Redefining the Australian Bush

A Town Like Trundle

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, even in the Australian bush.

When the town of Trundle offered farmhouses at $1 week to residents recently on ABC Television, the offer seemed too good to be true.

At the opening of the show, there was an air of charitable benevolence; the committee wanted to help people and “attract new families to the district, strengthen the community and save local schools.”

But the program claiming to provide solutions to families with financial troubles raises more questions than it answers.

What started out as a reality TV show about Aussies down on their luck, ended up last Tuesday night as a meditation on inequality in Australia.

Another brick in the wall

There’s only one thing more cringeworthy than reading Samantha Brick’s article on the perils of being beautiful in the Daily Mail and that’s reading the comments and tweets in response.

In the rarefied environment of the modern media – whose participants must carefully ensure they come across confident but not arrogant, progressive but not presumptive, pleasant but not offensive – Samantha Brick is a breath of sweet pungent air.

There was once a spirit of generosity on the worldwide web – it was a place of eccentric techos and commentators with views that lay outside the mainstream.

The attack on Samantha Brick is just another sign of the worldwide web’s imminent convergence with homogeneity and mediocrity.

Our Way or the Huawei

Blocking Huawei Technologies from building our $36 billion national broadband network (NBN) is a strategic move for the Australian Government.

Huawei may be the second largest telecommunications firm in the world, but it’s also on the cyber security watch list of the Pentagon and the US Congress.

Local concerns that the decision sends the wrong message to China about foreign investment are unfounded in a world with increasing protection of national information systems.

Oh help me nanny!

When my daughter was less than six weeks old, I made the obligatory rounds of the childcare centres in my locale. Things looked grim.

‘‘She should have been registered six months ago,’’ said one apologetically (presumably as a four-month-old foetus). At another, there were 300 people in the queue before me.

Unless you knew someone or knew how to ruthlessly monster people into getting what you wanted, there was no childcare. Quite simply, there is a market failure in the care of young children in Australia.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s nanny rebate proposal could not have come at a better time for Australian parents facing our diabolically inadequate childcare system.

Margin Call

Unemployment had never been a consideration for educated financial sector worker Brigit Wilkinson, until she found herself spat out by the markets.

Exhausted by the chaos of working through the GFC in the fast-paced City of London, she found herself almost begging for a redundancy last year. After a trip overseas and plenty of café time, she finally fronted up to find work only to discover the market in fast retreat.

Single, 38 and weighed down by a massive mortgage, she joined the growing ranks of the white collar unemployed.

Beyond the day-to-day struggle of applying for jobs in a market that hasn’t finished shedding them, she found herself facing much deeper questions about life.

Quiet

I once had an actor friend who told me the key to his success at castings was in the silences, not the things he said.

As the silent film The Artist scoops up one film award after another and Susan Cain’s book Quiet roars up the charts, the word on everyone’s lips is shhhhh.

Amidst a frenetic world of networking, team building, bonding and quality time with others, The Artist and Quiet offer us a rare commodity: permission to say nothing.

Susan Cain argues that quiet people may be happier, smarter and more productive. Is it finally time for a little reflection?

I, Animal

Thought and personality define the ways we perceive our physical bodies. So much so that we are losing any sense of belonging to the animal kingdom or respect for the planet.
Humans see themselves as the superior species in every way. Although we know that the basis of our everyday existence is physical and organic, we perceive ourselves more as disembodied personalities than biological creatures.

What happens when the way in which you see your body begins to change? When the oddness of the human body, and its kinship with other “lesser” animals, begins to loom large?

Kissinger’s Orient

As Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd puzzles over Australia’s response to China’s rise to global power, he has turned for inspiration to Dr Henry Kissinger and his latest book “On China”.

The former US Secretary of State and the world’s most renowned diplomat, Dr Kissinger has surprisingly similar views to Mr Rudd on creating a Pacific Community to quell the tensions of Asia’s Great Powers.

But the big question remains. Can such a Pacific Community realistically forestall geostrategic conflict between the US and China?

Gina’s Ire

The bad PR keeps coming for billionaire Gina Rinehart, but it’s unlikely that Australia’s wealthiest woman will buckle under the pressure.

Indeed it may be all part of the plan for the daughter of iron ore magnate Lang Hancock.

Last week, newspapers in Australia brimmed with the news that the billionaire mining magnate has left her children virtually penniless.

For a woman who nearly lost her fortune twice – once to her ambitious Filipina stepmother Rose Hancock Porteous and another time to the markets – it would be a lesson to her children in how not to lose.

Treason for Toffs

“Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away”

This quote from John Le Carre’s 1974 classic “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” well summarises the post-war fate of Britain’s ruling class.

George Smiley’s hunt for a Soviet mole in British intelligence is the basic theme of this espionage classic.

And the current movie adaptation of this psychological thriller starring Gary Oldman does a good job capturing the Cold War’s physical and spiritual zeitgeist.

But just what really drives our interest in tales of elite British espionage and treachery?

French children don’t throw food

After a forgettable seaside holiday where her baby daughter spoils every meal, author Pamela Druckerman decides to swear by the detached parenting technique of the French.
  
Hot on the heels of Amy Chua’s tough love parenting manual Tiger Mama Druckerman’s French children don’t throw food argues the case for a little French nonchalance.

Her new book criticises hands on parenting techniques, but are they simply a rational response to a rapidly changing and competitive world?

Bringing them down

“So where was I?” joked Gervais in his opening line. “Nervous? Don’t be. This isn’t about you.”

Celebrity culture, with its adoration of the lowest and the high, from Kim Kardashian to George Clooney, is a powerful social phenomenon that defines our era.

The Church is defunct and dysfunctional. Politicians and their craft are disdained. The only reality left is success and its materialistic priesthood.

No one listens to the local priest but they will take tough advice from Tom Hanks or George Clooney.

So why such pleasure in seeing our silver screen idols brought down a peg? At bottom we know our celebrity heroes are just like us.

Brazil’s Baader-Meinhof

She used false names, held secret meetings, transported weapons, might have been involved in a robbery, learned to shoot, taught Marxism, was arrested, tortured, prosecuted and spent 28 months in jail.

No, she’s not a former member of Germany’s notorious Baader Meinhof gang, but Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, President of the world’s sixth largest economy.

Will it take this woman to save Brazil from corruption?

So far six heads have rolled in her anti-corruption drive and the word is out in the Palácio do Planalto that this year’s cabinet reshuffle could be a blood bath.

Sex, lies and art galleries

Picasso is revered as a symbol of modern cool – but underneath the enlightened artist, he was a brutal, ambitious and highly sexed individual who saw art as a form of combat.

The Picasso masterpieces, currently on exhibit at the NSW Art Gallery, represent an important event but the exhibition leaves a blank state when it comes to the artist’s identity.

Both his mistress and his wife committed suicide, he preferred submissive women and was said to have liked bondage.

His cruelty and sexual greed were legendary and neither was unrelated to the success of his art.

Summer in Sydney

“The girls from the suburbs used to go topless on Bondi beach,” says the old surfer wistfully, “but now they wear shorts.”

Behind him, the beach is a tightly packed arc of meditating bodies. Thousands of golden totems lie perpendicular to the shoreline, their faces and palms upturned towards the blinding sun.

Beyond the fake tans and firm flesh, there is something irrepressibly democratic about the lazy mix of tanned surfers, rowdy kids from the suburbs and lobster-coloured tourists, that parade up and down the promenade.

There is energy on the promenade. It’s a place where you feel anything might happen. It’s summer in Sydney.

‘Sunday at Bondi’ photo by www.clairereynolds.com