who put a brick through a truck window who did prison time at Mt Eden. We were not charged for putting sugar in petrol tanks and although  we were threatened with a beating from the arresting cop nothing eventuated. But it made the early evening news in glorious black and white. The rest of the day in the Auckland watch house with the drunks before a brief court appearance the following morning. In that time while locked up, the house was flattened to kindling and dirt. At court, watching a rotund and perspiring David Lange, with a cow lick, schoolboy hairstyle, beaming like a lighthouse representing someone else while our People's Union lawyer Barry Littlewood told the judge how sorry I was to have got myself arrested-so remorseful and slapped a hand over my mouth when I went to say "Like fuck!" Roger Fowler, as always got to make a political speech and was reminded by the judge, the judge knew his parents. I forgave Mr Littlewood a year later when he paid my then $31 fine (it was $15 but as I turned outlaw and refused to pay money to the capitalist state-the state repaid the compliment and added interest). That is I was on the run for two years until the police picked me up early one morning in an Auckland park. I was off my nut enjoying the stars but the two cops thought I was planning a burglary. Bless those more innocent times. Another year they would have looked into my eyeballs and arrested me for being under the influence. As it was they checked on their new data base and found I had an unpaid fine. Mr Littlewood rolling his eyes when I approached him for representation and sent me down to the court to pay it.I think he gave me advice along the lines of "Don't be a tit all your life!"

So this large book certainly stirred up the memories and reminded me I haven't quite lost the plot yet. Some of the stories I have relayed over the years are found amongst these pages. Some parts important to me are not there like Billy TK-incendary Maori guitarist, along with the Alternative School in Richmond Road and as for the Hostel for Maori Virgins on Shelley Beach Road, zealously guarded by an order of nuns trained to protect virginity like a sacrament. Anita Peters photographs. Or Jimmy Baxter roaming the streets, a mournful, mumbling or was it praying? Large wooden cross around his neck, a prophet in search of a drink, a smoke or a feed to keep the string tight around his over large trousers.

A Belgo Geordie original circa 1974 worth squillions! Any offers like?

In 1977, I left New Zealand and when I came back in 1981 to live in Lincoln Street (off Ponsonby Road but at the Grey Lynn end) the guts had been ripped out of a multi-cultural mainly poor suburb and gentrification started. Other than a brothel on the top of Franklin Road, and Mrs Ivan with her beehive hair do and killer fish and chip meals with six slices of white bread troweled over with yellow, full cream butter. Tea you could stand a spoon up in, served dark brown, piping hot, in large white cups and saucers with dollies and plastic table mats. There was also the post hippy food eatery Fed Up.  But a lot of the spark had gone. I missed the Polynesian flavour, the street life and the chaos of the shops but was glad to see the slum landlords also gone. Sadly they had just moved their business further out and were still preying on people's poverty and causing misery. Of course a new life was creeping around, slightly edgy. The Gluepot had just hosted the last Toy Love gig and Chris Knox was still prowling around the streets of Grey Lynn. Grey Lynn festivals were starting, Kohanga and other language nests were still operating out of Richmond Road School. And on a Sunday you could still hear Polynesian choirs in the small Tongan church in Sackville Street and performer impressario/living art work Warrick Broadhead still turned up in unexpected places in full costume performing epics in ways they were never intended - little liberal parented kids scared shitless by magnificently cruel over blown red queens and poisonous yellow dwarves. And Limbs, modern dance, still gathered blisters dancing the wooden floors of Brown Street. There were still artists (Tony Fomison in his e-lavalavas, his new tattoo and little else) and Warren Tippett throwing beautifully coloured pots and plates from his kiln at the back of his house just off Richmond Road.But I had left the New Zealand of Rob Muldoon and returned to the New Zealand to the 1981 Springbok Tour and the subsequent rise of Jim Bolger. Nothing after that was the same.

I thank the two women who put this together. It is a book of memories.

LOOKING FOR ALBO.....Will the real Anthony Albanese show his-self, your country...well some of us, need you

Classical seventies brick work

"The problem isn't that Tony Abbott's stuck in the past, it's that he wants the rest of Australia to go back there and keep him company"
Albo serves up the dish circa March 2014
There's nowt like a fellow trade unionist to bring you to yer knees with a bellow of disbelief and gut wrenching despair. "I hear if Labor roll Bill Shorten and its looking likely, then the chatter is they'll replace him with Tony Burke. "... It was well intended, the comment like, but if I could have farted...it would have been a piece of hail the size of Bronwyn Bishop's handbag. AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH! !!! Not the member for Watson for fooks sake!Is that the best they can come up with. Why? Do they ever want to win an election? Is Labor a party of the left or of left over centrists with as much leadership option, charisma and charm as a bus shelter. Do Labor want to stay stuck in the blender of no vision, no direction, no pulse. Where's Albo "I like to fight tories, it's what I Do!" in all of this I asked in a manner of balding geriatric grasping at straws. "Naw, they won't pick him, he's a team player"...Well that had me reaching for an extra large (bariatric) oxygen cylinder and me liquid adrenaline pump and twelve inch needle sharpened like an ice pick. When I came to, Tony Abbott was still prime minister and the world was just that much more a scary place..to quote American poet Gil Scott Heron "Three More Years...Three More Years OF THAT!" An' anoother three years in 2019 and finally, finally...they choose Albo! I think I'll go off and darn me socks with barbed wire.

