Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Dog and cat picture is most interesting thing today

Another sultry day promises to sap our energy. At 6:45 the ceiling fans are already turning.

I've had a quick look at the morning newspaper. The state Liberal party opposition is still in turmoil. Apparently the men can't relate to women very well. The new leader has had occasional burst of inspiration - but from the contour of his suit it looks like he's taken to wearing a corset.

The front page has a picture of the ex-footballer Ben Cousins. Aboriginal boxer Tony Mundine has arranged for him to appear at some sort of public conference in Sydney tomorrow to talk about his experiences with deleterious substances. Zzzzz!

Inside the paper there's a lot of material on Perth's most prominent gangland identities. One of the most powerful heads of an outlaw motorcycle gang is alleged to have had a severe beating at the hands of his underlings. This could mean big underworld trouble in river city. On the other hand it could just be a beat up by a newspaper short on headlines.

Another bit of news is that the 'P Plater' PM Mr Rudd is apparently running short of ideas. He'd announced that a thousand of Australia's 'best and brightest' will be invited to go to Canberra and participate in a two day gabfest to put forward suggestions on how the country should be organised in the future. The 'best and brightest' will be expected to travel to Canberra at their own expense and pay for their own accommodation. This suggests to me that some of the unsponsored delegates will not be very bright if they go for that deal.

Of course its intended to cut out the dross. Big business will have no qualms about sending as many delegates as they can, and senior academics at Australia's innumerable universities will have no trouble in getting funded by their institutions. So it can be seen that there won't be any room for anyone else anyway.

My theory is that the gathering will also a talent-scouting exercise in search of potential Labor Party political candidates. There will be more interest in how persuasively certain individuals at the gabfest project themselves rather that the actual ideas they try to put forward. I reckon someone behind the scenes has been inspired by the TV program, Australian Idol. Will Dicko and Kyle be there acting as judges?

For added digestion there is the 'Sorry' speech to Aborigines which Mr Rudd is going read to the nation on February 13. The wording is still secret. It promises to be a recipe for national unhappiness because an apology will never be enough for some people and too much for others. The PM has said he will not open the doors to compensation claims, others, including a lot of Aborigines, reckon he's dreaming.

The sorry business has reminded me of my time with the Australian Army in Vietnam. There was an expression, "Sorry about that." which was used by everyone. Australians, Americans, Vietnamese - probably in fact almost everyone on the country, even if they didn't speak English.

It covered every situation where something didn't go according to plan. It could be spoken by a Vietnamese laundry woman who had lost a button on a shirt, or a US pilot who had just dropped a napalm bomb on the wrong village. (Every village was the wrong one.) The response was always the same, "Sorry 'bout that." It was a verbal shrug of the shoulders. No arguments, no compensation - end of story. It might have been one of the most common expressions I heard during my almost twelve months in Vietnam.

Anyway enough about these various aspects of human communication. I've put online another picture of Milly the puppy. She gave us a fright when she accidentally fell off our back verandah to a garden path. A one metre drop. She's landed on a geranium branch on the way down. Luckily she's okay. Not so the geranium. Sorry about that.

I took this picture this morning. Bubbles and Squeak, our two mini-panthers, were observing silly Milly the geranium vandal and wondering what to do with her.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

When there are multiple image links in some of my original essays, it might be easier to explore them by simply going direct to the cache at my Panoramio website. Most of them have a brief description and link back to the relevant essay. All the images can be enlarged even more by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!