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Come here for my take on politics, life and culture from the land down under
01:12 UK time, Wednesday, 31 August 2011
"The land down under" has always been a colloquialism dripping with inconsequentiality, and reaches back to a time when the tyranny of distance brought with it the felony of neglect.
It provides a fitting title for Bill Bryson's best-selling book on Australia, a portrait, sweeping in its broad brush strokes, which focuses on what the author perceived to be this country's sheer irrelevance.
04:53 UK time, Tuesday, 30 August 2011
In creeks and hollows that were once the focus of a 19th Century gold rush, modern-day prospectors have come in search of their fortunes. Nugget by nugget. Speck by tiny speck.
Four hours' drive inland from Sydney, over the Great Dividing Range that separates this vast continent, the scenery is classic Australian bush.
16:06 UK time, Monday, 29 August 2011
When we launched this blog on the eve of the federal election in 2007, we thought it would have about the same shelf-life as the campaign itself.
Going into polling day, I did not think it would survive much longer than John Howard. Thanks, largely, to your continued support, however, we are still in business almost four years on.
15:35 UK time, Thursday, 25 August 2011
How would American history have been altered had John Kerry decided against inviting a little-known Illinois state senator to deliver a prime-time address to the Democratic convention in 2004?
Or if John McCain had studied more closely the record of an obscure governor from Alaska before inviting her to join his presidential ticket in 2008?
16:42 UK time, Wednesday, 24 August 2011
This has been a fairly miserable few months for the arts in Australia.
The national broadcaster ABC axed its flagship culture show, Art Nation. Fans of the programme described the move as an act of cultural vandalism.
03:04 UK time, Tuesday, 23 August 2011
How should white settlement be characterised in the wording of the Australian constitution? The question has been raised after Sydney City Council decided to change the preamble in its corporate plan to describe the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 as an "invasion" and "illegal colonization". It replaced the phrase "European arrival".
For many of the councillors, the issue was clear-cut. They thought it was simply historically dishonest to go on describing white settlement as anything other than an invasion, given that Australia was already home to the world's longest continuous living culture and that Aborigines were conquered and slaughtered by the British. After all, the first settlers routinely used words like "invasion," "warfare" and "enemies" when they spoke of the indigenous population.
00:14 UK time, Monday, 22 August 2011
A new arrival in Australia could reasonably be forgiven for thinking that there was some kind of constitutional requirement making it mandatory for political leaders to spend at least three days each week wearing either a fluorescent orange jacket or a white hard hat.
Virtually every morning, it seems, image-makers in the gainful employ of opposition leader Tony Abbott and Prime Minister Julia Gillard conjure up some kind of unimaginative photo-opportunity, where their leaders appear brandishing a blow-torch, a spade, a butcher's knife, an on-button or some kind of piece of light industrial machinery.
17:03 UK time, Thursday, 18 August 2011
Few private companies engender quite the same sense of public ownership as Australia's national flag carrier, Qantas.
The airline has encouraged this, of course, with its sentimental advertisements featuring the Peter Allen hit, I Still Call Australia Home, and its sponsorship of national sports teams, like the Wallabies, the Socceroos and Australia's Olympians.
08:31 UK time, Wednesday, 17 August 2011
They descended upon Canberra with Aussie flags draped round their shoulders, "No carbon tax" stickers affixed to their shirts and wearing Akubra hats and baseball caps to guard them from the early spring sun: 4,000-5,000 protesters who had amassed on the lawns of Parliament House to vent their fury at plans for a carbon tax which they believe will increase fuel bills, wreck Australia's resources-dependent economy and do nothing to halt global warming.
Many, probably most, vehemently reject the science underpinning worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions.
00:51 UK time, Saturday, 13 August 2011
Imagine the outcry in America if a senior cabinet member in the Obama administration had announced she was about to have a baby with her gay partner.
I'm thinking protests from the Christian Right outside the Treasury Department. Fiery on-screen denunciations from some leading television evangelists. Perhaps one or two preachers might even have blamed America's demotion from AAA to AA+ status on the moral impoverishment of its financial officials. The unborn baby would have quickly become the latest proxy in America's ongoing culture wars.
