Reverse Regret

"There is a landscape behind the landscape that we are always reaching for and seeking with our eyes and hearts. It is the landscape that is always there, and always receding, and that seems especially well evoked to the Aboriginal conceptual frame of the Tjukurrpa, which is the flash of the present moment and the echo, far off, from primary, long vanished events."
Nicholas Rothwell.

Stolen from the torrents, born defective, these days allowed for little introspection, shame guilt regret remorse he had chanted all those years ago, and more recently, deer caught in the headlights, he had chanted shame guilt remorse, forgetting the regret. They crowded around others, they didn't crowd around him. He was a thorough gentleman, and kept his own counsel. And everything was calm, in that eternal, unthinking way.

The light disappeared rapidly, the forest looming even more intensely over the shed he had so badly mistaken for a house. As if they were at a tourist resort, he had carried Charles Dickens' David Copperfield in with him. He had begun reading it in one of those "things to do before you die read the Western canon" moments and was now determined to finish the thousand plus pages. How infinitely sad were the gropings of his present. The city family he had acquired which were so much more important than his real family, they had passed on or disintegrated, years ago now. Their voices remained in his head, and he often talked to them there, but in reality they were long gone.

Time to get moving, it will be dark soon, Henry insisted. The mosquitoes will be out soon. They are in plague proportions.

I tried to ascertain how far it was; and he made it seem as if it was only a couple of hundred yards away. And with the light rapidly disappearing, and the screech of the cicadas having stepped up a notch, we walked and we walked and we walked, first via the car and then to the so-called "main house" block; which sounded grand but in reality was unlikely to ever hold anything; here in the aching isolation, in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

I couldn't understand the panic that seemed to be settling upon him; and realised he had never actually had a guest before. I was the first; and at this rate the last. He told me his dream of building some sort of creative writer's retreat; here where you could disappear from the modern world. But as the mosquitoes buzzed and another hallucinatory sound wave rose on the shriek of the cicadas, he couldn't think of anything worse. Call him old fashioned, but he liked a bath everyday, he liked human contact, even if it was just at the cafe every morning. He liked a coffee down the road and bumping people in the street. As lonely as he had often felt, he was not a social isolate.

THE BIGGER STORY:

SMH:


Inflation adds edge to Labor's budget axe

Mark Davis Political Correspondent
January 16, 2008


ALARMED by the inflationary pressures building in the economy, the Rudd Government will seek spending cuts well above the $10 billion targeted by Labor in last year's election campaign.

The Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner, said yesterday that to keep a lid on inflation and interest rates the Government would aim for a budget surplus higher than the latest estimate of $14.4 billion for the next financial year.

In an interview with the Herald, Mr Tanner said his department was leading a "razor gang" exercise to achieve the cuts.

While he did not identify any targets, the total spending cuts could exceed $1 billion for 2008-09, on top of the $10 billion previously promised for the next four years.

...

SMH:


Andrew Darby in Hobart and Alex Tibbitts
January 16, 2008

THE war between whalers and protesters has escalated dramatically, with an Australian man allegedly beaten and tied up aboard a Japanese vessel, hours after a court ruled the Antarctic whale hunt was illegal.

Benjamin Potts, 28, a helicopter assistant from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's vessel, the Steve Irwin, and Giles Lane, 35, a Briton, were detained yesterday after boarding the moving whaling catcher boat the Yushin Maru No. 2 in the icy Antarctic.

The leader of Sea Shepherd, Captain Paul Watson, said the incident happened after the group's vessel broke up the whaling fleet's attempt to resupply in the Southern Ocean.

The two men had boarded the whaling ship in an attempt to deliver a letter telling the whalers to leave the Antarctic, Captain Watson said. "First the whalers tried to throw them overboard, then they tied them to a bulkhead and were beating them," Captain Watson told the Herald. "We are asking the Australian Government to help with this."

A spokesman for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, said: "The Government is investigating the reports as a matter of priority."