Jack Darmody

It was Jack Darmody's funeral today. He got a good roll up. Jack was a legend of Australian journalism from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when he worked as a police reporter on some of the country's leading tabloids, including the now defunct Daily Mirror in Sydney and The Truth in Melbourne. He broke the story on the Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs hiding out in Australia, arriving at the house where Biggs had been hiding only minutes after Biggs had fled, well ahead of the cops.

Jack was of the old school, when journalists were expected to be drunks and misfits, not the cleancut tertiary educated mob of today. At endless press conferences the young ones are more likely to drink mineral water; in Jack's day if you didn't feel like a beer it was only because you wanted a scotch. He died in St Vincent's Hospital's Sacred Heart Hospice with a flask of rum beside his bed. Their services to the dying, and after all these years of Aids their good humoured tolerance and loving care of the eccentrics who choose this inner-city hospice, are nothing short of excellent.

If not kind to himself, Jack was often kind to others, and was popular amongst generations of cadet journalists for the world that he showed them. Jack would never last in the present clime. He would have been sacked for being drunk long ago.

In amidst the heavy drinking legend, Jack left a trail of ex-wives and broken relationships. I watched the sad face of his son; who no doubt had had a hard time of it all. Jack was known across the pubs of Sydney, for a long time where he lived at the Darlo Bar, in Darlinghurst, in more recent times, after he had fallen and ended in a wheelchair. Housing found him a place where he could get in and out, but it was at Ultimo, on the perimeter of his natural drinking grounds. He was always at the bar early, smoking unfiltered camels, sipping scotch. He had at once a melancholy and jovial air; always good company if nothing else, always happy to catch up on gossip or rail against the present incumbents of power.

Jack never had any intention of stopping drinking. The rest of us might bounce in and out of detoxes or seek help in twelve-step programs, AA, NA or PA, pills anonymous, was the usual range. In eighties Sydney these groups were the height of fashion; even things like Co-dependents anonymous. Or perhaps a group for those who had become addicted to twelve step programs. It reached a farcical stage. But none of this, of course, was for Jack. As sports writer Peter Kogoy said in his eulogy, quoting Walt Whitman: "I am large, I contain multitudes''. The line summed Jack up perfectly . He was bigger than himself, larger than life. Or as one barmaid who went to his funeral, a woman who had spent many hours alone with him in the Darlo noted; "Of all the many barflies I have known, he was the one with the most perceptive intellect."

I remember particularly with Jack one day during the 1980s, after he had finished work as a police roundsman and the decades long war between the city's tabloids, The Mirror and The Sun, had finished with the papers being shut down. I was working as a reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald, and he had for some reason latched on to me as someone who might be sympathetic to the story he was flogging. He was himself an old boxer - as a young amateur he had been known as the The Mooretown Mauler, or whatever the name of the Melbourne suburb was from whence he then hailed; there was a picture of him as a strapping, fit, handsome young fighter kitted out and ready for a brawl, on the brochure that was passed around at the pub. There was, basically, no resemblance between the young man in boxing gloves and the old man who died.

Needless to say, a somewhat different approach now applies from the army of modern PR women. When I tried to refuse a drink, Jack wouldn't take no for an answer. As far as he was concerned, "I'm working" was simply not an excuse not to to drink. He had one of those faces, it just seemed to take up the whole room.

At the time, in the eighties, the Liberal government of the day, or at least its Housing Department, had decided for whatever reason to cut the funding for the boxing ring on the housing estate. It had been a place, no such places exist anymore, where young men worked out, trained to be boxers, got their angst out in sound and sweat, got a bit of exercise, gave them a chance to hang with their mates, to prove themselves, or more commonly, just learnt to defend themsleves in tough neighbourhoods. The boxing gym, unrenovated and unpainted, had been very important to the troubled young lives of the boys who grew up on the estate; their parents drunk, deformed, derelict or dead.

It was not just a working class tradition, but a male working class tradition, and as such was completely out of fashion with the leftwing bureaucrats who's own agendas bore almost no resemblance to the concerns of the working classes they supposedly represented. The first thing Jack tried to do was get a can of beer in the hands of myself and the photographer. His idea of PR was to buy as much alcohol as he could and pour it down the gullets of as many journalists as he could. He had a big green garbage bucket full of ice and beer, with several cartons stashed conspicuously to the side. But as a glorious sign of just how good these days were, two full bottles of scotch also floated in the ice. It was late in the day, about four o'clock, with some of the kids starting to come in from after school, the place large and poorly lit, the smell of sweat. In the ring, an aboriginal boxer of some local renown was warming up. Jack was clearly going to be still there at midnight, drinking and holding court and waging the good fight against the bureaucrats and politicians and arse-wipes in government, many of whom he had already rung to point out the heartlessness of their destruction of this working class gym.

