The first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox is approaching. Christians call it Easter, probably the most religiously important celebration of their calendar. Parents of school-age kids call it the start of the two-week first term holidays. Other people call it a long weekend. It’s a special time for many different reasons…
This time last year everybody in Australia was in lock down panic mode because of covid-19.
On our last day at Palm Cove we thought we’d head inland along the Savannah Way. We’d been out there a few years before, as part of a tour we did up to Cairns and then over to the Gulf of Carpentaria and we’d passed through some interesting little towns. The first bit of excitement…
This year keeps giving us strange, history-making spectacles. Last month we saw the grand final of the Australian Football League held somewhere OTHER than the Melbourne Cricket Ground in (you guessed it) Melbourne for the first time ever. Covid-19 had sent the city into a second lock down which made holding the footy at the…
Since this is 2020, the year of living very dangerously, this time of transition, marked by Hallowe’en and the night of the full moon, also includes an election.
I’m worried about my country, I really am. Seems to me too many of the State Premiers are setting themselves up as petty dictators, proclaiming that everything they do is for the good of Queenslanders or Tasmanians, or West Australians or Victorians. As it happens, I’ve lived in several states over my lifetime. And first…
A few days ago I read something on Facebook extolling the virtues of how New Zealand had dealt with the covid-19 pandemic – harsh lock downs all over the country, no travel, and strict quarantine, resulting in no new cases in over one hundred days. It all sounded great but it occurred to me as…
As the pandemic surges on in Victoria, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory, we inhabitants in the other states watch and wait. Even up here in Hervey Bay, well away from the corona virus hotspot in Brisbane suburbs, let alone Sydney and Melbourne, there’s a certain tension permeating the atmosphere. Our Premier has…
When I was a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies of the previous century, life was good. But there was an ever-present background noise, like the rattle in an air conditioner on a hot day. I’m talking about the Cold War. We all believed that nuclear war could well be just around the…
I suppose we had to expect a second wave of the corona virus at some stage. And it has arrived in Melbourne. Cases have soared. A person arriving in Darwin from Melbourne has become the first case in the Northern Territory for months. The man in his thirties had spent two weeks in quarantine after…