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Fricasse of Kangaroo Tail

When it comes to the word “mankind”, it seems to me like there’s been something missing from the language all along. You see, leaving aside all the current bickering about the proposed questions in the next Australian census, the androcentric narrative that is most of written history is sort of a half story. It may be stating the bleedingly obvious, but in case you hadn’t noticed, one half of…

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The Authority of the Gun

They say guns don’t kill people, that people kill people, but in 1906 at Yallambie it was a subtle distinction wasted on William Alfred Wragge. In July of that year William, the second youngest son of Thomas was shot dead at the bottom of the garden in an accident where it could be said that no one pulled the trigger. Dr Cole, the coroner investigating the incident, ruled “that there was…

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If the cap fits

You know, it would be fair to say that of all the multifarious sartorial styles people have worn throughout the ages, it has been that thing they put on their head that has most defined social standing. The cloth cap of the working man, the bowler of the professional and the stove pipe topper of the ruling elite – these are all hat styles that are familiar, but there are literally hundreds of…

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Smoking as an Olympic size sport

If I owned a bucket filled with all things that I had wanted to do in one life, I think I’d turn it upside down right now and have a good long look for the hole I’m sure must be down there somewhere. It’s true the bucket list of all we mean to get done never quite measures up to our expectations, something the Spanish call, “mañana, mañana” but I’m wondering if what I have is really less of a…

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The Old Bill as art crtic

“…miles and miles of hoardings hiding the ugly hole in the ground that is the start of the North East Link…” Greensborough Rd, May, 2024. (McLachlan) You’ve got to feel something for the persecution poor old William Posters has suffered from the Old Bill. He’s been copping it from the coppers for years, the words “Bill Posters Prosecuted” once upon a time a familiar sight on awnings and placards…

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The walls have ears

Caricature of Oscar Wilde from an 1884 edition of Vanity Fair. (Source: Wikipedia) The poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde has sometimes been quoted as saying that he liked talking to brick walls. They were the only thing that didn’t contradict him he said, but then this was coming from the man who also alleged he was in a war to the death with his wallpaper. “One or the other of us has to go,” he…

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A Monkey on the Outback

“but that which was the pleasantest surprise, was a largish clump of what in England we should not look for in a garden, yet what once filled in England the soul of Linnaeus with delight, covered over with its golden bloom—gorse; the seed whence it was raised taken from a common near Nottingham.” (Richard Howitt describes weed gorse growing at Yallambee, from Impressions of Australia Felix,…

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The City on the Edge of Forever

By any sort of a measure, forever is a very long time. The whole of human civilization is usually dated from the end of the last ice age about 10 or 12,000 years ago, give or take, while recorded history can only be measured from the emergence of the first city states and the invention of writing, about 5000 years ago. Of course, nomadic peoples across the world like the Indigenous people of…

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The long and the short of shortbread

[yallambie]

It's time

Some people kill it. Others put a stitch in it. But for most of us, there never seems to be quite enough of it. Given the inscrutable nature of that thing we call time, it seems little wonder that the devices we use to mark it are made in the way they are. We say there are 24 hours in a day, but we only mark 12 of them on a typical analogue clock face, and we start the count not at zero, but at…

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A concrete way of thinking

The next time you’re handed one of those most improbable of all monetary units, the $100 polymer banknote in loose change with your litre of milk, take a moment to check out the moustachioed gentleman on one side. I’m not talking Dame Melba here but the intrepid General himself, Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash to give the old boy his full title. On their website, the Reserve Bank tells us he’s…

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Tempered intemperance

“He persuaded a man from Geelong to pose as a buyer, and that man finally made a deal with Mrs Beaton, paid a deposit and obtained a receipt which he handed to Thomas. It has been suggested that Thomas promptly rode over to the pub, ordered everyone out of it and burnt down the building.”(Calder: Classing the Wool – recounting Thomas Wragge’s solution to Beaton’s sly grog trading at Tulla) There…

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Seeing

It’s been claimed that in the heady years of old Empire, in the years leading up to the First “Great” War, senior British naval strategists resisted the temptation of introducing new submarine sailing technology into the Royal Navy, convinced that submarine warfare represented a wholly unwanted and cowardly way of conducting the time honoured practice of naval fighting. If allowed, they worried…

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“Look Mum, I found a Cornflake”

The French historian Philippe Ariès claimed sometime in the middle years of the last century, “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist”. The Frenchman’s idea was that children in history had been treated like sort of miniature adults without a separate phase in life of a clearly defined childhood. I don’t know whether growing up in France was necessarily all that different for…

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Ashes to Ashes

Don’t you love The Ashes? Not the kind left over in your fireplace when you wake up with the fire burned out overnight at the dawn of a frosty day in July. I mean the kind we see on the television screen and beamed to us from the English summer overnight. With the heated play, it’s been something to wake up to on these cold mornings, hasn’t it? The Ashes urn as it appeared in The Illustrated…

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Woof, wolf, woof

It’s a grand life, a dog’s life… It is undoubtedly the most perfect form of enjoyment that can be known. Where else shall we find those hourly opportunities for sport, romance and adventure, combined with a place on the rugs of the wisest and greatest?” – The Dean remembers his life as a dog. From Lord Dunsany’s novel, “My Talks with Dean Spanley”, Chapter 8. Do you remember that Bugs Bunny…

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Cheese and crackers

There are some things that I’m saying improve with age. I’m thinking primarily of things like the getting of wisdom and of course, our general knowledge. That improves too Oh, and don’t forget cheese. Contrarily, other things can be said to correspond to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the idea that entropy increases with time. This is the natural tendency of things to respond to a…