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My December-January South Sydney Herald story

01 Dec

Shuffling the years with Bev Hunter

Like old Dan in Judith Wright’s “South of My Days” John and Bev Hunter have seventy years of Darlington memories hived up in them like old honey. “It was a great place. We had the best of it,” Bev recalls. “It was a really safe area. You could leave your key in the door, or leave it open, or the key under the mat. You never got shut out.”

“It was terrible, what happened. ‘Progress’ they call it, but the Town Hall where everyone had their birthday parties, engagement parties, wedding parties – that went. But we did save the old school, which is a music room now, and the gates with the war memorials. How many were affected? You’d have to look at the James Colman Report on the expansion of Sydney University into the Darlington area.” Bev has a copy in front of her; it came out in 1976 and is in Waterloo Library.

There were some, apparently, who helped themselves to people’s property even before they had fully moved out. Some of the local hard men soon dealt with that. “It was pretty tough in those days,” Bev says. “But we did get enough support to stop them crossing Shepherd Street” – referring to the University of Sydney which began encroaching on Darlington in the 1960s and has now swallowed up almost half the suburb.

Not the first time the area was devoured of course. In 1788-9 the “Kangaroo Ground” (as it was then known) was set aside for educational and other purposes, though it would be the 1850s before the University actually appeared just above the swamp and lake that formed one of two sources of Blackwattle Creek. By 1791 most of the Cadigal had succumbed to smallpox and other hazards. In 1835 the botanist Thomas Shepherd had a nursery there named in honour of Governor Ralph Darling; the street names – Ivy, Rose and so on – reflect that origin. By the late 19th century Darlington was well established as the working class suburb John and Bev Hunter were later born into.

One of the attractions for young people in the 40s and 50s of last century was the Surryville. Johnny Devlin & the Devils, from New Zealand, started a permanent Tuesday night dance at the Surryville, but the place had been jumping long before that. St Vincent de Paul’s had an event there: “In the winter of 1903, the Society organized at ‘SurreyVille’ for the’ distressed poor of the parish’ a Bread and Butter Dance which was hailed as ‘a perfect success’. Thirty-three lady parishioners, ranging from Madame Huenerbein to Madame McSweeney furnished a generous table free …Rickett’s string band discoursed the music and Miss May Stanley played the extras’ . G.Smythe provided Arnott biscuits, E. and G.Humphreys the cordials, the chemist Mr. M.H.Limon the programmes, and four local butchers the meat.” Bev remembers the alcohol-free dance nights. “We used to walk up to the Surryville, where the Wentworth Building now is, and walk home again around 11pm – that’s how safe it was then”

But the University did provide work too for local people in the 60s and 70s. Bev herself worked as a cleaner in the Wentworth Building from 5-9am, then worked at a shop on the corner of Calder Road and Shepherd Street, which she eventually owned. Later she was in the hamburger bar upstairs in Wentworth. The Calder Road shop did much business with students from the new Engineering School; among Bev’s customers was Frank Sartor with whom Bev would in time be on Sydney Council. Bev’s activism in that role is local legend now. Her community work was acknowledged by the Council in 1988 with an Australia Day Award for voluntary work. She had also become a JP during those activist days so she could save people having to walk up to Newtown Court to get their documents witnessed. She is still an active JP.

Bev and John raised three children in Darlington. Retired to Long Jetty, she still feels part of the Darlington community. Some of their old neighbours now live not far from their new home, including one who was John’s next-door neighbour in 1939. Bev still has relatives and friends in Darlington and visits quite often. A sister-in-law and her family still live in Calder Road.

Acknowledgement: St. James’ Forest Lodge parish history (online) for the account of the St Vincent de Paul event of 1903

 
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Posted by on December 1, 2009 in Australia, Australia and Australian, local, nostalgia, reminiscences, South Sydney Uniting Church

 

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Mary Travers – and more nostalgia

18 Sep

Here is the very album I bought as a teenager.

ppm 001

 
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Posted by on September 18, 2009 in America, memory, music, nostalgia, USA

 

…another school term, and much else, going down the tube…

14 Sep

New Series: Entry 12

rabbit 16 September 2004: It turns out the Salt Mine’s Deputy went to the same school in Armidale where Mister Marsden (see previous entry) was a junior seminarian…

Oh yes, the computer – a Pentium 4 – in my Salt Mine staff room was stolen yesterday afternoon: all its inner workings neatly removed. There’s been a bit of this happening lately.

Back in 1962 Dr Marsh, the best lecturer on Shakespeare I ever had – he had completed a book on Cymbeline while in prison in South Africa, told our tutorial group who, at the time, were discussing Yeats’s "The best lack all convictions, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity" that the problem with the then South African regime, which he opposed, was not that they were evil but they were so absolutely sure they were right. This came back to me while watching With God on our Side last night.

You will get the general picture very effectively by perusing The Jesus Factor, a PBS production. On that site Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner Magazine – well worth visiting, says:

… When Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney talk about the necessity of American power and supremacy, military supremacy in the world as the only way to peace, I understand that as a foreign policy. I think it’s not a wise foreign policy, but I understand it.
When President Bush adds God to their formulation and says God’s purpose or intention is somehow linked with American military preeminence, that’s a very dangerous thing. President Bush [and] the White House basically choreographed a liturgy at the National Cathedral. President Bush was a chief homilist. In the pulpit of the National Cathedral, he made a war speech. He called the nation to arms in the pulpit of the National Cathedral, and he claimed a divine mission for our nation to rid the world of evil.
That is not only bad foreign policy or presumptuous foreign policy — I would say it’s idolatrous foreign policy to claim God’s purpose for that mission. And in the language that Mr. Bush has used, he does this again and again and again. Our role, and his role as president, this is acclaiming a righteous [decree] that Pax Americana is God’s foreign policy. This is a very unsettling thing.

