Category: Columns

Designated drivers should film their mates

admin /21 September, 2008

I was a slender youth. At 26 I still weighed 63 kilograms and shoveled and barrowed a tonne of sand, cement and bricks a day. Then my wife got pregnant. Somehow I never recovered my figure.

It was partly a desk job and fancy lunches that did it but mostly it was the rivers of beer.

I’d always enjoyed a drink. Okay, I’d always been a grog head, but landscape gardening and an active night life kept the waistline down. At forty, I gave myself surfing lessons and realised that I was out of shape. A dozen twenty somethings and one fat old bastard lined up on Belongil Beach to learn the moves. By lunchtime, the youngsters complained about sore calf muscles from balancing on the board. I could hardly move my arms from struggling to lift my fat carcass off the horizontal. I started running three times a week but, more pertinently, I gave up the grog.

Pioneer rednecks vote Green too

admin /17 September, 2008

The clean green sweep of Ballina, Byron and Tweed on Saturday involves a certain degree of polarisation. Some conservative voters see the Greens as a new fangled bunch of feel good softies. They contrast these Johnny-come-lately’s with the hardened pioneers who battled the wilderness to provide the creature comforts that we enjoy today. These ancestral heroes, they fear, spin in their graves as bush regenerators plant trees on paddocks hewn from the bastard scrub, vegetarians criticise hard hoofed grazing animals and animal rights activists oppose poison baits and mulesing.

In short, they view the Greens as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the world.

Passionate as they are, they are wrong. They are few and their number is shrinking.

Crowd loves colour by number politics

admin /12 September, 2008

Whereas politics is the art of compromise, campaigning is done in black and white. Voters on election day simply want to know where to put the number one.

We are herd animals and herds need simple commands. Fight. Flight. Left. Right.

The left, right scale of politics is a recent rendering of good and evil. It mimics the star rating on energy efficiency, the chart ranking of pop music or rating cars by their top speed, or fuel efficiency.

We want to be told where to stand.

High-octane festival buries bananas

admin /25 August, 2008

Amid the hooplah of crowning a Banana King and many Queens, the medieval pageantry and power-boat races on the river, the humble banana was pushed somewhat into the background.

First presented to the Western palette in 1876, the banana is now grown in 119 countries. So popular is this nutritious and energy loaded fruit, that around 100 million tonnes of bananas are grown worldwide, 20 million tonnes of them for export. Ecuador is the world’s banana basket, exporting 8 million tonnes of the yellow energy snack every year.

Koalas not behind war at Yelgun

admin /25 August, 2008

The Yelgun residents who declared war on festivals last weekend have struggled to build a united front for their cause. Landcare workers have been cautiously appreciative of, but publicly silent about, the efforts by Splendour organisers to protect the wildlife corridor. Those efforts include swapping land with the National Parks to complete a well forested section of the corridor and planting thousands of trees.

Oil price changes politics forever

admin /14 August, 2008

War in Georgia, Afghanistan, Iraq and probably Iran: Rising prices for petrol, food, steel fencing and fertiliser: If you doubt that the oil crisis is changing the world, you have not read past the headlines.

Some people call it peak oil, others, oil depletion. No major oil discoveries have been made in two decades. The 90 billion barrels of oil under the Arctic ocean that can be retrieved thanks to global warming are equivalent to only three year’s world consumption. We are using oil as fast as we can pump it out of the ground. Oil will continue to get more expensive and there will be less of it to go around. It will be the preserve of the military and the very rich.

The Federal opposition, motoring magazines, truckies, farmers and most consumers have focused on petrol prices. The truth, though, is that higher oil prices will cause a fundamental reorganisation of society.