Australia: a backwards country, going further backwards

September 30, 2014September 30, 2014freshlyworded 1 Comment

Last weekend, whilst driving in the Melbourne northern burbs, my wife’s phone rang.

It was friends of ours, recently back from a holiday in Europe and they had big news. They had gotten engaged in Paris.

They had been together for a number of years and we were delighted to hear they had tied the knot.

But then the realisation struck home that they cannot legally marry in this country, because Australia does not allow gay marriage – they are a lesbian couple.

For a very brief period in December last year, it was legal for gay couples to wed in the ACT. Rather than embrace this bold move forward, the Commonwealth government successfully appealed the territory laws that had been in force for less than a week. No sooner were gay couples saying “I do” then their marriage certificates were being gleefully stomped upon by conservative bureacrats.

This is the country we live in.

These are 17 countries where gay marriage is legal with Scotland the latest to the join the list of enlightened nations earlier this year.

First to allow gay marriage was Holland way back in 2000, the others are: England (2013), Wales (2013), France (2013), New Zealand (2013), Uruguay (2013), Denmark (2012), Argentina (2010), Portugal (2010), Iceland (2010), Sweden (2009), Norway (2009), South Africa (2006), Spain (2005), Canada (2005) and Belgium (2003).

Yes, even the country of my birth, South Africa, a developing country with many social issues, has recognised that people of the same-sex have the legal right to become husband and wife, but not in Australia. Prime minister Tony Abbott is vehemently opposed to gay marriage despite, his own sister Virginia being in a gay relationship.

Asylum seekers

This is not an isolated backwards step, Australia is moving backwards in many disturbing and insidious ways.

Our foreign minister, Scott Morrison recently drank champagne with his Cambodian colleagues after agreeing to send refugees that arrive by boat to Cambodia in a grubby “cash for people” deal that treats people like livestock.

Cambodia, one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world will take Australia’s unwanted refugees who are already living in secret squalor on the impoverished island of Nauru.

What will Cambodia get out of this – $40 million and the promise of more money if they take more people. At the same time, Australia has washed its hands clean of its commitment to provide a safe haven for genuine refugees in what Amnesty International has labelled “a new low in Australia’s deplorable and inhumane treatment of asylum seekers”.

This is just the tip of the iceberg: The 2014-15 Federal Budget, the first under Joe Hockey, cut Australia’s refugee and humanitarian program from 20,000 to 13,750 places and reduced its aid spending by $7.6 billion over five years.

Free speech squashed

Rather than enshrine freedom of speech as he had promised in opposition, Tony Abbott has done the opposite.

Journalists and bloggers now face up to 10 years in jail for doing their jobs, providing information about the secret activities of government organisations, even if their stories are in the public’s interest. This is not all, the new national security laws also make it easier for security agencies to access personal computers and spy on Australians overseas, the very violations of individual privacy, that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed were happening on an industrial scale in the US, UK and Australia.

And while the government eventually backed away from moves by attorney General George Brandis’s love-child – plans to water down protections under the Racial Discrimination Act that would have made Australia a protected haven for Holocaust deniers and racists (legal to offend, insult, humiliate someone based on their race or ethnicity), the fact that they were drafted in the first place, speaks volumes about our retreat from enlightenment.

Other backwards movements

These are but three examples, there are many more:

Savage reductions in funding for impoverished aboriginal communities, scrapping of the two-year carbon tax, which actually worked to reduce carbon emissions in exchange for support for the coal industry, money pulled from the national broadcaster the ABC forcing the likely cancellation of important investigative journalism programs, a $7 GP co-payment that will hurt the poorest in society. The list goes on.

It’s a depressing state of affairs for those who cherish Australia as a forward-thinking, first-world nation, that values multi-culturalism, basic human decency and a “fair go”.

As for my gay friends who are now engaged, there’s always New Zealand as a wedding option – a country that’s not just beating us at rugby.

For a far more erudite article on Tony Abbott and his government, read David Marr’s excellent article in The Monthly here.

Jewish humour and shame: why I loved “The Making of Henry” by Howard Jacobson

September 24, 2014September 24, 2014freshlyworded 1 Comment

It’s hard to say exactly why I enjoyed reading Howard Jacobson’s 2004 novel “The Making of Henry”.