The joker in Marrickville July 2015

Murder most foul in Canberra 1997...or a shallow, self-obsessed, disordered girl's grasp on reality and its grievous consequences

Ms Garner takes this project on in the aftermath of the collapse of her third marriage. 18 months after the event at the centre of this book. although there is a reluctance she is drawn in to a story. Murder suicide discussed at dinner parties by bright young things and then carried out. Although professing an open mind, from the opening of this book her view of protagonist Anu Singh is guilty as charged. As much based on her (the writer's intuition) as the evidence of a second, judge only trial. Then the book is justified as a means to bring the forgotten person in this story, the murdered Joe Cinque, into focus and give witness; tell his part of the story. It does not do so with any effect until the last chapters and then only in part with less attention or depth, analysis or concentration than is given to either Anu Singh or her co-charged Madhavi Rao. Yes the story of befriending his grieving, devastated parents is told. But they have more meat on their story than does Joe. It is very much Ms Garner's journey into darkness regarding the trials, courts, legal system, expert witnesses-particularly unilluminating because she has already decided she knows Anu Singh and 'her sort of woman' well. 

Only the chapter (a later discussion with the judge from both trials this book examines in depth, Justice Ken Crispin) that asks of the morality and ethics in our legal system as opposed to justice is thought provoking/engaging; providing the sense the writer is thinking outside of her preconceptions. It is ironic this discussion tagged onto the end of the process does not seem to cause the author to reflect on her thinking about the view she has formed other than to wring her hands that it is more complex an issue than just guilty as charged.

Likewise Helen Garner exposes a poor understanding of a range of mental health conditions and the expert and divisive (contradictory) expert evidence that is part of the territory of these areas. I found her marginalisation of Professor Paul Mullen breath taking. I know his work on stalkers and querulous litigants well. Professor Mullen has international standing for his work in forensic psychiatry-the respect he is held in is due to his experience and knowledge of working with people with severe personality disorders. Ms Garner appears to sniff at this, his Englishness (I thought he was a New Zealander), and to dismiss his views because they do not concur with hers. Forged from background reading and her days in court observing the accused, her friends or social group and the family of Joe Cinque and then fitting this in to what she thinks and knows. Professor Mullen's cannot, being a gun for hire, see the obvious. How could Anu Singh be anything other than a cold blooded and manipulative killer using psychiatric babble to pull the wool over our eyes! Isn't it obvious by just looking at her? Hearing how others describe her. Then by her own words and actions? No, and that was the problem in this case which Ms Garner does not attach weight-intent. After reading this book I am no clearer on Anu Singh's intent on killing Joe Cinque-Just that she did kill him and in a cruel, compassionless, lab rat kind of way.

However, like Ms Garner, on reading this book, I cannot argue against that Joe Cinque, nor his family were served well by the legal system and nor was justice. The information about Anu Singh provided by Ms Garner and in the public domain does require clarity on the level of Anu Singh's responsibility. For me the universal tragedy in this story (and Helen Garner does pose the question without broadening it's impact) is this; In a group of young, smart and ambitious students-where was their individual or collective moral compass? Why did they not stand up for Joe Cinque even during their attendance at the trial-Rather than treating both trials as if they were being exposed to an unpleasant sideshow that was getting in the way of them getting on with their lives. He was dead wasn't he? Move on! Where was the remorse? Where was their compassion? Their reflection on they got it wrong and have learned to be more morally strong people? It was the sense of the majority of these young people, 'his friends' having learned nothing that made Joe Cinque even more invisible and his very existence as a human being expendable. 

For me, Anu Singh appeared in these pages as someone with a very tenuous grip on reality. Dangerous? Undoubtably, as circumstances proved but seemingly without any effective moral guidance other than her own warped view of the world around her. She was not effectively challenged in her narcissistic beliefs either in her peer group or family. No one stood up to her or stared her down. She did not seem to possess a thread of self-reflection or anything which indicated she did know right from wrong. Is that still not the test for diminished responsibility? Was she even effectively tested on this capacity? It appears not from what is written here. Nonetheless, diminished responsibility? Perhaps-but this should not be an excuse or a defence for the actions she took but a legal system would be unlikely to expose this and did not. Morality and ethics as the judge pointed out have little part to play in court. Adversarial argument and rebuttal do. Into this paradigm this book and author fall. Guilty as charged? No, more complex than that. Undoubtably guilty in a lack of morality and responsibility and remorse and no insight that what she did was wrong to Joe Cinque but in that she was not alone. And Joe Cinque, basically a decent man with a life ahead of him, whose one fault was to love her and not see the danger coming. If Helen Garner had included in this book as fleshed out a portrait of Joe Cinque with as much depth as she did for Anu and later Rao, then it may have truly been a consolation; a suitable memorial other than the endlessly used line "And Joe Cinque is dead". We know, but why? From reading this book,that we still do not have a clearer understanding of.

Helen Garner is like Janet Malcolm ("In the Freud Archives" a hatchet deconstruction of Jeffrey Masson). Intelligent, with an engaging writing style. She inserts herself into the text so that by the end of particularly her non fiction you have an idea of her personality, beliefs and character. You either are a fan/friend or not. I am not.