Sweet sweat

Apparently this top spot on Google has been held since 2003 - if you Google miserable failure it takes you to this website. What a hoot. It's worth looking up the history too on the second Google choice at the urban legends site, always worth a visit for a laugh on any topic. And apparently it was all down to a few determined bloggers manipulating the Google ratings with blog entries such as this one...just thought I'd add my couple of months' worth!

Wonder what I'd get if I googled dangerous sycophant. Well okay I set that one up!

This photo thing is soooooo sloooooow. I think this will have to be the last one. I tried posting 4 at once and it didn't seem to be happening, so changed to posting one at a time, then thought if I posted larger ones without the layout option it might be faster... still, you get (something of) the picture!

I haven't said a lot about the Darwin Festival. For the final two weeks of August, after the Fringe Festival (mentioned previously) we get two whole weeks of the Darwin Festival. Concerts, plays, art exhibitions, comedians. The Festival Club and the Star Shell are set up each year in the Botanic Gardens. Here are a few photos taken tonight around the Star Shell. It's magic. The palm tree gallery features artwork from Arnhemland and local restaurants set up stalls where you can buy a fantastic curry, a great coffee or a wood-fired pizza for a few dollars. Tonight we saw a free circus performance from the local youth theatre.

I've been thinking about my Dad a bit lately. He died when he was the age I am now. At the time, I thought he was old and wasn't surprised to hear he'd died. That fact strikes me as unbelievable now that I am the same age. I'm not old - in fact I'm so not old that I worry about the future, about how I'm going to live in my 'old age' for maybe the next 20 - 30 years.

My Dad was a very witty man. He was gentle, easygoing, lovable and loved by many people, not only his family and close friends but people he met in business or in the street, people he went out of his way to help. He had a whole store of old Australian 'sayings'and someone who read my recent blog entry where I said I'd been 'flat out like a lizard drinking' reminded me of a few of them. Well I've just remembered another one 'crook as Rookwood' which is how I feel today. Rookwood being a famous Sydney cemetery. I don't think I'm for the cemetery yet, I just have a virus that's making me feel like death and has been since last Tuesday. Although, as an aside, I must mention that I think Dad's epithet was a little more complex than that, I think when he said 'crook as Rookwood' he often meant a person who was 'a crook' (a dishonest person or criminal), rather than 'crook' (sick). I think my virus reached its peak yesterday, at least I hope so. I want to be well for next Friday when I go on holidays to visit my family. That's a problem with living so far away, you have to book plane fares a long way in advance to get a reasonable price, then, if you happen to be 'crook' or if something else intervenes, it's not easy to change the dates. Anyway I'm looking forward to my holiday and seeing my beautiful grandchildren again.

I'm not sure how much you'll hear from me for a while. I'm going on from Sydney to Canberra to work on a project for 6 weeks, and my work server won't allow access to blogsites, so if I get a chance I'll update, if not, then you might all have to do without me for a while.

and now, sliding seemlessly from the personal to the political I've got a few other things on my mind...

Our Prime Minister, John Howard (who has just won some American award for being a great and good friend of the United States - for that read George Bush's acolyte) has managed (through the total idiocy of the Australian voting public)to get himself a virtual monopoly on our Government by obtaining a majority in both houses is busy pushing through a raft of 'labour reforms' that will see average workers' rights and entitlements whittled away and everyone in Australia forced to negotiate 'individual contracts' rather than being entitled to 'award wages' - you can imagine how fair that will be to all us cannon-fodder workers out here - fine for the the overpaid heads of corporations and their minions. At the same time he's talking about new tax reforms - not as you may expect to assist low-paid workers or young families who are in what is now called the 'middle income' bracket (way more than I earn) at $70,000 to $125,000 (I could wear this one because many of them have 3 or 4 young children and the cost of bringing up kids and building for the future in this country now with schooling, mortgage and health costs is astronomical) - oh no, Johnny is talking about cutting the top tax rate the one that kicks in after $125,000- talk about blatant self-interest. Who is this going to benefit? Why Johnny and his cronies and the top managers of corporations who contribute to his political party. And while I'm on my political hobbyhorse, I saw a play last week about David Hicks's (he's an Aussie accused of being an 'unlawful combatant' in Afghanistan)incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. Whatever the rights and wrongs of what David Hicks has done the attitude of the American Government in keeping him locked up in a cage for 3 years awaiting a military trial (he wasn't even charged with anything for God knows how long - like years)is disgusting and not worthy of a 'freedom-loving people' but even worse is the Australian Government's reaction to this injustice. Have they been protesting to their great and good friend Mr Bush and asking for fair treatment for their citizen? Have they made any attempt to have him repatriated to Australia? No and No! And apparently there are nationals of 19 countries being held this way by the management of the 'land of the brave and the home of the free'... and of those countries, 18 have complained/made representations/ attempted to get fair treatment for their citizens. Guess which country is the only one that has not?... you got it...Australia!