Well the photographs were beautiful and the story got a run. Unlike the cool PR princesses of today, Jack rang up the next day and was fulsome in his thanks. John Fahey was Premier at the time, and from memory, as Jack told me, he had taken one look at the story, stepped in and fixed the problem, not just reversing the bureaucrat's indifferent brutality, but had given the gym extra money and resources to ensure its survival.

MEDIA WATCH:

A number of reports remembered Jack fondly:

Mark Morri wrote in part:

As a storyteller he could write and tell a yarn with the best of them. He could be poignant, witty or straight-to-the-point with a simplicity that could be brutal. But it's more the stories about Jack Darmody,rather than by Jack Darmody, that he will be remembered for. A big man physically, he could fill a bar with his laughter or empty it just as quickly with a growl. To make him laugh was a joy. To make him angry was akin to a death sentence. Many a cadet reporter learnt more about journalism -- and life -- from Darmody in the Shakespeare Hotel than in a newsroom. I count myself lucky to have been one of them. Darmody would sit in the corner, eyes on the door ``just in case''.

As a trained observer and judge of character, he was unmatched and he'd sum people up in an instant -- sometimes to their intense discomfort. Like the armed hold-up squad detective I introduced him toone day. It was a short introduction. Darmody looked him up and down and snarled. After the detective left, which was pretty quickly, Jack looked at me and grunted.``He's crooked,'' he said. ``Who?'' I asked.``Your new mate,'' Darmody said.``How could you know that? You hardly said two words to him,'' I said.``Brand new Italian leather shoes, fifty bucks each way. He\'s crooked. ''A couple of years later that same copper was sent to jail for taking bribes from a drug dealer.

Darmody didn't chase fame, just a story or mate who needed help. He fought for those doing it tough. For years he and best mate John McColl would try to teach boxing -- and maybe some manners -- to street kids at Glebe Gym. It was in a Glebe early opener one morning I asked him if he wasn't worried about the toll that drinking 15 schooners, a dozen rums and smoking 80 Camel a day was having on his health. He replied: ``I'm 48, I've been married three times, once for a week. I have done two tours of Vietnam. I know prime ministers and murderers by their first names. If I go tomorrow, I think I've done enough."

Mark Day wrote in part:

Jack is a reporters' reporter if ever there was one, up there with the best of our times. He's in Sydney's St Vincent's hospice fighting a long battle with that pernicious beast, cancer.

He is as tough as teak and as soft as butter. The cancer must have found his soft side because he would have belted the hell out of it had it been stupid enough to try to meet him head on. Built like aside of beef, he was a boxing champion in his youth and he knew his way around a ring before he knew life on the other side of the ropes. His appearance could be highly intimidating if he wanted to convey the message that he was not to be trifled with -- a man mountain given to scowls, gravel-voiced growls, and body language reminiscent of a bullpawing the ground before charging. But it was mostly an act. He preferred to use words as his fists and he was very handy at it. He wrote like a poet, always on the side of the angels; always in search of dignity for those who had precious little of it.

Not everyone got it with Jack. They saw a barrel-shaped man, utterly devoid of dress sense, with rarely-combed hair and endless Camel cigarettes poking out from a singed but formidable moustache; they heard him demand the facts, the truth, or just the story, and they registered rejection, puzzlement or fear. But those who knew him --particularly women -- found a kind, caring man who would shift heaven and earth to help and protect them. His body had to be so big to hold his heart.

How Do They Get Away With It?

This is the picture of the helicopters I was trying to post the other day; issued as far as I know by the US military. Everyone loves helicopters, of course. Maybe it's a movie thing. I'm still struggling with the technology. l don't, for instance, even know how to make this photograph bigger, although it must be easy. Maybe it's just a function of being 53; an age I never dreamed of arriving at. We've just had the British Prime Minister Tony Blair passing through Australia; and generally the irony of our own so-called "conservative" Prime Minister John Howard getting on famously with a British Labour leader, while our own Labour leader, Kim Beazley, was regularly highlighted for his many perceived failings. Beazley came off second best, compared poorly with Blair, his elegance, his intellect, his sweeping and impressive turns of phrase, grasp of detail and understanding of international politics; who according to the commentators had as a leading social democrat no peer in this country.

Our own left wants to "cut and run" from Iraq, Howard wants to stay. It has been a bizarre positioning. I said on radio one night, the Australian attitude to the war will turn when the Australian body bags start coming back. But Howard has been lucky, unlike America and the appalling toll, over 2300 now I think, the Australian public has not been been disturbed by the harrowing sight. The phone rang with complaints the next morning, how dare I say such a thing. But I shrugged it off. It was true.

