Land of law?

From my antipodean observational outpost here in France, I'm frankly alarmed by the way in which my native land is handling the case—or rather the lack of a case—against the accused terrorism supporter Mohamed Haneef. Clearly, the police investigation up in Queensland got screwed up, which explains why a federal law-enforcement directorate is now called upon to review the fiasco. My first reaction is positive: Thank God Australia employs a so-called Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions!

I don't know why Queensland premier Peter Beattie, in criticizing the methods of his police force, had to resort to the foreign [Hollywood] image of the Keystone Cops. Homegrown anecdotes of idiotic police blunders abound, notably in the bushranger domain.

The thing that worries me, when I observe what has happened in the case of Haneef, is a lurking suspicion that Australia might no longer be what we commonly refer to as a land of law. Sure, it's a land of politics, with a lowercase "p", and a land of Dollars, with an uppercase "D". But it appears to be a land in which an Indian doctor can find himself involved, overnight, in a frightening imbroglio, as indicated by the following extract from today's The Australian:

Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty was also forced to deny reports police had written the names of overseas terror suspects on Haneef's personal diary, and that Haneef was being investigated for plotting to bomb a Gold Coast skyscraper.

Many years ago, when I saw customs officials in the port of Fremantle confiscating jars of baby food that my wife was bringing ashore to feed our Emmanuelle during our brief stopover in Western Australia, I formed the vague opinion that certain Australians in authority often tend to be excessively zealous, as if their credibility depended upon their obtaining outstanding results. I witnessed this same behavior twenty years later, in exactly the same city, when I saw WA cops taking pleasure in arresting drivers leaving places of revelry associated with the America's Cup regattas.

If all the events surrounding Haneef were to mean that the threats of terrorism in Australia will henceforth be diminished, one might conclude that it's worthwhile. But that's like saying that the invasion of Iraq could be justified a posteriori if it had reduced the outlaw phenomenon in that land. In my view, in their sunny microcosm, Queensland cops are surely just as dumb as George W Bush.

Trains

On this sunny Sunday morning, I decided to drive to the Valence train station to buy a return ticket to England for five days in August. It's a splendid new station out in the countryside, catering primarily for TGV [high-speed train] links.

I've become accustomed to using the Internet to make purchases of all kinds, but I prefer a person-to-person contact in the case of train tickets. I have the impression [but I may be wrong] that the human operator in a train station has access to more information than an Internet user, and knows how to find an optimal solution to queries in a minimum of time. Above all, I guess I'm old-fashioned, since I simply like the idea of dropping in at a railway station to buy train tickets from a human employee. Besides, in the special case of the Valence TGV station, I get a kick out of visiting such a nice place, whether it's a matter of buying tickets, catching a train or picking up visitors.

On the other side of the planet, in my native New South Wales, people don't seem to have such a positive attitude towards trains as they do here in France. A few days ago, in The Sydney Morning Herald, there was a derogatory but well-written article entitled The curse of CityRail [read], which started out as follows:

Sydney is supposed to be a major global city. We're constantly telling ourselves how world-class we are, and major surveys keep agreeing - most recently we were ranked fifth best city in the world to visit. And we are the largest city in a wealthy, highly developed nation. So can someone explain to me, in extremely simple terms, why our train system is reminiscent of a third world country - or, worse still, England?

Last year, I spent no more than a month out in Australia, but that was more than sufficient to provide me with ample evidence concerning the antiquated train system. First, I wasn't able to visit Braidwood by train, because the railway doesn't even go there! Second, one afternoon, I spent over an hour in a halted Sydney north-shore suburban train, for reasons I never learned. Third, my trip up to Grafton and back provided me—without my asking—with old memories of my adolescence, because the train system doesn't seem to have evolved in any noticeable fashion since then. But I wouldn't go out of my way to complain about anything, because I have the impression that this antiquated railway system corresponds to my overall conception of my native land and its people. Australia is a place where nothing much has ever happened, and probably never will. Maybe the constant humid heat provokes torpidity, preventing people from being creative. In any case, every country has the trains it deserves.

The above-mentioned article in The Sydney Morning Herald includes a significant reflection: We're constantly telling ourselves how world-class we are... To my mind, most praise of Sydney is indeed locally-produced hype. I'm not so sure that many non-Australians are convinced that Sydney is "world-class", whatever that might mean. For European visitors, Sydney is definitely not a charming city. Once you've had a beer in one of the few surviving pubs at the Rocks, strolled through the Botanic Gardens, wandered around the Darling Harbour area and taken a ferry to Manly, you've "done" Sydney. There's truly nothing more to be seen there... unless, of course, you're a native-born Australian, like me, who finds it meaningful to visit the place where Braidwood bushrangers were hanged, and to drive with one of my sisters to the shoreline of La Pérouse, where the vessels of the French navigator were seen for the last time. In other words, Australia is a great place for Australians, who are sensitive to its interest and charms, and don't necessarily mind if the train system is shitty. Things only start to go haywire if you're tempted to make silly and unnecessary comparisons between Sydney and great cities such as London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Jerusalem...

