Evil

This is the ground floor of an interconnecting block of flats where we had to stake out a paedophile one day. It was the most disgusting case I had ever heard of. In one of these flats they raped a three-year-old boy and when he died as a result of this mistreatment they tried to revive him by putting live exposed wires on to him in an attempt to jolt him awake. That poor kid. This was all apparently watched by the six year old sister. The perpetrator was already in jail, long may he rot, the person we were chasing was the person who's flat it was; the person police were having troubhle fingering becasuse he was the organiser, he liked to watch. These people, this incident, was beyond disgusting. And here he was, living at taxpayers expense, on the dole, in public housing, living in the same unit where the horror had occurred.

It took us all day but we got him, myself, who some days could hardly be more sardonic after years on the road, and another photographer who is equally as difficult to inspire. And when we got him - it took us about eight hours of careful staking out - we were practically high fiving each other. We pursued him down the street. We had all the classic shots; him running, him lashing out. He was an ordinary looking little guy, looked more like a Greek peasant.

And one of the mums that we co-opted into helping us; already off her head at nine o'clock in the morning, said to us: yeh, but I think Keith, for that was his name, I think Keith feels sorry for what happened. Then she drawls, what was he supposed to have done. It had already been on every news channel, every newspaper, every radio station; as one of the most appalling cases Sydney had ever seen. Yeeeaaaah, what do you think he did? And then she goes on; yeh, I thought there was something odd about him. He's always talking to my four year old, and you know how kids have a sixth sense, well he doesn't like him.

For Christ's sake, you're letting your four year old talk to someone who was in the flat, who must have watched, as a three year old boy was raped and killed?!! Just unbelievable. This is what they mean when they talk about the collapse of the under-classes; there's nothing left, there's no moral basis, they're off their heads 24/7 and it's all funded for by the taxpayer. They don't have to get themselves together; someone will always pick up the pieces.

This case shocked me through and through. As a separated father, and as someone who had seen an awful lot of documentation on false sexual abuse allegations, the standard bread and butter fare of our disgraceful family court system, I had come to believe that almost all of these cases were simply false allegations. There was nothing false about this one, which was sickening beyond belief. And while the taxpayer funds all this; the traffic flows by as if nothing had ever happened. And the mother who let these guys care for her kids while she had a break; from all reports she couldn't have cared less; thought the kid was obnoxious anyway. These kids had been repeatedly reported to the auhorities; who did nothing. Some things in life defy understanding. Some things in life can only be explained by one word: evil.

NEWS:

LAST NIGHT at 1 a.m., Israeli Defence Forces bombed the town of Qana in southern Lebanon. The buildings, which were reduced to rubble, housed refugees who had fled from other villages and cities, such as Tyre, which had been bombarded by the IDF over the past 18 days.
Fifty-four civilians have been reportedly killed, 37 of them children.
While Israeli spokespersons regret the loss of civilian lives, they maintain that Qana was being used by the Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks into northern Israel and that enough warnings had been given to innocent civilians by way of air-dropped pamphlets.

The Howard Years

While the world, or at least the Middle East, continues to descend into chaos, here on the other side of the world the grinding silence of the nights has created vacuums impossible to fill. John Howard, pictured here at yet another Community Morning Tea at which he specialises, and at which shaking everybody's hands and giving often very good or suprisingly good off-the-cuff speaches are all part of his surprsing success, has been Prime Minister for ten years now. That means if you're 28 and you began voting when you were 18, there's never been anyone else in power your entire voting life. Having faced off so many challenges, he is more confident now than he has ever been. His 67th birthday just passed and he doesn't look like going anywhere; the media full on the morning of him walking through the streets of Melbourne, and being spontaneously embraced by a boy off a rowing boat who happened to be carrying a screwdriver, prompting much comment about the security surrounding him.

But far more remarkable than the screwdriver was that this particular teenager wanted to embrace him at all. It would never have happened in my day, when we regarded Gough Whitlam as the messiah and the conservatives as the face of evil. Of course Gough, too, thought he was the messiah and betrayed the very people who had voted him in. Apart from overseeing a hopelessly scandal ridden administration, he was the beginning of the transformation of the Labor Party from the party of the workers to the party of everybody but the workers, of every trendy left wing cause anybody had ever heard of; the transformation of Australia into a so-called multi-cultural society by left wing bureaucrats determined to destroy the mainstream culture and establish multiculturalism as the state religion. To dare to express any doubt in this creed was to be howled down as a racist and a redneck by the pack mentality fostered amongst the half-educated. And Gough, of course, created the Family Court, the most dishonest, most corrupt and of course completely anti-father jurisidction in the country; a sell out to the sacred cow of feminism of the working class men who were stupid enough to vote him into office.

But once Gough had been the saviour and Malcolm Fraser, who overthrew him, had been the devil. And the Governor General John Kerr, who had been the figure behind the 1975 ructions in Australian politics, when given the opportunity I booed and booed and booed. Even on free tickets. And now we have John, who has just seen off another feeble attempt to push him aside by his deputy Peter Costello; who will never have the common touch that Howard has. The ex is back in Sydney and this time my equanimity has gone out the window. I was proud of the way I handled it before the school holidays, when she was hanging round like a bad smell pestering the kids. Now I've just had it. So you want to impose your mental illness on the children because you have no life? Children will never fill the gaping hole you have inside of you, made worse by the psych drugs and the hydroponic pot, nothing will fill that hole. We were born that way. We'll always be that way. But there are things you can do to live a decent life - and you ain't doing none of them. So piss off pest.

NEWS:

Associated Press:

TYRE, Lebanon - Israeli planes targeted bridges in southern and eastern Lebanon in new airstrikes Saturday, destroying one in a resort area on the Syrian border, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was returning to the region to try to broker peace.
After two air raids destroyed the bridge over the Orontes river in the Bekaa Valley, cutting off the town of Hermel from the rest of the country, Israel said it was flying new missions against bridges in southern Lebanon but provided no further details.
The Israeli army also said Saturday that seven of its soldiers were wounded, including one seriously, in heavy fighting the day before when Hezbollah attacked a ridge overlooking the villages of Bint Jbail and Maroun al-Ras — areas of strong support for the guerrilla movement.

Famous People

This is a picture by Margaret Olley, one of Sydney's best known and most beloved painters. She has been famous in Australia since 1949, when a portrait of her as a young woman won the Archibald Prize, the country's leading award for portrait painting. When it comes to dates, everything about Margaret is astonishing. She proudly declares, for instance, that she gave up drinking in 1959 and attributes her success to having stayed off the booze ever since. She is not shy about letting everyone know that she attributes her success or at least her sobriety to her involvement in a twelve-step program. While programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous repeatedly claim that anonymity is one of their spiritual corner stones; some of their more famous converts see it as a positive that they can openly parade themselves as examples of recovered alcoholics, thereby providing hope to anyone out there still struggling with the demon drink. Anthony Hopkins - who I last saw in that very endearing film The World's Fastest Indian - is another example. There are so many little giveaways in that movie; as he walks into a bar in America where everyone is sodden with the drink and he proudly declares that he doesn't drink; to the AA pamphlet he throws into his luggage when he is packing to leave New Zealand for his land speed attempt.

