Qantas bull

Most news websites are now polluted with ads. I'm often annoyed, when concentrating upon an interesting article, to find a totally irrelevant publicity video flashing in a corner of my screen. In such situations, I usually resize the window so that the ad noise is no longer visible. Well, this morning, while reading the Australian press, my eyes were attracted by the image of the forehead of a curious grey beast, branded with an expression that meant nothing to me: earth+.

Behind the grey head, the whitish background seemed to be a sloping snow field. Was the animal a yak? Maybe a cloned mammoth? Then I saw the textual part of the ad:

Everything fell into place. It was a nice friendly grey-haired bull. What I had mistaken for trees on a sloping snow field was simply the animal's right horn. And I was watching Australia's national airline doing its best to maintain the regular statistics concerning drunken Aussies getting gored in Pamplona. But I remained intrigued by the image of the Qantas bull, which just didn't seem right. I wondered where on earth+ the ad agency had photographed this grey-haired animal. Maybe it was a retired senior Spanish bull purchased specially by the ad agency for its photos. It's more likely, though, that this bovine photo presents a young Australian breed of beef cattle (maybe a harmless steer or a cow) and that the ad shows only a small area around the animal's eyes for the simple reason that a larger view would reveal instantly that the beast in the photo has no connections whatsoever with bull running in Pamplona. In other words, they're trying to pull the bull over our eyes.

Here's an image of an authentic black Pamplona bull about to gore a fellow who might well be a Qantas earth+ tourist:

I'm wondering whether earth+ aims to attract Irwin-inspired Aussie animal-lovers who might be enticed by the idea of hopping across to Spain next July to watch a nice presentation of friendly grey-haired bulls skipping through the picturesque streets of this balmy town. I can imagine a future Qantas ad in which Bindi is feeding popcorn to the charming beasts of Pamplona, with a choir of angels in the background singing Still call Australia home. [To rediscover a celebrated specimen of Qantas publicity work, click here to see my article of 18 February 2007 entitled Watch out for life!]

Lollies

Just as few people apart from me—born beyond Waterview, South Grafton—can know that a chook is a chicken, or that a poop is a smelly human shit in all its round brown glory (akin to Dorothea McKellar's My Country), I don't expect many readers to understand that a lolly is a piece of candy. So what the hell! I've never imagined for an instant that colloquial Aussie English of the kind I encountered during my childhood contained any elements that might have justified its preservation. It was empty parlance, detached from its origins. Even within the microcosm composed of my English-Protestant-oriented father and my Irish-Catholic-oriented mother, there was a nasty daily opposition concerning the way in which one might pronounce such a fundamental word as "bread". Dad said bred, in a curt clear-cut monosyllabic fashion, whereas Mum liked to drag out this word as brea-eud... as if the extra effort in the pronunciation represented a final essential stage in the baking. Can you imagine it? Parents who disagree upon how to pronounce the word bread? How could they possibly agree upon anything else in the universe? They didn't...

Today, like an ugly old man trying to entice little girls, John Howard is offering lollies to potential voters. It's perfectly normal. Some 8.5 billion dollars worth of candy. The style of Aussie politics disgusts me. Dirty old men flashing their overcoats on the edge of the school playground. Exhibiting their lollies.

Saving the planet

She's not in the same heavyweight category as Al Gore, but Australian star Cate Blanchett has just revealed that she's making a personal effort to save the planet's natural resources.

"I really love a refreshing shower. But I'm careful about how much water I use. So, I've just had a shower timer fitted, which means I don't have more than four-minute showers."

On the other hand, she denied a rumor about no longer washing her hair at all. And she ended her interview in the UK's Daily Express by a curious evocation of her home land.

"I do live in a desert called Australia, you know!''

We're all familiar with the "sunburnt country" image invented by Dorothea Mackellar [1885-1968]. But I feel that Cate Blanchett has parched us out excessively when she refers to the Australian continent as a desert. Although I know it's wrong to judge an individual from her physical appearance, Cate doesn't strike me as an expert on deserts. I have no idea whether she spends much time Googling about the environment. Besides, I wonder what kind of a computer she uses.