The author of the article in The Sydney Morning Herald mentions a recent ranking of Sydney as the "fifth best city in the world to visit". To appreciate correctly the significance of such a judgment, one would need to know more about its origins. If, for example, we're talking of a poll conducted by a travel magazine that caters essentially for globe-trotting Florida widows, then we should view its findings with a certain relativity. In any case, visitors of that kind don't catch trains, neither in New South Wales nor anywhere else.

Having said all this, I do believe that the fellow in charge of trains in New South Wales [whose identity I ignore] should pull his finger out, and look around for ideas about improvements and evolution. And I'm sure I'm not the only Australian with this opinion.

Concept shock

Travelers who visit the Antipodes, in one or the other direction, are familiar with the feeling of disorientation known as culture shock, brought about by the simple fact that people do many things differently at the opposite extremities of the globe. However, once you're accustomed to visiting foreign lands, there's usually no longer any real shock, merely a mild bewilderment upon discovering that familiar activities—such as eating, for example, or talking to strangers—are not performed in the same way as back home.

Concept shock, on the other hand, is a far more serious rupture, since it concerns, not so much the way that Antipodeans act, but the way they think. Let me give you an authentic personal example of concept shock that affected me when I was out in Australia for a few weeks, a year ago. One evening, on television, I saw an Australian news documentary concerning a young woman [let's call her Mary] who had become the victim of an allegedly wicked female cousin [Betty, say], who appeared to be a fraudster. The gist of the story was that Betty had apparently stolen [or at least acquired illicitly] certain identity documents and banking data that belonged to Mary, and the evil woman was now exploiting this stuff to steal money from her innocent cousin.

Now, my first reaction to this tale was that it sounded complicated and far-fetched, if not dubious. As they say metaphorically in French, the affair seemed to be tied together crudely with string that was simply too thick to be kept out of sight, but too coarse to hold. Much more would need to be known about the relationship between Mary and Betty before we outsiders could be certain that one was definitely a goody and the other a baddy. Fair enough, I said to myself. It's obviously an affair that needs to be handled by society's competent authorities: police, lawyers and finally judges. But I was in for a shock: a concept shock! Instead of culminating in an appeal to such authorities, the TV producers decided that they would take the case into their own hands. And, to maximize the reality of the show, they called upon Mary, Betty and their respective friends to participate in the performance, playing what they thought of as their authentic personal roles... but not necessarily with adequate acting skills.

Watching this fiasco with relatives, I complained that the notion of a TV channel taking justice into its own hands was utterly shocking. I tried to point out that a concept was at stake here: the time-honored concept of old-fashioned Justice with a capital J. But I had the impression that my relatives didn't understand what I was raving on about. They seemed to think that it was bloody good reality TV. And it was, too. But it was hardly an instance of the concept of Justice.

Today, I find myself confronted with a jolting case of concept shock when I discover the way in which the Australian minister of Immigration, Kevin Andrews, has just overturned a court order to free the Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef. The most ridiculous aspect of the minister's disregard for the basic legal principles of the nation (in this case, the respect of a court decision) is the antiquated concept brought forward to justify his outrageous decision: Haneef's failure to pass a so-called "character test"...

I'm profoundly shocked. That's all I can say. Concept shocked.

Medieval Australia

I'm shocked by the fact that certain elected politicians in Australia are described in the local press as "Catholic MPs", as if their religious beliefs might impinge upon their political convictions and choices. Are so-called catholic MPs expected to cater for voters who might be Protestants, or Jews, or Moslems, or atheists? Or does the Catholic tag attached to such a politician mean that he/she is morally justified in ignoring non-Catholic citizens, and leaving them to rot in hell? To my mind, the expression "Catholic MP" cannot logically exist, and should not be tolerated in serious journalism. When an elected member enters the sanctuaries of the State, he/she should leave his religious beliefs in the cloakroom.

Today, no nation can claim to be adult, and no political constitution is sound from a purely human viewpoint, unless a strict separation is established, once and for all, between the supreme concept of the State (that is, in the case that concerns me, the nation of Australia), on the one hand, and the multifarious religious organizations that the land might shelter. Ideas of the latter folk should not be allowed to ooze, like medieval sewage, into the sacred domain of the Nation and the People.