One of the advantages of working in the media is meeting famous people; and over time I set out determinedly to meet them. Margaret Olley, who I had never met, put in an appearance when the NSW Art Gallery decided to use her donation of half a million dollar's worth of paintings and drawings - including by Picasso and Cezanne - as an opportunity for a bit of publicity. Now 83 years old, one of the most endearing things about her is her sheer eccentric normality. While the media queued to talk to her and arts writers asked pompous questions about what she thought about this and that, she wanted to know why they couldn't ask her these questions outside so she could have a cigarette. After it was all over I went outside and had one with her; although I keep trying to stay off them I haven't been very successful lately.

I was feeling quite thought disordered that day; not having been able to sleep the previous night, not being an arts writer and not actually knowing much about Australian art. Finally, as I struggled to form questions while she cheerfully inhaled, she patted me on the knee and said: you're struggling, aren't you dear? Well yes, I was. She was completely right, very perceptive. She had that way of looking into you, not at you, and if you're not feeling 100 per cent and are trying to hide it, it can be very unsettling. These old birds who have seen everything, done everything; viewed humanity at its most deceptive, most craven, most dishonest. I left with nothing but admiration.

But better than long off days in the 1980s when I used to do author interviews in London, interviews which were always easy to sell back in Australia. I interviewed many of the giants of world literature, including Paul Bowles in Tangiers, Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Heller; and one I particularly remember, Anthony Burgess.

Being from Australia and low down on the pecking order, the PR woman had slotted me in at 9.30 in the morning - almost nobody genuinely wants to be interviewed at that hour - and I was just the first in a long day of interviews for his recent book on the world's top 100 novels and another of his pointless literary exercises on the ghost of Shakespeare. Picking the world's best novels - a list I had once fantasised about joining - was a controversial exercise designed to promote debate, and I was keen to meet him; having been a fan of Earthly Powers and other works of the period. But also just attracted by the fame of the name. Skeptical, too, of his enormous output. How could anyone be genuinely sincere or genuinely creative over so many hundreds of thousands of words? It was in an upmarket hotel and I had been up all night gallivanting around, an expat in London. I had one of those massive hangovers; pain of historic proportions, alcohol seeping out of the pores; disheveled and sad, a shambolic future written large in the present. We sat in the upmarket hotel's cafe and I spewed forth my ordinary questions over the coffee. He answered as I struggled for some form of coherence; some semblance of reason and normality. He answered; in his entirely professional manner; as the archetypal PR woman sat nearby, watching. And I remember, as I left after my half hour session; I remember their look as I left, disheveled and out of place amidst all that style; and they put their heads together, making some sort of derisory comment as I left, shaking their heads. Well the story was published, in The Bulletin from memory, and I was paid, although money was always an issue for a freelancer, arriving often months later; but it was just that embarrassing moment, that collusion, between the author and the PR woman as I exited that I remember; a complete feeling of hopelessness in a bizarre world. It would be many hours that day, indeed many years really, before I was to feel any great sense of normality, when confidence and sobriety would restore me to sanity.



NEWS:

Here, in largely peaceful Australia, images of war torn Lebanon dominate the TV screens. The sight of thousands of Lebanese Australians trying to flee the country provoke little sympathy in Australia, where most people wonder how come all these people with dual passports can happily live in Lebanon on welfare payments from Australian, living like kings off the sweat of the grotesquely overtaxed Australian workforce - and then claim to be Australian when it suits them.

ABC:

Lebanon PM appeals for urgent aid, cease-fire efforts
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has called on the international community to send urgent humanitarian aid and to work for a cease-fire, rather than stand by and watch Lebanon "torn to shreds".
"I call upon you to respond immediately without reservation or hesitation to this appeal for an immediate cease-fire and provide urgent international humanitarian assistance to our war-stricken country," he said.
"The country has been torn to shreds. Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?
"Is this what the international community calls self-defence?" he said, referring to US and British statements of support for the Jewish state's right to respond to the capture of two soldiers and the rocketing of northern Israel.
"The toll in terms of human life has reached tragic proportions: over 1,000 injured and 300 killed so far."
He also warned that "over half a million people have been displaced; in some areas, the hospitals have been crippled ... There are shortages of food and medical supplies."
"You want to support the government of Lebanon? Let me tell you ... no government can survive on the ruins of a nation.
"I hope you will not let us down. We, the Lebanese, want life."

*

With more than 550 dead from the latest Indonesian tsunami, at any other time this would be major major news. This time around, with the pictures of the bombings in Lebanon unsettling everybody, another few hundred dead hardly seems to be impacting at all:

ABC:

Earthquake shakes buildings in Indonesian capital
Tall buildings swayed as an earthquake struck the Indonesian capital and nearby parts of Java island, sowing fear two days after an undersea quake triggered a tsunami on the southern coast, witnesses said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, but people in several areas fled from office buildings and homes.
The quake's strength was 6.2 at its epicentre in the Indian Ocean off the south-western tip of Java, Fauzi, an official at the national earthquake centre, told Reuters.
A quake of 7.7 magnitude on Monday off the southern Java coast triggered a tsunami that killed at least 550 people.
Asked on Indonesian news radio Elshinta whether the quake on Wednesday could cause a tsunami, Fauzi said: "If there is a tsunami it won't be big."
Indonesia's 17,000 islands sprawl along a belt of intense volcanic and seismic activity, part of what is called the "Pacific Ring of Fire", and is prone to frequent earthquakes.
-Reuters

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1042593

Gagged bloggers fume at ban

NEW DELHI: Having been deprived of their personal space in cyberspace by a government ban on blogs related to Mumbai terror attacks, netizens have slammed the internet censorship through messages expressing outrage in other web forums.
"Government has really gone crazy... is Blogspot the only medium for sending messages? The Internet is flooded with free and paid services... (to carry hate messages)," said blogger Gurpreet Singh Modi, reacting to the ban on 18 websites in a bid to check hate messages following the July 11 blasts.
While messages expressing disgust at the ban flooded almost all general blog sites, some sites that were banned moved to other servers under a different name.
'Mumbaihelp', one of the sites on which the government pulled the plug, moved to a 'Wiki' server under the name mumbaihelp.jot.com.
Bloggers logged on to the new homepage to check if the service was still working fine and after reassuring themselves, started exchanging comments.
Elsewhere on the web, messages spewed pure hatred against the decision-makers with some netizens comparing India with China when it comes to clipping civil rights.
"The government has recently taken a page right out of the Chinese playbook - Internet censorship," an anonymous blogger said in a message on a tech blog.

