This will hurt me...

Full steam ahead means trouble for Papa . Starboard tack Henry! STARBOARD TACK!!!

Well well well, it's the Aurora Australis! As seen from the Derwent, Hobart, May 2011. After last week's free-for-all, this week has seen the ratio drop considerably; with a combination of no bus trips, no lunch breaks and both children and PSP close to hand has seen me finish just one (and slowly make my way through another). The Beacon is an odd little novel that explores concepts like family, ambition, truth (all that jazz). Riffing off the question of what happens to those implicated by the rise of 'misery memoirs' ('grief porn'?). At the centre of the book is the strangely stilted May Prime, sister of Frank, who has written a bestseller called about his cruel childhood at a remote North Country farm through the 1950s. In it he accuses his late father of terrible cruelty and his family of collusion. Although Frank's memoir portrays himself as a victim, the actual novel [ The Beacon ] revolves around his siblings, who must live with what he has written. ...

Waiting for something to happen. Geilston Bay, November 2010. I took this photo just over the road from our place. It's a mite depressing that you can see - on the extreme upper left - the Carruthers Building. I suspect that with the right equipment, you'd even be able to zoom and and see my desk! Today's Sunday Top Five? Five Games In Which Henry Has Bested Me! SNAP! Connect Four Guess Who? Hide and Seek Memory If you've ever played games with Henry, you'll understand that sometimes taking one for the team is the better result for everybody...

Tall ship is Sullivan's Cove as viewed through the window of a water taxi, March 2010. I've just finished reading the blackly comic (and unremittingly bleak) The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills on the bus in this morning. By golly if there was ever a book to explore the notion of work as a domineering force in the lives of workers, this is it! Check it out, even if your headspace is akin to mine at the moment.

She's back! In what must be the world's fastest trip to Antarctica and back, the Aurora Australis is back in town. I suspect that they never made it all the way down, and headed back to get some extra loaves of bread. Penguins, you see, can never get enough Vegemite sangers .

Sometimes, truth can be found in the margins . Here is a little seen angle on the Aurora Australis , which has now left port for the heady journey through the Southern Ocean . Good luck people. God Speed!

I won't give away the answer, but my clue is that today's photo is of a ship berthed down here in Hobart ALL winter. It doesn't have the nerve to tackle a REAL Antarctic experience and sail about with right and proper icebergs. Word on the street is that they are set to leave on a vital and top secret mission designed tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif end the scourge of global warming ! Yes, they'll be measuring penguin farts. Time for the Sunday Top Five! Today I am tackling my Top Five Australian Birds ! 5: Galah ; 4: Emu ; 3: Kookaburra ; 2: Fairy Little Penguin ; 1: The Splendid Wren !

He is our old mate L'Astrolabe basking in the sun again down in Sullivan's Cove. They'll be off molesting penguins again soon. It’s a very serious business. A very serious business indeed .

Here is an Australian Navy warship that was parked just outside of the office a few weeks back. They must have done twenty fire drills the way their sirens were blaring all day! Here is another one minute poem . things things (i say most things) most things are right not quite right to the point the point, she said, is that now is more than how . it was unbearable she was confident but unruly thoughts are always going nowhere fast Man give me one good man - she said - just one i say she said.

It's our old friend the Oceanic Viking again. You might remember her from this post in June (with a sufficiently obscure Norweigan proverb for a title). In a bit of a rush as usual, and have got another conference presentation tomorrow that I have yet again left far too late! Looks like I'll be winging it yet again. By golly it's a good thing that I'm not afraid of crowds and can crap on (and on, and on, and on).

Yes, it is another ship! Drawn to the water yet again, I got a new one for my collection. This one is the MV Oceanic Viking , an armed patrol vessel of the Australian Customs Service. However, it is owned by a Norwegian shipping company and contracted to the Australian Customs Service through P & O Marine Services. A convoluted arrangement, to be sure. It was originally built as an offshore supply vessel, then converted into a vessel used for laying optic fiber cables between Europe and North America, then in 2004 it was converted to an armed patrol vessel and chartered to the Australian Customs Service. With two deck-mounted machine guns, it became the first civilian ship in Australia to carry mounted weapons in peacetime. It is Australian flagged and operated by a civilian crew, carrying armed Customs officers. It seems to get about, chasing illegal Indonesian fishing vessels off the Northern Territory and responding to distress signals as far away as the Kerguelen Islands (as cl...