Now, as if it weren't enough to have the Church—like an antiquated harlot in parrot-colored robes—trying to allure hesitant politicians in the context of the ongoing debate (not only in Australia) about research using human stem cells, there's a greater cause for concern in this domain. Apparently, a new social phenomenon is arising, described colorfully by Australia's national media organization as stem-cell tourism. What's it all about? Well, in the backwoods of Australia's great Asian neighbors, private charlatans have started to jump onto the bandwagon of stem-cell treatments by offering miraculous cures of a highly suspect nature. Their potential patients (customers) include Australians with a terminal illness or spinal injury.

Funnily, in speaking out against this quackery (a tiny voice in the wilderness), I would seem to be on the same side as the Sydney cardinal. This is an illusion. In French, there's a terse old saying: Robes don't make a monk. In Sydney parlance: Clothes don't make a drag queen. My simple advice to the cardinal (borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick): Watch out for life. The same advice might be given to travelers of all kinds, including sexual tourists and stem-cell tourists.

BigPond story (continued)

In yesterday's message entitled BigPond deserves a big kick in the pants [display], I didn't go into details concerning the nature of the BigPond problem that has been annoying me for so long (well over a year). Furthermore, behind the visible part of my blog, I've been using email to instigate an investigation into BigPond's behavior, with the aim of forcing this organization to abandon their French blacklisting.

First, let me point out that my use of the expression "French blacklisting" is eloquent (people understand that image) but slightly approximative. A more precise way of describing the situation in technical terms consists of saying that certain BigPond mail servers (not necessarily all of them, because some of my emails to BigPond do get delivered) have placed the names of certain French ISPs (Wanadoo/Orange and Free) on what is known as a DNS block list.

Why? If I understand correctly, BigPond calls upon an outside firm to help them combat spam... which is a noble intention. Apparently, this outside firm (maybe TrendMicro) considers that Wanadoo/Orange and Free "continue to allow spam to be generated by their customers"... that's to say, by ordinary people like me. Consequently, BigPond has taken the decision to include the names Wanadoo/Orange and Free in DNS block lists on their servers.

To use a famous image (popular in French), it's like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Since BigPond believes that lots of spammers operate from Wanadoo/Orange and Free (which may or may not be true), they've decided to punish everybody, globally, by refusing to deliver any email emanating from these two French ISPs.

This morning, I was happy to receive an email from my old schoolmate Ron Willard who reminded me of the existence of an excellent technical website [display] on the subject of DNS block lists. It includes a more powerful image than my metaphor about the baby's bath. A US army officer is quoted as saying (no doubt in a Vietnam setting): We had to destroy the village in order to save it. BigPond has decided to destroy the possibility of emails from France in order to save their Australian customers from spam.

Memory of the world

That's a big formula: Memory of the world. What's it all about? Well, Unesco has decided to register a certain number of outstanding historical documents as a permanent testimony of the human story of our planet. I'm enchanted to learn, for example, that the choice of US documents is neither the Gettysburg Address nor even the Watergate tapes, but a whimsical Judy Garland movie that charmed me infinitely as a child: the Wizard of Oz.

In the case of Sweden, Unesco has registered two sets of family archives: those of Alfred Nobel [1833-1896], founder of the prize, and those of the 88-year-old cineast Ingmar Bergman.

Concerning France, Unesco has selected the tapestry of Bayeux.

This fragment shows the Conqueror's half-brother Odo wielding weirdly a massive shaft at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. I've always liked to imagine, not very objectively, that he might have been a nominal forebear of my 13th-century ancestor Odo de Scevington [literally, in Saxon, place of the shaft], owner of a manor in Kent with the lovely name of Dolce. In any case, if future researchers use a computerized network to look up the Bayeux tapestry, they might find their way to my Skeffington typescript [click here to find it straightaway].

In the case of my birthplace, Australia, the Unesco Memory of the world project is perfectly explicit. The documents to be registered for posterity are our convict archives. Here's a treasured personal fragment of this memory:

This is the famous ticket of leave indicating that my Tipperary great-great-great-grandfather Patrick Hickey [1782-1858] was transported to New South Wales in 1829, and even spent time on notorious Norfolk Island. Today, I get a kick out of thinking that the future world, as envisaged by Unesco, will remember my maternal family and me, not for the pioneering efforts in Braidwood of Charles Walker [1807-1860], probably the elder brother of the whisky inventor Johnnie Walker, nor for smart hotel founders named O'Keeffe, nor for northern Irish Protestant pioneers named Kennedy and Cranston, nor even for any of us living folk (including my two Smith cousins, Australian doctors, who were indirect recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace awarded to Médecins Sans Frontières a few years ago)... but for a vulgar and no doubt lovable Irish cattle-poacher whose son William Hickey [whom I'm researching] was an early bushranger.

