A Shiver Looking For A Spine

*



So Clancy rode to wheel them -- he was racing on the wing
Where the best and boldest riders take their place,
And he raced his stock-horse past them, and he made the ranges ring
With the stockwhip, as he met them face to face.
Then they halted for a moment, while he swung the dreaded lash,
But they saw their well-loved mountain full in view,
And they charged beneath the stockwhip with a sharp and sudden dash,
And off into the mountain scrub they flew.

Then fast the horsemen followed, where the gorges deep and black
Resounded to the thunder of their tread,
And the stockwhips woke the echoes, and they fiercely answered back
From cliffs and crags that beetled overhead.
And upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way,
Where mountain ash and kurrajong grew wide;
And the old man muttered fiercely, "We may bid the mob good day,
No man can hold them down the other side."

When they reached the mountain's summit, even Clancy took a pull,
It well might make the boldest hold their breath,
The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full
Of wombat holes, and any slip was death.
But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,
And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,
While the others stood and watched in very fear.

He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet,
He cleared the fallen timber in his stride,
And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat --
It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.
Through the stringy barks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground,
Down the hillside at a racing pace he went;
And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound,
At the bottom of that terrible descent.

He was right among the horses as they climbed the further hill,
And the watchers on the mountain standing mute,
Saw him ply the stockwhip fiercely, he was right among them still,
As he raced across the clearing in pursuit.
Then they lost him for a moment, where two mountain gullies met
In the ranges, but a final glimpse reveals
On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet,
With the man from Snowy River at their heels.

And he ran them single-handed till their sides were white with foam.
He followed like a bloodhound on their track,
Till they halted cowed and beaten, then he turned their heads for home,
And alone and unassisted brought them back.
But his hardy mountain pony he could scarcely raise a trot,
He was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur;
But his pluck was still undaunted, and his courage fiery hot,
For never yet was mountain horse a cur.

And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
And where around the Overflow the reedbeds sweep and sway
To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,
The man from Snowy River is a household word to-day,
And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.
Banjo Patterson, The Man From Snow River




How was that then that nothing worked, that strange misshapen plasma kept shooting from his skull, that his heart sank and his belly despaired, and all was lost as he went about his daily duties. All day the leaden aquarium that was the air kept crushing down on him, as if born beneath mercury seas. Nothing made sense. All sound was distorted. Light came through in shafts of grey and sickly green. He couldn't have felt worse if he had spent a century plotting to achieve this finely calibrated despair. Oh how cruel you are, he shrugged, grinning madly through broken teeth.

We all grew up, or grew old, with the former Prime Minister Paul Keating preening through our lives. Women adored him, he cut a fine figure in a suit. Perhaps their ardent, pseudo-intellectual desires were misplaced. Mr Keating, Mr Keating, I'm an academic from Sydney University and I agree with everything you say; they chanted at endless, pointless symposiums and forums at the National Library, or some other tax payer funded institution. There was no doubt he had the gift of the gab. Wind him up and away he would go, a string of impressive sounding words. Women loved him. Men watched him with raised eyebrows, cynicism or outright dislike.

He was astonishingly arrogant, of that there was little doubt. He was admired for his invective. "You're nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up. I'd put him in the same class as the rest of them: mediocrity. We're not interested in the views of painted, perfumed gigolos. I was nearly chloroformed by the performance of the Honorable Member for Mackellar. It nearly put me right out for the afternoon. Brain damaged...gutless spivs." He spent years stalking the corridors of Canberra in a Spegna suit, undermining Bob Hawke, perhaps the best Prime Minister we had had, certainly the most popular, for many a year. When he finally undermined him, and knocked the old rooster off his perch, he didn't know what to do when he got there.

He was like many ambitious people. Once they arrive at that place they fought so hard to get, they don't know what to do. Their raison d'etre, their purpose or being, has gone; and they sit in their grand offices with their fabulous views, their drivers, their secretaries, all paid for by the sweat of ordinary working people, and in their vast, vacant days they have no idea how to behave. The former Prime Minister had rung him once, unhappy over a story. It had been a conference on town planning, which although he had left school when he was 15 Keating regarded himself as an expert at. Simply because he adored Paris and the great boulevardes of Europe. Er, who didn't want to wander down the Champs de L'see?

It was to a captive audience of Keating adorers, town planners and council heavy weights, all sucking on the public tit. How could a person on a mere $100,000 a year resist the blandishments of developers, he asked. Considering the average wage in Australia is around $50,000, perhaps by acting like everyone else, perhaps by showing a shred of integrity, decency, honesty. But that's by the by. He was, as usual, pouring invective on everyone in range, the then Prime Minister John Howard, the man he appeared to hate most in the world, the man who had his job. Journalists, oh how he loved to pour out his contempt for journalists.

I'll speak to them last, he declared. Yet they were the only ones in the room working for a living that day, and he was determined to treat them with the contempt he seemed to think was their due. And then wondered why he got such poor coverage. His astonishing arrogance was in full flight. He poured contempt on the town planners, on the council system, which he declared had derived from the rotten borough system of the English, and on those brutal neanderthals, developers, brigands who build things, he called them.

