Walking along a bush path, it is almost impossible to tell the weeds from the ‘real’ Australian plants. Actually, ‘weeds’ is the wrong term – there are indigenous plants and exotic ones, the exotics having been brought here by non-indigenous people. The exotics seem to have settled in well and are thriving.
It would be easy, in a weekly column, to comment on current or recent events. I am more interested in looking at what allows events to unfold as they do and to ask questions that help me better understand why what is happening is happening.
Millions of people are still suffering from the colonial and imperial activities of European governments from the fifteenth through to the twentieth century. Territories were seized and the people living there were subjugated, often with disastrous results for their cultures and livelihoods.
How far does our ‘community’ extend? In the past, it might have been limited to our village or, more recently, our suburb. This would be overlapped by our extended family and, for many working men, the crowd that gathered after work at the local pub. In the countryside it may have been a collection of farms and the Country Women’s Association and in Australia it would also have been indigenous tribes. Some of these communities still exist.
Black Glass
Meg Mundell
Scribe 2011
ISBN: 9781921640933
$32.95
288 pp
Black Glass is gripping, frightening, clever and thought-provoking. It is written in an unusual style with an unusual structure and I resented every interruption that prevented me from reading it in one sitting.
Humans are illogical, which is contrary to what we tell ourselves and each other but consistent with our animal nature. We can reason and debate, make lists of arguments for and against something but, when we act, we seem to act at the behest of some other process.
Fall Girl
Toni Jordan
Text Publishing 2010
ISBN: 9781921656668
$32.95
240 pp
Following a successful debut novel with a second one can be daunting for a writer. With Fall Girl, Toni Jordan has come up with a worthy, well-crafted follow-up to Addition, showing that she has it in her to keep on entertaining us. (more…)
Dear Madam,
I am writing to you as a penultimate resort as you are the CEO of New Concept Builders and you have the power to set things right. My last resort will be to take this matter to the media, but please don’t read this as a threat. I do not know if your General Manager (New Housing) has passed on to you any of my last twenty-eight letters, so I will recap.
Thank you for purchasing a Klastelle Baby-Bounce-and Play Center. We congratulate you on the wisdom of your choice and support your obvious commitment to ensuring your baby has the very best in environmental stimulation and constructive play activity.
We seem obsessed with best, worst, highest, lowest, first, last, youngest, oldest. Any extreme seems to do. People go out of their way to have their names in the record books. Recently, the world’s oldest women died at the age of 115. Now her ‘runner-up’ is the oldest woman. It is a good thing that centenarians are not often given to bumping off their ‘competitors’ in order to make it into the record books.