Unsettling all right. "It is sobering to recall that … Athens, as the leader of the Delian League, was destroyed when it arrogantly began to impose its will on other states," writes Denis Kenny in the latestDissent. "President Bush especially, has been congratulated by his supporters for his ‘moral clarity’ in waging the ‘war on terror’, when by any recognised thical standards his pronouncements read like those of a moral cretin." In the same magazine, Dirk Baltzly says: "Whatever its moral value, deception has sometimes been used successfully as an instrument of foreign policy. Self-deception never has." Looking at the escalating insurgency in Iraq, and the manifest continuance of terror elsewhere, not to mention the fact that recruitment to terror is actually rising, it is hard not to see the black-and-white nostrums so beloved by George Bush and his offsiders – Condy Rice is another born-again for example – as setting them all up, and us, for self-deception. Not evil: just too damned sure they are right.

"Two-valued orientation, the mindset that perceives a clear separation between good and bad, black and white, right and wrong, is a stage of consciousness that everyone experiences as part of the maturation process. Some people remain there instead of growing into the more nuanced stage of formal operations and beyond, and these people can be described as fundamentalists. They exist in Islam, and also in our society. Not all, or most, fundamentalists are terrorists or capable of terrorism, but all, or nearly all, terrorists are operating at the fundamentalist level of human consciousness." So writes Courtney Nelson in "THE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT: AFTER 9/11/01." Good stuff too.
We have not been well led…

  • "Let’s look at the facts for a second. The Bush/Cheney administration’s record on terrorism is not exactly the best. They delayed military operations in Afghanistan long enough for Osama bin Laden to escape our grasp. They failed to crack down on Saudi Arabia, the country that produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. And, in the coup de gras, they attacked Iraq, a war that terror experts feel was a diversion from the real war against Al Qaeda. In the words of the author of Imperial Hubris, who wrote anonymously but is known to be a senior CIA official fearful of losing his job, the Iraqi war was a ‘Christmas present’ to bin Laden. We gave him a delay from our operations against him while at the same time leading many new recruits to terrorist groups." — "The Politics of Terror" by Dave Rosenberg (The Bentley Vanguard | Bentley College Thursday, September 16, 2004.)
  • Far graver than Vietnam – The Guardian (UK) Thursday September 16, 2004: "’Bring them on!’ President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is ‘winning’ in Iraq. ‘Our strategy is succeeding,’ he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday. But, according to the US military’s leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush’s war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: ‘Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse, he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.’ He adds: ‘Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends’…"

    Falwell_Robertson Last night we had a reprise of Jerry Falwell’s disgusting comments on the subject of September 11 2001:

    I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

    A soul-mate of Abu Bakar Bashir?

    # Just in case you have been wondering and hadn’t noticed the date, this is from my long dead Diary-X blog, second series 2004. I have found a CD-ROM with quite a few archives on it.

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    Posted by on September 14, 2009 in blogging, nostalgia, reminiscences, reminiscing, replays

     

    A five-finger exercise

    12 Sep

    While my coachee slaved away on a Trial HSC English Advanced paper this morning I undertook to answer the creative writing question from our previous session: “Select one of the following quotations. Use this quotation as a catalyst for your own piece of writing on belonging.” I think I rather overdid the thematic side, but I was hoping to demonstrate how this rather artificial task may be done. It isn’t fiction, but that’s in the parameters given.

    c) “My fondest childhood memories”

    When you think about it there is a lot of truth in the old Catholic saying “Give me a child to the age of seven and I will show you the man.” By that age our sense of identity, which is so much shaped by our sense of belonging to family, home, town and country, are basically set – if not in stone, at least firmly enough that escape if needed is quite difficult.

    In my case my grandfather rather than my father was the key influence. My father, you see, was rarely home, being overseas with the RAAF, so my family were living with my grandparents, and the one who had time for me most was my grandfather.

    My grandfather was a retired teacher. I don’t know how he did it, can’t remember, but before I went to school I could already read and tell the time. This led to early alienation in Kindergarten. Invited in week one to “write” on the blackboard I wrote “Sydney Morning Herald” and the date. I gather the teacher was not amused and rang my mother to complain – strange as that may seem.

    He was a mine of information, my grandfather, and I was a hyper-inquisitive child. Once he was gardening and I asked him: “What are snails for?” He stood up and took me round the garden, showing me snails, describing their life-cycle, their means of locomotion and their feeding habits and why, if we wanted our lettuces, he had to get rid of them. “Yes,” I replied with precocious analytical skills, “but what are they FOR?” Since the metaphysics of the snail was not something that had occurred to him he became uncharacteristically short with me and called out to my mother, “Get this bloody kid out of here!”

    I never have found out what snails are for, but I guess they fit into the web of life. Even snails belong, don’t they?

    Another thing about my grandfather was that he talked to just about everybody. He was genuinely interested in their lives and what they did. I would accompany him on his walks and get impatient as he stopped at this fence or that gate to chat to someone for what seemed like hours to me. I was not displeased though when he would climb over the railway fence to chat to the driver of the milk train when it was waiting at the siding for the express train to go through. There were steam engines in those days and I was enthralled standing on the tracks with my grandfather as the fireman and driver leaned down from the cab to share finer points of their trade.

    On the other hand, so I am told, when my father at last returned from overseas my first words to him were “Get that man out of here!” (Perhaps I learned the expression from my grandfather.) To me my father was the picture on the dressing table, not this large imposter who had suddenly disrupted my life, just when I had my mother pretty much in control. What this may have done to our relationship, indeed to my father’s recovery of his belonging, I can now only guess – but it did rather colour our later lives.

    You can see what a network one close relative can set up for you in those formative years. With my grandfather I explored so many aspects of my environment and he was, you could say, my map-maker. Through him were developing all those templates of background, culture and place which shape so much where “I” fits in – belongs, indeed.

    There are many other stories I could tell of my grandfather. Did I mention he only had one eye? No? But that is another story.

    I was 21 when my grandfather died. He had mentored me in so many ways, easing the pain of high school maths, answering my incessant questions about other countries as we browsed the atlas together, showing by example tolerance of people from other cultures, leading me (without pressure) to emulate him in my choice of career. If he were removed from my life story I wonder if I would today have the network of belongings that I now possess, modified as they may have been by other experiences and circumstances. Nonetheless, if I look for the rock on which it all has been built I need look no further than those childhood experiences with Roy C. – my grandfather.

