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Showing posts from December, 2009

Seaside Rest

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It's only now as we're about to leave the Eastern Suburbs that we're exploring it a little. Recently we visited Waverley Cememtery, possibly one of the best photo opporunities I've ever seen. Although I didn't do the place justice, please enjoy the small fruits of my labours... The headland above A-ha, there it is (after our long walk!) Rock fishers, waiting to be swept off. I have no idea how they got there. So muh money once spent on monuments now neglected... Not a bad view for all eternity Suburban conformity can last forever Or the vaults - the Eastern Suburbs' finest real estate for the deceased An unexpected, and unexpectedly touching, memorial to the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikers Sorry to end on that melancholy note. Wine anyone?

NSW: Let's Keep Things In Perspective

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Like many in NSW, I could only roll my eyes and groan last week as the Sate Labor leadership spill took place. This, I thought, is just getting ridiculous. Nathan Rees finishing out the term was the best prospect Labor had. In different circumstances, he could have been wildly popular; a garbage collector from the Western Suburbs who also has a degree in English literature. I wasn't a raving fan - the damn Metro is foolhardy and unnecessary, and this coming from someone who loves the inner west and trains - but he was trying to clean up the factional system, and for this he gets the toss. When will this bunch of clowns get their act together, I wondered. Then I saw this cartoon in the Daily Telegraph, and I had to wonder some more: What can anyone have suffered at the hands of the NSW government which would possibly justify that sort of reaction? I too have had to wait hours for hospital treatment, been stuck on the train, despaired that the train journey from Sydney to Newcastle

In Praise of St Erma

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Today I tracked down two Erma Bombeck books I'd not read before in a Newtown bookshop, and my squeals of delight were such that DF insisited on purchasing both for me. I've read and enjoyed Bombeck before, but read her work with a special poignancy now I'm about to be married and start a family myself. It's a different era now. Ms Bombeck was born the year after my grandmothers, her children are the same age as my parents, so how come so much of what she writes hits home to this feminist in 2009? Bombeck has been attacked by feminists before. A supporter said "Did these women think, come the revolution, that husbands would stop watching football, or that socks would stop getting lost in the machine?" It's Ms Bombeck's - Erma's (I want to call her that, she feels like a friend) - ability to poke fun at all this that points to why she is still relevant. It can be hard to laugh sometimes. Around our place, DF pays the bills and I run the place. "