Indigenous peoples

The UN General Assembly recently adopted a non-binding declaration upholding "the human, land and resources rights of the world's 370 million indigenous people". Guess which countries opposed this declaration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Australia defended its decision to oppose the declaration, saying that the document was "outside what we as Australians believe to be fair". Fair enough. The minister of Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, explained haphazardly: "We haven't wiped our hands of it. But, as it currently stands at the moment, it would provide rights to a group of people which would be to the exclusion of others." I fail to understand such mumbo-jumbo.

Once upon a time, the British colonialists in Van Diemen's Land—the early name for present-day Tasmania—set out to exterminate the Aborigenes, as if they were vermin. One of the last survivors, Truganini, pleaded to be buried in her mountainous homeland. Instead, her remains were placed in a glass museum case. Today, I have the impression that our Aborigines are still being treated, not as fascinating human beings, but as specimens in an antiquated museum.

Australia intends to censor the web

I've often thought that Australia surely appears to the world at times, from a sociopolitical viewpoint, as an immature nation. When political candidates seek to be elected, and when citizens vote, they often seem to do so, not through profound principles about what's good for the people and right for the nation, but merely on the basis of a single pervading question: What's in it for me? Things are warming up for a forthcoming federal election, and the tactics of the two major contenders [current PM John Howard and Opposition leader Kevin Rudd] are already producing what a local journalist referred to poetically as "a shriekfest about smears, fears, sneers, jeers, cheers, leers...".

To my mind, there is no more abject indicator of sociopolitical immaturity than an appeal to censorship. And this is what John Howard and his minister of Communications, Helen Coonan, are presently seeking to impose upon the Australian people.... in a telltale elusive manner, as surreptitiously as possible, so that few observers are likely to realize what is happening, and kick up a fuss.

This lady wants to extend a black list of websites to be outlawed, purely and simply, by the ACMA [Australian Communications and Media Authority]. For the moment, apparently, ACMA shields the Aussie public from certain websites containing pornography or offensive content. It would be interesting to know what exactly is meant by the terms "pornography" and "offensive content", just as it would be intriguing to learn something about the individuals who perform this censorship, their credentials and their operational criteria.

The planned Coonan censorship extensions concern websites in the domain of "terrorism and cyber-crime". Superficially, that sounds great. Australia simply has to ban websites that seek to expound terrorist ideology and cyber-crime methods, and—abracadabra!—these obnoxious phenomena will disappear magically from the wide brown country. What idiotically naive thinking! Are Australians not mature enough to separate the wheat from the chaff? To see what web stuff they wish to examine, and what they want to reject spontaneously? Are Howard and Coonan afraid that some silly kid in the suburbs is going to learn from the Internet the art of making roadside bombs, or the methods for delving into the online bank accounts of unsuspecting citizens? What rubbish! The nation's leaders would do better to enhance the sophistication of their intelligence, security and law-enforcement services...

To paraphrase one of my favorite conclusions on affairs of this nature: Every nation has the censorship it deserves.

Spelling and driving

In yesterday's post entitled Australian passport, I mentioned a government website called smartraveller.gov.au. Here's a trivial question for the folk who dreamt up the "smartraveller" name: If they came upon a website named www.cartraveller.com [not be clicked, because no such site exists], would they expect it to deal with people who travel in cars or rather carts? What I'm trying to say is that it's not very smart [particularly in the case of a government website] to drop a consonant when combining words such as "smart" and "traveller". If the authorities allow themselves to do such things, they shouldn't be surprised if kids get around to writing "bookeeping", for example. If a young man were to send his girlfriend an email asking whether she would like to accompany him on a Mediterranean "boatrip", she would be justified in imagining that the voyage might have something to do with huge snakes.

Talking of spelling, I find it disappointing that Australia has never turned wholeheartedly to American rules, which have the merit of producing words that are shorter and more logical in their pronunciation than their old-fashioned English equivalents. According to the built-in dictionary on my Macintosh, for example, "traveller" comes up as a spelling error. I agree that "traveler" is preferable, because there's simply no obvious reason whatsoever for the antique "ll". That's to say that there are cases in which double consonants are logical, such as "bookkeeping", and cases where they aren't, such as "traveller". In most instances that come to mind, I prefer American to Australian spelling: "honor" rather than "honour", "jail" rather than "gaol", "practice" rather than "practise, etc. Having said this, I admit that it's often a trivial matter of taste and habits. For example, even in my wildest Americanism fantasies, I would never write "Sydney Harbor"... no more than I would follow the author of Thorn Birds in referring to an Australian cattle station as a "ranch".