     
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    Posted by on September 12, 2009 in creativity, curriculum, education, English studies, ex-students and coachees, exams and assessment, humanity, nostalgia, personal, writing

     

    Sunday is music day 24: Click go the shears…

    06 Sep

    … or perhaps “Quick go the shears…”

    Yes, that is SO Australian. But it tells of time past rather more than time present, and is more true of 1909, even 1959, than of 2009. All things must pass, as the article I linked to above in The Australian notes.

    THEY are becoming icons of a passing era. As sheep numbers continue to plummet, so do the carloads of shearers crisscrossing the backblocks in search of work.

    In Western Australia, where some of the big remote stations could carry up to 60,000 head of sheep in their heyday, the harsh realities of modern life are threatening to turn our most romantic profession into nothing more than a curiosity…

    In 1971, there were 155 million sheep across the nation, propping up the long-held notion that the country had made its luck off the sheep’s back. Today, there are fewer than 70 million, and that number has been dropping annually by anywhere between 5 and 8 per cent over the past decade. That trend is not expected to change…

    Here is another rendition, in its own way a marker of how this country is changing.

    Well, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube…

     
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    Posted by on September 6, 2009 in Australia, Australia and Australian, generational change, memory, multicultural Australia, music, nostalgia, Sunday music

     

    Glebe revisited

    13 Jul

    As I mention on the photo blog, I went over to an old stamping ground of mine today: Glebe and Forest Lodge. One reason was to drop off copies of The South Sydney Herald at the bookshops whose proprietors I had interviewed (on Skype!) for my article in the July edition.

    Bit of a private joke this:

    glebe 001

    Cornstalk Books was one of my destinations. The room above the shop – empty then – was the place all but the last issues of Neos were launched between 1981 and 1984. Memories!

    glebe 022

    In the $5 tray outside I picked up something of a treasure: A D Fraser (ed), This Century of Ours: Being an Account of the Origin and History during One Hundred Years of the House of Dangar, Gedye & Malloch Ltd, of Sydney, 1938. I am sure Jim Belshaw would be interested. (I’ll sell it to you for $100, Jim! ;)) I see it is $25 on that catalogue at the link.

    This is the frontispiece by artist Raymond Lindsay.

    glebe

     
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    Posted by on July 13, 2009 in Australia, Australia and Australian, History, Jim Belshaw, Marcel, memory, nostalgia, reminiscences, reminiscing

     

    Sunday is music day 16: Paul Robeson

    10 May
     
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    Posted by on May 10, 2009 in America, music, nostalgia, Sunday music

     

    Sunday is music day 14 — nostalgia

    19 Apr
     
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    Posted by on April 19, 2009 in music, nostalgia, Sunday music

     

    The American Dream – Vanity Fair, Howard Fast, and some right-wing flummery…

    10 Mar

    Very late on Sunday night ABC1 ran an old documentary on US communist writer Howard Fast, best known these days for his novel Spartacus, on which the movie by Stanley Kubrick was based. Since Fast died in 2003 the doco had to be quite old; it included extensive interview material. Fast left the US Communist Party – which he had been in and out of – in 1956 following Kruschev’s revelations about the Stalin years and other events of 1956 in Europe. He was quite a man though, first published at the age of 19 and last published in 2000. His life is a neat alternative history of the USA. There is a good site on his work. Until seeing the documentary I hadn’t realised Howard Fast wrote crime fiction under a pseudonym – especially during the years of internal exile in the Cold War days. And during World War II – while a communist – he virtually was the Voice of America.

    When I was a boy, I developed a passion for Howard Fast’s novels, and read all I could find in my school library. Then, one day, I no longer found his books. Fast was blacklisted for being a member of the American Communist Party…

    "…in May 1952 The New York Times reported intimidation of librarians across the nation by Legionnaires, by Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, by Minutemen in Texas and California. School texts showing city slums, UNESCO material, all books by such threats to the free world as Howard Fast were purged from school libraries."   (Victor Navasky, "The Social Costs," in Naming Names, Viking Press, New York, 1980)

    Citizen Tom Paine, formerly used as a school text, was banned from use in NYC schools. In 1956 Fast broke with the Communist Party, and published his rationale in 1957 as The Naked God. His 1990 memoir Being Red goes more deeply into the issue.

    So with that in mind I read with interest (via Arts & Letters Daily) Rethinking the American Dream by David Kamp in Vanity Fair. It is a good example of the introspection going on post-Bush.

    …Whatever your opinion of [Norman] Rockwell (and I’m a fan), the resonance of the “Four Freedoms” paintings with wartime Americans offers tremendous insight into how U.S. citizens viewed their idealized selves. Freedom from Want, the most popular of all, is especially telling, for the scene it depicts is joyous but defiantly unostentatious. There is a happily gathered family, there are plain white curtains, there is a large turkey, there are some celery stalks in a dish, and there is a bowl of fruit, but there is not a hint of overabundance, overindulgence, elaborate table settings, ambitious seasonal centerpieces, or any other conventions of modern-day shelter-mag porn.

    It was freedom from want, not freedom to want—a world away from the idea that the patriotic thing to do in tough times is go shopping. Though the germ of that idea would form shortly, not long after the war ended…

    …what about the outmoded proposition that each successive generation in the United States must live better than the one that preceded it? While this idea is still crucial to families struggling in poverty and to immigrants who’ve arrived here in search of a better life than that they left behind, it’s no longer applicable to an American middle class that lives more comfortably than any version that came before it. (Was this not one of the cautionary messages of the most thoughtful movie of 2008, wall-e?) I’m no champion of downward mobility, but the time has come to consider the idea of simple continuity: the perpetuation of a contented, sustainable middle-class way of life, where the standard of living remains happily constant from one generation to the next.