Not a lot happens throughout its 340 odd pages. The reader is largely stuck inside the head of retired English lecturer Henry Nagel, 59, Jewish, morbid, mildly misanthropic and with little libido (His chief love was his aunt, Marghanita, who introduced him to books).

After an utterly unremarkable career as an English literature lecturer at an undististinguised academic institution in the Pennines (where his chief accomplishment was to have slept with most of the wives of his friends and colleagues – and to have published virtually nothing), he finds himself living alone in a grand old St John’s Wood apartment, given to him for life by a mystery benefactor, whom he assumes was his father, Izzy’s, mistress.

This is just one of his many ruminations.

It might have all been so very different for Henry if his estranged best friend and rival Osmond “Hovis” (because his head was shaped like a loaf of bread) Belkin hadn’t called him a “girl” on their first day of grammar school or if his father hadn’t chosen a career as a fire-breathing children’s entertainer or if Henry had had plan for his life or a desire for one in the first place:

“I’ve cocked up my life.” Henry told himself, early on the first day of his first term as an assistant lecturer at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology. That was not simply a description of what had happened, it was also a statement of intent…”I’ve cocked up my life”, as Henry inflected it, also contained the meanings “I will have cocked up my life” and “There was never a time when I wasn’t going to have cocked up my life.”

Not exactly an inspiring figure, but in my eyes the true Jewish male intellectual anti-hero.

Without any real ambition, without any noteworthy achievements, great wealth, wives or children (the standards by which many Jewish men are judged) Henry obsesses over his own mortality, finds his life to have been mostly pointless, but who drudges along anyway, holding out a flicker of hope that some meaning or purpose may yet come, even at this late stage.

He encapsulates what Alvy Singer, the neurotic main character in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall means when he says, telling an old joke, that: “Life is full of heartache and misery – and over far too quickly.”

Now 40 and wondering how I got here so fast or where the years went, I could relate to this passage (though not quite so morbidly):

Does Henry feel, then, that his has been a disappointing life? No. Henry feels his has not been a life….There was his childhood – say from zero to twenty-one; all right, say from zero to thirty – then whoosh! (he teaches, he is borrowed by his friends’ wives, he resigns, he moves to St John’s Wood, he meets a dog) and suddenly it’s now.

Where has the time gone? What have I achieved? Is it too late? Should I be ashamed? What would my parents think of me now?

Howard Jacobson has been celebrated for being the unofficial laureate of the Jewish male persona and in ‘The Making of Henry” he has unearthed many of its characteristics.

Also, ‘The Making of Henry” made me laugh out loud, particularly at Henry’s interaction with the outside world, of which his experiences are mainly bad, shameful or unsatisfying.

In one scene, Henry, reluctantly agrees to walk a friend’s dog, who then pisses against the tyre of a BMW:

“Hey!” someone calls.
Neither Henry or Angus (the dog) take any notice.
“Hey! I said hey!”
Henry looks up. They are outside Bar One or something similar. A man in shiny metallic suit…is standing in the doorway, pointing rhythmically. He is on his mobile phone, and expects Henry to put up with his half attention.
“Your tyre?” Henry wonders.
“My wife’s tyre”
“Well I’m sure she drives through worse.” He does not intend to apologise. Not on Angus’s behalf. For Angus, Henry will now lie on a bed of broken glass.
The man goes on shaking his finger. “You should know you’re not to let dogs foul the footpath.
“That’s not the footpath. He wants the gutter, but your wife’s car is in the way. And on double yellow lines.”
“In the way! You shouldn’t be walking him here at all.”
“I take my dog,” Henry says, “For walks where he wants to walk.”
“And my wife parks where she wants to park.”
“Then your wife and my dog have much in common.”

Henry may be morbid and depressing, but he is also witty,darkly comic, free of the burden of being polite, considerate and nice.

Salvation, and a re-awakening of Henry’s loins comes when he meets and falls in love with flat-shoe wearing, yet flirtatious, Moira, the Eastern European scented waitress who serves him his coffee and cake at the Viennese pâtisserie he frequents on the St John’s Wood high street.

It is Moira who brings Henry back to the world of the living and literally snaps him out of the moments when he disappears into his own head and thoughts about his dead parents, or lost friendship with Hovis Belkin.

