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What fresh hell can this be? Ah Dorothy Parker, if only it were so. This is not a fresh hell formed in the political world of Canberra. This is a cycle of ambition and revenge. This is a scene from Dante’s Inferno. This is the raw lust of Shakespeare’s players who strut upon the stage,
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The town in which you live on the fringe of the city has long receded into the distance, the familiar markers have vanished hours ago. When you look in the rearview mirror the view is the same as that which is before you. You are across the border, driving north and the horizon has opened
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Some voices are like old friends, familiar at once not broken by time or distance. The singing voice that rises and falls to the ocean within is an especial welcome visitor. John Schumann, welcome, come in. Sing us your songs. He is here once more with his Vagabond Crew and the new CD Ghosts and
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Claiming the high moral ground on what constitutes an Australian value is no more an exercise for social studies. Now it is a relentless battle of crude sloganeering and blunt instruments. Since we have always had a problem with race (after all, we tried for a long time to extinguish one type either through death
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The year is lost in the forest of time’s misty mountains, but I can still recall the moment Led Zeppelin thundered into my life. It was in the kitchen at home. The radio was emitting what charitably could be called a bridge of noise (or interlude as it is described in the sheet music). It
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All roads lead to Shakespeare. Atlas of emotions, roadmap of the soul, landscape of the inner terrain. These things are the geography of Shakespeare’s world. In his depiction and exploration of this place the internal battles do not change over the centuries. For at heart, the base elements of thought and deed are recognisable whether
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The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never anymore the dead. In a Disused Graveyard, Robert Frost There was no gold here, on top or beneath this gnarl of earth. Yet below on the creek flats, it was everywhere, to be plucked, scraped,
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As all conflagrations begin, so too did this one. Plume of smoke rising, a spark, a licking of small flames taking in oxygen, building upon itself, a blaze bursts forth. Coruscating. Incandescent. It burns still. It is a song. All Along the Watchtower started as one piece of a suite of low-key, restrained songs from the
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To infest: (of insects or animals) be present (in a place or site) in large numbers, typically so as to cause damage or disease. “The house is infested with cockroaches.” Late Middle English (in the sense ‘torment, harass’): from French infester or Latin infestare ‘assail’, from infestus ‘hostile’ – Oxford Dictionary People of good heart don’t
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Right, you blue and white striped clowns. The game’s over. It’s time to straighten up the pair of you and all your mates, too: Barrie Cassidy, Fran Kelly, Ian Henderson, and Jon Faine, to name a few. Living off the Crown’s coin, while honest Australians toil away the hours maintaining life and liberty. You’re all
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