    This is not a matter of any generation’s having to “lower its sights,” to use President Obama’s words, nor is it a denial that some children of lower- and middle-class parents will, through talent and/or good fortune, strike it rich and bound precipitously into the upper class. Nor is it a moony, nostalgic wish for a return to the scrappy 30s or the suburban 50s, because any sentient person recognizes that there’s plenty about the good old days that wasn’t so good: the original Social Security program pointedly excluded farmworkers and domestics (i.e., poor rural laborers and minority women), and the original Levittown didn’t allow black people in.

    But those eras do offer lessons in scale and self-control. The American Dream should require hard work, but it should not require 80-hour workweeks and parents who never see their kids from across the dinner table. The American Dream should entail a first-rate education for every child, but not an education that leaves no extra time for the actual enjoyment of childhood. The American Dream should accommodate the goal of home ownership, but without imposing a lifelong burden of unmeetable debt. Above all, the American Dream should be embraced as the unique sense of possibility that this country gives its citizens—the decent chance, as Moss Hart would say, to scale the walls and achieve what you wish.

    On the same page of Arts & Letters Daily was one of those insufferably humorous pastiches of social “analysis” some on the Right seem so fond of – rooted in a superficial knowingness, in impregnable smugness and snobbery masquerading as “conservatism” but really just marking and confirming territory – or “Aren’t I glad I’m not a prole, and neither of course are you!” You know the genre. Here in Oz we have a number of practitioners, not all of them named Tim. The case at hand is a slash at Facebook, and it gives itself away a bit by using the term “sheeple” for those who inhabit the site. Oh, and it’s in the Weekly Standard – of course. See Down with Facebook! by Matt Labash.

    What nobody bothers to mention about the social-networking site is that it’s really dull–mind-numbingly dull.

    Look at the outer shell–the parachute pants, the piano-key tie, the fake tuxedo T-shirt–and you might mistake me for a slave to fashion. Do not be deceived. Early adoption isn’t my thing. I much prefer late adoption, that moment when the trend-worshipping sheeple who have early-adopted drive the unsustainable way of life I so stubbornly cling to ever so close to the edge of obsolescence, that I’ve no choice but to follow. This explains why I bought cassette tapes until 1999, why I wouldn’t purchase a DVD player until Blockbuster cashiered their VHS stock. Toothpaste? I use it now that it’s clear it’s here to stay.

    So I’m not inflexible. But there is one promise I’ve made to myself. And that is that no matter how long I live, no matter how much pressure is exerted, no matter how socially isolated I become, I will never, ever join Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that like so many things that have menaced our country (the Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every crevice of society…

    …the reason to hate Facebook is because of the stultifying mind-numbing inanity of it all, the sheer boredom. If Facebook helps put together streakers with voyeurs, the streakers, for the most part, after shedding their trench coats, seem to be running around not with taut and tanned hard-bodies, but in stained granny panties with dark socks. They have a reality-show star’s unquenchable thirst for broadcasting all the details of their lives, no matter how unexceptional those details are. They do so in the steady, Chinese-water-torture drip of status updates. The very fact that they are on the air (or rather, on Facebook) has convinced them that every facet of their life must be inherently interesting enough to alert everyone to its importance.

    These are all actual status updates (with name changes): "Maria is eating Girl Scout cookies. … Tom is glad it’s the weekend. … Jacinda is longing for some sleep, pillow come to momma! … Dan is going to get something to eat. … Anne is taking Tyler to daycare. … Amber loves to dip. I can dip almost any food in blue cheese, ranch dressing, honey mustard, sour cream, mayonnaise, ketchup. Well, I think you get the point." Yes. Uncle. Please make it stop. For the love of God, we get the point…

    Well OK, the article really IS funny, if also silly. What Facebook is like for you really is up to you. You don’t have to use all those gizmos it offers, nor do you have to accumulate “friends”.

    You may as well rail against the telephone – and I am sure there were conservatives who did.

    On the other hand – and Jim Belshaw has succumbed I see – you’ll never catch me Twittering! 😉

     
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    Posted by on March 10, 2009 in America, generational change, humanity, humour, magazines, nostalgia, personal, politics, right wing politics, web stuff, writers

     

    1949: I was there and even remember it!

    20 Jan

    king_george_vi_small Such was my response as I watched Episode 2 of The House Of Windsor: A Royal Dynasty on ABC the other night. The episode dealt with George VI, with the embarrassing Edward VIII and his American wife walking on here and there from time to time. The link takes you to the gloriously eccentric Professor David Flint’s account of the series for Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. I have even so found the series interesting and I certainly have nothing against George VI. But oh my, how patronising were those old newsreel voice-overs!

    I notice my parents became “Australian citizens” in January 1949 – not that they had come here from anywhere else. But before that they were just British Subjects, for all practical purposes, such as passports. They still were, but now they were hyphenated: British Subject: Australian Citizen. (See Australian nationality law.)

    We still had a Labor government: Chifley. Later in the year we got to know a lot about candles and kerosene lamps, and fuel stoves. We had such a stove in the kitchen at 61 Auburn Street Sutherland. It was to be a year of coal strikes and blackouts. At the end of the year the Reign of Menzies began.

    Consider the things we didn’t have: TV, coffee (or anything we would now call coffee), hamburgers, wine – unless you were a wino or in a somewhat different social circle to that which we inhabited, Aborigines, Asians, even Italians – I speak of Auburn Street Sutherland there. Italians, Greeks and so on were just over the horizon, but hadn’t disturbed our world yet, and Asians, apart from market gardeners in some nearby suburbs, were not part of our scene, while Aborigines were to be visited at La Perouse on a Sunday afternoon, should one want some different entertainment. Salami, pizzas and garlic were totally unknown. As was green tea. Tea was always black, and in two main varieties: Ceylon and Chinese. The latter (Lan-Choo) was a minority taste. Biscuits, like just about everything else, came in brown paper bags, weighed out from bulk tins by the grocer. There were no supermarkets, none. Not such a bad thing that…

    We didn’t have preschools either. I had just started at Kindergarten, but was already reading – Felix the Cat among other things.