Minnesotta farm boys, their handsome smiles, looking smart in their uniform, sad reminders of lives that could have been, had become, at least from this distance, a part of the fabric of American life. The Australian public remains pretty solidly against the war; and the mess, the daily mess, the unbelievable death count, just confirms that. But even so, the fact that we are at war in a far off country, aligned with the never very popular yanks, has had no real impact on the country's psyche or mood. It's disengaged, like a television still running on a garbage tip, the thing simply doesn't seem real. New Zealand took the high moral ground and refused to engage, but not us. With minimum numbers and minimum body counts, Howard has managed to support the US and strut his stuff on the world stage, portrayed as a man of courage and vision who can cut it with the world's leaders. Most journalists, like most of the public, remain opposed. But the commentary, ramped up as a result of Blair's visit, suggests otherwise.

It's all very strange. I remember, too, on radio, commenting the night the Saddam statue was pulled down, that sometimes you knew when you were watching history. The statue fell, but it was a stupid thing to say, and unfortunately impossible to unsay; not that in the fleeting welter of words these things had any great import. The polls suggest the Australian public agrees with Howard, they don't want to cut and run either. We're there now. We have to see the job through. Whatever that job may be. We can hardly take up arms against every country in the world with an oppressive regime. Are we really going to take on Burma, China, half of Africa? But these contradictions, from a child of the seventies and the Vietnam protests, remain as confused and as unsatisfactory as ever.

MEDIA WATCH:

From Reuters:

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Monday that Iraq and Afghanistan were decisive battlegrounds for the values the West believes in and warned of the risk of a U.S. retreat into isolationism.
In a speech to the Australian parliament, Blair made his case for the West to get involved in a broad range of issues, not just on the security front, in its struggle against Islamist militants.
U.S. allies Australia and Britain both have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Australian opposition leader Kim Beazley has said a future Labour government would withdraw Australian troops as soon as possible.
Blair, America's closest ally in Iraq, acknowledged that the war there had divided both Australia and Britain, but portrayed Iraq and Afghanistan as critical battlegrounds.
"Every reactionary element is lined up to fight us. They know if they lose, a message is sent out across the Muslim world that strikes at the heart of their ideology," Blair said.
"We must not hesitate in the face of a battle utterly decisive as to whether the values we believe in triumph or fail ... If the going is tough -- we tough it out. This is not a time to walk away. This is a time for courage to see it through," said Blair, who received a standing ovation.
Outside parliament, about 100 anti-Iraq war protesters, holding placards saying "B.liar" and "Troops out of Iraq", blew whistles and trumpets to try to disrupt the visit, but they were kept well away.

FROM THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE:

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber struck an army recruiting center Monday, killing at least 40 people in front of a joint U.S.-Iraqi military base between Mosul and the ancient city of Tal Afar.In another gruesome discovery in the nation, 29 bodies were found, nine with nooses around their necks.A variety of attacks with guns, bombs, mortars and rockets killed at least 12 other people, including seven who died in Baghdad when a rocket hit a building that housed the headquarters of the Shiite Fadhila Party.And gunmen in four civilian cars kidnapped 16 employees of an Iraqi trading company in Baghdad's upscale Mansour neighborhood.

FROM THE ASIAN TRIBUNE:

The massacre of as many as 40 unarmed worshipers in a northeast Baghdad mosque Sunday has triggered a political crisis that threatens to accelerate Iraq’s descent into civil war while sharply intensifying the hatred of millions of Iraqis for the three-year-old US occupation of their country. Reuters news agency Monday cited Iraq’s security minister accusing "US and Iraqi forces of killing 37 unarmed civilians in the mosque after tying them up." Other police sources said that the victims numbered around 20. While US military sources and Iraqi eyewitnesses have given conflicting versions of the bloodbath, it is undisputed that killings were carried out early Sunday evening by a combined force of US special forces and US-trained Iraqi commandos. The mosque where the massacre unfolded is in a neighborhood that is a stronghold of the Mehdi Army, the militia loyal to the radical nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr. While those killed apparently included some of his followers, others were apparently members of Dawa, which is the party of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and other Shiite parties. The evidence supporting the claims that what took place was a massacre organized and executed by the US occupation authorities is overwhelming. Video footage broadcast over Iraqi television and photographs shot at the scene clearly depict unarmed bodies, many of them elderly men, heaped on the carpeted floor of a prayer room in the Mustafa mosque. As outrage over the incident erupted in Iraq, Washington sought to distance itself from the killings. The shifting US account of the incident suggested a crude attempt at cover-up. Initially, Centcom, the US regional military command, reported that 16 “insurgents” had been killed in a raid conducted by US and Iraqi troops in Adhamiyah, a former Baathist stronghold, where Saddam Hussein was seen surrounded by a cheering crowd after the US invasion had begun.