The Lads

These are the lads, James from News, Brendan from the Sydney Morning Herald, Mick from the wire service AAP, three of Sydney's better known working news photographers. We pop up time and again together; at functions big and small, burnt churches, funerals, disasters of any and every kind; politicians; this day in the foyer of the Bankstown Workers' Club with the Prime Minister John Howard; at other times; in other disasters, at the back of parliament house, where politicians hold brief "pressers" in the open air; where they don't have to provide refreshments and the open air backdrop suits them. They can make their escape easily as the questions hound their pomposity into the ground.

We are as cynical as they make them, having seen everything; the brain not working and clearly grasped, sardonic, supercillious; we knew exactly what we were doing, what the bosses wanted; how our master works would be treated once they got back to the office. We were in darkness and we were displayed; we grew older; girlfriends came and went; the children multiplied in number. We may have worked for competing news organisations but we were not enemies. Could you call it camaraderie? Could you say we were friends; in a city like Sydney where layers of breath-taking arrogance took storms in our wake? There had once been a creative impulse. Now there was a matter of getting through the day.

Everyone new each other's dramas; they wouldn't know a story if it sat on their face, we would say, exasperated at the truths of what we saw and the images that were transmitted in the mainstream media. I was lonely now, older now; the times of fame and novelty long gone; the times of meaning dissipated. Four children died in a housefire and we competed with each other to get quotes from the drongoes involved, the boyfriends of the grieving mothers, communities closing in around the deep stupidities of a fractured underclass. What used to keep this world together; the church, the army, the local factory, a working class ethos, tight knit families and ancient morals; all these had collapsed now under so-called liberalism, individualism, progressive social policies; and what was left was drunken drug fucked chaos from people born without a chance, people who had never risen above their circumstance; young men who would never reach a noble goal. And we were always there, flashing cameras in their faces; completely untouched by the dramas of other people's lives; reduced, in our working lives, to points of technical difficulty. To reach beyond this to a more profound reasoning, or to a greater beauty, was all but impossible.

NEWS:

ABC RADIO:

TONY EASTLEY: The skies over Lebanon are filled with smoke and in northern Israel residents have taken to air raid shelters, as the situation in the Middle East seemingly spirals out of control. As the death toll mounts on both sides, with children among the dead and injured, there seems little hope for a lull in the fighting or a ceasefire. Thousands of Australians, desperate to get out of Beirut where they've been on holiday, are hoping that the Government will come up with an evacuation plan.

Israeli air raids have so far killed more than 40 people in southern Lebanon in the last 24 hours, and more Israelis have died after a wave of Hezbollah rocket attacks hit the city of Haifa. The crisis has intensified, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah saying the battle against Israel is just at the beginning. In the latest escalation of the conflict, Israeli aircraft fired rockets at fuel tanks at Beirut's international airport.

Our correspondent, Matt Brown, is in Beirut.Matt Brown, how do we characterise what's going on? Is the fighting getting worse?

Matt Brown: It's certainly getting more deadly, Tony. You're seeing a sustained bombing and missile barrage coming from both sides in this conflict. Hezbollah missiles killed at least eight people in an assault on Haifa earlier in the day. That's in northern Israel. And Lebanese officials saying 43 Lebanese people killed today, the death toll now well over 100 on the Lebanese side. So the more effective rockets that Hezbollah has in its arsenal given to it by Iran are being used more regularly against Israel, and the bombing campaign by Israel in Lebanon is sustained. And Israel has said Hezbollah is firing its rockets from within civilian areas in Lebanon, and that's not going to stop Israel from striking at those targets. So we expect to see the civilian death toll in Lebanon continuing to climb significantly.

Struggle Street

This is a picture of the Bankstown demonstration over industrial relations late last month. Thirty thousand people marched through the streets in a largely good natured display of opposition to the new industrial relations laws. More than 150,000 people marched in demonstrations around the country. The march in Melbourne was 80,000 plus. Hey hey, hoh hoh, Johnny Howard's Got to Go. Placards, t-shirts declaring the wearer to be "working class". I was amazed by the size of the demonstration, that surreal feeling as I emerged from a taxi into the marching throng.

Mind you, many of the teachers and government employees had been given the morning off to participate; so I guess it's easier to protest when you are being paid for it. Maybe the impact of the new laws is starting to bite - the government was trailing Labor by six percentage points in the last Newspoll. But somehow I can't get my head around who is right and who is wrong. Basically it seems a good idea to get the government off our backs and out of our lives; but that leaves everybody exposed to the untrammelled greed of giant corporations. And who as an individual can possibly sit down with their employer and negotiate terms which suit them best when you are dealing with some of the country's and the world's most ruthless organisations?
Once I would have automatically regarded Howard's actions in bringing in the new laws as outrageous, and backed Labor 100%.

But there have been too many excesses from the left; and I'm left confused as to what and whom to believe. Labor has promised they will abolish the new laws immediately they come into government. That has immediately put them offside with big business. Most people I know regard the laws as Dickensian, a brutal assault on the working conditions of employees.

The laws, regularly described as "extreme" by the Labor opposition, appear to have wiped out a hundred years of union activity just like that. They have unsettled a lot of people, not just the chattering classes. The Howard battlers that have been so important to him, particularly here in the western suburbs of Sydney where a number of longterm Labor seats have fallen to the conservatives. I just don't know where I stand on the whole issue. The industrial relation laws were a quagmire and the industrial relations commissions the usual left wing enclaves of pompous overpaid idiots running around pretending to be defending the working classes. But many people feel uncertain about the new laws; which basically encourage workers and employers to reach their own agreements. People are trading away holidays, leave loading, over time payments. There's been a string of hostile stories: the woman who refused to sign an Australian Workplace Agreement - AWA - because she would be fined $200 if she reported in sick without 12 hours notice; people having to pay for interviews.

The counter-argument is that it will encourage enterprise and commercial activity and actually lead to an improvement in working conditions. I doubt it very much. The trouble is, I've been so very wrong about so many things before. So, the long and the short of it is, I don't know where I stand on the issue. My instinct is against; my brain says wait and see. I'm just glad I've bought a bolt hole in the country and can disappear at a time of my own choosing.

QUOTE:

"The currents here are labrynthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.

"They are hard to follow.

"The whales are dead."

The Scar, China Melville.