Personally, I'm not troubled by this strange filtering process that determines what might, and what might not, be remembered. On the other hand, I was disappointed by the fact that, during my one-month visit to Australia last year, I was unable to visit Braidwood, the territory of Patrick Hickey. He got there easily in 1829. My ancestor Charles Walker, too. But William Skyvington never made it. Modern Australia was incapable [because their public transport is shit] of letting me visit the region of one of my major ancestral memories.

Same name as Australian mountain

France's newly-appointed 34-year-old State Secretary in charge of Ecology has the same name as Australia's highest peak (2,228 meters), whose official spelling now includes an unpronounceable letter "z": Mount Kosciuszko. The mountain was climbed for the first time in 1840 by a Polish explorer and geologist, Count Strzelecki, who named it in honor of Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish military hero.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet [often referred to as NKM] is a descendant of this man. In fact, she comes from a distinguished family on the recent French political scene. A graduate of the famous Polytechnique, she specialized in biology, and then trained as an engineer in the national school of rural management, rivers and forests. Attached to the super-ministry now attributed to Jean-Louis Borloo [who replaced Alain Juppé, who resigned after his electoral defeat], NKM is an experienced militant in the ecological domain.

Snake oil

In my blog, I've already mentioned a couple of daring Aussie money-making inventions:

— first, half-naked female automobile washers [click here for article],

— then yesterday, oysters macerated in Viagra [click here for article].

In this exciting marketing domain, there's no reason why I shouldn't add a plug for the following Australian product [click the banner to visit their website]:

If I understand correctly, uncorking a bottle of this magic liquid in the presence of snakes creates an effect of repugnance upon them, filling them with a desire to get the hell out of the area. You might say it's a little like the effect upon humans when somebody stealthily lets off highly odorous wind in a crowded lift.

To be perfectly frank, I have to admit that I once purchased a French version of such a product. My son and his girlfriend, holidaying at Gamone, had informed me excitedly that they had glimpsed a terrible-looking reptile, with colored stripes, on the edge of my vegetable garden. Naively, I went along to a pharmacy in nearby Villard-de-Lans and asked them what kind of product I should have in my medicine cabinet, knowing that I was living in the presence of an unidentified but no doubt awesome snake. Actually, I was thinking vaguely of some kind of first-aid product: maybe a snakebite antidote. [I later learned that the use of such a product by anybody who's not a skilled medical specialist is no less dangerous than the snakebite.] Well, the pharmacist was delighted to sell me a big bottle of expensive yellow liquid labeled snake repellent, and I was out of the pharmacy and on my way home before I realized what a sucker I had been. I mean: What can you actually do with a bottle of alleged snake repellent in the case of a reptile that you haven't even seen, which is not likely to reappear spontaneously on your doorstop pleading to be repelled? Sure, you can squirt the stuff all around your property until the bottle's empty, then sit back waiting to check that the snake does not indeed reappear. But that's a bit like using a mixture of warm water and sugar to repel butterflies. The chances are that, if you get up early in the morning, and pour a cup of warm sugared water on the lawn, you won't see any butterflies there for at least an hour or so. There's a similar system of a flashing bicycle lamp, in the early evening, to chase away falling stars. To make things worse, my son and his girlfriend finally admitted, with great hilarity, that they'd hidden a rubber snake with green and purple stripes on the edge of my vegetable patch, in the hope of scaring shit out of me. Retrospectively, I can't recall ever having seen this object, which probably means that the rain washed it down into Gamone Creek, from where it might have floated down to Pont-en-Royans to frighten the tourists. As for my bottle of snake repellent, I finally used it in an attempt to repel mice in the attic, but it didn't.

Normally, with a bit of imagination and talented showmanship, it should be child's play to demonstrate that a snake repellent does in fact repel snakes. In the style of the late Steve Irwin, the master of ceremonies could arm a courageous child actor with a can of repellent spray, and then let loose a snake in front of the kid. One press on the button of the spray can, and the disgusted snake would go sliding back into its box. To make the demonstration more scientifically convincing, they could let loose a whole assortment of different snakes and the kid would repel them, one after the other, as if he/she were playing table tennis. If only the ShooSnake people were able to put up such a video on their website, they would sell tons of their product overnight... and the Aussie kid actor would be offered a fortune to star in Hollywood-produced ecological, environmental and wildlife films.

Business imagination

We Australians can be imaginative in the business domain. On the central coast of New South Wales, oyster farmers have been putting a mixture of crushed Viagra pills and calcium in some of their tanks, and then canning the oysters. What I don't know is how long the oysters were allowed to lead a euphoric sex life before they were canned. Imagine an oyster with a huge erection chasing its hermaphrodite partners around the pool. No doubt many of the poor buggers died of physical exhaustion after a few hectic hours of this behavior.

