Goodbye to all that
This had never happened until a recent trip to Phuket, but then it happened twice more on one night, and that was being swabbed in search of explosives. Bags, body, frisked all over with a wand attached at the one end to a square of material which in turn is run through a detector looking for things with the potential to light up the night, or at least an aeroplane. This was the farewell from Perth, the last hurrah, and the same happened again at Melbourne the next morning. This type of check may be a new phenomenon but three times in four flights could give rise to speculation of hyper-sensitivity or that an innocent grandfather from New Zealand could vaguely give the look of terror. I didn’t ask which, those that operate these sorts of security apparatus aren’t given lightly to such speculation.
If the security is sensitive, the airline is good and a second trip on Virgin Blue from the west of Australia to New Zealand was every bit as good as the first. Virgin’s plane have legroom, they provide a reasonable service and they run to schedule; everything a discerning passenger could want. In fact not only did the flight from Perth get away on time, it landed a half hour ahead of schedule, a tail wind pushing the Boeing 737 along at over 1,000kph. This has been said before but it is worth repeating, and it may be a free ad, but Virgin Blue leaves its Qantas-owned rival Jetstar in its trail of vapour and it beats other low-cost carriers such as Tiger, Air Asia, Ryan Air and EasyJet hands down. Although again, just to repeat the point, those other airlines are all OK with the exception of Jetstar which is in a class of its own, and that’s not a recommendation.
If there is a negative about a four and a half hour stopover at Melbourne Airport it is the absence of free wireless internet. In Singapore, free wireless internet access was a godsend during a five hour wait in the budget-carrier terminal, but at Tullamarine there’s nothing unless you pay. To add insult to injury, the Vodaphone mobile broadband service appeared blocked, and at 6.00am little is open to occupy transit passengers.
There are things to be missed about Perth and Western Australia, not least of which are the Monday night television interviews with John “Woosha” Worsfeld, the coach of the Western Sea Eagles, one of two local AFL clubs. The Eagles have an unassailable spot as wooden spooners of the AFL League and it is sheer theatre each week to watch a beaming Woosha confidently tell Channel Seven’s Basil Zemplas that the team is on track and that his job as coach is rock solid safe. Last Saturday, the assistant coach told The West Australian that Woosha was at the very peak of his coaching career, and that is the very thing to love about Australians. They are optimists; when the chips are down, lower than ever imaginable, they can always see the positives.
To put other things in perspective, a scheduled television debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, the leaders of the two main Australian political parties, has been moved; the timing clashed with the final of Australian MasterChef and it was feared, rightly so, that this would distract viewers away from the lesser stuff of who is going to lead Australia over the next three years. Gillard and Abbott are neck and neck in the polls which is a surprise given Abbott’s loathsome persona.
During out time in Australia we have scoffed, loudly so, at the prospect that Kangaroos run free in the wild. We had heard stories about their antics and were told on countless occasions we would see them, or at least Kangaroo road kill, in any number of places we travelled; on the Nullabor, in the south-west, while out camping and on our travels north. But not a one other than those tamed or in wildlife parks and so it was fitting that on the last day, between Perth and Ellenbrook where Seath and Nicole are building their house, there was an unexpected presence. In a paddock about a dozen, standing around grazing, the occasional one hopping at speed along a fence line looking for all the world like the tail on a Qantas aircraft. After seven months in Australia, it was like we had finally arrived.

Of Barrys and Shaggas
The summer may have been hot, but it gets cold too in Western Australia, and the news has been preoccupied in the last weeks with reports of the coldest winter on record and leading items on television bulletins showing frost being scraped from the windows of cars. The overnight temperatures have plunged below zero, and it may be too cold to stay much longer.
It may also be the cold which has caused a blockage to the brain at the Karratha Natural gas plant; the West Australian reports that the plant’s nine page Bicycle Procedures make riveting reading. Among the examples of the carefully crafted procedures are that staff are not permitted to ride their own bicycles on site but must submit a “Request for Bicycle” form including a 26-point bicycle maintenance checklist each month. All bikes must have a kick stand and carry basket sufficient to hold 5kg of cargo on the front and 15 on the back. It would be good to see these big, burly plant worker getting about in these bikes.
If there was any doubt that Australia is an uncultured, bogan nation there can be none now after, Rivers, one of the local discount retail stores started advertising “metallic shagga” boots. There are two things to consider here; if metallic footwear is not bad enough, calling them shagga boots is really quite beyond the pale. Apparently a derivative of Ug, Ugh or Ugg boots, the ad describes them as having a unique Australian history, created by surfers who, after a day paddling the cold water, wanted these sheepskin boots to keep themselves warm in the evenings. “As Australian, we consider them a cultural icon”, the ad concludes, and as a New Zealander this may be the last time a sheep joke will be enjoyed at our expense.
An AFL bad boy was in hospital last week, Richmond Tiger Ben Cousins having suffered a reaction to a combination of caffeine tablets and prescription sleeping pills. What has been revealed is that players get stuck into caffeine tablets before and during games to give them that added boost and then take sleeping pills after match to slow them down again. But what is intriguing about this report is that, while Cousins was relatively abstemious following one of his sides rare wins, one newspaper report described the official after-match function as having been attended by a number of “over-refreshed” club legends. Over refreshed, how is that for a euphemism for paralytic?
The final and favourite report for the week is that of a new website dedicated to saving the name Barry from extinction. Barrys built Australia, the site says, and the great name, once popular with parents, is being overlooked in a world of Zacharys, Oscars and Julians. Barrys need all the help they can get and on the endangered list a number of great Australian Barrys; Humphries and Gibb and one of the baddest boys of all, the Australian Football League star Barry Hall. Already the corresponding Facebook pages has over 3,000 “likes”.
Last night, the All Blacks beat South Africa in what must be one of the best rugby tests in recent time and local favourites, the Fremantle Dockers were beaten by Ben Cousin’s Richmond. It must be time to abandon this curious country and return to the sanctuary and sanity of New Zealand.