    We did have the Sutherland Odeon for the flicks or, more formally, “the pictures” — or perhaps “the pitchers”. No-one talked of “movies” and only the pretentious said “cinema”. At the flicks we all stood to attention as God Save the King was played. No-one I knew questioned that. We were all very much Union Jack people.

    My first students at Cronulla High in 1966 were being born too, or some of them…

    I grow old.

     
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    Posted by on January 20, 2009 in Australia, Australia and Australian, best viewing 2009, History, memory, nostalgia, personal, reminiscences, reminiscing

     

    Friday intellectual spot 2

    16 Jan

    Not all that intellectual today, but two items of interest from the recent Arts & Letters Daily selections.

    The first I immediately thought was another reactionary rant on its subject, but closer examination shows it is better than that. I was put off by the A&L’s intro:

    Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. All in the name of progress… more»

    Much better than that would lead you to expect. You can read the whole thing in PDF here.

    The second is from The Atlantic Monthly: The End of White America? by Hua Hsu.

    "Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

    He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring a different set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone in feeling besieged. The book by “this man Goddard” had a real-world analogue: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in 1920, five years before Gatsby. Nine decades later, Stoddard’s polemic remains oddly engrossing. He refers to World War I as the “White Civil War” and laments the “cycle of ruin” that may result if the “white world” continues its infighting. The book features a series of foldout maps depicting the distribution of “color” throughout the world and warns, “Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”

    As briefs for racial supremacy go, The Rising Tide of Color is eerily serene. Its tone is scholarly and gentlemanly, its hatred rationalized and, in Buchanan’s term, “scientific.” And the book was hardly a fringe phenomenon. It was published by Scribner, also Fitzgerald’s publisher, and Stoddard, who received a doctorate in history from Harvard, was a member of many professional academic associations. It was precisely the kind of book that a 1920s man of Buchanan’s profile—wealthy, Ivy League–educated, at once pretentious and intellectually insecure—might have been expected to bring up in casual conversation.

    As white men of comfort and privilege living in an age of limited social mobility, of course, Stoddard and the Buchanans in his audience had nothing literal to fear. Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class’s political and cultural power than to the perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned.

    From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s. There’s no better example of the era’s insecurities than the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, in which an Indian American veteran of World War I sought to become a naturalized citizen by proving that he was Caucasian. The Court considered new anthropological studies that expanded the definition of the Caucasian race to include Indians, and the justices even agreed that traces of “Aryan blood” coursed through Thind’s body. But these technicalities availed him little. The Court determined that Thind was not white “in accordance with the understanding of the common man” and therefore could be excluded from the “statutory category” of whiteness. Put another way: Thind was white, in that he was Caucasian and even Aryan. But he was not white in the way Stoddard or Buchanan were white.

    The ’20s debate over the definition of whiteness—a legal category? a commonsense understanding? a worldwide civilization?—took place in a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia, and it is easy to regard these episodes as evidence of how far we have come. But consider that these anxieties surfaced when whiteness was synonymous with the American mainstream, when threats to its status were largely imaginary. What happens once this is no longer the case—when the fears of Lothrop Stoddard and Tom Buchanan are realized, and white people actually become an American minority? ….

    Do make sure you read on. It becomes even more interesting, and it is very relevant to our thinking here in Australia, despite its US emphasis, and to our own past. In fact I’ve PDFed it too: Hua Hsu article. Of course there are major differences between the US and Australian experiences, but there is common ground in some of the thinking Hua Hsu alludes to.

    Putting both articles together, you might say a 21st century Tom Buchanan would be running an ultra-Right blog! 😉

    The relevance to our own past? See earlier entries here: That hypothetical Year 10 lesson on “White Australia” and Updating that hypothetical Year 10 lesson on "White Australia". My contention would be that in the context of the time, given what was “normal” thinking in much of the Anglophone world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it would have been very surprising if Australia hadn’t had a “White Australia Policy”. We don’t have to agonise about it, because we have moved on since then. Sadly, not everyone has moved on, as we know, but generally speaking there has been a lot of progress, especially here in Australia.

    It doesn’t hurt our international reputation though to be frank about our own past, while equally assertive about the progress that has been made; I’d go further and claim it is very desirable so to do, setting an excellent example to others less honest about their chequered pasts. That’s why I don’t accept Keith Windschuttle’s special pleading on the subject. Our White Australia Policy was indisputably racist, whatever else it may have been – protective of labour, concerned with Empire and with internal social cohesion, inspired by distance and vulnerability, and so on – all part of the mix too. But it is really not surprising that racist thinking shaped much of the rhetoric at the time.

    Jim Belshaw and I have thrashed this one out several times in the past, as visiting those two posts will show. 🙂

     
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    Posted by on January 16, 2009 in America, Australia, Australia and Australian, computers, culture wars, generational change, History, humanity, immigration, intellectual spot, Jim Belshaw, literacy, magazines, multicultural Australia, multiculturalism, nostalgia, pluralism, Postcolonial, racism, USA, writers

     

    Hmmm… Been blogging for way too long…

    04 Jan

    Five years ago:

    Sunday, January 04 to Tuesday, January 06, 2004

    Sunday: Special for American Readers

    Since about 30-40% of my readers are in America, I thought you’d better have some explanation of this strange game I have been talking about lately. It does, I’m afraid, require a longer attention span than baseball ;-) — as you may see:

    Each side has two innings (plural same as singular), and when each side has completed its two innings, the side with the most runs wins. This is not as simple as it sounds, because cricket matches almost always have a previously agreed time limit, generally in days, with the hours of play for each day specified in advance. If both sides do not complete their innings within the time specified, the match is a draw, regardless of the score. (In cricket, a draw and a tie are not the same thing. A draw is a match that is not completed; a tie is a match that is completed with the scores even.) Therefore to lose a cricket match you have to have your two complete innings and still not get as many runs as your opponents. If the number of runs needed for a side to win is too many for them to make, they can still play to achieve a draw and deprive their opponents of the win by avoiding being “all out” before “stumps” (the end of the match, when the umpires pull the stumps from the ground).