On the other hand, I've often been intrigued by the fact that Gordon Brown (left) heads a body whose name is written as the Labour Party, whereas Kevin Rudd (right) represents an Australian entity called the Labor Party. It goes without saying that the reasons behind this distinction [if they exist] are surely not earth-shaking, and aren't likely to affect my voting choice in a forthcoming election.

In the domain of disappearing dregs of Australian allegiance to the ancient British Empire, I often wonder why Australians still persist in driving on the left-hand side of the road. While I'm prepared to forgive the Poms for carrying on this tradition [because they would be morally traumatized if ever they had to give in to all those aliens over on the Continent, by adopting the euro and driving on the right-hand side of the road], I can't understand why Australia doesn't decide to get onto the same wavelength as Europe and America. The longer this anachronism persists, the harder it will be to change it.

When I was a child, the expression Southern Hemisphere was little more than a geographical label for remote lands that were once described as terra incognita. Today, it's nice to see the French sporting media, in the rugby domain, according a new nobility to this expression. Indeed, they talk constantly of "Southern Hemisphere rugby", as opposed to the Old World variety of this ancient game. There's no doubt about it that the Wallabies, the Springboks and the Blacks [not to mention other valorous Pacific-island teams] appear to have discovered the right side of the rugby road on which to drive.

Australian passport

It was fun getting my passport renewed. It all worked so smoothly that I'm tempted to believe that the efficient services of the Australian embassy in Paris were designed with one purpose in mind: to make it easy for William to get his passport renewed. Everything was handled by Internet, telephone [friendly French-speaking hostess] and the splendid French Chronopost service. Then the new passport got delivered to me yesterday at Gamone by a guy in a van who was thrilled to inform me that he remembered the path up to my place from the time he delivered my broadband Internet box. I'm amused by the tiny logo at the bottom, which signifies (I suppose) that there's an electronic chip inside the passport.

My passport photo is ideally sinister. The authorities don't want you to smile. You have to look as if you've just been caught in the act of setting up a roadside bomb in Kalgoorlie, say, and you're about to answer trivia questions from the police designed to see if you might not be un-Australian. I think I look like all that.

I've just browsed through a paper document that came with my new passport, entitled Hints for Australian travellers, signed by a certain Alexander Downer. Living in France, where I can phone free-of-charge to Australia, I find that the department of Foreign Affairs and Trade puts an unnecessary accent on the reverse-charge telephone procedure [even to the point of printing Telstra publicity on the back of the slightly-undersized plastic passport jacket]... but I imagine that this service might be interesting for an Aussie lost in Iraq or Indonesia.

I consulted a government website, mentioned in the literature, called smartraveller.gov.au. And I was amused by the following advice:

Make sure your passport has at least six months validity and carry additional copies of your passport photo with you in case you need a replacement passport while overseas.

The idea of carrying spare copies of your passport photo is bizarre. Does this imply that, beyond Australia, there are backward zones of the planet in which photography hasn't yet appeared? Maybe... That reminds me of an anecdote at the unique restaurant in Choranche, back in the days before portable phones. From time to time, motorists would stop there for a drink and ask politely: "Is it possible to make a phone call?" And the proprietor, my old friend Georges, would take pleasure in replying cynically: "Just a moment while I find out whether the telephone exists at Choranche."

Does it really matter?

I've been browsing through stories in The Australian about police behavior during the APEC events in Sydney. And I've been asking myself questions of a rhetorical kind. That's to say, it's important to pose such questions, without necessarily hoping to obtain answers.

• Does it really matter if a pair of air-force fighter jets scarred shit out of an innocent private pilot in a tiny Cessna who strayed into the air-exclusion zone?

• Does it really matter if dozens of police removed their identity tags before manhandling innocent demonstrators in an excessive manner?

• Does it really matter if a freelance photographer was arrested and charged after refusing to stop filming police during the protest?

• Does it really matter if an innocent 52-year-old onlooker, crossing the road ahead of an APEC motorcade, was arrested violently in front of his son, and spent 22 hours in jail before being released on bail?