He wrote this up in a straight newspaper report; and the result made Keating look like an abusive malcontent who still couldn't get over the fact the Australian people had tossed him out of office. And then, at ten to five, filing time, a week later, came this soft, sibilant voice on the phone. Why did you write such a nasty story about me? Keating asked. I didn't write a nasty story about you, he responded, it was just a straight news report. Let me take you through the points, he said. As if the world didn't know, you don't ring a journalist at five o'clock, they're filing for the next day. His fingers rested, itching on the keyboard. I didn't say the Australian council system was corrupt, I said it was based on the corrupt English council system, he began. Yes? The next point was equally obscure. Paul, he said, you're notorious for ringing up and abusing journalists, and I don't have to put up with it. He slammed the phone down. The chief of staff looked up, startled. Who was that? Paul Keating, he answered, and went on about his duties.

A week or more later the paper finally succumbed and ran an opinion piece by Keating. It declared that his only mistake at the speech was not to issue a press release before hand, so that even the most simple minded of journalists could understand the points he was making. As is commonly said: astonishingly arrogant.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/rudd-follows-the-family-way-of-artful-dodging-20080827-442d.html

KEVIN Rudd always knew he had a convict in the family tree, but only recently did he discover that at least seven of his ancestors were transported to Australia.

They were a light-fingered lot. Old Thomas Rudd, it seems, was transported twice to Sydney town — once for lifting shoes, the second time for pinching food.

And yesterday, at a ceremony to bequeath the Rudd family history to the National Library, the PM discovered that a newspaper article in 1806 had the early Rudd, by then emancipated, complaining that his house in Parramatta had been burgled.

"Perhaps he was covering his tracks over a third felony," Mr Rudd chuckled as the family story, pieced together by the world's champion genealogists, the Mormons, was turned over for posterity.

The Opposition had its own theory. Brendan Nelson and his troops made clear they reckon burglary has run down the family tree and re-emerged in the guise of the Prime Minister himself.

Why, they grizzled in Parliament, he had clean-stolen their policies on education and simply repackaged them as the Rudd Education Revolution.

Mr Rudd didn't deny it. He merely transformed himself into the Artful Dodger. He said his department had counted 24 reports on teaching quality prepared for the Howard government.

"And I would ask the people of Australia: What happened to those 24 reports?" he thundered.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24252057-663,00.html

MASKING her own disappointment, vanquished Democrat Hillary Clinton yesterday rose to the challenge of playing healer to her divided party.

In a barnstorming performance that raised the roof of the Democrats' Denver convention, she called on all of the 18,000 delegates to rally behind the man who stalled her presidential ambitions.

"Barack Obama is my candidate and he must be our president," she said, reinforcing the message that she was "a proud supporter of Barack Obama".

In one of her most important speeches, in which her every word and expression was scrutinised, Senator Clinton said Democrats had worked too hard over the past 18 months to suffer four more years of failed Republican leadership under John McCain.

"No way. No how. No McCain," she said, as the stadium erupted with deafening cheers.

"Whether you voted for me, or voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose.

"We are on the same team and none of us can sit on the sidelines," she told Democrats. "This is a fight for the future. And it's a fight we must win."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24253185-2702,00.html

AS he prepared to leave the editor-in-chief's chair at The Age, Andrew Jaspan sent an email calling staff together. It was headed "That's all folks!" Like Porky Pig in the Looney Tunes cartoons:

"Th-th-th-that's all, folks!"

Some of those who attended Jaspan's farewell described it as "pugnacious" and "graceful and dignified under pressure".

Four months ago, more than 200 journalists at The Age unanimously voted against Jaspan in an effective no-confidence motion. Yesterday, many editorial staff members were running a very different line, saying he had been a beachhead against the cost-cutting culture introduced to Fairfax by its Australian newspapers boss, Brian McCarthy.

Reporters explained their mixed feelings at his departure: "It's sort of 'Hooray' and 'Oh shit' in the same breath," one senior journalist said.

At the start of a brief exit speech, Jaspan asked that it not be recorded, a pointed reference to a humiliation on the newsroom floor in April when his attempts to appease staff concerns over the paper's treatment of certain stories were recorded and broadcast online.

Since his arrival from Glasgow four years ago, Jaspan has remained l'etranger of Australian journalism. He said yesterday he had made The Age a better, sharper newspaper and expressed hope that print journalism had a future. He said there were no such things as bad newspapers - just badly managed and badly edited ones. He was given sustained applause.

Announcing his sacking, Fairfax management said Jaspan had done "a magnificent job in reinvigorating The Age", although Fairfax chairman Ron Walker, one of his most ardent supporters, last night refused to comment.

It was not quite the speaking slot at the national convention that, 18 months ago, Senator Clinton had hoped for.


Countryside near Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.