Costello's

This is a picture of me when I was about 16.

This is a story I came across while cleaning up that I wrote about those troubled times, during the Wood Royal Commission a while back, where the bar Costello's was frequently mentioned. I was probably one of the only people in the Australian media who had even been there. It's all, I guess, about moral ambivalence. I wouldn't write this piece in the same way now; but this is what I wrote back then, and is pretty well happened.

I remember Costellos.

It was a place where as kids we could go to get off the street, get warm, get bought a drink, a feed, find somewhere to sleep for thenight. For many of us it wasn't the place of pedaristic evil that it is being daily painted in the media and the Police Royal Commission. In the very early 70s Costello's was one of the only places in the Cross where young people were welcome. While the evidence from some of the witnesses before the Commission may suggest that they were permanently psychologically damaged by what went on in the less public realms upstairs, how much of this derives from the impact on already disturbed adolescents of the stigma that was attached to homosexuality in those days is a moot point.

For a lot of us Costello's was one of the only places you could go to get off the street, away from the cops and the wierdos. They didn't have youth refuges in those days. There wasn't a queue of social workers waiting to help us. No one wanted to know. Our parents certainly didn't.

Going back home was never an option. And for many young kids I'm sure it isn't an option today. No - I don't support 12 year old kids being sexually abused. If there's one thing I hope to achieve in life it would be that my own children have a happier less emotionally distressed youth than I ever did. But let's get all this into some sort of perspective. Does anyone seriously expect us to believe that you can't buy 14, 15 or 16 year olds in Sydney in the nineties? That to this day an endless stream of sexually confused young men aren't coming in from often abusive homes in the suburbs, seeking adventure, affection, somewhere to sleep. And that most of them, like myself, go on to have careers, wives or lovers, children.

If I had to point to one thing that had scarred my life more than any other, it wouldn't be the number of queens who admired my young body. I don't know how my parents could have let me come home from school on Fridays, change outof my school uniform and come back in the early hours of Monday morning. Knowing what I know now, I wonder how they could have thrown me out tofend for myself within days of my 16th birthday. I remember, drunk as a skunk, standing at the top of William Street, and out of all the miserable chaos of that night one phrase from apasser-by: "He should be at home with his mother."

And around the same period, passing out literally in the gutter outside Circular Quay, blind drunk again. Out of all the hundreds of office workers bustling home to the North Shore, it was a gay man that picked me up and washed the vomit off me, let me have a shower at his house, gave me a change of clothes. It was gay men who encouraged me to finish my schooling bycorrespondence. Who taught me to appreciate music, books, conversation. Who encouraged my first stumbling efforts to write. Who, when I was homeless, sometimes for weeks on end, would give me shelter, food, clothes. Who in later years helped me through university when my own father wouldn't because only pinko communist poofs went to university.

Most of us came from pretty miserable home lives. We were utterly starved of affection. But there was always a queue of queens ready to take us home, buy us drinks, lavish us with attention, probably boast about us afterwards. They were often kind, they were often lonely, they were often alcoholic. A few kindly old souls I remember with affection to this day. People like old Hugh, a retired doctor in his 70s, long dead now, who treated us all as if we were his own children. Who was too much of a gentlemen to ever ask for sex. Oh no dear, I've already had one heart attack, he would say when we offered. Who listened to our problems, cared about us, gave us money and advice when we needed it.

A lot of young men around the Cross were very saddened by his death. For me, old Hugh was one of the first adult men who had ever actually caredabout me, who I was, what I was feeling; who I could go to for help, who was proud of me for trying to complete my education. In the end, who was using who? Costellos was one of Sydney's earliest gay bars, popping up at a timewhen gay pride and gay culture was entirely subterranean, when the sexuality of everyone there was illegal, when the upheavals of the sixties were only just starting to be felt in Australia and when the vast stupidity, ignorance and nastiness of the mainstream culture was something worth fighting against.

At the back of Costellos was the dance floor. At the front the bar. Ifyou were in any way different or remotely adventurous in Sydney in those days, sooner or later you would end up there. As someone who was there, raking over the coals of what happened in that bar more than 20 years ago strikes me as very odd. For everyone who was tormented, for whatever reasons, by their early sexual experiences, there are probably dozens of others that owe their present lives to our so-called predators, to the kindness of strangers.

Here, There, Everywhere

These are the boys from 2UE and 2GB, the two most popular talkback stations in Sydney, with the girl from the Daily Tele in between. They're typical of the new breed of reporter, young, educated, clean cut, professional, good at their jobs. The old days when reporters were assumed to be drunken misfits who wandered into the job because they didn't belong anywhere else are long gone. Now they're all very nice, and what I guess I notice most, clean cut. They might sneak a cigarette, not even that most of the time. They're certainly not dashing down the pub in between filing their stories. Becoming a reporter isn't part of some doomed, tragic destiny; it's a career choice like any other.

