Whimsy
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If on a 'faithful afternoon', as my unsolicited African correspondent put it, you receive as email promising all sorts of undeserved riches, do stop, think and read the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s latest Targeting Scams report. Then pause to wonder how so many people can be so stupid
April 22, 2023
5 mins
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There's a tendency to regard politicians as the sum of their public personas and nothing more. But look beyond the headlines and histrionics, the fulminating press releases and playing to the peanut gallery, and what you'll find is perfectly normal. A loving and sustaining relationship with an adoring bikie boyfriend, a passion for yarning circles and the sweaters and scarves they produce -- and, of course, immense respect for the taxpayer dollar
March 19, 2023
5 mins
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A president in his dotage, a dipsomaniac janitor in The Lodge, a misplaced phone call and a starstruck prime minister-- that's how the Voice campaign acquired its marching song.
February 18, 2023
6 mins
The latest
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Let me say a few words in support of emus -- dromaius novaehollandiae in the argot of zoologists -- the forgotten ‘other’ of the bookends on our nation’s coat of arms. Once of equal standing with the kangaroo in our symbology, our largest ratite has been unjustly denied the limelight by her hopping partner
October 15, 2022
4 mins
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It's a few years hence, the Voice referendum has been passed and day-to-day life in Australia -- a considerably smaller Australia -- is rather different from those white supremacist days of old. That was when the country had only one flag and people were judged not as members of an identity group but as individuals. Fortunately, the naked racism of that colonialist perspective had been banished forever
July 16, 2022
5 mins
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As a break from relentless election news, the deluge of vote-for-us ads and grim thoughts of the massive spending both major parties are promising, here's something a little different: the strange case of the many feet washing up on beaches on both sides of the Pacific with nary a trace of their owners
May 14, 2022
7 mins
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For the next seven days in the city formerly known as 'Melbourne', we have Naarm Writers’ Week, with perhaps the biggest cast of publicly subsidised transgressive nonentities you’ve mostly never heard of. Not to worry, though. The important thing is that the Australia Council knows where to send their cheques
March 11, 2022
5 mins
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They are called bandtograms and have nothing whatsoever to do with the leader of Greens, although both are silly and serve no useful purpose whatsoever. Still, what might be called 'sons of the palindrome' offer the prospect of time-killing amusement to those who enjoy crosswords, Wordle and brain-teasers. Readers are invited to submit their own bandtograms in comments
February 19, 2022
3 mins