NEWS:

BBC:

More than 60 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched its offensive four days ago, sparked by the capture of two of their soldiers by the Hezbollah movement. Militants in Lebanon continue to fire rockets across the border into Israel.

INDEPENDENT:

Beirut - Israel kept up its blistering offensive against Lebanon Saturday after Hezbollah guerrilla leader Hassan Nasrallah defiantly declared open war in a conflict that appears to be spiralling dangerously out of control despite international calls for restraint. Lebanon failed at an emergency UN Security Council debate to secure any action for a ceasefire to halt Israel's fiercest assault on its neighbour in a decade, underscoring rifts among world powers over how to handle the crisis. Combat jets bombarded Lebanon in a series of dawn raids, slamming missiles into bridges and petrol stations and killing four people on the fourth day of fighting that has so far claimed the lives of at least 90 people on both sides.

Disconnect

The Middle East imploded.

There are samples from some of the major Middle Eastern blogs at:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19785441-401,00.html

Miguel D'Souza from Reuters reports:

"AS Israel launches major offensives and goes toe to toe with militants on two fronts the conflict inevitably has spilled into the blogosphere. Bloggers, some of them posting from the affected areas, have captured the panic, anger and sorrow that the violence has unleashed."

Meanwhile, in the antipodes, we've had headlines that the rail stations are not terror proof - der - and another week of leadership skirmishing, our own version of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown saga in the UK.

The headlines have run all week: "One of these Men Is Lying"; "Get Back In Your Box Peter"; "Howard Costello face off in Cabinet"; "PM won't be stampeded".

The day after the so-called cabinet showdown, with Howard still Prime Minister and Costello still Treasurer, Howard went to the Bankstown Workers' Club where once again he confirmed his bizarre rock star status. Nobody can work a room like Howard. I noticed it years ago, when it started up; he would walk through the airport and suddenly there would be mobs of school girls going silly with excitement. This bizarre popularity is probably under-reported in the media at large; the disconnect as they say between what interests journalists and what interests the general public.

The demonstrators outside sang "We've Got the worse gov-ernment, in the world" to the tune of "He's Got the Whole World, in his hands".

As he arrived, after an unplanned detour to MacDonalds, where he shook all their hands too, he strode into the club to the now traditional chant of ``Hey hey, hoh hoh, Johnny Howard's got to go''.

The Blacktown Workers Club is the social centre of Greenway, the Liberal's most marginal NSW seat and their third most marginal seat in Australia.

The seat of Greenway, which envelops the classic western Sydney working class suburb of Blacktown, fell to the Liberals for the first time in its history at the last election. It is a quintessential working class seat, home to the ``Howard battlers'' who have been so influential in his success. It is held by just 800 votes.

In his oft applauded speech he reminded people that he too had been born in the suburbs of Sydney. He co-opted Western Sydney into his vision of the country, as an area full of people aspirational for the future of their children, a place where people could start with nothing and build a life, a small business, raise a family. "Can I express my admiration for the spirit of Western Sydney, the way in which they have embraced the ideal of aspiring to build better lives for themselves, their children and their community. It is the essence of modern Australia.''

He moved amongst the crowd, shaking just about every hand of the 800 or so present, a bubble of activity surrounding him as he moved amongst friends, stopping to talk about schools, about volunteer groups. Thousands of photographs were taken as he posed cheerfully with children, parents, pensioners.

This strange celebrity status, and his enthusiastic shaking of hands, is one of the keys to Howard's success. It's the simplest thing, shaking somebody's hand, but the fact that he is actually prepared to meet the voters goes a very long way. I've seen him do it even when therewasn't a vote in it. One morning a few years back he went out to the airport to meet the disabled athletes coming back from the disabledgames after the Olympics. None of us, well certainly not our chiefs of staff, cared less about noble stories on disabled athletes and even back then the only question they were asking was about Costello and succession.

One of the athletes, a gallumphing mongoloid, ran through the airport gates and jumped into his arms, nearly bowling him over. After shaking every last one of their hands Howard then gave a stirring speach on how the sight of the green and gold always made him immensely proud and lifted his spirits high, and never more so than on that day. The media didn't want to know but the athletes all loved it. And to this day I bet you they remember the morning they shook the prime minister's hand and he told them their country was proud of them.

A group of Southern Sudanese present him with a soccer ball as thanks for his help. I love the PM because he loves Australia, and that is all important to me, said one 70 year old woman. He's greatly respected, said a 17 year old.

That Peter Costello had a ``hide'' to tell Howard when he should go.

At the presser Howard expressed his sympathy for the terror victims of India, but all the questions were on succession. His final, perhaps mischievous, line to the media as he departed was: ``Ten and a half years and counting''.

Star Gate

  

We are definitely a Stargate household; in love with the wraith; with action heroes and forms of entertainment you can watch with the kids without being embarrassed. They're teenagers now and the world has been enveloped in smut; Big Brother scandals, "suggestive" lyrics. He sought passionately beyond his years; caught in tiny moments beyond embarrassment, open declarations. I just want to be friends. And in his own craven stupidity; in his own longing for a home beyond time; well yes, old fashioned as it was, he made a complete fool of himself.

He stood and he said, in pure anonymity there were things he could not say, diseases he could not name, fortunes that were brushed up against, gleaming black cars, Cayennes, the thoughts that tunnelled his own productivity, if that made any sense at all. Finally he made the jump; because he thought, just one last roll of the dice. Everything doubled in price while we stopped and fiddled. The astonishing beauty of the summer was all for him, a giant walnut tree in the front lawn; Devonne van Dusen, 2422 Coon Rapids Boulevarde, Coon Rapids, Minnesota I think it was. My pen friend from America. We kept in touch for years, until adult chaos shook the trails apart.

A family lawyer has been killed in Melbourne, a man charged. Lots of speculation over whether it was a Family Court matter. Perhaps one of the only miracles is that it hasn't happened before - you take a man's kids, home, assets, income, demean him in public and humiliate him in court - and then claim this completely abusive process is in the best interests of your kids - that is the typical process in the country's most corrupt and most dishonest jurisdiction - corrupt because the farcical family reports and the systemic abuse of psychiatric evidence are endemic - and people are being paid kmnowing full well that they are acting in a dishonest manner and against the interests of children.

The court has brought the legal profession into disrepute. There's barely a separated bloke in the country who has anything but contempt for lawyers, contempt for a government that continues to perpetuate the institution's abuse of children, and politicians too scared of the women's vote to speak the truth.

In that court truth is a complete irrelevancy and always has been. They reach to a higher goal, to a feminist ideal; truth is nothing but a weapon men use to batter women and perpetuate the system, as feminist jurisprudence claims. Gough Whitlam, who founded the court in 1975, has just turned 90 amidst plaudits and yet another tax payer funded party. It was one of the worst things he ever did; and as has always been typical of the modern Labor party, represented a complete and total betrayal of the working class men that created the party. The Howard government's feeble attempts to reform this troubled jurisdiction have also been half-assed, and will fail because they don't reform the Court's practice. It's been very unfortunate.