Then there's our Government's 'anti terrorist campaign' or as GWB calls it 'the war on terr...'. We are being warned to 'report anything suspicious' to 'be alert AND ALARMED'. What does that mean 'report anything suspicious'? That kind of thinking makes people nervous and causes racial divide. What happened to the country that welcomed migrants from every land and where they all became "OZtrailian". That kind of thinking caused me to look sideways at the young man of middle eastern appearance, carrying a backpack and reading the Koran who sat next to me on a recent plane flight...and that's not right and not fair...it's not right to make us feel scared of shadows and it's not right to place ethnic parameters on what we should be alert for...

Just 20-30 years ago in this country you could see a doctor for free - all the charges came out of a thing called the Medibank Levy - a percentage charge taken from your income, a form of tax. Now you have to pay $50 out of your pocket and then take the receipt to the Medicare office and get back about $25 - that's ok if you are working and single but imagine you're the mother of 4 kids and they all get bronchitis or asthma (God forbid anything worse or long-running), the doctor doesn't get them all in and dose the lot of them for one fee any more, oh no, it costs you $50 for each one, plus medicines which used to cost $2 on the subsidised medicine list and now cost about $12 or $15 or something - so far we are looking at abour $300 and a whole morning off work for mum who has to sit with her sick children for anything up to an hour waiting for the Doctor to deign to keep his 'appointment' with her. Oh yes and a 'standard' appointment is no longer than 10 minutes. How the hell can doctors diagnose and write out a treatment in 10 minutes - it's just not realistic - but that's what our system of payments to doctors dictates.

I suspect we still live in the 'lucky country', that it's still easier to make ends meet and have a reasonable quality of life here than anywhere else in the world, but bloody hell, it's going to hell in a handbasket pretty damn quickly and I can't understand why this has happened... how did it all change and please, can we have our caring, inclusive, nurturing society back again... PLEASE?

Big fat nothing. Every time I think about blogging my mind dissolves into an oily black puddle. All that's got me started tonight is that I don't want to lose my one remaining reader - thanks HR mommy! Do I piss people off even on the internet? For a while there I thought I had real friends in blogland but one by one they've dropped away, presumably for their own reasons, but maybe they just got bored with me or I annoyed them in some way. I hate thinking these thoughts but they've gotta be thunk, otherwise how will I improve myself?

Anyway I've been flat out like a lizard drinking. Croc Festival in Hall's Creek all last week. Beautiful drive through semi-desert scenery - nice hotel, shocking, dusty, spiritually and economically impoverished town and sad people. But the kids make it all worthwhile. This week is a big thing in their deprived lives; they get to have fun, meet other kids, get up and dance on a real stage and hopefully realise that there's a whole other world out there they can explore if they only make the right choices. Those choices are a lot slimmer than most of us have and it will take a big effort and a strong will to make it, but hopefully some of them will and some of them will have been inspired by their week at the Croc Festival.

So I flew happily back to the promised land, into the frenzy of the Darwin Festival. Wonderful balmy star-filled nights listening to a free concert on the Esplanade on Saturday night featuring the best Aboriginal bands in the country and tasty, cheap Asian food from the vendors, then Sunday night the army band played in the Botanic Gardens to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII in the Pacific. In a burst of political correctness, this day is now known in Australia as VP day (victory in the pacific) whereas, until recent years and certainly contemporaneously it was known as VJ day - victory over Japan!

The concert featured Marina Pryor, often billed as Australia's first lady of the musical theatre. She was sensational. Ever the sucker for a romantic song, I had tears running down my cheeks when she sang "I dream a dream" from Les Miserables ... and was on my feet to the rousing strains of "We are Australian" which should by rights be our national anthem.

Since then it's been work, work and more work - yet another event- this time a science fair attracting 2500 children over three days. There's a lot of stuff going on at work and I may be making some big changes soon but I'll tell you about that another day.

I've got tomorrow and the whole weekend off, a play to see tomorrow night, maybe a fiddlers concert on Sunday night and I really think I need to do some of the three-week pile of ironing on Saturday instead of catching the ferry across the harbour on a work social outing... but we'll see. Then there's the 4 out of 5 DVDs hired last week that I have to watch by Saturday... don't like my chances of achieving that particular goal.

I'm glad I decided to pay my respects to blogland! Goodnight friend.

It's a regular smorgasbord of delights every weekend in Darwin at the moment as we put on our best face for the tourist season. Silly thing is that most of them come up here for the horse racing season or the V8 Supercars (or even the cricket in a years when we get a cricket test). They stay on for a few days or a week to cover the regular tourist trail: barramundi fishing, Kakadu, Litchfield, Katherine Gorge, maybe check out the Mindil sunset markets, then rush off back to their rat-race, gerbil on a treadmill existences. Up in the dark (and/or home in the dark) to a cold house after battling traffic and fumes to get to an air-conditioned, neon-lit office - they rarely see daylight for 6 months of the year- while we bask in an even 32 degrees, day in day out, with never a sign of rain and evening falls at around 7 o'clock summer and winter. Anyway, I digress - most of them don't attend any of these events, sponsored at great expense by our civic authorities. At this time of year the NT Government and the local councils and the arts societies and the theatrical types all battle it out for prime spots on the festival programs, and for us who actually live here, it's fantastic.