This is in the park at the end of a street in Ultimo wherein a seige a man held the police at bay for 29 hours. I've been a bit riled the last 24 hours, for some reason or other, over the government's disgraceful whitewash of the despised Child Support Agency. It's the duplicity, the blatant dishonesty of this government, which disappoints me so. Not that the Opposition would be any better, worse probably, but that is not the point. It is a failure of democracy, a failure by self serving public servants to pay any credence to the people who pay their wages. I should be suprised? It's like being surprised when someone lies to me; it's ridiculous, but true.

Many of the same gang see each other at similar events all over Sydney, asbestos scare, we're all there, man dead in apartment for six months, his skeleton at the kitchen table, we're all there, interviewing the junky neighbours, swapping notes. Apartment block collapses into tunnel. Michelle Lesley, the model charged with ecstasy possession in Bali; returns to Australia. The country's richest man dies, we're all there, outside Kerry Packer's house, as if there was much to get in many of these situations. It's the stake outs that get boring. The absolute hopelessness of some of the scenarios. Four kids dead in burnt out house, drunken mother near by, the usual ratty defacto mouthing off. They've no idea, the smug pricks that run this country, how deeply spread the unease is; how difficult life is for many, how futile the struggle to stay on top. The fat cats couldn't care less. Our taxes pay the fat cats and everything gets worse. That everything works is the biggest lie. That the judiciary have ethics the biggest lie. That bureaucracies such as the Child Support Agency are not corrupt to the core the biggest whitewash. That's the world we've created. I never belonged. I don't belong now.

Silence in the Slipstream

I was trying to post a picture of helicopters in Iraq, but I'm still struggling with the technology. Condoleezza Rice just spent three days in Australia; and generally seemed to impress everyone, even if much of the country disagrees with her and her administration on Iraq. There were some demonstrators who got into a Sydney University Hall, surprising considering the level of security surrounding her, but otherwise most of it was dignified, all the appropriate gravitas. Instead this is a picture from our local park; which despite appearances is a very urban park, with the traffic choked City and Parramatta Roads on either side, and Sydney University on the other. It gets dark a little after five; and walking the dog then, it has that crunching feeling of isolation that all big cities can emanate in the middle of winter.

But we're laughing now. No more rehearsals for Grumpy Old Men. Much more positive. You seem so much happier, they said at the local cafe. I can't believe what I'm seeing, you're laughing. The best way forward was to say nothing. I used to play this game with myself as a kid, of seeing how many days I could go without speaking to anyone. It drove my parents mad. There in the green nightmare, the tiny bedroom, the steep funnel web infested bank that leapt up to the road; the screeching cicada heat in the summer.

I had decided to play the same game as an adult; and then started laughing. It was too ridiculous, painting over fractured thoughts; incoherencies. There were ways forward. The kids will be away for the school holidays. Sam is going to Vietnam; how exciting going to Vietnam for 14 days as a 15 year old. My father was a pilot and I still remember the excitement of those trips. The trick is to enjoy yourself; to laugh at things. Wishing for stability won't alter anything. The settling silence that was descending on all his actions had vanished, magically; and he thought now he could practice his own beliefs; "don't just make do, go for clear view", as the advertisement says.

Quiet As

This was the view in my street a bit more than two years ago, after the death of TJ Hickey. As the SMH reported: "TJ, 17, was impaled on a fence in the inner city suburb when he fell from his bike on February 14 2004. The local community said he was being chased by police at the time. His death became the catalyst for a riot. A coronial inquest found police were not responsible for the accident." It happened on a Sunday. Working a night shift, I had to report on the riot, and then couldn't get home. Went and stayed at Stephens.

It's all much quieter now; since the police moved into the TNT towers next to Redfern station. Their cameras are no doubt pointed down the Block and across the hotspots; and any trouble is promptly squashed. There's almost no one down the Block now, the area of land basically given to the Aboriginal Housing Company by then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Once the centre of urban aboriginal movement, radical, progressive, proud, whatever you want to call it, there are only 16 families left. It fell apart in the 1990s when heroin gripped the area, assisted by government tolerance, the location of a needle bus and health regulations which insisted that police could not conduct any activities which would discourage addicts. It became one of the biggest or the biggest heroin market in the city; an already beleaguered community inundated with the city's junkies; an unlovely mob, desperate, ill, ruthless; capable of anything. Kids crawled around in broken bottles while their mothers nodded off. A bloke with sores all over him passed out at our front door. We didn't want to touch him. We called the ambulance.