Apparently the aphrodisiac qualities of these canned oysters are greatly appreciated in certain Asian countries where sex is the national sport. Note the subtle marketing language on the labels: sex in a can, hard down under, rock hard oysters... Poetry from the land that invented bare-breasted barmaids.

El Nino and global warming

In an email yesterday, my sister Anne informed me with joy that the drought had broken in NSW [New South Wales]. Today, I learn that a gigantic tempest has been blowing in on the NSW coast, accompanied by torrential rain on the vineyards of the Hunter Valley, and that five thousand people have been evacuated from their homes around Maitland because of imminent flooding. Eight individuals have already drowned in this sudden bad weather: the worst for thirty years.

A question springs to mind immediately:

— Could this exceptional weather be associated with El Nino?

Two complementary questions:

— Are Australians, in general, conscious of the El Nino phenomenon?

— Have Australian scientists envisaged the possibility of correlations between global warming and El Nino? More precisely: Could the former phenomenon have any effect upon the latter?

Big questions. Big risks.

Neighbors who dwell in castles

Here in France, authentic ancient castles abound. And all kinds of manor houses and stately homes have the look and feel of castles. So, in countless villages, it's not unusual to have neighbors who dwell in structures that we might refer to as châteaux. During my recent excursion to Provence, I was particularly impressed (among many other surprises) by the mysterious white castle in Lacoste that once belonged to the famous Marquis de Sade.

Today, it is inhabited by the equally famous Pierre Cardin, genius of haute couture, who is both a familiar neighbor for the village people of Lacoste (including many US students) and the organizer of a summer music and theater festival.

Not far away from Choranche, in a village named La Sône, on the banks of the Isère, I recently visited a fairytale castle that belongs to a friendly ex-pharmacist from Avignon.

The adolescent novelist Françoise Sagan was a friend of the daughter of the former owner, and the present owner informed me that the novelist used the La Sône castle in 1960 as the setting of her play entitled Château in Sweden.

Talking of castles, believe it or not, back in my native Clarence River region in Australia, in the vicinity of Grafton, there's a kind of castle, called Yulgilbar, constructed by German craftsmen for wealthy cattle men named Ogilvie between 1860 and 1866. Historians of architecture would refer to it as a mock-Gothic folly, because it has crenellations of the kind that once played a role in defense.

Here's an old photographic glimpse into the courtyard of Yulgilbar:

During my adolescence, I often heard my father and his beef-cattle friends referring to the huge and prosperous Yulgilbar affair, owned by a great rural pioneer: Samuel Hordern [1909-1960], member of a wealthy Sydney merchandising family. Today, the immense Yulgilbar estate belongs to Hordern's daughter and her husband Baillieu Myer.

If I understand correctly, the original name of the rich land on the banks of the Clarence, belonging to the Bunjalung Aboriginal tribe, was Baryulgil, and the Ogilvie pioneers decided to invert the syllables to obtain a name for their huge property. Much later, in about 1940, descendants of this Aboriginal community were employed as laborers in local asbestos mines. And today, there is distress in this community because of asbestos pollution and poisoning.

Yes, sometimes we have rich neighbors who dwell in castles, while neighbors on the other side of the castle walls lead very different lives. It has always been that way with castles.

Australia, world champion polluter

Within Australia's CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization], Mike Raupach is the chief of the Global Carbon Project, which measures the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions. He can therefore be considered as one of Australia's leading experts on the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and the risks of global warming. An article in today's Herald Sun indicates some of the alarming findings of Raupach and his research team. In 2004, Australia's per capita emissions were 4.5 times the world average, and increasing twice as fast as those of the US. In China, explained Raupach, annual carbon emission amounts to one metric ton per person, whereas in Australia and the US the per capita output is over five times the Chinese figure. In the case of a significant yardstick known as carbon intensity, which is the quantity of fossil fuel consumed to produce a unit of energy or wealth, Australia has in fact become the world's most wasteful nation.

In the forthcoming elections, one of the main reasons why I'll be voting Labor is that it's shameful that the Howard administration has never signed the Kyoto agreement.

The Environment Society of Australia [click here to visit their website] informs us that Clive Hamilton, director of the Australia Institute, has just brought out a book, Scorcher: the Dirty Politics of Climate Change, which deals with "greedy corporations, craven politicians and public disengagement". Hamilton is particularly critical of Howard's claim that Australia, as an energy exporter, should be pardoned for its excessive emissions. "Our energy exports have no bearing on Australia's emission-reduction obligations at all. The emissions from our exports of coal, gas and oil are counted in the country where they burnt." Hamilton recalls the fact that Howard asked for advice on greenhouse pollution from the country's major polluters, without bothering to listen to environmental experts. Hamilton concludes: "In short, the Howard government has been able to hoodwink the community with impunity because many Australians have preferred to believe the lies."