This weekend I took in an Oz Blues show on Friday evening. Held at my local outdoor cafe (about 5 minutes from home), it featured two of the members of the Blues band 'Chain'.Billed as the founders of the 'Oz Blues' movement, the pair played solo and as a duo. Matt Taylor has a powerful voice and some good original music but it was Phil Manning who shone with some of the most exciting guitar playing I've ever experienced. Under the tropical stars, eating a wood-fired pizza washed down with a bottle of red - it doesn't get much better than this.

Saturday I ventured to the Roma Bar again for a big breakfast after a visit to the library, an art exhibition and the video store. Then out of town friends popped in for a drink before we headed out to dinner at local seafood smorgasbord place on Cullen Bay. Beloved of tourists and always packed out, there's plenty of variety and plenty of volume -although it's not my favourite seafood smorgasbord in town, the visitors seemed happy and I couldn't believe the amount of food those 4 people can pack away. Guess it becomes very good value at $27 a head if you can eat 5 platefuls of prawns, bugs, oysters, mussels, battered fish, grilled fish, calamari, chips, salads, pork ribs, chicken wings, curried chicken, curried beef, chili crab...each! Oh, I forgot the soup, sweets and coffee.

Today I took it easy and just hung out at home, markets, bit of a walk etc.

Three excellent DVD's watched over the weekend. My favourite was "Finding Forrester" with Sean Connery and a gorgeous young black guy called Rob Brown. If they could only clone Sean Connery at every age and give one to each unattached woman in the world I reckon life would be almost perfect! Great 'feel-good' story and fantastic acting from the whole cast. A must see if you have missed it. I've missed heaps of movies, so I can always find a good oldie. The others I also loved: Jodie Foster as 'Nell' I'd seen before but enjoyed even more the second time around and 'What Women Want'- laugh out loud, comedy with the glorious Mel Gibson. A 'must see' for women and one every man should see (they'd even enjoy it if you can get them past the title)!

My family has all abandoned me as scrabble partners so I play the artificial intelligence on the GameHouse version and have now found a random internet partner from the USA. She's a cool lady called Char - I picked her because her name reminded me of someone else I like a lot. We seem to be pretty evenly matched and it's nice to get something interesting in the inbox each day.

I'm going. Have a great week. Hope life shines for you all week. Think of me sitting in the sun playing games with the wild Aboriginal children of the Kimberley while you're battling sleet and storm, won't you... :)

I've never seen these ducks in a tree before. Perhaps they were afraid of crocodiles!

ok I've been very neglectful of my blog. I've been doing and thinking and playing scrabble on the computer and somehow didn't really feel like writing.

A week ago it was my birthday -too many years to want to share- and I went camping. It was glorious. For a full description you could turn back to July last year when I went to the same place. I love it. Douglas Hot springs and the Douglas Daly Park. It's not on the most favoured tourist map of the Territory but if you ever come here, put it on yours. It's the most beautiful place. Peaceful, lots of wildlife, hot springs, rapids, campfires and this year I enjoyed it all for 4 whole days. I'll post a picture or two after I finish this post.

We've had two long weekends in a row... how lucky are we. This weekend I did all sorts of nice little things like having a big bacon and egg breakfast in a nice, low-key, alternative style cafe with the best coffee, wandering around the shops and buying an outrageously colourful skirt for the ridiculous price of $14, chatted to a beauty therapist about how to spend my birthday voucher before swinging by the markets for a big fresh fruit cocktail and some laksa and green paw-paw salad to take home for dinner. Got 5 good old movies out of the video store and went for a couple of walks across the sand flats while the tide was out. Sunday I gave 'out of town friends' the grand tour of Darwin and had lunch under the palm trees at the Trailer Boat Club and saw Kris Kristoffersen in concert under the stars. Monday was recovery, housework and catching up with the shopping and email day.

Movies watched so far: The Virgin Suicides - I'd seen it before but had another look in view of the fact it's a favourite of one of my sons. I can't say I see it as outstanding but I'm a long way past my school years and maybe I've just forgotten the drama of teenage experience. Monster's Ball- I enjoyed quite a lot but if it's a fair representation, I'm real glad I don't live in a red neck town in USA. Iris - enjoyable, well-acted but sad to the point of depressing.

Books read and phrases that appealed: Finished "Tricks of the Light" by Alison Fell.
"So she could bear to be hated. Hate was a grown-up sort of verb. Active. But there was no verb that conveyed what the abandoned felt towars the abandoner, only a few nouns nudging impotently around in the void. Despair. Panic. Betrayal. Words that were as afraid of finding their object as of losing it."

"Queenmaker" - India Edghill
"All David's women had loved him, and he had tossed their love aside. Just as once, long ago, he had tossed aside mine, as if love were no more than a pretty toy that he might scoop up to play with again whenever he wished. But women's hearts are not trivial playthings, and it is never wise to throw love away- if only because its warmth may be needed in the cold future."

"An Imperfect Marriage" - Tim Waterstone quoted a poem by R.S. Thomas:
"I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you."

...and so goodnight!