All this has changed. Every night there's a fire and they gather around, drinking, in off the train from Kempsey or Wilcannia or wherever, the remnants of once warring tribes in an entirely different place; the shock of invasion collectively experienced. But there aren't many of them and it's mostly harmless, down there in the dark. With the exception some weeks back of the rape of a woman by something like 15 men which turned the mood sour, so much for the noble savage. A drunken band of street alcoholics, their streams of invective still puncturing the night; but nothing like what it used to be. There isn't the same level of drunkenness, of out of control dereliction.

Once you'd regularly hear women in the street after they had been robbed. The Daily Telegraph ran a front page picture of an Asian woman being dragged across the road by her bag. These bags, sans cash, would often end in my backyard and if there was enough to make it worthwhile, licenses, keys, I would take them up the local cop shop. But of course there are still scenes, some hysterical in their bizarre twists. As I heard it, the other night three aboriginal women, drunk as skunks, were having a bit of a dingdong argument opposite the station while the police looked on. Then one of them passed out completely in the middle of the street. Eventually, furious with their non-responsive mate, they dragged her by the air across the street and dumped her at the feet of the coppers. "You look after her, you white c...s" they shouted, arguing with the police before heading off the to the RSL, leaving their friend unconscious in the street.

The war over the future of the Block continues, with the NSW Government in the form of the generally disliked Frank Sartor, former Mayor of Sydney, trying to basically zone the area commercial, while the Aboriginal Housing Company's Pemulway Project, a mix of housing, an open air market, an aboriginal business college, all very progressive and empowering; compiled with some of the city's best architects on side. All ignored as the two dig their trenches and make their statements to the media. While defended as a "sacred place" for aboriginal people, a place they will never back down on, recently planning Minister Sartor, who has all the power, said was looking for "a presence for Aboriginal people in a sustainable way in the broader community of Redfern. When you can integrate them better -- not in a homogeneous sense but in a harmonious sense -- there are wins for everybody." Yes, well, that's why he's hated.

Media Watch:

International Herald Tribune:

BAGHDAD U.S.-led forces pressed on Friday with an offensive against suspected guerrilla targets near the north-central town of Samarra, witnesses said.
"Operation Swarmer" came as Iraq's deeply divided political leadership prepared to meet again, hoping to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that might avert civil war.
U.S. military officials said Thursday that the operation, involving 50 helicopters, was the biggest "air assault" since a similar airlift across Iraq just after the war in late April 2003. That operation was also conducted by the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.
A U.S. military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, said ... that 50 people had been detained and 30 remained in custody. The U.S. military usually describes insurgents as "terrorists," so Iraqis netted in the raids could have just been ordinary farmers from rural areas near Samarra.

A Working Port

The big house cleanup continues; finding old photos, getting organised; function without purpose. The bloke over the road has helped me get the scanner going. I've had it for two years but never been able to work out how to use it. Then the software dropped off the computer, something like that anyway. He was great. The technology still amazes me; just the fact that, like me, everyone on earth can have their own website for nothing. I don't even have a digital camera, just an old mobile phone. And like a lot of seprated blokes, I don't have much money, at a stage in life where it would really help. The computer's not bad, it can play Empire Earth and Age of Empires and all those other big games the kids like, but there are a lot of fancier computers out there. Yet here we are. Astonishing. And where the Information Age leads us in the next 20 years, it is hard to predict. Mobile phones would have seemed like science fiction when I was growing up.

This was the view out the window from where leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley was giving a speach on climate change. It was the day after former Opposition leader Simon Crean had trounced his factional enemy in a bitter and highly publicised by-election; unseemly for a former leader. From the imperial or was it foggy heights of leadership Beazley refused to intervene in the Victorian fight. Like much of the population he couldn't stand Crean. Those who knew him all said he was charming, but it didn't transmit. Whatever telegenic meant, Crean was the opposite. In victory, Crean acted as if he had just won the leadership; again. This was hyusterically reinforced when, after a crisis meeting between the two, with the wives present to dilute the intense awkwardness; when Beazley would happily have been anywhere else. Crean got into his white waiting limoousine; except it turned out to Beazley's. The4y kept the air conditioning running, just to reinforce the sound of our money vanishing.

He was like that this day. He just wanted to be somewhere else. The journalists couldn't have cared less what Beazley thought of climate change; when his enormous almost hour long fine sounding speach to something called the Leader's Forum, sponsored by one of the country's largest builders and developers took forever. He tried feebly to get the issue of climate change on the agenda; weren't we already tired of climate change? Albanese's release today suggested our failure to address climate change was hindering our campaign to stop whaling. And they wonder why they're in opposition; these issues your working Joe couldn't have cared less about.