The news just said he was a former client.

At least this day started afresh. Howard and Costello have been caught up in a ridiculous battle for the leadership - after Howard has been there for a decade and led the party to unparallelled dominance.

Many people believe the new industrial relations legislation is Howard's poll tax; the tax that saw the end of Maggie Thatcher; one step too far. Others think we are a country of contractors and small business people and the new laws will encourage an entrepeneurial culture. I'm not sure who's right.

I predicted that Howard would introduce the GST, a ridiculous tax which has done nothing but feed the pockets of bloated public service bureaucracies, and would then exit as the most unpopular prime minister in Australian history. Nothing of the kind happened. Shows what I know.

Terror: At least 190 dead:


MUMBAI: Seven coordinated blasts in local trains running on the western line in Mumbai on Tuesday evening. All within 11 minutes. To trigger such a series of terror, the plot would have to be minutely planned and executed. And a thorough understanding of the behaviour of a regular local train commuter in Mumbai would be essential.

The proficiency of the plan is evident from the following timings of the different detonations: Khar -- 1824 hours; Bandra -- 1824 hours; Jogeshwari -- 1825 hours; Mahim -- 1826 hours; Mira Road -- 1829 hours; Matunga -- 1830 hours; Borivali -- 1835 hours.

No information is as yet available on the explosives or detonators used or how the explosions were triggered off. But it is apparent from the timely managed detonations in the suburban trains last evening that the perpetrators had expert knowledge of exact trains that would actually carry the maximum number of passengers. They had obviously done a thorough study of the railway time table and meticulously chosen the seven trains that would ferry the maximum number of commuters in the evening rush hour. Hence, the three Virar bound trains were chosen besides the other trains terminating at Borivili - all soft targets.

Thus In The Harsh Morning Light

When the word came through that the first job of the day was in Phillip Street, outside the federal government offices, he knew it would be cold. He reached for a black jacket he had acquired he was not sure how, found, he couldn't remember where, and headed out the door. He noticed, as always, how alone he was these days. There wasn't anyone to say goodbye to. There was no polite kiss, no subterfuge; the intimate moments they had shared, he and M, were so much a part of history now that his fantasies reached back across decades; cold in what had been so much chaos; so much warmth; they had been special and shared so much difference, they held their unique love and now, old, those unique smells of intimacy he could still remember. There wasn't anybody else he could do those same things with; that he could inquire into erotic depths and know that no matter how hard they struggled their patterns of lust were a political statement; sperm splattering on taut stomachs; sunshine through the bedroom window of the room where M had spent his adolescence, growing up in the security of upper class houses.

He had never seen anything like it. His own youth had been fraught with embarrassment. There weren't any educated parents conversing in expansive dining rooms, discussing the shifting politics of the day, gay politics, the rumoured sexuality of the former South Australian premier Don Dunstan, who of course they all knew well. M had been best of friends with Dunstan's son; who was nice but we all thought a bit of a nerd. I was from Sydney and thereby exotic. I was burnt out already and I wasn't even half way through my twenties. I was already old, the ancient age of lost speed freaks who had seen everything, been everywhere, who had spent the long nights in grinding despair and knew that in failure, in genetic codes that blighted any hope of a simple, optimistic future, of happy families and social success; I already knew that the misery that would envelop us would provide no comfort or certainty. I already knew, the psyche of a corrupt, alcoholic old queen, lisping in a distorted future, I already knew that things would not end well.

So when I heard the first job was Phillip Street, I reached for the black jacket and knew, in that wind tunnel of a street, that whatever elaborate nonsense our politicians would get up to, we would be standing outside in the cold, popping futile questions as they swept through the media pack; is the Treasurer a liar, is the Prime Minister a liar, can the government continue like this? Amanda Vanstone, the Minister for Immigration, one of the only government ministers with a real dose of personality, was uniquely herself. While most of them pulled up in front and climbed out of their government cars with an adopted air of self-importance, Amanda toddled down the street from wherever she had been staying, uniquely on her own. Aren't you cold? I asked. She was wearing a dress and a ballooning, short sleaved pink top. What are you, a wimp? she asked? Joining in the riposte, laughing. We knew each other of old. Would one of you help me with these bags, she asked, handing her bag over to a handsome, willing television reporter. I'm just looking forward to doing my job, she declared, hit with the same barrage of questions as everybody else, giving nothing away, playing the game. There was the deputy prime minister, Mark Vaile, who declared the issue of the leadership had to be resolved; Julie Bishop, touted as potentially the country's first conservative female Prime Minister, gave her short speil to the pack as head of the Nationals; there was much work to be done, she was determined.... But determined to do what; be the next PM? And Costello, the Treasurer who had brought on the leadership battle, himself chose to do the walk. He could, like the Prime Minsiter, have had his car drop him under the building, avoiding the scrum; but he had no such inclination. Arriving from the airport, where he had just arrived from Melbourne, he chose instead to get out a couple of hundred metres up the road. And he did the walk. There's Peter, the word spread quickly, and they filmed him as he approached, that same stupid grin he always had. He held his doorstop; saying again exactly what he had said yesterday, the truth would out; and in the pack, this time containing many of the country's leading political commentators, he stirred the pot before going inside. Anyone who doesn't think they lead the party as a gift from the 100 or so parliamentary members of the Liberal party, was displaying arrogance and hubris; Howard had said that morning at the beginning of his daily walk. Arrogance and hubris it surely was. But my own thoughts, that nothing would happen, that Howard, as a true conservative, would follow his natural cautious instincts and do almost nothing; turned out to be true.

At the end of the day John Howard remained Prime Minister; Peter Costello remained Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, and while he should have been decisively sacked for gross disloyalty, nothing of the kind happened. They can't even have a decent stoush; senior figures on the paper commented, and thus it proved to be.



From the ABC:

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has emerged from a cabinet meeting in Sydney saying he doesn't believe his professional relationship with Treasurer Peter Costello has broken down.

The cabinet meeting was Mr Howard's and Mr Costello's first face to face meeting since making contradictory claims about a leadership deal between the two men.

Mr Howard says he and his treasurer continue to disagree over whether a leadership handover deal was struck at a meeting 12 years ago.

But Mr Howard says the two men will continue to discharge their ministerial responsiblities.

The prime minister says it has been a difficult few days for the Liberal Party, and expects the political damage to be felt in the opinion polls.

The leadership issue was discussed at the cabinet meeting, and again later in a private meeting between Mr Howard and Mr Costello.