    Match lengths are generally agreed upon in advance as a certain number of days, with the hours of play on each day specified, as well as the breaks to be taken for lunch and tea. The most important international matches (”tests”) between sides supposedly representing the best their countries have to offer are generally scheduled for five days.

    That is from Cricket Explained (for novices), an American site…

    That’s to be found here. But if you scroll up from there you’ll see it really is way too long…

    January 2000

    1 January, 2000

    Well, that date at last. The computer rolled over OK bar one or two things: 1) that PIM generated weird messages, so I deleted it, installing a new address book in Microsoft Access instead; 2) on rebooting this morning I discovered the computer thought it was 2094! I rang G later today and he talked me through changing the date deep in the computer’s BIOS, but the change did not hold so now each time I boot I have to manually change the date back to 2000. G says the only fix would be a new motherboard, but when one takes into account the need for larger memory, graphic capability, modem, sound, it is now (he agrees) more viable to consider a new unit. The price ought not to be too bad given there is no need yet for a new monitor, keyboard, mouse or printer.

    Stayed home for New Year, after having a beer too many at the Flinders yesterday afternoon. Spoke to Ian at the Flinders, who had sent an email to M. Heard that “Dark Cloud” had a fire the day before, and got more details when I rang PK today. Apparently a lantern exploded setting off the sprinkler system in his building. He was subsequently attacked by a psychotic young Greek from upstairs and Dark Cloud’s landlord (Greek himself) said that the basher was threatening to kill Dark Cloud for some weird millennial reason. It is not the first time the crazy had threatened Dark Cloud but the first time in front of witnesses and a translator. The police are now involved, and Dark Cloud is unable to live at home at the moment. His considerable collection of gear (he is a shopaholic) is damp and will go to storage. Meantime Louis and the people at the Flinders are helping out. Which is a nice bit of gay community at work; but what a New Year’s Eve for Dark Cloud.

    Tomorrow is Yum Cha. I rang A to remind him at about 3.00 pm, but he was still asleep; the poor bugger hadn’t got home from televising the festivities until 10 am. C is spending New Year in Royal North Shore Hospital, however; he had urgent work on his leg circulation being just short of gangrene.

    The New Year was pretty amazing on the world stage. Boris Yeltsin resigning (not too soon), the Indian hostages in Kandahar being freed, the Yugoslav Care Australia worker being set free at last. There was much spectacle on TV for the big Y2K; Sydney was truly spectacular, and so was Paris. Beautiful moments included beautiful Maori men (especially the ones dancing in the pouring rain in Auckland), the Gisborne dawn with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, the Sydney dawn, the Uluru Mimi Dancers…Less beautiful was Barry Manilow horribly out of synch in Connecticut. The Great Wall of China was made spectacular by Nature and hordes of colourful musicians and dancers. Guess it was a night to remember.

    And no Armageddon or computer meltdown.

    2 January, 2000

    Reading the magnificent and impassioned middle section of Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows (1987), while earlier in the day I had happened upon some typical gobbets of F R Leavis in Justin Wintle’s Dictionary of Biographical Quotations: disbelief that anyone ever took Leavis seriously– what a dickhead the man was: arrogant, and hopelessly parochial. Smarmy on the subject of Keats, idiotic about D H Lawrence, but not so bad I suppose on Donne and co. Then what of that other idiocy of the later 20th century, the “death of the novel”? Not much evidence for that looking back now from the year 2000! We have in fact been living through a great age of the novel!

    The other thing I’ve been reflecting on while reading this novel (Of Love and Shadows) and thinking too of the most moving item in the great Year 2000 international telecast (Nelson Mandela lighting a candle in Robben Island Prison) is that one of the greatest things the 20th century has bequeathed is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and one hopes that all will see it as transcending cultures, as fewer things are more pernicious than those who for political self-interest or religious reasons reject it as “inappropriate”.

    Yum Cha was a success this morning. A. turned up and was fascinated by the Y2K problem in the computer BIOS. Ian came up with the theory that it may have defaulted to the chip’s year of manufacture, and indeed when I rang G later today he agreed it was possible, as the chip was manufactured in 1994. So the BIOS was ready to change 1999 to 20 something, but became confused; it kept the 20, but defaulted to 94. A. rang later and came back over about 5.30. He had been online at work to the company (Phoenix Technology) who now have the rights to Award Software, the manufacturers of the BIOS. He downloaded a patch onto a floppy disk, brought it over, and we installed it. While the BIOS still thinks it is 2094, the patch enables it to boot the computer to 2000, obviating the need to buy a new motherboard or a new computer just yet. Next step is the modem and signing up to an ISP.

    Mind you, those just sat on my Brother Word Processor for a few months until finally I started a blog, or a site, on something called – what was it now? Some free service that is no longer anyway… That’s right – thank God I wrote it down – Talk City! That’s when I became “Ninglun”… Strange seeing that bit about Dark Cloud.

    And now I find there is a copy of the Guest Book from my original Talk City site on Wayback. I have decided to copy then edit to save some little embarrassment, and to delete all email addresses… I can’t guarantee any remaining links work. It’s over the fold.

    Yep, way too long! Maybe I should stop…

    Read the rest of this entry »

     
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    Posted by on January 4, 2009 in blogging, memory, nostalgia, personal

     

    Such is time… Stream of consciousness, almost…

    13 Dec

    raleghw Before his head was removed, Sir Walter Ralegh wrote this magnificent lyric:

    Even such is time, that takes in trust
        Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
    And pays us but with earth and dust ;
        Who, in the dark and silent grave,
    When we have wandered all our ways,
    Shuts up the story of our days ;
    But from this earth, this grave, this dust
    My God shall raise me up, I trust !