Gregan out

The French sporting press appears to be surprised and saddened by the idea that George Gregan, in World Cup year, might no longer be the emblematic captain of the Wallabies. And journalists here tend to be ironical concerning the solution of dual captains.

Latest Nicholson animation

I've just received the latest Nicholson animation, which features the Dalai Lama. [Click on the image to see it.] Incidentally, on the opening page of Nicholson's animations, there's an invitation to subscribe to their alert service, which means that you receive an e-mail as soon as a new animation exists. I've been using this service for months now, and I recommend it to all Nicholson fans.

I think I've said before that it's a pity that Peter Nicholson limits his repertoire to the relatively tiny universe of Australia's political leaders. I've always imagined that his extraordinary artistic talents and his sense of political satire could be extended to embrace other personalities and situations in the world at large. Indeed, Nicholson's excellent depiction of the Dalai Lama (image, voice, attitude and thoughts) demonstrates what I'm saying.

Clean car, dirty thoughts

I seem to recall that a political leader stated recently that small business is the backbone of Australia's prosperity. In Queensland, the proprietor of a strip-tease joint concocted the brilliant idea of a car-wash service carried out by semi-nude women.

Car owner: "I'll just hang around while you're washing my car to make sure you don't run into any problems."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, if you hang around, you might be able to give me a hand."

Car owner: "No sweat. It's so bloody hot, I wouldn't mind a wash job for myself."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, I'll see what we can do. Just hang around."

The service is ecologically correct, since it uses recycled water. Besides, since the washing operations are performed in a closed shed, there's no problem of what is referred to in Australia as "public decency".

In Victorian London, there was an unwritten law that gave citizens the freedom to do almost anything they felt like doing, even if it infringed morality, provided they didn't do their naughty stuff in public, in the streets... "where it might frighten the horses".

That backside vision of the washerwoman astride her stick horse could indeed arouse the senses of nearby beasts.

Sporting language in politics

The TV encounter between Ségolène Royal and François Bayrou turned out to be extremely polite and friendly, with no rudeness, aggressiveness nor even raised voices. In describing the show, French media used the fencing expression "fleuret moucheté". This is a foil without cutting edges whose tip is covered by a round button, so that nobody gets hurt.

A fortnight ago, an amusing Nicholson animation appeared on the website of The Australian, on a theme called sledging, which probably comes from cricket. [Click here to see it.] In a cricket match between political parties, John Howard is the batsman and Kevin Rudd the bowler. The commentator, Ritchie Benaud, has invited along a talkative guest: Paul Keating. The match gets off to a quiet almost gentlemanly start:

Bowler Rudd [to the batsman]: "You spineless sycophantic nitwit!"

Batsman Howard [to the bowler]: "Pull your head in, you useless nong!"

Then the great mud-slinger Keating takes over, with comments of the following kind about the batsman: "Howard's got a brain like a sparrow's nest: all shit and sticks. You know, when they circumcised him, they threw away the wrong bit. He's a dead carcass swinging in the breeze, and nobody's got the balls to cut him down. Etc, etc."

Naturally, at the end of this quaint animation, the Sledging Cup is awarded to Keating. [Click here for an anthology of authentic Keating sayings, some of which have been used in Nicholson's sledging animation.] Personally, my favorite Keatingism is his description of Treasurer Peter Costello as "all tip and no iceberg".

Jumping from one thing to another, I was impressed by the sporting language used in the female entourage of the Melbourne underworld personage Carl Williams. A typical specimen, quoted in the Australian press, consists of one of Carl's ladies referring to another lady as a "trashy piece of fucking carnage". The journalist in The Australian used (invented?) a nice expression to designate this kind of language: trash talk.

Getting back to French politics, I see that Nicolas Sarkozy is resorting more and more to sporting metaphors in his combat for the presidency. The other day, when he heard that Ségolène Royal would be debating with François Bayrou, Sarkozy turned to soccer language. In the days preceding a cup final, he stated, it would be weird if one of the teams that was already eliminated wanted to replay a match with one of the finalists. Today, Sarko (as he's nicknamed) has turned to cycling, in referring to next Wednesday's debate with Ségolène Royal as an Alpe-d'Huez stage in the Tour de France culminating in next Sunday's election. As for me, in boxing terms, I hope that Sarko gets KO'd by Ségo next Sunday.

I need words to express my gut-level aversion to Nicolas Sarkozy. Paul Keating is surely a kind of poet, like Barry Humphries, and it goes without saying that I don't share their rare quality of linguistic imagination. I don't know how you would say "mangy maggot" in French... mainly because I'm not quite sure what a mangy maggot would look like. But, if I did, that might just be the right expression for Sarko. However I shouldn't talk that way, at least not before I get naturalized. Sarkozy has a good chance of being elected. In sporting language, I would then stand the risk of receiving a red card and getting sent off the field.

