This will hurt me...

  Breaking the waves. Bellerive Beach, Hobart. March 2021. The Plotters by Un-su Kim (translated by Sora Kim-Russell) This is the silliest book that I have read in a long while. I did enjoy it as the pacing was fine and plenty was happening. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that it read like a far better version of that dreadful creative writing exercise by the Virginia Tech shooter that found itself on the Internet back in the day. The biggest flaw is a common one found in the genre. It is like the author has not really met or spoken with any women, so he's not quite sure how they work. However, he obviously means well and sees women as more pure and worthy in a debased world, which I guess is better than the way that it usually goes in these things. It's an action movie in book-form. I found the pretensions to something more meaningful hamfisted and a bit childish, but nothing worse than anything you'll find in the Matrix or John Wick. I can't quite figure wha...

Mindless violence. King Street, Sandy Bay. November 2011. Just the two books this week, but what books they were! The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark ventures into a genre that I am more familiar with in film than print: the Western. A brief plot synopsis might lead you to think that this novel is little more than a cliché: two drifters are drawn into a lynch mob to find and the rustlers presumed to be the killers of a local man. It is in fact much more than that. Written in 1940, the novel is a somber, unsympathetic examination of the ease with which men slip into violence and resist the urge to ‘justice’. It explores starkly ‘masculinity’ and the tendency of the fear of exposure in terms of physical cowardice to trump moral courage when it comes to groups of men. It is a fantastic collection of set pieces that affords Van Tilburg Clark the opportunity to explore these themes and remain able to keep the pace cracking along and tense narrative to the (inevitable) ugly conc...

A crime has been committed. De Bomford Lane turn off, East Derwent Highway, Geilston Bay. April 2011. If you think that Hobart is some serene and peaceful idyll filled with blissful and benign sprits floating around gently hugging each other, THINK AGAIN ! I couldn’t possibly comment on the perpetrators of the heinous act I’ve photographed above, but I suspect that it might have something to do with the kind of internecine war commonly found in groups like the Cripps , the Bloods , Mara Savatrucha , Sureños , the Hells Angels , the Babysittters Club and the Muppets . The local hardcore exxxtreme posse is the notorious Risdon Vale Boyz . Note the nerve-jangling utilisation of a ‘ z ’, as this flagrant disregard of the correct plural suffix indicates an exxxtreme challenge to established authority. You see, the breakdown of society begins with importer syntax and sentence construction, it continues through car theft and wilful destruction of authority, and into the kind of anarchy that ...

Is it just me that feels a little uneasy when you see a door especially set aside for a dubious role (and labelled as such) in the holding cells that are found underneath Tasmania’s Supreme Court. Look closely. No, it’s not a BELL. “Escape door”!?! In a cell? It’s political correctness gone mad.

Wall in Battery Point, September 2009 . Look at that wall will you? Just look at that shoddy workmanship. Bloody convicts. No wonder they got sent off to the other end of the world... Tasmanians are a funny mob when it comes to convicts. You are probably aware that one of the primary reasons for the British settlement of Australia was the establishment of a penal colony far, far away to send their overabundance of criminals. Over the whole period of transportation of convicts, over 165,000 rapists, murderers, handkerchief thieves were dispatched to Australia. For us Tasmanians, we have an extra-special relationship with these vile scum pesky miscreants. You see, the soft, feeble and indolent New South Welch-people decided that the vilest, smelliest and foulest criminals would be better suited to somewhere else, away from them. Thus, a new penal colony was established in Van Diemen's Land! All those buggerers perverts cannibals kiddie fiddlers Irish prisoners who were unable to...

Here is Henry checking out a ye olde shoppe in the ye olde towne of Richmond. It was kind of embarrassing, actually. He went in there and said something, and from what I could tell, there seemed to be a heated discussion of some sort. I went in to check it out and Henry was telling the old woman behind the counter what a nice shoppe it was, how it would be "a real shame" if there was "an accident" or something. Then he knocked some fine china off the shelf, and she started crying and I hustled him out of the joint. We're going to steer clear of Richmond for a little while. At least until the heat cools down a bit...

Henry has graciously agreed to offer up one of his photographs as fodder for an experiment in digital manipulation. This one has all of the hallmarks of great photojournalism. A body has been found, foul play suspected, yet no motive nor suspect to speak of. The police are at wits' end, and a keen amateur sleuth is called up to investigate, with little more than a magnifying glass, a stick and a keen sense of justice.

The big boys court is just up the road from my work, which means that if you walk down that street of a morning, you often see the real nasty characters innocent until proven guilty being loaded from a cage on wheels into a cage around a door (leading to another cage just inside the door, one suspects). I usually have the camera safely tucked away, lest we have some kind of misunderstanding . justice a full Phil meant nothing of it. "a joke, a stupid joke gone wrong" (fuck forgive me look at me don't judge me) to the charge in court (a full six months later) phil could only say "sorry" nothing (quite so dramatic) was intended.