This will hurt me...

Monster on Bathurst Street. West Hobart, February 2021. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Interesting enough, but I suspect that I am not Harari's core target audience. I was already familiar with a lot of the work referenced here. While he has managed to weave an interesting arc that runs through the interconnected research, there were points in which my confidence with the linkages made was stretched rather taut! For one, I'd treat his certainty in terms of biological determinism with a significant grain of salt. The book - in my opinion - frequently tends to underplay social determinants to the detriment of the overall thesis. That said, it is certainly worth exploring and makes a significant contribution to the mainstream understanding of the emergence of our species. Still, I'd ensure going to the primary source material if you were looking to make a substantial academic case. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

This used to be an orphanage. Poor orphans! St Johns Park, New Town. March 2011. The King's Orphan School , later, the Queen's Orphan School , was built in 1833 to provide for people who weren’t quite orphans; that is, the children of convict women, orphans those whose parent were unable to support them and abandoned children. It seems that the ‘school’ was a bleak and over-crowded establishment, with headmasters who were more interested in their own profits than they were the wellbeing of the children in their care. The minutes of one of the Board of Management meetings makes for grim reading. … Children had never been furnished with Porridge, but merely a very thin Gruel -- that the Oatmeal provided for making a thick porridge could not have been used, & that what had been used was never weighed or measured. -- that the Childrens Tea was made in a Boiler contg about 6 Galls of water, a handful of Tea with some Sugar & Milk being thrown into the Boiler, wit...

Back when Tasmania was still Van Diemen's Land, a lot of babies died. A lot of babies. Earlier this week I spent my lunch break wandering around St David's Park here in Hobart looking at the gravestones they tore up to make a park. I snapped a few photos off, and noticed the preponderance of children's gravestones. The stones alone tell a bit of a story so I'll keep my mouth shut and let you look.

As this blog has demonstrated over the past 1,607 posts, Hobart is home to a lot of boats. What I have not stressed is the propensity for the owners of many – if not a majority – of those boats to pick a terrible pun as a name for their boats. Believe it or not, Concerto in Sea [pictured above] is indeed one of the wittier examples to be found in our many marinas and boatsheds around town. Just as in naming a child, the pressure of picking a moniker that will be able to weather the tests of time, trends and mean-spirited individuals is immense. I would like to think that I’ve performed well thus far with the world-renowned Henry and Ezra [with the added pressure of the pun tastic surname of Mc Crack en], and thus would flourish if faced with the challenge of a virgin ketch trembling in anticipation at the prospect of a lick of paint and a dignified name. That said, today I face a new kind of anxiety, Theme Thursday pressure! The Powers That Be have decided – in their infinite ...

Despite my change of heart , people appear to have given up on 10 Murray. Similarly, even though there has been some belated effort to save her , she's going to be blown up and knocked down . Thus, it is with a heavy heart that I concede that this week, Theme Thursday has hit the nail on the head. The consensus of the Tasmanian public is that the imposing princess of late-1960s functionalist architecture, 10 Murray Street, is well an truly OVER THE HILL . They're knocking her down. Judged as an ugly testament to a period people would like to forget, the elite have conspired to concoct a death warrant for this misunderstood beauty and replace her with [and I am not making this up] a giant television screen . No doubt this television screen will continually remind us that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Tasmanians are addicted to sandstone it seems. For Hobartions, the entire functionalist movement in architecture should be erased from history! The world over; work...

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 hairy Henry showcasing his version of a chonmage ( 丁髷, ちょんまげ ), a form of Japanese traditional haircut. It is most commonly associated with the Edo Period and samurai, but more recently, you might recognise it from those really fat blokes in nappies. Originally, it was a method of using hair to hold a samurai helmet steady atop the head in battle. When I (politely) informed Henry that he was neither Japanese, a Samurai, or indeed a fat bloke in nappies (he's a lean bloke in underpants who poos on the toilet now), he promptly had a haircut!

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

When I first moved to Hobart in the heady days of the mid-1990s, I used to have to walk up this lane carrying all of my groceries for the week. The lack of shorter alternative routes should explain the voice. Somewhat unwisely though, I also chose to jog up it every second day for "relaxation". It was an odd kind of folly, and demonstrates the extremes that vanity will drive us! Go on, here's another one minute poem , this time penned at the bus stop. indignation get it? got it. et cetera cornered into thinking specified instructions yeah... and she can tell you every detail every fucking detail.