Personally, I don't think it matters a lot, because every society generally ends up with the police it deserves. And many Australians are so hoodwinked into believing naively that they live in a laid-back environment that they apparently accepted the recent police closure of Sydney as a necessary evil, without seeing Howard's dictatorial constraint as a state-imposed incursion upon their civil liberties.

Hearing complaints, Andrew Scipione, the new chief commissioner of police, explained: "That's the way we do business in NSW now." What a frightening conclusion.

Fences and walls

When people are terrorized (in both senses, figuratively and literally) and their imagination runs out, causing them to lose control of themselves, they build fences, hoping that the demons will remain on the other side. That's what the French did, between the two world wars, when they decided to erect the ridiculous wall of blockhouses, to the north of Metz, known as the Maginot Line:

The Nazi demons simply flowed around one end of this silly barrier.

The most notorious fence of modern times was the Berlin Wall:

Thankfully, most walls are fragile. They have weak spots. And, when a breach was finally found in the ignominious barrier between the two German peoples, the wall disappeared overnight, heralding the start of a new European era.

In Belfast, the Protestants thought of the Catholics as demons, while the Catholics applied this term to the Protestants. And people found a pretty name for the ugly barrier that cuts the city into two camps: the Peace Wall.

In the Holy Land, where a legendary wall around ancient Jericho was once shattered by a trumpet blast from Joshua, today's leaders have thought it necessary to erect a wall to keep the demons out.

In Sydney, John Howard has been so terrified by potential demons on Australian soil that he too decided to build his own little fence:

The greatest surprise with protective fences and walls is that, when they're broken down, the elements out of which they were composed can be transformed rapidly into weapons.

Unhealthy compatriots

At a medical level, you might say, I would have thought it enough that Australian Internet news [my immediate informational contact with my land of birth] should reveal that equine flu had stopped the NSW spring racing carnival. But there seems to be worse news, of human kind.

There would appear to be what is referred to, in The Australian, as a "growing obesity epidemic". Now, this doesn't really surprise me in the sense that my French children and I first discovered the McDonald's phenomenon in Sydney, many years ago. Last year, during my brief excursion to Australia, I was shocked by specimens of obesity encountered everywhere, including my birthplace. In a South Grafton club, I witnessed a family of overweight monsters who appeared to be regarded as normal by the locals. At the place in Grafton where my dear departed father once sold spare parts for Ford automobiles, there is now a cake shop that distributes unbelievably heavy-weight luncheon stuff for workers. But my brief observations have little weight... you might say. So let me quote directly The Australian:

Almost all Australians are either eating poorly or exercising inadequately, while only five per cent meet national lifestyle guidelines, a new report shows. The landmark study of more than 16,000 Australians has painted a grim picture of a slothful, unhealthy nation falling short of its own recommendations for exercise and nutrition.

One in four—25 per cent—meet physical activity guidelines, while 55 per cent eat enough fruit and 15 per cent eat enough vegetables.

But an alarmingly small number—fewer than five per cent—met the criteria for all three guidelines, a statistic the University of Sydney and Deakin University researchers say is "extremely concerning".

At a personal level, I'm not directly involved in the problem to which I allude. I'm no longer directly concerned by Australia in general, because I've moved on. But I still react as if it were my birthplace [which it is] and my homeland [which it hasn't been, for ages].

I love a fat brown country...

Sydney skies

On the front page of The Australian this morning, we find this photo of an RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] jet fighter, illustrating an article with a shock title: RAAF may use 'lethal force' for APEC.

Australians in authority often take themselves a little too seriously, to the point of getting carried away with their self-importance. We saw a striking case of this behavior recently in the conflict between a self-righteous government member and the Indian doctor suspected of abetting terrorists. Today we find a member of the air force, in charge of protecting the airspace over Sydney next week, telling reporters that "any pilots entering the area without a permit ran the risk of being shot down". This excessive kind of cowboy talk, coming from a senior military representative, would be hilarious were it not alarming. The RAAF would do better to go about its assigned business quietly and expertly, with no spectacular but unnecessary buzzing of central Sydney, and no front-page stories in the media.