There was a time when the phrase "working port" caught hold; a handy catch phrase to describe a nostalgia for a Sydney Harbour all but gone; the giant tourist cruisers, the James Cook, the Captain Phillip, their ample decks and kitchn galleys, taking two or three hundred at a time, a glistening, substantial money spinning machine; the polished deck, the gleaming white paint. Beazley had to be talked into walking through the media pack this day; something he normally thrives on; and was far too busy and important to answer the media's questions. So we all had to hang around for the coffee and sandwiches and that enormous speach. He held a presser on the renovated roof top; trying desperately and ridiculously to keep the focus on climate change. My half asked, unfinished question as Beazley pulled it all to a quick finish, "Is Crean guilty...?..." was played repeatedly on the news.

MEDIA WATCH:

From The Age:


THE first of a series of speeches designed to shore up dwindling American support for the war in Iraq, President George Bush has warned that the violence is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.
"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead is smooth," he said. "I cannot."
As the latest Gallup poll showed his approval rating at a record-low 36 per cent, a grim-looking Mr Bush pleaded for patience.

The Mail&Guardian

In the past 24 hours, police have found the bodies of at least 85 men killed by gunfire execution-style in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian killing, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.They include at least 27 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shi'ite neighbourhood.Much of the bloodshed -- the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shi'ite shrine last month -- followed deadly weekend explosions in a teeming Shi'ite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.Iraq's interior ministry announced a ban on driving in Baghdad to coincide with the first meeting of Iraq's new Parliament on Thursday. The ban takes effect at 8pm on Wednesday and lasts until 4pm on Thursday.

Life's Changes

This is a picture of me and the kids circa 2000 maybe late nineties. Now they're teenagers; and it's hard to imagine how vividly they changed your life. Travelling was different. People relaxed and related to you; women, kids, everywhere.

Now it's high school and music and anything older than yesterday is daggy. I guess it was ever thus.

Some weeks are just frustrating; hundreds exposed to asbestos, into cyberspace, hundreds of retrenched maintenance workers, into cyberspace. With the bad comes the good. It shouldn't be the struggle that it sometimes is. Even now, he could hear the sound of passing traffic, the grinding sound at the end of days. 

Ants in the Big City

Maybe they were right, whoever it was, Plato I think, who said we were all villagers at heart; that the ideal sized community was around 5,000. You got to know a large number; here in Sydney we get to know each other mostly out. It's not Melbourne, where as far as I know they're still big on dinner parties. The splashes of the harbour and the glittering, well catered functions on renovated modernist rooftops, didn't hide the fact that in the crushing crowds nobody knew anyone anymore. It was of no interest to anyone whether the person standing next to them lived or died. In the crush his own spirit was being crunched.

This was the morning, looking up from the road by the docks into renovated warehouses and cafes several floors up through glass; looking for somewhere that would take a credit card for breakfast because we had run out of cash; just being the working joes. Sydney was a city totally divided between those who had property and those who did not. On the north shore houses comfortably changed hands in the million dollar plus range, while the crushing crowds were often short of ready cash. The bills just kept on coming.

Iraq, where Australia is contribnting to the war effort, remains an absolute mess, on the edge of civil war. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in Sydney, although many think it is just a matter of time. Surprisingly the time has extended into the distance. Perhaps the raids have genuinely kept these things at bay. I need a tragedy in a lyrical landscape, get out of the office, he would say. But the gut wrenching tragedy of what he feared would come was something he hoped he would never have to face; not just the difficulties of reporting it, the gut wrenching horror of it all as people's lives are torn apart, there one minute and gone the next. 

PK

This is the former Prime Minister Paul Keating giving a speech on urban renewal at Sydney University at a conference called the Mayor's Forum. Sadly perhaps, he is best remembered for his line of invective. "You're nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up" was one of my favourites. He took over from his still pretty popular predecessor Bob Hawke after years of white anting. Like many of the disloyal, once he got to power he didn't know what to do with it; isolating in natural autocracy.

They were good years in some ways. At first the nation, or at least the left, well at least a few journalists, were captured by the blizzard of words, the fireworks that he promised. Dazzled by his own intelligence, the ideas whirled fruitlessly round and round, with a mounting contempt for the ordinary man. The people sensed it instinctively, and his approval ratings were always dismal, half the present Prime Minsiter's on a good day. The Zvegna suits, the knife edge suits, the well groomed face, the patrician nose, women loved him for a long time. Excuse me, Mr Keating, a female academic stammered, I agree with every word you said, could I just ask...?