The prime minister says he feels no personal hostility towards the treasurer.

"I do not believe that the professional relationship between Mr Costello and me has broken down," Mr Howard said.

"We have worked together in the past over a long period of time. It has been a very successful partnership and I intend to continue to work in a professional manner."

A former defence minister, Ian McLachlan, has revealed he witnessed a meeting between the two men in 1994, where Mr Howard said if he won office he would hand over the leadership after two terms.

A Picnic-like Atmosphere

There had been so many demonstrations that they had taken on a picnic like atmosphere; hard to believe anymore that their claims were true; or that anyone cared. He paused, notebook in hand, representative of the right wing press, the unconverted; and they spilled forth their beliefs. The march went through the streets of Kirribili to the Prime Minister's dwelling. There was never going to be any threat; or danger. These demonstrations were entirely within the accepted domain, ritual protests over subjects most of the population couldn't care less about.

I haven't had any internet for more than a month as I've struggled to switch to broadband. It's been the most ridiculous drama; so boring I can barely talk about it; but frustrating; life on hold; so many things to do and impossible to do them all. I wanted to be free but didn't know how to begin. I wanted to start anew but creeping fear kept me transfixed in one spot. I wanted to be sure things worked; but they never did. It was just impossible; dealing with Digiplus; Telstra; they were all providers that didn't provide. For days I just couldn't get the damned thing to work at all.

This is just an experiment, sad sometimes; but true; and then just moments when he was determined to make a difference. He wanted to curl up and say goodbye. He wanted to start again. He wanted comfort where there was none. He wanted to be safe and all he could find was doubt. These stories made little sense. The protestors marched through the streets; united in their simple beliefs, in their opposition to the government of the day, to their noble causes. And he didn't know where to stop; or what now to believe. We were caught tight; but none of these things made sense to any but the very wise.


Today's story:


http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060627_occupation_iraq_hearts_minds/



In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.

Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father’s Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja’s worst neighborhoods. ...

The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. “Fuck yeah!” cheered one sergeant, “Hi honey I’m home!” The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian soldier who said, “You’ll fucking learn how to walk.” Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. “Down the road,” he pointed. “Show us!” he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the soldiers ran ahead. “No, no, it’s here,” yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the soldiers, “Take me for 10 years but leave my father!” Both were taken. The children screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.
As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets.
Home after home met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man’s arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.

Photo, on the job, interviewing the legendary Gough Whitlam, 2006.

Redfern

We could have been followed, walking blind into circumstance. You're being punished for not listening to the ABC, he said. I had missed a story on some great liner coming in from a lap of the Pacific with hundreds, or was it dozens, of sick passengers. There were muffled secrets. They all stank as they squatted on holiday toilets. He could see them without being there. The gift was strong some days, his clairvoyance, moving beyond mere empathy. He could reach across the city and actually see them, clutching their stomachs as doctors arrived, the ambulances lined up along the dock, the freaked out pretending to be efficient management from the liner; the presence of the media making everything worse.

What do you mean punished? he asked. I've written beautifully about dead people for weeks. They all laughed. It had been true. That morning he had organised a freelancer to do a job in Whistler, in Canada, the most popular ski resort in North America, two million plus visitors each winter. There had been something like 700 Australians working at the resort, as always prized for their sunny disposition, good looks and hard work. Twenty three and twenty four. As if time itself had been descended, hushed, the brilliance of the snow, there with two lives snuffed out. For him, remote, working with a machine brilliance, a professional empath, he misted up in sequence as he spoke to the shocked relatives; this time ringing so close to the time they had themselves discovered from the news that, in shock, they actually answered his questions.

While the furore, and the sequence of the things they spoke about, the length of private occupations, the time passed, and amazingly, he didn't care about that either, appealing, through their emotional distress, to the parent's desire to get things right. I'm sorry to ring you at a time like this. He was a lovely bloke, the father sobs as he slams down the phone. Fuck off, vultures, is the more common response, the cries disappearing flat into the suburban night.

The Crosses We Create

There wasn't anything but reclamation, the streets quiet now; the day gone under flourescent tubes, whsipered conversations. Just stay out of their way, goes the motto. Your life will be better if your paths do not cross. Redfern, too, is quieter, if not stripped of conflict then absent many of the difficult bits of chaos that used to characterise the place, people passed out on the streets, arguments outside the front door. Some of it lingers, in a black humour way. The other day there were three aboriginal women, drunk as skunks, standing at the top of Eveleigh Street, mouthing off at the cops in front of the station opposite. Then Doris, the middle one, just passes out completely. They slap her around, shout in her face, nothing works. Finally they drag her across the street, dump her in front of the cops and shout: "You look after her you white cunts".

But mostly it's quiet now, a stream of clean cut, earnest, sometimes handsome university students stream past the door, ten thousand a day; and people wait to pick up friends in cars. But they're not waiting for what the cars used to wait for. Sophie Delezio got out of hospital today. Yesterday it was two young men who died on the Whistler ski fields in Canada. Tomorrow it could be anything, anything at all. Dead people.

Two years ago I wrote the story which began: "Two fifties, how much is that, 200?" "Four fifties, 200? No it's not." They're about 13. They're dealing heroin but they can't count. They should be in school. But that whole Redfern seems to have washed away now, along with other parts of the city. The kids are going up to Moree tomorrow with their mother and will be back on Monday. Everythinng seems vague and out of phase. One more day and the week is over.

Our Times

I just couldn't be held to account any longer. The days were intermidable. He spat out story after story and the tragedies merged together, the dead person roundsman. The pink and blue coffins of the kids and the parents, the mother who killed them. The crowded Catholic cathedral suddenly silent with the shocking tragedy of it. Not a dry eye. The Catholics do death well. My half brother, 17, my father had a very long breeding cycle, shot himself a year ago; took a rifle out into the orchard at 2am and pulled the trigger.

There wasn't too much mess, the man who owned the property said. I thought your old man was going to have a heart attack. There amongst the macadamia nut trees. Once avacados; and before that passionfruit; way back in the sixties when he bought the 80 acres for $10,000. The old man sold it after he had a heart attack, and it's since doubled in value to more than two million while he lives on their, where their youngest son killed himself. The grieving mother, wrung out with grief, acting in pecular ways; clasping a framed picture of him; flashing it at me over the coffin; see, he even looked like you.

But I hadn't been successful. I had walked along the beach and waited to die from 24 aspirin; but ending up with nothing but a bad stomach. The utter forlorn melancholy of the waves. But it didn't happen, he happened, in the orchard in the early morning, after being on the internet to his friends; who didn't bother to tell their parents. That would be an invasion of privacy. They lived every moment and the gut wrenching tragedy of it all; they would never be the same. Many of the people he dealt with would never be the same again.