There is indeed a nonnegligible risk that an unfortunate private pilot might be unaware that special airspace regulations are in vigor over the Sydney region during the APEC conference. One can even imagine such-and-such a member of a visiting delegation with a civilian pilot's licence, who decides to rent a small aircraft and spend an afternoon with his wife, taking aerial shots of the Blue Mountains, while naively ignorant of the fact that a so-called "lethal force" is operating in the nearby skies. Imagine the huge diplomatic incident that would ensue if rescuers were to find that the wreckage of a small aircraft, blasted out of the skies by an RAAF fighter, contained the charred remains of a junior cabinet member, say, of Brunei, Peru or New Zealand.

No horses at next week's Sydney circus

This photo shows an unmounted policeman in Sydney, leading a horse that is probably suffering from equine flu:

That's the way it's going to be at the APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] event next week. Not only will police horses be absent, but Laura Bush won't be there either, because she has a mysterious pain in the backside, or somewhere or other. As for Bush himself, he'll be arriving and leaving earlier than initially scheduled, which means that a lot of the advanced security planning carried out conscientiously by NSW authorities will have been a waste of time and effort. They've nevertheless purchased some kind of sophisticated high-tech truck capable of spraying high-pressure water on groups of protesters. The APEC circus will provide the authorities with an excellent opportunity of testing this equipment... provided, that is, that there are groups of real-life protesters. According to plans, it is highly likely that people in this category will in fact turn up in Sydney. On the other hand, if ever the planned protesters did a Laura, or stayed away from the APEC circus because they were afraid of catching equine flu, then the police would have no other alternative than to stir up pseudo-protesting among crowds of normally calm onlookers, so that they can be hosed down experimentally with the new truck. I've heard rumors that the most disgruntled abservers of all are the members of the famous Bondi Icebergs: the folk who make a point of going surfing every day, even at the height of winter. Apparently the APEC organizers have taken over their clubhouse on Bondi beach, in the context of some kind of luncheon for APEC dignitaries. Wouldn't it be funny if Icebergers, protesting because they couldn't go for their normal swim, were to get hosed down by icy water from the high-tech truck. They would probably whine that the water's too warm for their tastes.

Finally, there'll be a fireworks show, but the authorities are telling Sydney folk to watch it solely on TV. As for me, here in France, I plan to watch TV to admire, not only the fireworks, but the high-tech hose-truck in action. I had been looking forward to seeing George W Bush and John Howard dressed up in R M Williams clothes for the traditional end-of-conference photo. But this is unlikely, unless the organizers were to take a photo of Bush in Aussie cowboy gear before he leaves, and then use Photoshop to insert him magically into the final group photo. These days, everything is possible. But only one thing is certain: This gigantic APEC shemozzle is going to disrupt the normally calm life of Sydney for most of next week. I'm glad I'm not there.

Kevin Rudd's a normal bloke

Howard supporters probably hoped that Kevin Rudd's reputation would suffer because of an old story about his spending a drunken evening in a New York strip club, while on a government-funded excursion to the UN. But those who unearthed and publicized this piece of ancient history have grossly miscalculated its effect. A phone survey carried out last week by the Australian firm Roy Morgan Research reveals that 87% of electors are not concerned by this incident. The feelings of electors were summed up in the following typical comments:

— We're all human and we all make mistakes.

— He's just a bloke, a normal Aussie male.

The comment I like best:

— It doesn't affect how he runs the country. Just look at Bill Clinton.

On the contrary, for the first time ever, a majority of people taking part in the survey said they disapproved of John Howard's handling of his job as prime minister.

Equine influenza

Little has been said yet outside of Australia concerning the outbreak of equine influenza, detected last Friday at Sydney's Centennial Park, close to the famous Randwick racecourse.

Finally, an informative website on this affliction, produced by the Queensland government [display], reveals that it's highly contagious, but apparently not life-threatening for horses or humans. A singular outcome of this viral outbreak is that there may not be any mounted police officers in Sydney to handle possible protesters during the forthcoming APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] conference, on 8-9 September. Worse still for most Aussies, if the outbreak of equine flu were to spread, horse-racing might be interrupted for a while.

Indian doctor and Aussie patient

This morning, I was happy to learn that Mohamed Haneef had succeeded, in a court appeal, in recovering his Australian work visa.

This young Indian doctor is surely an ordinary individual who has never been condemned of committing any crime whatsoever. The idea of being tempted to consider him as a terrorist is idiotic and grotesque.