The blokes were far more sceptical. Now everyone is more sceptical. As you got closer to the blizzard of words, the less the dreams were true. But in those years, with a young blonde partner and picture perfect young blonde children and a job that others regarded as having some cache, those benighted years, it didn't seem wrong that Keating lived in the big house and strutted the stage. The Domingo of Australian politics and the streams of dreams. The kids were young and I was off the eternal bar stool and all was right with the world; until it all fell apart.

Waiting For Reply

What's the mood? he asked, after the announcement that something like 400 maintenance workers at Qantas would be laid off. How would you feel, how would you cope, if you were told you wouldn't have a job in ten weeks time? The straggling heat. They knew exactly what they were doing. They followed the union delegate through a maze of side lines and parking stations, a short cut to the front entrance.They got the picture even before security woke up to what they were doing. Who owns it though? he asked, as the guards tossed them off the property; leaving them to stand at the entrance, talking to cars as they stopped at the lights.

He just wasn't sure how to negotiate anything anymore. Night time in Coogee. Glad it's Friday tomorrow. Want to go and see Capote. Loved In Cold Blood thirty years ago, God knows what I would think of it now. I interviewed Gore Vidal in London once. By this time I had got a bit blase about interviewing famous people and took along a couple of mates. He looked a bit surprised when he opened the door to us in his suite at the Connaught, I think it was, an enormously expensive London hotel. But despite the expense, the rooms were tiny and Vidal, a large man, seemed twice the size. Please don't be overwhelmed, he said grandly, as he swept us into the room.

He was a great story teller and seemed to enjoy meeting people from Australia, we were still exotic then, sincere, a long way away. The subject of Tangiers came up, and then Capote, somehow. He related the story in high, farcical detail. You know he looked like a Southern senator, in a green suit, he said, we hated each other. One day, after William Burroughs and Paul Bowles and the rest had made Tangiers famous, Capote declared he too was going to Tangiers. He arrived on a luxury liner with an enormous crowd waiting. But determined to ruin the moment, Vidal flew from Rome down to Tangiers and stood amongst the crowds on the dock. As Capote waved to the adoring and the curious and the cameras popped, his eyes lit upon his literary and social enemy. Vidal says it was worth the trip, just to see the look on his face. He got back on the plane and flew back to Rome.

Rocks

Rocks in the head some days; circling around the same mistakes. He went through all the motions, was prolific, or concise, as always; the surface froth of things. They were glorious days, stopping the car, getting out, walking in these extraordinary landscapes. Nothing to wonder why.

Only just starting to get on top of the bills. Things need to be more organised than they are. Been to Liverpool radio and back with a bloke who's an ex-rock musician who has just written a book called the Daddy Split Guide. He's very lively. Always in these crowded streets, endless traffic. A sound technician's nightmare. He wasn't going to surrender, not yet.

Different interests filtered around. That criticism they used to make of various authors, an emotional life like a dirty laundry basket; well how much was there these days? Eighty, sometimes ninety per cent of the people in various scenes seemed younger than him. It was like India, where something like half the population is under 25. These outposts into which he had ventured, he was no longer confident. The sweeping vistas could lead to ruin. Was it worth matching up for the sake of it? Was that where it all led, to where the core lay? Into the secret halls where he would never be himself again. Rocks in the head.

Through A Glass Darkly

Well things barely kept pace, fine once, gaps between, spirits soaring; all things were looming into a fine entrance. He couldn't have mastered the words so quickly if he hadn't been a local, at home anywhere, telling us what they knew to be true; black cheerful faces and mirrors everywhere. He could talk any talk, walk any walk. The desire to drink was lifted from me, they cried ecstatically, and he didn't believe a word of it.

There's been another wierd week of things inter-connecting, Martin and the former Prime Minister Paul Keating; Martin in his new role as policy adviser to one of Sydney's largest western councils; mini-empires in themselves, over 400 staff. Organising a Mayor's forum where PK was one of the star turns. What a spiel. Astonishingly arrogant. These people were a million miles from the people they supposedly represented.

The city was a patchwork quilt and he had long ago given up any hope of embracing it. The city he had once loved was no longer his. It's been Mardi Gras week and the streets have been crowded, very active. Out and proud. Well hung declared one lad's t-shirt. The empires were parasitic. There was no reason to embrace the mood. He hadn't been to a Mardi Gras in years. He took the kids once, when they were about five; but even though lots of other parents did it was barely worth the effort; with the impossible crowds, impossibility of finding a parking spot; the march towards the party impossible with kids in tow. Now they were tweenagers and too impossibly aware of everything to want to go to a gay mardi gras, even though they've grown up in the middle of Sydney. I read to them every night when they were growing up, and Sammy wouldn't read a book if his life depended on it. Well there you go. They danced in the distance and he could barely hear them; it was that long ago.

At other times and in other forms; that had been the way of it.