So, really, The Making of Henry is a love story.

When in Bali… eat Italian, Spanish, or French

September 18, 2014September 18, 2014freshlyworded 1 Comment

What you quickly learn about Seminyak, the tourist enclave on Bali’s west coast – apart from its crippling traffic congestion – is an obsession with eating well.

Seminyak, from the rooftop bar of Double Six Hotel

Everyone has a favourite restaurant. Stuck in an endless traffic jam, as mopeds whizz by, the chatter in the minivan is all about gourmet cuisine.

People talk about Sardine, which serves international and French-inspired seafood creations by Californian chef Michael Shaheen, and beach club establishment Ku De Ta, where Byron Bay’s Ben Cross prepares Mediterranean-inspired cuisine while American pastry chef Jeff Goldfarb has set up a laboratory to develop new flavours. Then there’s Mama San, run by former Longrain chef Will Meyrick, offering an inventive pan-Asian menu.

Bali is undergoing a food revolution, with overseas chefs setting up establishments at a fraction of the cost of doing so back home, catering to the taste experiences demanded from Bali’s Australian, European and mainland Indonesian visitors.

Hipster joints

Having spent a good 90 minutes stuck on Jalan Petitenget, we give up on sampling some cheap local fare at Warung Sulawesi, a traditional Indonesian restaurant serving rice dishes, curries and stir-fries, and pull up instead at Latin American meat joint Barbacoa – a relatively new addition to the hipster list.

Barbacoa is a big open-plan establishment with mosaic-tiled floors and high ceilings. Near the entrance, a wood fire crackles below what makes the restaurant’s signature dish – slowly roasting whole pigs basted in chimichurri (an Argentinian herb and garlic sauce) – which must be ordered in advance.

Slow roasted pork, the speciality at Barbacoa

Barbacoa is run by former Sydney chef Adam Dundas-Taylor, whose CV also includes stints at Nobu and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, both in London. We get a table outside and order a selection of tapas. Highlights include tender Cuban pulled pork sliders ($4.50) with pickled red onion, aioli and tomato, and salt brined chicken winglets with agave and pumpkin seed powder ($6.50). All are washed down with Bintang, the local brew.

Dundas-Taylor says he originally planned to open a Mexican restaurant in Seminyak with chef and business partner Sean Prenter, but was forced to “regroup” after a rush of Mexican establishments opened up in a short space of time.

“We kept a little bit of the Mexican tapas and then mixed it with my love of Argentinian charcoal cooking and my knowledge of Peruvian cooking from my days spent working at Nobu.”

High demand for international fare

While demand for international fare is high, competition among restaurateurs is intense. Offering something with an international flavour does not guarantee success. “It’s very important that you become one of the 10 restaurants on the dining circle in Bali,” Dundas-Taylor says. “A lot of people think Bali is dense in people and customers, but actually the food industry is quite [the] opposite.

“I feel that Bali is calling for a certain amount of international food. What some people may not realise is that the market in Bali is already saturated. and location and price point has a lot to do with your success. There are many restaurants struggling,”

In the new luxury Double-Six Seminyak hotel overlooking the beach and next door to the crazily popular Cocoon bar and nightclub, Sydney chef Robert Marchetti has created international food experiences with the backing of hotel owner and prominent Bali businessmen, Kadek Wiranatha.

Marchetti’s Seminyak Italian – his first venture here – overlooks the meandering hotel swimming pool (the longest in Bali) with gorgeous beach views. It includes a glassed-in pasta room where fresh spaghetti, ravioli and penne are made by hand. In another glass cubicle hang mortadella, salami and prosciutto alongside Italian cheeses, all part of Marchetti’s desire to create a “great fun Italian eatery” with local produce.

An faux-Italian ice-cream vendor on wheels, hotel Double Six

“Burrata (an Italian cheese made from mozzarella and cream) is made specifically for us on the island,” he says. “We use lots of local seafood and the mountains of Bali grow plenty of great fresh produce.”

Menu highlights include Granchio alla Veneta, hand-picked crab meat with garlic and chilli on a bed of mascarpone polenta ($9) and for dessert, tiramasu ($9) scooped straight from the baking tray at the table.