Be that as it may, the Australian minister Kevin Andrews is not at all happy with the ruling of the Federal Court. As for me, I was satisfied to see a photo of this intriguing all-powerful Australian administrator:

Indeed, it's frustrating to remain aware of the existence of a curiously notorious individual without knowing what he might look like. Thanks to The Australian, I can now associate a physical image with the name of the man who declared that Mohamed Haneef couldn't pass an Aussie character test. Andrews, to say the least, has an intriguing face. To call a spade a spade, the stark face of Kevin Andrews, with its corpse-like rigidity, frightens me.

An Australian journalist compared Kevin Andrews with a notorious fictional character of the '60s named Maxwell Smart, an incompetent law authority who invented the shoe telephone:

Personally, I'm not sure that Kevin Andrews could invent anything whatsoever. He doesn't strike me as an inventor. He doesn't strike me as anything of a nice nature. Well, yes, his face does in fact strike me in a morbid sense. I wouldn't like to meet up with Kevin Andrews on a dark night in a remote alley, let along in a government immigration office. To put it bluntly, he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would wish his neighbor well.

Meanwhile, the amusing thing about this whole affair is that Haneef, sooner or later, will become a celebrity in Australia. People will be queuing up to obtain a consultation with this nice notorious Indian doctor. And many of his patients will be tempted to ask the same questions: "Who's this weird guy named Kevin Andrews? Why did he attack you? Do you think it's safe for Australia that such an individual should remain in such a prominent post?" By then, of course, I would hope that Kevin Andrews will have retired from active service.

Secret river

I'm fascinated by the story, related in The Australian, of the discovery of a so-called secret river called the Kallakoopah in the heart of Australia. [Click here to read the story.]

To remain geared to the universe, we humans need to discover things constantly, where the word "things" denotes both intellectual and material entities. One can imagine no more inspiring discovery than that of an ancient river.

Bali bird flu

Last year in February, a Sydney-based think tank named the Lowy Institute succeeded in scaring shit out of everybody by announcing the theoretical worst-case scenario of a bird-flu pandemic capable of taking 142 million lives. [Click here or on the image to display the CNN article.]

At that time, we Europeans shuddered most, because the mortal H5N1 virus had been detected here in migrating wild fowl. French authorities reacted to this threat in a draconian fashion by outlawing outdoor chicken yards. Meanwhile, people feared that the celebrated recipe of Poule au pot farcie Henri IV might soon become a thing of the past, like roast pheasant. [Click here to display the recipe in French.]

Today, alas, the action has shifted to Australia's playground: the tiny Indonesian island of Bali. Now, I hasten to add that I've never set foot in Bali, and have no immediate plans to go there. Besides, I've never understood what draws young Australian tourists to this place. Wouldn't it be a relatively simple affair, for filthy-rich developers, to create an exotic but safe Bali-like atmosphere in delightful local places such as Bondi or Byron Bay? Or even Yamba or Woolgoolga?

Judging from this morning's press, there's no panic yet in Australia. At the moment I'm writing, Australian health and tourism authorities don't seem to have issued any directives concerning Australian citizens who are already holidaying in Bali, or those who might be preparing to go there. Is this absence of official declarations an indication of calm and clear thinking, or rather a sign of negligence?

Aussie bungler of the year

I would like to nominate Kevin Andrews, minister of Immigration, for the Bungler of the Year award. Speaking of the departure for India of liberated Haneef, the bungler is quoted as saying: "If anything, that actually heightens rather than lessens my suspicion." Andrews is a bloody stubborn bungler, too, who doesn't even appear to be aware that he screwed things up. And don't expect him to apologize for his bungling. He summed up his idiotic actions with the following weird words: "I have had to defend this matter with one arm tied behind my back because of protected information." The guy's a nut, and the only decent thing he could do would be to resign.

Tony Abbott, minister of Health, spoke of the bungler as follows: "He's a terrific bloke and he's done a good job." When somebody goes out of his way to describe a mate with rotten egg on his face as a "terrific bloke", this is often a euphemism for saying: "He's not quite the total arsehole you might imagine him to be." OK, fair enough. Abbott seems to be telling us that Andrews is only a minor arsehole.

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.