09:31 UK time, Tuesday, 9 August 2011
The tagline was the invention of journalists rather than the Gillard government, but when ministers came up with the idea of sending asylum seekers to Kuala Lumpur, they hoped it would offer a "Malaysian Solution".
This was an emergency measure borne of a political and logistical dilemma. The country's detention centres are overcrowded and volatile. Julia Gillard has been hammered in the polls over one of Australia's most toxic political issues. No Labor leader wants to be portrayed as being soft on border protection. Indeed, Paul Keating pioneered the policy of mandatory detention.
03:13 UK time, Friday, 5 August 2011
Australia has not lifted the Rugby World Cup since John Eales was handed the Webb Ellis trophy by the Queen at the Millennium Stadium in November 1999 on the very day that his compatriots opted to retain her services as Australia's head of state - a day of two halves, I think you will agree, for rugby-loving republicans.
Indeed, not since 2003, when John Howard huffily awarded the cup to the victorious England captain Martin Johnson at Homebush, have the Wallabies come close to winning rugby's most illustrious prize.
06:57 UK time, Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Should David Hicks be allowed to profit from his memoir, Guantanamo: My Journey?
The book, published in October last year, provides an account of the five years that the "Aussie Taliban" spent as a detainee at America's controversial detention centre in Cuba, and details allegations of torture against his American captors.
07:42 UK time, Tuesday, 2 August 2011
By this time next month, my Australian posting will have come to an end, and I will have handed the reins to my colleague Duncan Kennedy, formerly of the Rome parish. Between now and then, there will be more than enough time for a few farewells and final thoughts, but first there's the more humdrum task of the handover.
No doubt I will be passing on various logistical tips and pointers. Getting a satellite signal out of Perth, for instance, can involve lying prostrate on the ground in the public park next to the CBD with a receiver dish in one hand and a microphone in the other, a bodily feat that requires the kind of physical contortions that might test a Byron Bay yoga instructor.
01:49 UK time, Thursday, 28 July 2011
Travelling back on the train from a rugby match the other night, a young fella who had probably had more than a couple of medium-strength lagers decided to challenge the entire carriage to the Sunday Telegraph trivia quiz.
A real larrikin who was hilariously funny, he rattled off question after question as we all raced to be first with the answer.
05:21 UK time, Monday, 25 July 2011
There are times when I think that Australia should truly be known as the Lycra Country.
Get up early on virtually any morning of the week, and you will see packs of cyclists hurtling around the parks or thundering, Peloton-like, down the highways. Venture out a little later and you will often see them packing out cafes as they gather for a hearty post-ride breakfast.
03:53 UK time, Friday, 22 July 2011
I confess to being a complete sucker for those books that purport to tell you the history of western civilization through six glasses, 300 cheeses or a dozen different ways to cook potatoes.
Australia is ripe for such treatment, of course, for you could easily write a half-decent history of the country through the prism of its wine glasses, rum tumblers, coffee mugs, tea cups, schooners and stubbies.
13:18 UK time, Wednesday, 20 July 2011
Britons of a certain vintage will remember the question asked after election night in 1997: "Were you still up for Portillo?" - a reference to the Cabinet minister whose middle-of-the-night constituency defeat came to symbolise the end of 18 years of Conservative rule. Many Australians have been asking this morning: "Were you up for the pie?" and wondering perhaps whether the Murdoch era of media dominance has also come to an end.
The parliamentary hearings became a major television event here - an overnight sensation, in the most literal sense of all, because they unfolded at such a late hour. The Murdochs took their seats at 2330 Australian eastern standard time. The major networks carried the parliamentary hearings in full, with only SBS sticking to its scheduled programming. By strange coincidence, cycling fans tuning in were captivated by the performance of another Australian, Cadel Evans, who is going well in the Tour de France.
08:11 UK time, Tuesday, 19 July 2011
The Britain I left late on Saturday night was a markedly different place from the country that I arrived in just 10 days earlier.
Outside of a general election, it is hard to think of a moment in modern times when so much power shifted in so short a space of time.
12:32 UK time, Friday, 8 July 2011
One of the year's great feel-good sports stories plays out tonight in Brisbane, as the Queensland Reds take on New Zealand's Crusaders in the final of the Super 15 rugby.
It has been dubbed the "natural disasters final", because it pits flood-affected Queensland against quake-affected Canterbury.