    So here am I, not in the Tower of London contemplating execution of course, but in a Surry Hills flat contemplating the $1400 Mister Rudd so thoughtfully placed in my bank account yesterday. (Very handy to cover a couple of debts, and maybe to buy a new pair of boots…) I contemplate also that next year is the fiftieth anniversary of my comparatively undistinguished leave-taking from Sydney Boys High – well I did win a History Prize after all, I suppose.

    dec11 010 My niece was in contemplative mood a little, I think, in her Christmas letter, which I also received yesterday. Her family has had an eventful year and have done many interesting things, some of them reflecting how The Shire these days reaches out to the world in a way that would have been inconceivable fifty years ago when, as it happens, my niece was born. They are a rather good looking family too, as you may glimpse on the left… The daughter is a promising dancer, I mean seriously promising. Rather proud of them I am, though through circumstances I have seen less of them than I may have done. You may recall we all got together in July when my brother visited from Tasmania.

    I can recall having a few “my God! a quarter of a century!” thoughts when I turned 25, and then, as my niece mentions of herself, even greater wonder when I turned 50 – M gave me a magnificent party – and of course this year I went on the pension, which means I am now…

    dec11 009 And looking back through my bits and pieces (right) I see how quickly the kids I have taught have grown up and made their ways in the world, some of them with great distinction, or making important contributions of one kind or another – one I mentioned just the other day.

    I have every confidence in the young.

    Now, what kind of boots will I buy? A good choice will last me at least three years, as the last pair has…

    In another age of recession Henry Lawson wrote of an even deeper level of misfortune:

    When you wear a cloudy collar and a shirt that isn’t white,
    And you cannot sleep for thinking how you’ll reach to-morrow night,
    You may be a man of sorrows, and on speaking terms with Care,
    And as yet be unacquainted with the Demon of Despair;
    For I rather think that nothing heaps the trouble on your mind
    Like the knowledge that your trousers badly need a patch behind.

    I have noticed when misfortune strikes the hero of the play,
    That his clothes are worn and tattered in a most unlikely way;
    And the gods applaud and cheer him while he whines and loafs around,
    And they never seem to notice that his pants are mostly sound;
    But, of course, he cannot help it, for our mirth would mock his care,
    If the ceiling of his trousers showed the patches of repair.

    I am well stocked with pants…

     
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    Posted by on December 13, 2008 in Australia, generational change, memory, milestones, nostalgia, personal, poets and poetry, reminiscing

     

    Watching The Howard Years has made me nostalgic…

    25 Nov

    No, don’t get me wrong! I really don’t miss The Howard, and last night gave plenty of reasons for that lack of sentimentality…

    But I was reflecting on what I was up to at the time, and the horrible thought is that for much of it I was blogging, mostly on sites that are long gone. You may recall I found out back in January 2008, however, that much of it was not as far beyond recall as I had thought, which is scary, at times more than a little embarrassing, but also satisfying.

    For example:

    January 28 [2001]: A bit of a spray…

    Going to fire shots right and left today, folks. I hope it will be fun. I’m also composing this on my old but lovely Brother Power Note (memory 32kb!), obviously designed for George W Bush, as one of its quirks is to leave out "W" from time to time, so everything must be carefully checked: "ill" for "will" etc. can be most frustrating as spell checkers don’t notice.

    Fancy the poor American people getting George W, thanks to his having pots of money and the Americans having a daft electoral system. Lack of intellect is not a disadvantage obviously; speaking of which there was a documentary here on TV last night about Richard Nixon: scary stuff.

    We have a government here I have little respect for. Amongst other things they strike me as alarmingly deficient in the humanity department, not to mention their lack of a sense of history–except what suits them. One Tony Abbott, a would-be but never-will-be Prime Minister (my bet is on Peter Costello, whom I actually prefer), is a "man with a mission" according to today’s Sun-Herald. "I don’t see why unions should have any special rights and privileges in the industrial system," says the deeply experienced and empathic Employment Services Minister. We no longer need unions, says Abbott, because workers and management can make their own arrangements, thanks to "high education standards and the mass media." Fan pi as they say in Mandarin: the greatest load of it is possible to imagine.

    I have read, thanks to my flatmate, a few of these "workplace agreements". Suffice it to say they are very professionally drawn up–and guess whose interests they serve, hmmm? And guess how many workers, without the skills in industrial relations and industrial law that a good union can draw on, get sucked in by the fine print? I am in a sector that is still unionised, and, while I am not a raving leftie on all issues, I am very glad my cash goes to an organisation that can supply all kinds of support when things get nasty–and they will and do. Employers are not all evil, but their interests cannot be allowed to rule unbridled. In many sectors the profit motive drives inexorably towards exploitation: profiteers are not moral people, never have been, never will be–and many employers are profiteers. Something has to be there to keep them in check.

    Those who argue that economic laws are analogous to natural laws are forgetting that economic arrangements are human creations, like governments and legal systems. They are therefore open to human intervention. One rather obvious fact is that the enormous gaps in the distribution of wealth, the obscene salary packages of many high-flying CEOs, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of the world’s population, cannot go on without some kind of Armageddon. I don’t have slick answers, but I do predict that sometime in the 21st century, either after or in order to avoid such a crisis, people will start rediscovering democratic socialism–one hopes in a less naive form and stripped of the pseudo-science of Marxism.

    Back to Abbott. I heard a particularly nauseating interview with him on 2GB a few weeks ago, conducted by the oleaginous Reverend Doctor Gordon Moyes of Wesley Mission (an organisation that does a lot of good, incidentally). At the end Moyes brayed interminably about the fact we now have a "godly government". Oh my God!

    Or:

    Monday, October 30 2000

    Spent the day at Bondi in a workshop session on policies/strategies on racism. Quite interesting.

    Which brings me to John Howard. "Who is he?" you may ask, if you are in some other country–actually even if you are not. He is the Australian Prime Minister. Here is the joke:

    John Howard decided one day to get to know young Australians, so he visited a school. "Now, children," he patronised, "I have a little quiz. Can you tell me what a tragedy is?" "Oh yes," said a little girl. "If my best friend was run over by a bus, that would be a tragedy." "Close, but not right," replied John. "That would be an accident."

    So a little boy said: "If all the class was in a bus, and it went over a cliff, and they were all killed–that would be a tragedy." "Oh no," replied John. "That is close, but that would be a great loss, not a tragedy."