In October, Marchetti will open the Plantation Grill, a Great Gatsby-styled diner, specialising in dry aged meat and line-caught seafood cooked over open grills and in wood-fired ovens.

World-class destination

Marchetti says Bali has really evolved over the past five to 10 years to become a world-class food destination. And it just continues to get better, he continues. “It’s a really creative island in every sense and the possibilities are endless.”

Travel writer Ryan Ver Berkmoes, author of the Lonely Planet Bali & Lombok guide, understands the apparent dissonance between location and food. “Just because people are on Bali doesn’t mean they want to eat Balinese and Indonesian food every meal,” he says. And I say that as someone who loves nasi campur (lunchtime plate of mixed dishes) and babi guling (succulent roasted and spiced suckling pig).

Ver Berkmoes, who grew up in California, says a big part of Bali is eating out. “Bali has hit the sweet spot with a whole slew of excellent restaurants serving foods from around the world that you can eat for a fraction of what the same meal would cost at home.”

“The onslaught of tourists means that if you’re good, you do great business yet your costs are low, even if your food is grown organic or sourced internationally.”

The only thing that’s more expensive is the wine – around $50 a bottle for good Australian plonk – courtesy of Indonesia’s “insane Indonesian tax system.”

Ver Berkmoes’s advice: “Enjoy the $10 mains and learn to love Bintang.”

The writer was a guest of Double-Six.

This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review

Serial killers: a reading list for the obssessed (or uninitiated)

September 11, 2014September 12, 2014freshlyworded Leave a comment

In 1997, I went on the famous Jack the Ripper walk through the East End of London, visiting all the spots where he had committed his grizzly Victorian-era murders. The tour ended at the Ten Bells pub in Whitechapel, where two of ‘Jack’s’ victims – prostitutes Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly – were said to have regularly frequented.

Our guide on the night was Donald Rumbelow, one of dozens of writers who had theorised about who Jack the Ripper might have been. I remember I bought a copy of his book after the tour and devoured it in a hurry.

At the time and throughout my twenties, I had perhaps an unhealthy interest in these evil monsters, reading book after a book, utterly fascinated and repelled in equal measure.

I had and still do have a fascination with the darker side of human nature, particularly when the crimes are committed by seemingly ‘ordinary people’. But doesn’t everyone?

Recently, it was revealed that testing of DNA on a shawl that belonged to one of the Ripper’s victims – Catherine Eddowes – was a 100 per cent match for the sister of a Polish-born hairdresser called Aaron Kosminski, a suspect in almost any reputable book about the crimes. This, it seems has dealt a body blow to 120 plus years of speculation and intrigue and an industry of ‘Ripperologists‘ comprising amateur sleuths and published writers.

This re-ignited my interest in the subject of serial killers, which had already been stirred by a book I came across in Big W of all places.

I was intrigued by the cover and its title: “The Most Dangerous Animal of All – Searching for my father…and finding the Zodiac Killer.” by Gary L. Stewart.

I have not read it yet – I am still making my way through, of all things a comic novel by Howard Jacobson called “The Making of Henry – but it’s next on my reading list.

On the back cover it says tantalizingly:

An explosive, revelatory memoir of a man who discovers that his father is one of the most infamous and still-wanted serial killers in America.

Like Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer – who murdered seven or more people in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s – was never caught. In another similarity, the Zodiac Killer also sent cryptic notes to the police, one in which he stated that man “is the most dangerous animal of all”.

There were numerous books written about the Zodiac killer and a very good 2007 film called “Zodiac” directed by David Fincher and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr and Mark Ruffalo.

If this Zodiac book is as convincing as the back cover claims, than that would be two famous serial killer mysteries solved. Never mind, countless others remain as does the question: who or what makes these monsters?

Here’s my list of six of the best books I’ve read about serial killers:

1. Written in Blood by Colin Wilson
This is actually a book about forensic science, but within its dense pages are countless tales of serial killers including Bela Kiss, Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and Albert Fish to name just three plus insights into their psychological make-up and motives. Wilson, a prolific writer on crime, the occult, philosophy and countless other topics sadly passed away last year. “Will enthrall connoisseurs of violent crime”- is on the cover of my well-thumbed paperback edition.