Sunset Over Redfern

It's been pouring, more rain in the last 48 hours than in the last five months; dust washed away. Former leader of the Labor Party Mark Latham was in Campbelltown Court today. I am fascinated by him. He was described as a house husband. He went apeshit at a Telie photographer back in January. The figure he cut in court today, grim, gaunt, nobody but paid lawyers for company; going through the process in a tortured way. He had been the great white hope, so to speak, of the Labor Party, after its last Prime Minister, Paul Keating, with his outlandishly aristocratic leanings, led the party up its worst garden path in history. Excuse me Mr Keating, Mr Keating, the academics would cry at endless tax funded conferences; I agree with every word you say.

But Latham was a different story; and for a while struck a chord as a real person in a bullshit game. It's hard to imagine now; history and politics having moved so fast, that Howard had been rattled by Latham, a big man. The room was darkened and he pleaded consent. The previous case was a driving charge. He sat next to a boy with gell in his hair, one of the many troubled young men that frequent the court everyday. Things were crying out for release. Time was clutching him and he knew he had to get by.

They have passed an ordinance or whatever they're called banning drinking in the streets of Redfern, all except for the Block. Which has upset some, saying that just means all the drinkers will go there. But what do you do with a band of street alcoholics, white black or brindle?

Some stories, though humorous, were better not told. We had been warned. We had been marked. They were our merry band, not so merry.

Rain

It's been pouring in Sydney, which is unusual. Sometimes it seemed it would never rain again. What happened to rain soaked summers and winter months when the rain just went on and on and on? Well not lately. Euphoria took over, but before that he couldn't find what he was looking for. Stuck in perpetual traffic, a big city now. And it never rained. St Barnies on Broadway burnt down and finally the heaters were on. Clear skies forever. Well just about.

Things weren't working out exactly.

The house needs organising and I need organising.

From:

http://mlcsmith.blogspot.com/

Sunday, May 28, 2006
Caveat Emptor Lector
I was re-reading an old article on Wired News called Blogs Make the Headlines and am still amazed at what a buffoon one the "experts" in the piece was. Professional media analyst and lecture circuit junkie, Elizabeth Osder had this to say at the end of the article:
"Bloggers are navel-gazers," said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books." She added, "There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting."
She said that some years ago. I wonder if she still has the same, er, opinion? Since she wrote those idiotic words we have seen in the professional media:
News media outlets which endlessly ran sensational news stories like the DC sniper hunt, Lacy Peterson's disappearance, and Michael Jackson's trial.
A journalist who printed a story that endangered a CIA operative and those that she had been in contact with.
Journalists who made up articles.
Journalists who used highly questionable and unverified sources to further personal opinions on matters of national security.
News media outlets which avoided asking the hard questions.
On the other hand, I have read blogs that:
Pulled no punches.
Reported on real & serious issues of interest.
Exposed me to other's thoughts, dreams, and opinions that I wouldn't have encountered anywhere else.
Told what civilian life in Iraq was like in direct and personal terms.
Told what soldiering in Iraq was like, both good and bad.
Reported on other blogs and carefully critiqued claims made in them.
Now blog pressure is leveraging change within media organizations.
No, I don't think journalists everywhere are going to throw down their steno pads, shout "hallelujah," and set fire to their bosses. While the media conglomerates may change a little, I believe the public is going to change even more. That's right, we, the people. My opinion is that the babbling of many blogs is forcing us to grow up, well, grow up a little.
With the blurring of professional with non-professional, accepted source and informal source, research and opinion, we will each have to think a bit harder about choosing whom we will listen to. We will get used to the idea this source is good for this opinion, while that source is better at that. In other words, caveat emptor lector; let the buying reader beware.
Unfortunately, in this rosy future of mine, Elizabeth Osder still can't by a clue from a clue factory on free clue day. I mean, get real, naming your personal website "Untitled Document" is so 1995.

Happy Days

Family photos. Happy days. This is of Sam much younger, at a birthday party with is friend Todd and others out of sight. It's been hanging around on the computer and something told me to put it up; an act of preservation. It was Mardi Gras night the night he was born, and I had to go up from the Women's Hospital to buy chocolate. It was very windy, a lot of rain about. Bedraggled drag queens seemed to gust out of the night, part of the boil and the trouble that was part of profound change. The corridors weren't white. Stories were never linear. You arseholes, someone just shouted outside. They've been quarelling all night up the road. Where are your children, one of them shouted angrily, drunk. I see mine. I know where they are. They're up in Lismore. Yours are in Mount Druit, you f'n blah blah; and on it goes.

Lost moments were for all to recall. There was so much scenery in all the world's dramas. Complex hydration. Refiltering. Gathering strength. Dino has been evicted from Big Brother and some days nothing works at all. He came hallucinating through the back streets. He watched the carp in the park at Elizabeth Bay. He felt the cold in the air and knew nothing could be done about it. The skies boiled and rain swept across the city. In the bars there were a thousand discourses. In house upon house the crunching cold and the damp kept everyone else in side.

In his own melancholic twist of mind it was easy to forget all the good times; as if he missed them before they were gone; as if a doomed destiny had only ever been on hold. Some days were just thought disordered; caffeine induced perhaps. A grinding frustration. It was quiet; boring sometimes; their household routine; but it was comfortable too, cosy even, and at least it had been peaceful for a good while now. Had been.

Useful Futures

This is a picture of my son Sam on a school excursion to Vietnam. Sounds like they had a fantastic time. He reckons lots of kids grow up there knowing how to use guns. My entire generation was affected by the Vietnam War. I got out of being drafted by being at university. Then Gough Whitlam came in and cancelled conscription. I had never wanted to go. Done some stories on Vietnam vets, over time, some disastrous, terminally drunk resolutions; nerves shattered for the rest of life. The only school excursion I remember is going to Long Reef at Collaroy on Sydney's northern beaches. There was infinite life in each of the ponds; the sun glinting beauty as the waves pounded; and even back then, the absolute horror.

Frothing white had always been his vision of absolute terror; never making sense till the story was told of his own father holding him out in the surf to get him used to it as he screamed and screamed and screamed. Thus the myth of the desert arab in his background, why he had never liked the water. Back from the excursion they had to give a speach at school about it. Was it worth it? was the question. Yes, came the mono-syllabic answer, as the school looked on. Silence that wasn't meant to be there. After all that had happened, the train trips, the medieval towns, the night on Howloon Bay. Yes.

Sydney's cold and wet now. There are no other solutions.