    Then a little girl said: "I know–if you and your wife were on a plane, and some terrorists aimed a missile at it, and hit, and you were killed–that would be a tragedy." "Right!" said John Howard. "Tell me, how did you work it out?" "Easy–I knew that it would be no accident, and it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss!"

    How disrespectful!

    Or:

    November 7 2001: Australian elections on 10th… and I am praying for a change of government

    I have had the vote now for 37 years.

    For the first half (approximately) of that time, being of mainly Scots/Ulster Protestant background, I voted Liberal, as did my parents and grandparents before me. For most of the second half I have voted Labor, except in the Senate where I have favoured one or other of the minor parties. For the first time ever I will not be voting for either major party in either House.

    As Ian McPhee rightly observed today, there are no Liberals left in the Liberal Party. What we have are conservatives (like Costello) and reactionaries (like the Prime Minister). Of course there are precious few Labor politicians in the Labor Party either, and the crunch issue separating me from them, and the government, has been the obscene asylum-seekers "crisis". I have canvassed that issue before on this diary, so do not propose to do so again tonight.

    Further, while not excusing those responsible for the attacks of September 11, I find myself increasingly appalled by the crudeness of the response by the United States and by our government’s alacrity (supported by Labor) to leap into the action. (Of course I also wish our ADF members well.) Our "non-evil" weapons, to paraphrase George Bush, are likely directly and indirectly to exact a human cost far in excess of the 6000 in the twin towers. I just hope the causes of terrorism are addressed by the world community more effectively at some time in the future. I fear the present course will in sum probably increase the appeal of terrorism in those parts of the world that currently feel, for whatever reasons, obliged to take that path.

    I hope that liberal and secularist religionists of all faiths will become stronger in their opposition to fundamentalism and fanaticism.

    Back home again, I am impressed with much of the argument in Quarterly Essay 3:2001: "The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction" by Guy Rundle. If you want an image of the kind of prat the Liberal Party throws up (and in this case out, after he fell on his face) look no further than Jonathan Shier. He embodied the mindset beautifully. He was just too nakedly prattish to succeed, but he was their man, very much their man.

    You are free to disagree with any of the above.

    I do lean more towards the Labor Party in certain policy areas, especially social welfare, health and education. I feel they could form quite a respectable government, if not an adventurous one. I also feel they will be quite conservative in terms of economic management this time around; their options are limited there anyway.

    M, who experiences nausea everytime he sees John Howard, asks: "Why does Australia want tough leaders? What Australia needs is wise leaders, compassionate leaders." Amen to that–but I can’t recall many: John Curtin maybe? Gough Whitlam? Not wise. Paul Keating? Flashes of wisdom but too much folly. Malcolm Fraser? Only since he retired. Who? Menzies? No, too deep a concept to sum him up, but he was much more of a Liberal than the current crop. Bob Hawke? Plenty of compassion, less wisdom. It’s a lot to ask, M. Depressing isn’t it?

    If you want some idea of what wisdom looks like, revisit the International Declaration on Human Rights.

    And finally:

    November 16 2001: An ex-student in UNHCR

    I had a delightful lunch yesterday with an ex-student who was recently working in Pakistan with UNHCR among the Afghan refugees. What he said did not change my views on the subject; rather the reverse.

    We also talked a lot about school issues and gay issues.

    I have revamped and added to my page about the refugees and related matters. [Updated link November 2008.]  I had admittedly thrown the thing together quickly the other day, and have taken the opportunity to revise and add. There is a much more wicked cartoon of John Howard.

    Evan’s call at that time was that the government’s line was a bit like the “tiger repellent” joke – that despite appearances there was no horde of refugees about to descend on Australia. I had that in mind as I listened to the to-ing and fro-ing on the matter last night and learned what “planning” had gone into the Pacific Solution. Evan went on to some exciting times in Malaysia after that.

    FEBRUARY 2003: After a perilous five-day journey by sea in tongkangs or slow wooden boats, Acehnese displaced by the escalating war in their troubled Indonesian province cross the narrow Straits of Malacca and land on the long west coast of peninsular Malaysia. Their favorite landing spot is on Penang Island. From there they head overland to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office here, a seven-hour journey by bus, where they hope to get some shelter and protection.

    The UNHCR office has been handling scores of requests for refugee status and asylum to third countries since the Indonesian military imposed martial rule in Aceh on May 19. Since then, military operations have, rights groups say, have killed more than 1,000 civilians and displaced 46,000 people. Because of the large number of applications, the UNHCR office has reserved Tuesdays to handle applications from Acehnese to interview, reject or confirm and issue them refugee papers.

    But when more than 600 Acehnese arrived last weekend, they found neither shelter nor protection but police waiting for them…

    The police action, sudden and inexplicable, puts the spotlight on Malaysia’s conflicting policy toward Aceh, a province that has a long history of resistance to colonialism and deep cultural and historical ties with Malaysia because of their proximity.

    There are many Acehnese settlements along the west coast of peninsular Malaysia and several prominent individuals, including actors, politicians and writers, are of Acehnese descent.

    The UNHCR asked police to release the detained Acehnese. "We urge the Malaysian government to grant temporary protection to those fleeing the conflict in Aceh and ensure they are treated in accordance with international standards," a UNHCR statement said.

    In closing the UNHCR offices, "we cannot operate with the police present and deterring people from approaching our office", said the agency’s refugee eligibility coordinator, Evan Ruth.

    At the core of the issue is Malaysia’s refusal to ratify the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees that grants displaced people rights, protection and shelter and asylum.

    I gather Evan is now in London.

    Back to the present

    Jim Belshaw has done two excellent posts today. The first notes the silliness of the Opposition’s stand on deficits: my feeling exactly, Jim, and I wish Debating Society Politics didn’t rule at times like these! The second is Jim’s reaction to last night’s episode of The Howard Years. Jim focuses on Indonesia, having had a long-term interest in the matter and more knowledge than most of us.

     
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    Posted by on November 25, 2008 in Australia, Australia and Australian, human rights, immigration, Jim Belshaw, John Howard, memory, nostalgia, politics, reminiscences, reminiscing, Tony Abbott

     
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