Sacred hills: Masada and Gallipoli

Anzac Day. I've often been moved by the fact that, behind the sense of national identity of both Israel and Australia, there are sacred hills submerged in morbidity: Masada and Gallipoli.

At Masada, there's a contrast between the majesty of Herod’s fortress and the grim circumstances of the collective suicide of the zealots when they learned that their resistance to the Romans was doomed. Today, a visitor at Masada might imagine a magnificent white stone palace under the dense blue sky, like the Acropolis in Athens: a place where people would come to celebrate life, not to die. But places are built for one purpose and then used for another. For Jews, the symbol of Masada is, not the plowshare, but the sword. The zealots thought they had God on their side, but they were victims who ended up having to kill one another, transforming Masada into a death camp. Today, when Israeli jets fly over Masada, they dip their wings in respect. If Australian jets were to fly over Gallipoli, they would no doubt behave similarly, for it is our national shrine.

A few days ago, French TV aired the famous recently-found 45 seconds of moving Gallipoli images (moving in many senses), believed to have been shot by the American war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett [1881-1931]. I grabbed my camera and took the following still shot on my home TV, since I don't know whether these moving images are available on the web.

Australian soldiers are waiting there on the beach in a terrible tightly-packed macabre throng, ready to be blown to death. An observer, today, is reminded of later images of crowds of condemned Jews disembarking from death trains at Auschwitz.

[Click here to listen to Eric Bogle singing The band played Waltzing Matilda.]

A great idea that didn't work in Australia

Antoine de Maximy is an intelligent 43-year-old French TV star. The title of his most popular show might be translated into English as How about inviting me along to your home? It's a travel video recorded in foreign lands by Antoine himself. He starts out by striking up conversations with random people he meets in the street. As soon as he encounters an interesting and friendly person, Antoine rapidly steers the conversation around to the above-mentioned question: "How about inviting me along to your home?" The general idea of Antoine's production is that the ideal way to obtain in-depth knowledge about people in a foreign (non-French) country is to interview them in their own homes, maybe around a dinner table.

An original aspect of Antoine's production process is that it's a strictly one-man show. He does all the video recording by himself, using three cameras that are either hand-held or fixed to his body. As depicted in the show's stick-figure logo, when he's doing his filming, Antoine looks a little like a tambourine man. One of the cameras is located at the end of a metal strut that juts out from his waist, making it possible to obtain shots of Antoine himself informing TV viewers about his on-going operations and intentions. Later on, back in France, all the recorded stuff is cut and edited in a video studio, to produce a feature-length TV program.

Normally, one would expect that, in a friendly land such as Australia, inhabited by warm open-hearted Aussies, Antoine's production technique should be a sure winner. Well, it wasn't. It was a shameful disaster. Retrospectively, an informed viewer (that's to say, an Australian such as myself, aware of what the French journalist had set out to achieve) can end up understanding what went wrong at each stage of Antoine's encounters. But it's a pity that all these mistakes and misunderstandings were congealed into an ugly mess, painting a most dismal picture of "average Australians" at home.

The opening scenes show Antoine in the office quarter of Sydney, probably at lunch hour, surrounded by people in business attire scurrying along the footpaths. It's not exactly the kind of environment where people would want to stop and chat with a guy whose body is wrapped in weird video gear, who speaks English with a strange accent. Sydney office workers seemed to take Antoine de Maximy for a crackpot. Maybe they're right. You have to be something of a crackpot to imagine that you can start talking with strangers and end up getting invited into their homes, to find out what makes them tick. In any case, Antoine never got anywhere near finding out what makes Sydney's business people tick. In an off remark to French viewers, he says: "I've always known that it's impossible to strike up conversations with chaps dressed in suits and neckties."

Next, Antoine heads to Bondi, where he meets up with three or four guys seated on the lawn in front of their beach house, drinking beer and trying to attract the attention of females walking along the footpath. Their mating call to Bondi birds is elementary: "Hey, come on, do you want a beer?" Needless to say, Antoine's camera never captured images of any girls who did in fact want a beer. Instead, Antoine succeeded in getting himself invited into the ringleader's flat and filming a sad monologue on the theme of sexual frustration, porn movies, booze, etc. It wasn't even an account of the seamy side of Bondi, if such a thing exists. It was simply the uninteresting confession of a poor guy who had got into the habit of trying to drown his big dick in beer. Hardly an image of typical Australia?