The world's biggest story rolls on:

By Michael Georgy
BAGHDAD, June 3 (Reuters) - A military probe that cleared U.S. troops of killing civilians in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi could not have come at a worse time for the new prime minister, who has promised justice for those killed at Haditha.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is battling a widespread public perception that U.S. troops can shoot and kill with impunity and Iraqi leaders are too weak to do anything about it.
Allegations that U.S. Marines massacred some 24 civilians in the town of Haditha and the finding that troops did no wrong in Ishaqi do not help Maliki allay Iraqi suspicions.

Edges

The story came in the first instance from the radio room. There had been a shooting in the main street of Wollongong. None of us knew the main street of Wollongong even though it was the industrial city a hundred kilometes to the south. There was no reason to go there unless you had to. It sounded like there had been a massacre, someone gone crazy, half a dozen dead. Tragedy strikes our noble, working heart, that sort of thing, as innocent people go about their shopping. The quickest way was by helicopter. Sitting near the chief of staff can mean you get caught with every idea that crosses their bewildered minds, or suddenly you can get caught up in things that take your own life in sharp jags across time and space, enveloped in other people's tragedies.

I found myself disengaging from a cab at the airport, the massively expensive helicopter already waiting. Boys and their toys, it was a wonderful world. The tarmac, the plane in the background. Being guided by young men in uniform. Taking off. Last time I had been in a helicopter it had been with the Premier Bob Carr, heading west across the city at enormous speed to a property in the Blue Mountains; power, luxury, intrigue and importance, they were heady combinations for a man predisposed to arrogance. This time there was just the helicopter pilot for company, as we flew down hugging the coast line. I organised the taxi to pick us up; to get us to the scene of tragedy in the quickest possible time. I looked into the secret coves, the sharp cliffs, the massive spreads of vegetation arking down into the sea.

And when we got there. The mall was returning to normality. Only one man had been shot; it wasn't a massacre. The reporters that had also travelled down by road were completely excess to requirement. If it had happened in the western suburbs we wouldn't have paid any attention at all. But because the paper had thrown so many resources at it, the splashing headlines the next day of death in main street covered the front page. We stayed in hotels nearby. We followed every possible angle. There just wasn't that much to it. Someone went beserk, an argument, money and drugs, it was almost always that; and he thought of other times, when he had done the working girls at Port Kembla, with the steel works and Wollongong in the background; a completely forlorn place with the old girls as outraged for fear of the competition as the general public was over the media whipped story of the Labor MP who owned a brothel and had employed an under-age girl.

To here in Shellharbour, still further down the coast, where the money kept coming all the time; new restaurants, new developments, some with inbuilt by the sea side charm. He wished he had the money to invest. We gathered to mark the passing of another day, holy times.

Limpid Days

Even here in Redfern, you can smell the salt air some nights; drifting in from the sea, the string of golden beaches that thread down the coast; the cliffs, the shallows, the rock pools, the fishermen; and little villages along the coast. Except Sydney has spread everywhere now, and what was isolated only 30 years ago are now opening into suburbs, the prices of land and houses spiralling, and old generation made rich, late in life. The absolute beauty of the coastline; strung out not just in dreams but in haunted moments, in long walks, in lonely toilet blocks and surfers shacks, eoncompassed by the ever creeping walls of brick houses; the metallic glint of cars, the squal of kids.

They went up the mountain and barely came down. Looking at the high altitude treks on Project Himalaya. Thirty days. $US2000. In the long days, in the long ways, in the mystery caverns, when a chronological order to cascades of experience, all these things would help. All is not cosy in Stephen's household. Long awkward silences. I need a bolt hole, between work and home; just to take a minute to himself. Is that such a bad thing? So he went and walked out and thought: you could cut the air with a knife.

Location, location; there in the heart of poofterville; as they called it themselves. I always imagined I would live here, he said, swishing a hand; and I watched on. The world was so straight now. He saw them pasty faced in the morning waiting to score, Thursday payday, pension day; white faced and puffy, furtive, moving fast, skinny, frantic. And he walked past in an ironed shirt and new pants, a tie and a new jumper. You looking at something mate? One of them snarled. You're not Sox, are you? I asked. No, he said. Sorry, you look like someone I used to know, I said. Those long lost furtive days in the back of Newtown. Those nights when their fragile despair descended into intoxicating patterns. Not all was lost; but much had drifted away.

A Break In The Traffic

A break in the traffic, he thought, in the cold winter mornings. The stories have all been about death defying mountaineers on the side of Mount Everest; in incredibly beautiful far-off places; Lincoln Hall who survived the night at 8600 metres and was found half undressed the next day after being left for dead. Sue Fear, Australia's top female mountaineer, feared dead in a crevasse on Mount Manaslu. Extremes, in far off places; under flourescent lights, in front of computer screens; talking to people in remote places; a man in the Hudson Valley, connecting automatically from his office phone in New York. A man at Advanced Base Camp on the side of Everest. Offices in Khatmandu. People everywhere.

The time wasn't right, was never right. He didn't know why he did things he did. There weren't pertinent crises. The river hadn't run dry. He wasn't up to anything, but some days it was just quiet, too quiet. The colours were extraordinary. He couldn't hide that fact.

In his dreams he had always gone back to the mountains above Rishikesh, the ancient hashish soaked sadhu route which took in Badrinath, the ancient, powerful temples, and Hemkundt, the holy place of the Sieks. And the Valley of the flowers. And the hidden, secret, astonishingly beautiful villages. He always thought he would return there; even die there. Always circling beyond the next turn; to the next exquisite view. Each day was unique. He forgot them quickly.

Sad to say, here's an article I related to:

MXS, Edition 1 - SYD TUE 16 MAY 2006, Page 008 Stuck at work and careering nowhere - WELCOME TO MIDDLESCENCE

If you hate the boss, feel bored and frustrated at work and want a new start but dare not try, you are not alone.

According to a study you suffer from middlescence a malaise similar to adolescence that affects grown-ups.Researchers in the US gave the name to the negative feelings which descend on millions of workers aged from 35 to 54. Rather like being a teenager, being a middlescent is a frustrating, confusing and exasperating experience. They find themselves leaving work feeling ``burned out, bottlenecked and bored''. Asked their opinions about their jobs, those in the 35-54 age group are the least likely to describe their office as ``congenial and fun''.

They are more dissatisfied with their managers than other age groups and have little confidence in senior executives. One in five look for an escape route but 85 per cent know a career change is difficult. Huge financial pressures, such as mortgages and school fees, mean they are unable to quit for a different lifestyle or less well-paid job. They usually work long hours, typically putting in at least 50 hours a week. ``Many mid-career employees are working more, enjoying it less and looking for alternatives,'' the report published by Harvard Business Review says.

The report suggests a sabbatical can help staff rejuvenate. It also suggests giving middlescents a new job in the same company, asking them to mentor younger staff and sending them on training courses.