If you stroll around Battery Point for even just a short while, you will find no shortage of evidence that we are indeed another colonial outpost of Mother Britain. I do wonder what these names mean to most Tasmanians though... Here's a poem that took me forty five seconds to write on the bus yesterday morning. I'm not sure as to the wisdom of posting it sans reflection, but sometimes I just can't be bothered. untitled i loved that time way back when way way way back when when you weren't talking to me. me. back then you knew everything and I knew nothing. but the nothing I knew knew your everything meant nothing.

So here we have yet another mercilessly bleak wartime recruitment poster from that war that we had because that war that we had that was supposed to end all wars really didn’t and what it actually did was set up the preconditions for another, bigger war. Yeah, that war. Now, when it comes to war, I can see the attraction of a) going off to defend your country, c) being embarrassed by girls , c) impressing the ladies , d) being nagged by greedy women, e) plain old fashioned ignorance , f) getting fired up because the other guys are a bunch of rotters and scoundrels , or even g) have a bit of adventure, see the world, meeting interesting people and killing them in all sorts of interesting ways. However, when push comes to shove, it’s best not to let me know what I’m really getting myself into before you have my name on the dotted line. Seriously, I’d see this poster and feel sorry for the poor bloke, but c’mon, the dude doesn’t have any hands ! As the kids at the bus stop say, that sh...

Is there anything that says AUSTRALIA more than a little bloke chomping down on broccoli and potato? I doubt it! For the title of the previous post, I decided to run with the very famous observation of Samuel Johnson, but in reality, I am inclined to to agree with Ambrose Bierce's observation some century or so later: In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first. The idea of being intensely proud of one's country is always one that has interested me. Now, I like Australia, a lot. I think that it is the best place to live in the world. I think that we have the best food, (plenty of) the best looking sheilas, the best beaches, the best sharks, crocs and easily the best poisonous biting and stinging things. So, you know, we've a lot of things to be proud of. But what we've seen appear is a sort of oddly quixotic yobbis...

Australia is a bloody big country. We've got bloody great big bits of water, bloody great big deserts, bloody great big trees, bloody great big sharks, crocs, snakes, spiders, wombats and bloody great big snags. When I took this photo of Henry the other day, he turned to me and said "look at that bloody great big mountain, are there any bloody great big yowies up there?" I didn't know. I've not seen any. So another Australia Day has come around again. It's a funny kind of day, Australia Day. It used to pass by pretty much unnoticed, and then the bloody Bicentenary came along is a haze of canary yellow and lime green and Australia day all of a sudden was bigger than Ben Hur in a pair of budgie smugglers and thongs! Then, along comes John Howard (with a bit of help from his mate Pauline Hanson ), and we've got these bloody great big flags everywhere. You can't turn without spotting a beach towel, singlet, bikini thong or set of BBQ tongs emblazoned wi...

I have gone down the gritty Soviet realism path here with Henry today. I think that he evokes an image of a rough hewn, long-haired Czech beat poet railing against Brezhnev’s tanks rolling into Prague (minus the flowers in the one hand, and the Molotov cocktail in the other). Change that shirt to a Dukla Prague away strip and we’re talking turkey. You might have some trouble with the title today; it is an old Soviet proverb that I think captures the spirit of the time well: There was a time they loved an accordionist, and now the time has come where they love a tractor driver. I’d like to think that the ladies – and the people more broadly – will love Henry regardless of whether he is driving a tractor or driving a piano accordion (or at least that they will tolerate his piano accordion-ship and not accost him with rocks and burning stakes).

So this title is a cutting little remark made by Percy Deane, the Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department, in 1928. To continue the tale, after an extensive search, the present site was chosen! Although people claim that it was chosen halfway between Melbourne and Sydney, the dodgy pastoralists of corrupt and amoral New South Wales managed to wrangle and extra 230 kilometres closer than their more cultured and classy southern rival. Thus, utisiling nefarious means to marginalise the exceptionally superior states, the NSW government ceded the new Australian Capital Territory to the Commonwealth Government in 1910. In that same year, setting the scene for the kind of funsville that Canberra would go on to be, the ACT became an alcohol-free area ! A soulless patchwork of streets sprawled out over a flat and barren landscape, Canberra is truly the Michael Buble of Australian cities: clean, neat, polite, inoffensive and completely and utterly lacking in any character, charm or sw...

If you've noticed the header on the blog here, you'll no doubt be shocked to hear that I'm a big time Peanuts fan. Actually, you won't as I've blogged on it before and I know everyone takes a lot of notice of , and puts a lot of stock in , what I have to say. I’m like Moses in that regard. So yesterday evening I discovered that the entire catalogue of Charles M. Schulz's incomparable Peanuts is now available online through Comics.com . How very apt, thought I, as I am currently knee deep in David Michaelis' meticulous (not to mention awfully weighty tome, Schulz and Peanuts: a biography . Delving into every aspect of Sparky Schulz's life – and I do mean every aspect, wink wink , nudge nudge – Michaelis has delivered a must read for any Peanut nut (see what I did there? I don’t even try, it just happens. Genius!) Needless to say, do yourself a favour and get your grubby little hands on this book and set aside some time, at 650+ pages, you'll n...

The always excellent The History Blog this morning alerted me to a really interest project that sets about memorialising the Holocaust through the use of collected mail that offers an incredible, if disturbingly banal hint into the everyday workings of the events in Central and Eastern Europe during World War Two. As I’m always keen to encourage online efforts to present history in new and engaging ways, I’m more than happy to endorse this one. For mine, there is often no better way to emphasise the magnitude of an event than through personal, sometimes mundane, sometimes heart-wrenching, correspondence. The Spungen Family Foundation, through the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, have put a collection of such documents in viewable pdf form online . Again, it’s well worth a click and browse.

A week ago know I wrote of wartime propaganda and its role in recruitment drives. Now, I was bold enough then to suggest that the old “ irate guy with a bullet in his head ” approach may not be the wisest or most successful tactic. Here we can see a far more effective approach: question their manhood . The logic here is clear: if they could, girls (dirty, stinkin’ broads!) would get out there and slaughter krauts and japs all day long. Unfortunately, steadfast patriarchal structures limit the opportunities for our feminine friends to get blood on their hands. That leaves it to men . Big, tough, hairy-chested MEN to do the job. What’s that? You don’t wanna kill japs and krauts? What are ya? Some kinda fairy...?

A child of my time, throughout my life I have on occasion taken to imagining my daily humdrum existence in cinematic terms. I’d think about lighting, angles, character arcs and plot development. This was no more prevalent than in those blissful days of University. Not very healthy, perhps, but it managed to pass the time when all one had to do was drift into university, crap on a bit, and then back home for an extended session of Syphon Filter 2 on the Playstation with a glass of cider set to one side and a jazz cigarette at the ready. In those heady days of youth (well, early-twenties), life was terribly easy : lots of reading; writing the odd poem or bit of prose; waxing lyrical on the subject of political theory and historical understanding a few hours a day; exceptional [if I do say so myself] marks and – most importantly – scholarship money . Of course, this lifestyle afforded moments of deeply serious reflection amongst a select group of esteemed colleagues , very few of them a...

You may well be familiar with the maxim “sex sells”. It is a feature of advertising as old as the craft itself, I would suspect. Indeed, I have featured a number of vintage advertisements on this here very blog over the past six months. You might remember Lolita on the comfy bed ; or, Girl next door likes to suck on the most disguising things (and enjoys it!). Who could forget Hot babe in bikini lounges on the beach slowly cooking, but becoming ever more beautiful ; a clean home = frisky husband ; or (a favourite of my Church of Latter Day Saints-splinter group friends) he has a nice tie and a couple of girls on the go . Of course, there is the good old “ treat her mean and keep her keen ” approach; the brusqueness of a beautiful, proud Soviet cock standing to attention ; and the sexy through the ages “ hot babes with even hotter lawnmowers ”. So, despite this technique being as common as the little minx that can be found in the first link, it still jars me ever so slightly to see i...