Imaginary Landscape

22 December 2005—This is the time of year when advertisers, store managers, neighbours, strangers, and any number of organisations and people start sending cards, communicating messages, and passing wishes that involve snow and snowmen, holly, mistletoe, Christmas trees, singing White Christmas and Let It Snow, visiting department stores to chat with overweight men dressed in wool and fur…but wait a minute! As I write, it is nearly 102 degrees outside. If I were in the city, rather than the country, I’d be at one of Perth’s beaches , slathered in sunscreen (because I’ve been burned in less than 30 minutes), and splashing in the Indian Ocean. It’s summer, snows only in the Stirling Ranges south of here on occasion, and any obese man in a big red suit would drop from heat stroke in no time. The Northern Hemisphere traditions of the Silly Season were carried here to Australia, along with meagre possessions, household goods, leg irons, or whatever transported prisoners and immigrants wer...

Whilst I was trying to force an alert state this morning over my second cup of tea, I abandoned playing Zuma Deluxe (reflexes just not fast enough yet), and resorted to something a bit less stressful, my newest obsession, Firefox Stumbling , whereupon I came to the web page with lists for the top science fiction stories, books, movies and television shows, according to the website’s visitors’ votes. Perusing these lists reminded me of pleasures long past that stay with me even now, some of them so obscure as to be relatively unknown. Granted, some of these books / movies / TV shows / stories are obscure because they are bad; I will admit that. But some are obscure because they are too serious, too upsetting, or somehow outside that Hollywood ‘blockbuster’ mould of happily-ever-after, moralising, all-American wholesomeness that seems to do so well with the movie-viewing public. I began a list of books and movies that did not appear on these lists or that appeared so far down as to hav...

What can one say about Woolly Mammoth? The Ratbag christened him thus because of his great amount of body hair. His real name is Jon, the son of a Greek father and a “Skip” (Australian) mother, as he used to explain. He looks Greek; in fact, he looks great. Jon is a very handsome man, tall, soft-spoken, if a bit obsessed about shiny boots. I often wondered how he managed his police duties, since he was so unassuming and mild-mannered. It wasn’t just Eucla folk (when he lived there) who taunted Woolly. Friends from Perth also rang up, often just to torment him. No one did it with such glee and dedication as Woolly’s friend, who would ring up and announce himself as a representative of Industrial Body Wax, or ask for Woolly as “the bloke with a koala nailed to his chest”. During a radio interview after a horrendous truck accident on the Eyre Highway near Madura when the weather had been rainy and bitterly cold, Woolly told the interviewer that he reckoned the temperature had been “minus ...

First, let me caution you: this is not a treatise on computer or software problems. This is my whinge about insects, critters, creepy-crawlies. It’s such a stereotype—a female who hates bugs. And I don’t know where it came from. But I can’t recall ever liking anything with more than four legs. As a child, I used to systematically engineer ways to stuff up anthills; I ran from bees and wasps; my mother cautioned me how filthy flies were. Finally, as an adult I declared that nothing with more than four legs could live under the same roof. A former husband cautioned me that crickets were good luck (but they kept me awake at night and eat clothes) or that spiders should be left alone because they eat other bugs (not fast enough). I’ll admit that I am biased against the critters, mostly because they’re ugly. I don’t feel quite the same revulsion for butterflies, dragonflies and bugs that have some attractiveness about them. But I still don’t want them crawling around my house. Case in poin...

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, [Abraham Lincoln’s] Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the [US] Declaration of Independence, but [US] government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words. – from the October 24, 1994 National Review The Ratbag came home from work last night and revealed that he and his fellow Western Australian police officers had been notified of a change in procedure regarding throwing someone in jail. Oh, they are still going to put people in jail, but they will no longer call it ‘arrest’. It is now an ‘episode’. And if after the episode, the ‘person of interest’ (not ‘suspect’) tries to escape, or tries to harm himself or herself, or another officer, well, that is an ‘event’ that may result in another ‘charge’ or an investigation. All police must complete a self-paced skills upscaling on this new system. Then they must sit an assessment that will measure their understanding of the new system. They may not undertake the assessme...

On the Road Again Since this was written, we have moved from Eucla (four years ago) to Kalgoorlie and, sadly, Mr P has passed away. But I return to Eucla often for visits and have recently had a book published on the history of Eucla (since 1940). Mr P’s daughter, Rasa, now runs the roadhouse…and the West Coast Eagles had a wonderful season this year. We were driving on the Eyre Highway, somewhere on the Straight (90 miles of it, says the sign, even though they measure distance in kilometres now), and I had all sorts of mixed feelings. I wasn’t past the amazement of having just sold, given away, thrown out or abandoned most of my worldly goods and moved to the other side of the planet. I was thrilled, but I couldn’t grasp that it had actually happened. I find myself walking down the Southern Ocean’s shore or slogging up a sand dune, watching whales basking in the Bight, or a mob of kangaroos hopping across the scrub, or a flock of emus curiously eyeing my camera in the relentless wind ...

There was a time when I had trouble with the gender of my pets. People often wondered why we had chosen the particular names my pets had. Every instance has a perfectly logical explanation. It was the quantity of the misnomers, I think, rather than just one little misnaming. Let me explain. First, I worked with a friend of the family, named Tom, oddly enough, who had a farm cat that, as farm cats often do, had produced a litter of kittens. The hobby farm now had more felines than mice, so he was giving the litter away. He offered me one, and after consultation with my other half, and in spite of the fact that we had a slightly deranged golden retriever, we decided to adopt one of the kittens. We told Tom that we wanted a tom cat, however, as getting a tom fixed—or broken, as the case may be—was generally less expensive than breaking a female cat. Tom brought this little ginger cat to work one day. I don’t think he was old enough to leave his mother, or if he was the constant attention ...