Marjorie Woodrow was removed from her family when she was just a child of two years. She would not see her mother again for over 68 years. Marjorie was one of 11,500 Indegenous people stretching from Perth to the Torres Straits Islands, many of them part of the stolen generations, forcibly removed from their parents 'for their own good'. On leaving school, people like Marjorie were often given into domestic service. &nbs...
Tales from Coober Pedy. Coober Pedy is the nearest to a gold rush frontier town that I have ever encountered. Scowling, swarthy, leather faced men eye the stranger with suspicion, the last thing they want is another potential prospector staking a claim. They mutter and glare darkly at attempts at conversation, and the fly strewn air means anything than a dash from shop to pub is as uncomfortable as trying to talk to one of the local prospec...
Seen at the entrance to the train station at Auckland, New Zealand. 'The entrance to this magnificently tiled hallway leading to the station is unfortunately closed for maintenance work. We regret that the visitor is unable to view the majestic spleandour of this world famous and unique feature. Well thanks a bunch. yechydda,
The Welsh Taxi Driver. In Coober Pedy I met a Welsman who told me a little story. Many years ago he had been prospecting in Northwest Canada in a one horse town called Broken Stick for anything the earth would yield; ore, gold, oil anything that could be sold further south. There was one road in town a kilometer in length and dotted with higgledy-piggledy hotels, busy bars and bordellos. Men slept ten to a room where it was dangerous to light a cigarette because of the fartin...
Dear all, In the outback, other than keeping whip snakes out of your swag bag, there is little to do other than gather around the camp fire with scrubby old diggers and swap tales of BLOOD CHILLING TERROR! On one particularly chill night, with a host of stars crowding the sky, an old aboriginal opal miner from Coober Pedy bade us gather around the flickering flames and crackling gum-bark to hear tell of the min-min lights. The min-min lights were named by the abor...
A small Chinese man pushes porter from the vast red-bricked megalith of Market City towards the rat infested destinations of of Chinatowns restaurants. His cargo is wide punnets of purple broccoli, and he sings to himself in a strange, alien sort of nasaly wail as he coughs and spits his way eyes shut throught the familiar songlines between gawping tourists and touting waiters. A beautiful young woman in impossibly tight white jeans that draw the male eye to consider, is she or isn...
From the Australian Newspaper: 'There was another story doing the rounds in Sydney some years ago which, one could only assume, was a furphy but which, delightfully for those who live off the grist in the gossip mill, turned out to be true. It was divorce time for a well-heeled couple and things were unusually acrimonious. He was in London on business, she here in the family mansion from which he had not moved. The telephone ran hot with screaming, tantrums, threats and accusations. Sh...
This week the Libyan Prime Minister said that his country was not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. He said that his country only argreed to take responsibility so that sanctions and travel restrictions would be lifted and ordinary Libyans could then 'get at the white women who were easy' Following outrage in the US, the Prime MInister later withdrew his remark, saying 'Okay then we did do it'. The US has accepted the retraction saying 'They have done what they needed...
Israeli troops this week have seized over $8 million US dollars in raids on Palstinian banks, claiming the money was ear-marked for terrorism. An Israeli bank robber, sorry, spokesperson, said from his new Penthouse flat that the money seized would be used to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian people. This would include paying for an extension to the wall being built to protect the Palestinians from themselves, along with a new swimming pool for his wifes servants tennis partner...
from the Australian Newspaper: ' My hairdresser sucked me in; she told me it had happened only last weekend. Her best friend in the whole world, a legend in the iconoclastic world of straight blow-dries, had been clearing up the salon on her late-night shift. Caught up in the intricacies of separating hundreds of small pieces of foil in readiness for the next day's bleachings, at first she didn't hear the rapping on the glass door. When she did, the hapless young man standin...
I recall reading this in a paper several years back. It's probably not true, hence the title, but what the hell, I'm in a storytelling mood. I proably made it up, who knows? Some years back, a Welsh couple were travelling through a remote part of the outback when a kangaroo leaps in front of their hired car. The driver desperately wrenches the wheel to try and avoid hitting the roo which simply stops in the road and observes its impending destruction by the four wheel ...
Dear all, I was shocked last night to see a debate on the Larry King show, carried by the moronic CNN news channel. I was shocked in many ways. Firstly the level of the arguments on both sides was so childish that it was almost unwatchable. I have never seen people present arguments that you could literally drive a truck through. The background is that in California, the mayor? has given approval for some 300 same sex couples to be married. This is important, because this all...
About one hundred years ago, a speaker at the Royal Academy of Science stood up and proudly announced that the time was fast approaching where mankinf\d would fundamentally understand all that there was to know about the entire universe. All that really remained was a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. He recieved a standing ovation. A century and a bit later, that statement has never seemed so foolish. It's an old truism, but we've learned one sure thing, that the mor...
The reason that people cling to religeon is because it is the one constancy in their lives. Secularity cannot provide this, because secularity begets human institutions and is therefore corrupt. Everything human is corrupt, no matter its noble aim. No human institutions can be pure. We can concieve of purity, we can imagine Utopia, but we cannot bring it about, deem it to be so. We are imperfect and so each and every action, invention or institution that we concieve of is doom...
It is rare that one reads something that makes one stop and think. It is rarer when that wisdom comes from the mouth of a child. The following is a transcript given by Severn Suzuki at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil: "Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's organisation. We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference: Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the ...