2. The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
The most chilling and fascinating book every written about a serial killer. Ann Rule was a friend of the charming, well educated and good looking Ted Bundy, only later to discover to her huge shock and revulsion that he was a vicious serial killer.

3. Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy
The story about one of the most infamous murderers in British history, John Christie, and the wrongful arrest and execution of his neighbour Timothy Evans. Made into a brilliant, hugely disturbing film starring the late Richard Attenborough as John Christie in 1971.

A poster for the movie “Ten Rillington Place” starring Richard Attenborough

4. Killing for Company by Brian Masters
Noted crime writer Brian Masters tell the story of Londoner Dennis Nilsen, who brutally murdered 15 men in the late 1970s and early 1980s, kept them as companions and then later buried them under his floor or dismembered them and flushed them down the plumbing. What haunted me was that he had lived close to a cousin of mine in Muswell Hill, North London.

5. Lust Killer by Ann Rule
The story of Jerry Brudos, a married man with children in Portland, Oregon, who kidnapped, murdered and violated women in the workshop of his family home in 1968 and 1969. His wife had no clue.

6. A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger
Written by the author of “The Perfect Storm” it tells the story of Albert DeSalvo who by an incredible coincidence worked on a construction job in Junger’s family home in the early 1960s and who later confessed to being the “The Boston Strangler”. Junger theorises that DeSalvo was also the murderer of an elderly woman in the neighbourhood, not a black man called Roy Smith, who was jailed for life for the crime. Deeply disturbing, the book has on its front cover a photo of DeSalvo posing in a family photo with the author as an infant.

Twitter’s anonymous racist underbelly is a parody account.

September 2, 2014September 11, 2014freshlyworded 3 Comments

********Spoiler alert: @ozprotectionistparty is a parody**************

If you ever want to pick up the mood among Australia’s racist underbelly, then Twitter is a great place to start.

Some of the vilest guff comes out the mouths of anonymous twitter accounts, racist cowards not brave enough to sign their name to their bile.

~~Take for example~~ I wrongly picked this fella:

I recently came across his account as part of a Twitter war involving Wendy Bacon, an academic and journalist (@Wendy_Bacon) , Sharri Markson, media editor of The Australian (@SharriMarkson) and News Corp ultra conservative columnist Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine).

It was a classic lefty journalist criticising a News Corp editor, which descended into a slanging match.

The fuse seems to have been lit by Wendy Bacon. She tweeted in response to an article by Sharri Markson about how journalists that tweeted their own opinions (examples included Bacon herself, Crikey star writer Bernard Keane, former Channel Ten broadcaster Paul Bongiorno and journalist and blogger Margo Kingston) were putting journalism at risk.

It was a provocative tweet no doubt – Bacon was clearly incensed that her opinions had been cast as a threat to journalism.

Miranda Devine leapt to Sharri Markson’s defence in typical fashion:

And then it all erupted as you can see with all the retweets and favourites.

I won’t go into all the comments – it was essentially a slanging match between ultra-conservative tweeters and left-leaning thinkers.

Amongst it all, @ozProtectionistParty caught my eye with this bogan-esque comment:

Then I read through OzProtectionistParty’s Twitter feed. These are just a few highlights:

On refugees:

Homosexuals and same-sex marriage (SSM):

Women:

Renewable energy

And so it goes on…

The twitter account is a parody – which I understand to be that he is actually mocking the right wing/racist elements in Australian society.

Otherwise and were it not for the spelling mistakes, it ~~seemed~~ would be an almost perfect synthesis of all the worst right-wing stereotypes – refugees are illegal queue jumpers, feminists are power-hungry bitches, students are bludgers – cloaked behind an anonymous Twitter handle.

Ten years ago, this fellow – were he real – would be spewing this stuff down at the pub with his mates rather than on the public forum that is Twitter.

There’s thousand of REAL PEOPLE out there who are not a parody like this account, barometers of what’s lurking beneath the surface of people you might stand next to on the train on the way into work or who are in front of you in the queue at Hungry Jacks.

Eager funnels for every right wing ideology and stereotype that comes out of the mouths of white/male/conservative/bigots.

Just hope you don’t bump into one of these REAL PEOPLE on a bus or train: