Facts versus fantasy

Before rushing to sit down for a meal such as last Saturday's annual lunch for the senior citizens of Choranche and Châtelus, I like to spend a little time observing who is seated where, to make sure that I'll be surrounded optimally by charming fellow citizens. The kind of lunch-table neighbors I attempt to avoid are those who have the habit of talking enthusiastically as soon as their mouth is full of food such as sauce or vegetables. My appetite disappears instantly as soon as I find that my face or plate is getting spat at. There can also be problems concerning neighbors who have either too much to say about uninteresting topics, or nothing to say about anything at all. Consequently, the choice of a table and chair is the outcome of a series of rapid observations and decisions. Above all, I avoid sitting down alongside or opposite chairs that are not yet occupied, because you never know who might slide into such an empty slot. In general, for a single person such as me, sitting down in the midst of married couples is a fairly sound strategy, because you can usually count on them—if the worst comes to the worst, as it often does on such occasions—to talk among themselves. But this kind of situation is risky, because you can never be certain beforehand that individual members of the various couples will soon get around to talking to one another, which means that you can be caught up in the crossfire.

Skillful hosts and hostesses at bourgeois dinner evenings place potentially sympathetic individuals alongside one another, in the hope that congenial communications might ensue. The French publicity chief Jacques Séguéla revealed his mastery of this art when he recently invited along to his Parisian apartment two single individuals named Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni for a dinner among smart friends. As far as we can ascertain, the conversation was lively, and no one complained afterwards about getting spat upon.

Getting back to last Saturday's lunch at Le Jorjane in Choranche, I made a beeline for an empty chair between two couples, diagonally opposite the mayor of Châtelus. This jovial fellow amuses me. Besides, I had heard a rumor that he would not be contesting the forthcoming municipal elections, and I thought he might be prepared to come out with some frank talk about his years of experience of local politics. Things got off to a good start when I asked him if he was affiliated to a political organization, whereupon he made it clear that he was a fervent socialist. He immediately asked me where I stood at a political level, and he appeared to react positively when I told him that I too was a partisan of the French Left. But then, all of a sudden, my hopes for an interesting discussion were demolished by his next out-of-the-blue statement (which I shall translate into English): "William, you're Australian. Well, you could never guess what I'm reading at present. One of the most fabulous novels I've ever unearthed: The Thorn Birds. Last night, I reached the turning-point in the story where Ralph de Bricassart finally gets into bed with Meggie Cleary!"

This intriguing saga crammed with outback passion has attained fame in France through the movie version. Exceptionally, the French title is more catching than the original. A thorn bird is described by the author, Colleen McCullough, as a magnificently-plumed creature that impales itself on a spike and sings beautifully while it dies. In French, the expression "birds who hide to die" evokes a mysterious elephantine graveyard, and attracts readers to a great fable. The only minor fault of this exceptional literary work is that many readers (such as the mayor of Châtelus, for example) are likely to believe that tales like that really unfold in a commonplace fashion in Australia. In other words, readers end up imagining that a handsome Catholic priest in a desolate outback setting could indeed inherit a vast fortune from an infatuated female parishioner, and then use this newfound wealth within the context of his employer, the Church, to purchase eventually a title of cardinal... while seducing, along the way, a young lady of the "ranch" (American term used by McCullough to designate what we Australians call a sheep or cattle station). Funnily enough, this popular TV series (aired regularly in France) that is supposed to present viewers with an awesome vision of outback Australia was actually shot in California!

Personally, I've always been bored by most literary constructions set in my ancestral land. I far prefer authentic Australian biography, history and (in my privileged case) genealogy. My attitude is summed up perfectly by these words from the great American writer Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain [1835-1910]:

Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange that it is itself the chiefest novelty the counry has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

If Twain's judgment is correct (as I believe), then, instead of The Thorn Birds or Riders in the Chariot (Patrick White), we would be better off reading ordinary factual stuff such as Kings in Grass Castles (Mary Durack), Squatter's Castle (George Farwell), Islands of Angry Ghosts (Hugh Edwards) or simply The Fatal Shore (Robert Hughes) and The Great Shame (Thomas Keneally), not to mention The Bloodiest Bushrangers (John O'Sullivan). The only problem is that none of the books I've just mentioned could be adapted easily, preferably by Americans, into a movie that would be immensely popular, say, in France.

Celebrations

On this 26th day of the month of January, my parents were married.

Armed with this date, smart readers will be able to calculate that the foetus whose presence would erupt upon the universe under the name of William Skyvington, on 24 September 1940, was already a few weeks old (bless the poor little bugger) when Dad and Mum walked up the aisle at Christ Church Cathedral.

On this twenty-sixth day of the month of January, in 1994, I signed the legal documents concerning my purchase of Gamone. So, I've been here for fourteen years.

This afternoon, we oldtimers of Choranche and Châtelus got together for our annual dinner. Among other things, I got back in contact with my English friend Patricia, CEO of Photonic Sciences, widow of our friend Adrian who piloted his jet aircraft into the English earth a few years ago [a long and touching story, which I must relate one day].

For me, personally, it was a momentous day of celebrations. Somebody said it's called Australia Day.

Aussie cowboys

In the space of a few days, Australian media have displayed images of two local cowboys. Heath Ledger, co-star of The Secret of Brokeback Mountain, was found dead in Manhattan last Tuesday. Today, in a more joyous context, country singer Lee Kernaghan was proclaimed Australian of the Year. And here's an old photo of an authentic Aussie cowboy:

This is my brother Don Skyvington (a year younger than me) at Wave Hill cattle station in the outback, in the company of Aboriginal stockmen. This photo was taken in the early '60s. Don has had major health problems for most of his adult life, possibly as a consequence of hepatitis that he picked up out in the bush. He now resides in Brisbane (Queensland) in a fine and friendly home with disabled Aboriginals, which I visited when I was out in Australia in 2006.

Tennis police

Australian vice-prime minister Julia Gillard is right. It's a pity ("bad for the nation's image") that disturbing photos and video sequences of incidents at Australia's great tennis tournament have just gone all around the planet.

Seeing ordinary spectators (often bystanders with no links to unruly elements in the crowd) suffering from the after-effects of pepper spray, many bewildered potential tourists are likely to ask, in Aussie parlance: "What the bloody hell are they wailing for?"

My personal opinion about Aussie cops has never evolved much over the last half-a-century. For me, all too many of them act like brainwashed self-righteous zombies. I remember them above all in Fremantle, in 1987, for the America's Cup regattas. One evening, I was pulled over while driving away from a social event, and taken along to the station where I was asked to take my coat off, empty my pockets, etc. Half an hour later, one of their team told me I could put my coat back on, place my money and belongings back into my pockets, and continue on my way, for they had no reason whatsoever to keep me there.

Concerning the cowboy cops and their pepper sprays at the Australian Open, many observers have pointed out that police behavior of this kind would be unthinkable in most civilized countries... particularly since it appears retrospectively that the spectator disturbances that provoked the police intervention were perfectly harmless, indeed banal at a spirited sporting match.

Friend on the rock

Bruce Hudson is no ordinary Australian friend. During my childhood in South Grafton, although our respective educational establishments were strictly antipodean [Bruce at prestigious Knox Grammar School in Sydney, and me at the public school in South Grafton], I got to know and admire this fellow as if he were a friendly icon of urban civilization, with profound attachments to my family, and a symbol (with the help of his father and uncle... with maybe a little push from my own father) of the great old-fashioned pioneering spirit of Australia. Bruce became my mate and hero. Meanwhile, he also turned into an authentic man of the bush. What I'm saying is not idle poetry. Bruce learned to live in the bush, and he has stayed that way. Today, he and his wife Debbie are operating three hundred acres of beef-cattle land out near Young.

Bruce Hudson has just sent me a fabulous series of photos of Australia's sacred rock, Uluru.

The aerial nature of these shots reminds me that Bruce's splendid father Eric Hudson [businessman, town councilor of South Grafton and great friend of my father] once invited me to fly, for the first time, in his Tiger Moth aircraft at South Grafton.

Australia's sacred mountain is a mystery. A rock that just happens to have appeared there in the distant past, in the middle of nowhere, like the black slab in Kubrick's Space Odyssey. Like my modest but magic Cournouze, opposite Gamone [see the photo at the top of my blog], Uluru changes color in a mysterious manner.

Several years ago, when talking with my friend Natacha Boudoul about the fabulous mountain of Mary Madeleine alongside Marseille, I evoked the crazy idea that sacred sites of this kind might communicate with one another, as it were, through some kind of terrestrial radiation. In receiving Bruce Hudson's images of Uluru, I'm convinced that this magic mountain-to-mountain radiation does in fact exist. And it functions perfectly. It's called the Internet.

Super-sacred rock

I warn Antipodes readers that you won't necessarily understand much, if anything, of what I'm about to say. First, it's in French. And second, even I don't grasp the theme of things. But, here goes...

Recently, a distinguished French newspaper, Le Figaro, displayed a quiz on its website [display] comprising twenty questions designed to test your awareness of French political happenings, generally at an anecdotal level, over the last twelve months. The 14th question was perfectly topical: a simple matter of identifying the personality who said: "I'm reminded of words from the Bible: Forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." Many people in France know the answer to this question. The Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal dared recently to talk like Jesus when she was criticizing certain elders of her party, designated in colloquial French political talk as "elephants". [Our metaphors start to get terribly mixed if we try to imagine Jesus talking of jungle beasts.]

What intrigues me is: Why did the French graphic artist of Le Figaro decide to illustrate their question by an image of Australia's Uluru?

Has Ayer's Rock ever been a specifically Christian symbol? I don't think so. Would it be a symbol of folk who deserve to be forgiven because they don't know what they're doing? Surely not. Finally, I end up believing that the employee of Le Figaro chose this image of Uluru for the simple reason that this sacred rock strikes us all as being terribly Biblical, like the words of Jesus... whatever that means. Funny, no?

Australian Internet censorship

Is Australia an adult nation?
It's so long since I lived in Australia for an appreciable length of time that I prefer to refrain from stating my hasty and uninformed personal opinion on that interesting question. But I've just heard about a Labor project that would consist of blacklisting various websites whose content is judged to be dangerous for the angelic minds of Aussie kids.

In the above sentence, the banal adjective "various" is significant, in the sense that only a random sampling of such websites would appear on the blacklist, for the simple reason that websites grow like weeds in your backyard, and you can no more blacklist all the offensive websites of the planet than you can eradicate noxious plants. The authorities can do little more than bow down symbolically to a lobby of wowsers and do-gooders who know fuck-all about the technicalities of contemporary communications of the web kind.

For almost two years, my personal email communications with Australia have been plagued constantly by some kind of a fuckwit blacklist maintained by Big Pond, designed to prevent the delivery of messages emanating from the French national ISP [Internet service provider] named Orange, ostracized as an alleged producer of spam [an absurd accusation].

In spite of all my efforts, I've never succeeded in eradicating this annoyance, and making sure that all my French emails would be delivered systematically to my relatives and friends in Australia. Often, I had the impression that trying to solve a problem of that kind was like attempting to nudge the Australian Way of Life. That's why I decided to create this blog, so that my relatives and friends in Australia would be able to see what I was doing and thinking in France. So, now that my blog is a thriving offspring, well over a year old, Antipodes says: Thank you, Big Pond fuckwits!

Today, when I start hearing talk about projects to censor the Internet in Australia, I'm itching to answer my opening rhetorical question, at the start of this article. For the moment, I'll force myself not to do so.

Gigantic news from Down Under

It's still 2007 here in France, whereas the new year is already an hour and a half old in my motherland. And the following dramatic story has already been transmitted across the planet on the Internet by Reuters, accompanied by an image:

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian newlyweds kissing on the backseat of their hire car were unaware their chauffeur was street drag racing, until a police siren broke their romantic bliss and ended the race. The chauffeur, clocked at up to 130 kph (80 mph) racing a young driver in a rental car, was fingerprinted on the side of the road and the hire car confiscated. "It's alleged that as the traffic light turned green both the (cars) accelerated harshly from the intersection and continued to travel at speed along the highway," police said in a statement. Both drivers were taken away by police, while newlyweds John and Laina Tauranga were escorted home in a police car.

Shit! Fuck me! Stone the crows! Can this really be true? Was this vehicle truly racing at 130 kph while the innocent newlyweds were kissing on the back seat? Thank God that the Australian police force is constantly vigilant, to detect frightening happenings of this kind, and to attenuate the consequences of such barbarian acts upon innocent victims. What a terrible atmosphere of drama in which the newlyweds John and Laina are going to start their married life. I hope they'll receive appropriate psychological counseling to recover from this ordeal. Unbelievable...

The new year, as I said, is less than a couple of hours old in my motherland, but I can sense already that dramatic Aussie stories are going to amaze me more and more throughout the coming months.

Old bridges in Australia

In my blog, I write one day about major themes such as Australia's future submarines, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto [who, I've just learned, used to be in the same class for foreign students as my Australian cousin Peter Hakewill at the Institute of Political Science in Paris] and all kinds of issues. Then, the next day, I'm submitting a lukewarm article whose title evokes bridges. Certain readers might be surprised or disconcerted by my eclectic behavior.

Please be patient. I'm merely working, as unobtrusively as possible, on my Google image. As I've already indicated, in my article entitled Identity issues [display], the Google folk appear to be scratching constantly their heads, trying to figure out what my Antipodes blog is all about. Now, this is a most pertinent question, since Google is displaying oriented ads on my blog site, and their ads are supposed to reflect what my blog is all about. Sometimes, Google's robots seem to sense, quite rightly, that my daily preoccupations might have something to do with Australia... which is, after all, a keyword that sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb. On the other hand, like certain members of my family in Australia, the Google robots don't seem to have assimilated or accepted various otherwise-obvious facts:

(a) The Antipodes blog is really concerned, not with my birthplace of Australia, but with my adopted land: France.

(b) I've been living in France for most of my adult life, and I persist in loving life in France, which has become for me, not only a gigantic legend, but a myth. Like Joan of Arc, I now hear voices...

(c) I'm a grave and no-doubt incurable victim of the Francophile virus, which has attacked me particularly in the intellectual region of my being. For me, in the Cosmos, there's France... and then the rest.

(d) Linguistically, there was Egyptian, Greek and Latin (with a little bit of Hebrew thrown in for the fans)... followed by French. Alongside this linguistic diamond, English was a magnificent chunk of flint, particularly with Shakespeare. Since then, as a worldly touristic and business Esperanto, the flint has disintegrated into porous rock.

(e) My ex-wife, children and dearest friends are all French.

(f) I dash to my mailbox each morning in the hope of receiving the final official document from Australia [a long-awaited stamped copy of my birth certificate] that will enable me to be gifted with the most profound but purely symbolic and superficial honor of my life: French citizenship!

OK, let's stop all this shit talk about France. The subject that I wish to tackle in the present article [since I know that Google is watching over my shoulder] is bridges: old Australian bridges. No hurry, because Australia has the habit of holding on to its antiquated infrastructure. Within the normal lifespan of an Australian, you're not likely to be surprised by the proliferation of new bridges, road, railways lines, etc. That's the charm of my native land. Nothing new under the rainbow...

First, there's the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which will shortly explode into New Year fireworks:

Then there's my home-town bridge across the Clarence in Grafton:

Finally, in this short touristic coverage of Aussie bridges, there's Bawden's Bridge over the Orara River, in the murky shadows of which I was apparently conceived on a tepid January afternoon of 1940 by a randy male named King Skyvington and a female named Enid Walker, otherwise known as my dear and fabulous Dad and Mum.

OK, Google, it's now up to you. I suspect that you're going to conclude that I'm attempting, through my Antipodes blog, to lure unsuspecting citizens of the world into going out to Australia and settling there. Fair enough. That's partly true. But they should be warned. Watch the Sydney fireworks on New Year's Eve, with no risks of danger, and cross the Clarence River, if you must, by means of the decrepit bridge of which we are so fond. But beware, dear tourists, of becoming romantically bewitched under Bawden's Bridge over the Orara, and using it as a backdrop for procreation. Its bizarre waves are capable of giving rise to un-Australian offspring who might be enticed by antipodean lands such as France. Weird creatures such as me.

Now, let's see how Google is going to react to this article about bridges in Australia.

Australia's submarines

It has just been announced that Australia plans to build "the world's most lethal conventional submarine fleet". That curious expression is an example of the propensity to exaggerate whenever Australians talk about Australia. It's a little like referring, say, to "the world's most powerful horse-cavalry division". If foreign navies throughout the world were to reach a gentlemen's agreement with Australia to the effect that only classic diesel-powered submersible vessels would be employed in future underwater conflicts with the Royal Australian Navy, then we would probably be in a relatively comfortable situation. But, if an uncouth enemy were to ignore the rules of the game by using attack submarines of the nuclear-powered SSN class (not to be confused with submarines that actually launch nuclear missiles), then Australia's antiquated SSG models might not be nearly as "deadly" as claimed.

Australia's recent history in the submarine domain, dating from the Bob Hawke era and culminating in the existence of six faulty Australian-made Collins-class vessels, has been catastrophic, from both a financial and a technological viewpoint. Will the situation be better when these old-fashioned mediocre submarines (whose computer systems are off-the-shelf products from Raytheon) are replaced around 2025 by the newer models, to be manufactured by the same shipbuilder?

As an outside observer knowing little about defense strategies in general and submarines in particular, I have the impression that the decision that has just been announced has been largely inspired by the cogitations of an Australian think tank named Kokoda.

For $22 you can even purchase a paper signed by Ross Babbage, dated April 2007, entitled Australia's Future Underwater Operations and System Requirements. Although I haven't yet invested in a copy of this report (and no doubt never will, because I've got more exciting stuff to read), I'm convinced that the decision of the Royal Australian Navy reflects intimately the thinking of the above-named author. So, it would appear to be a blatant case of one-man thinking. What a tank for submarines! Incidentally, at the Kokoda website, the summary of Babbage's report is accompanied by a quaint drawing:

Don't you agree with me that this rudimentary sketch looks like an illustration from an old volume by Jules Verne? If you look closely, you can even see a midget robot submarine that has emerged from the entrails of the mother vessel. Believe it or not, this is an authentic aspect of Australia's future submarine fleet. Vicious little unmanned tadpoles will be expected to do all the dirty work while the host vessel sits quietly on the seabed, trying to remain undetected.

Recently, I got into a discussion with an Australian friend concerning the antiquated nature of the transport infrastructure in New South Wales. I was thinking primarily of roads, bridges and railway lines. He reacted simplistically by claiming that the volume of tax revenues in Australia is insufficient to cover expenditure in this domain. Now, that sounds to me like naive bullshit. In Australia, the land is composed of metaphorical gold. Theoretically, there are more than enough riches in Australia's soil to build the world's greatest roads, bridges, railway lines and nuclear-powered submarines. There's enough uranium in Australia to power all the nuclear vessels of all the navies of the globe. The only vital natural resource that is totally lacking in Australia is political consciousness. The concept of statesmanship is unknown in Australia. Politicians get elected because they promise, say, to lower interest rates for wage-earners paying mortgages on their suburban houses. Australians voters simply don't comprehend the notion of electing an individual with political wisdom, vision, imagination and profound humanitarian moral principles (as distinct from the candidate's uninteresting personal beliefs of a religious kind). For loud-mouthed snake-oil candidates, seeking to be elected, mythical Australia is the richest land on Earth... and I agree with them a priori. But, for elected representatives of the nation, there's never enough cash in the coffers to build a safe road, a modern bridge, a decent train service or a self-respecting nuclear-powered submarine.

An article in this morning's The Australian says: Although Defence has not yet ruled out the possibility of Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, this option is considered highly unlikely on strategic, practical and political grounds.

Note the final adjective: political. That's what I was saying a moment ago: Australia is simply not mature enough, politically, to own a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. As the old saying goes, or might have gone: Every nation has the submarines it deserves.

77 Aussie dollars

That's the amount I've just had to shell out, in Sydney, to obtain an apostille from the Australian authorities for my birth certificate, in the context of my application for French citizenship. I can hear readers yelling out that (a) a seventh-generation Anglo-Irish Aussie such as me shouldn't be seeking French citizenship, and (b) I shouldn't be using a French word such as apostille in my blog, since nobody knows what it means. Well, let me you surprise you, at least on the second point. It's a fact that most French people don't happen to know the meaning of this purely French word, apostille. But it so happens that our Australian embassy staff, not to mention the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia, are perfectly aware of the precise meaning of this exotic term. An apostille [I don't wish to get involved in the difficult question of the pronunciation of this term] is simply an official signed and date-stamped mention indicating that the associated document is authentic and valid. In fact, I can understand that French authorities need to be reassured that I'm not giving them forged identity documents, and I can even understand that Australian authorities demand $77 [basic fee of $60 plus $17 for international express postage to France] for this stamp of authenticity. So, let's see what happens. Blog readers can rest assured that I'll certainly let them know, with an electronic fanfare, if and when I become a French citizen.

Meanwhile, my attention is attracted by the precise amount of money, $77, that my native state of New South Wales is asking me to pay in order to get over the final hurdle of French naturalization. If I understand correctly, that's exactly the sum that Sydney cops would ask me to fork out if I were to exceed the speed limit while driving in suburban Cremorne... like a certain legal gentleman who would appear to have behaved most illegally. [Google him, if you're interested, for trivial details.] Between the former judge and me, for a matter of 77 Aussie dollars, I'm convinced I've got the better value-for-money deal.

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.