Antoine then decided to go bush. Coober Pedy, opals, Aborigines and all that kind of stuff, including more beer. Here, of course, Antoine didn't have to beg to be brought inside. I had the impression that owners of dugout homes found it perfectly normal that French TV would have dispatched a video-equipped Martian such as Antoine to explore the interior of their strange underground abodes. On the other hand, God only knows why Antoine should have found himself talking to two ordinary-looking teenage girls, in their parents' dugout, who started spontaneously to relate outrageous stories, which may or may not be totally factual: "Concerning Aborigines, we don't mind saying that we're totally racist. You see, we've both been attacked, several times, by drunken Aborigines. So, we try to avoid any contact with them." Nasty stuff for Antoine's cameras.

The only nice sequence in Antoine's presentation of Aussies was his encounter with a miner who organized a small outdoor get-together with his lady friend and mates in honor of the French journalist. Setting aside the fuzziness due to beer, viewers learned that opal mining is often a kind of fascination that gets transformed into an expensive addiction. On the rare occasions that a miner strikes it rich, he immediately invests his new wealth in bigger and better machines. Other individuals in this rough world were prepared to talk with Antoine, but they shied away abruptly from the idea of taking him back home for dinner, bed and breakfast.

Finally, I could see what was coming when Antoine started to talk with a genuine Aborigine. After listening to the conventional explanations about the plight of Australia's indigenous population, the journalist from another planet sprung his standard "Take me to your home" request. I had the impression that the starkly negative but natural reaction of the dumbfounded Aborigine was more spontaneously profound than anything else in Antoine's vain video attempts to get himself invited into Australian homes.

William's theory of leaks

The above title mustn't give you false hopes. I'm not about to expound a set of principles and proofs that might earn me a Nobel Prize. In fact, my "theory" on leaks might be summed up in a three-word aphorism: Nobody leaks innocently! All I mean to say is that, whenever we hear of journalists suddenly having access to information that's normally supposed to be of a confidential nature, it might be a good idea to ask questions of the following kind: Who in particular might have reaped benefits from the divulgation of this information? What kinds of benefits? And why?

Another way of putting it is that press leaks are generally organized, indeed engineered. They're like the celebrated French miracle aimed at promoting today the saintlike qualities of the late pope. [Click here to see my article on this subject.] Leaks, like miracles, don't just happen, out of the blue. They're put into circulation purposely, like rumors, with precise aims in view.

I don't yet know who exactly made the decision to leak the information about a Thorpe doping query, but I imagine that this mysterious leaker [Let's call him Monsieur Leak] was seeking to achieve certain ends. Meanwhile, all Australia has started to go mad. The national director of swimming is even yelling out about the idea of hiring a private investigator to collar Monsieur Leak, as if that might solve anything.

When in trouble, when in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout!

For the last 24 hours or so, that's what Australia has been doing: running in swimming circles, screaming and shouting. I have the impression that Monsieur Leak [whoever he is] may have been awaiting these reactions. Maybe they tell him something about the fundamental but murky question of whether or not Ian Thorpe really is guilty of doping. Organized leaks aim to obtain information.

It would be good if everything were to calm down, as in an Olympic pool. Meanwhile, the procedures evolve...

Leak in the pool

Contrary to what naive observers might believe, the prestigious French sporting newspaper L'Equipe surely did not dream up, in one way or another, the story about Ian Thorpe. What happened was quite ordinary from a journalistic viewpoint. The information behind the story was leaked to the newspaper by an unknown source, whose identity we may never know. Everyday journalism in many domains depends heavily upon leaks. In the case of a serious and time-honored newspaper such as L'Equipe, one would normally expect that they only print leaked information from reliable sources. So, it would be foolish to insinuate that L'Equipe might have invented their information about Ian Thorpe.

Richards Ings, chairman of ASADA [Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority], spoke this afternoon to a Sydney radio station on the event referred to by L'Equipe, which stems from a urine test in May 2006. Although nothing has been asserted yet on this question by the WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency], it appears perfectly feasible for L'Equipe to imagine that Ian Thorpe's raised testosterone levels might have been unacceptable... which is all—no more and no less—that the newspaper claimed. The world swimming body FINA [Fédération internationale de Natation] would appear to know that a Thorpe affair has indeed been simmering, because they have apparently called upon the CAS [Court of Arbitration for Sport] to evaluate the situation. In doing so, FINA did not reveal explicitly the name of the swimmer in question. Finally, the only real scoop created by the leak to L'Equipe concerns the identity of the implicated swimmer: Ian Thorpe.

Is there any point in trying to determine the precise source of the leak, maybe in the hope of taking legal action against either the leaker or the newspaper that published the leak, or both? I don't think so. Good journalists, like good detectives, don't normally reveal the identity of their sources. One would suspect, though, that the leaker was probably somebody with French links... As far as the newspaper is concerned, is it really a crime to print leaked information?