Rudderless
The dust has settled on the leadership change and in Julia Gillard the lucky country now has its first Welsh-born Prime Minister. If that if not bad enough she is the first ever “ranga”, as they call red-heads in this part of the world, in the role and that has become, perhaps, the greatest talking point of her sudden rise to the top. Television viewers have been subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of her hair through the ages, from schoolgirl to Prime Minister. On that alone, she will likely win the Federal Election, now expected to happen sometime during August..
The move to topple Kevin Rudd coincided with my return from Phuket, and in the transient world of politics it was both inevitable and wise. Rudd and Labor were losing ground at an alarming rate to the Liberal leader Tony Abbott who is, quite frankly, an unnervingly creepy man. It would be an embarrassment to the civilized world should he be elected and, although there is still an outside chance he could win, the betting odds have tipped back in Labor’s favour leaving the Coalition only now a $3.10 long shot.
In defeat Rudd was as every bit as charmless as former Australian leader John Howard who this week failed in his bid to become the Chairman of the International Cricket Council. For some reason, Howard was grumpy and seemed surprised that Sri Lanka didn’t support him after his calling spin bowler Murathilaran a cheat and giving Zimbabwe’s Mugabe his pedigree (not that anyone could argue with him on that score). The Asian nations decided that Howard was racist and after his conduct towards the boat people in the lead-up to the 2004 Federal Election, and who could blame them?
But back to Rudd; he managed to alienate not only his political rivals but also his colleagues, the public and, it seems, even many of his own staff. This mild, meek looking man is apparently no stranger to letting serve and following with a volley of choice four letter words directed at staff and others who may not have satisfactorily fulfilled his every whim.
According to West Australian columnist Zoltan Kovacs, "it is undeniable that Rudd was a friend to his political gravediggers. He was evidently unaware of his fatal political flaw; an addiction to spin as the indispensible means of getting and holding power. . . It is an irony of Mr Rudd's downfall that he was widely known as a master of spin, but wa kicked out of office mainly because of an inability to communicate effectively."
Never better illustrated, Rudd’s tussle with the mining companies over the proposed introduction of a new mining "super profits" tax was his eventual undoing; whatever the merits of the tax, it was a public relations disaster and his toppling became only a matter of time. One thing about the Australians is that they had the daring and courage to replace a serving Prime Minister, still ahead in the polls, just months out from a Federal Election, and there may be a lesson in that currently for the New Zealand Labour Party.
If there is some disappointing new to report, it is that stumps have been drawn on the annual Lilac Hill Festival, an annual cricket match held near the small town of Guildford in the Swan Valley just outside Perth. Since 1990, the Lilac Hill Festival has been home to an opening match for international touring teams, a sort of shrugging-off-the-jetlag warm-up loosener. It would be like having a carnival day at the Heathcote Cricket Club, all good fun, and as well as the touring teams other legends such as Dennis Lillee or even our own Sir Richard Hadlee come out of retirement and play for the local Chairman’s Eleven.
Apparently touring teams no longer want to play, saying it will somehow compromise other international fixtures, this year the death knell being spelled by England refusing to play in what would have been a twenty year anniversary match prior to the Ashes series. It is, alas, another casualty of the corporatisation of sport.

Trouble in Paradise
There is trouble in paradise; it may end in a gunfight at the OK Corral and if it does, there is no doubt whose side we’ll be on. Our friend Tanacha, or Kid, pronounced Kit, is currently embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over the ownership of a bar which her Canadian “boyfriend” brought for her in January this year, and she is sad, very sad indeed.
The problem is that, while Kid (on the left of the picture) was preoccupied setting up the bar, the boyfriend was just as preoccupied setting up a new Thai girlfriend, and if that wasn't bad enough, he then tried to replace Kid with the new girlfriend to run the bar. Kid was having none of it, having done the hard yards establishing the place and using her very wide circle of Facebook friends to draw in the punters.
Without doubt, at 29 years of age, Kid is a canny operator and was not prepared to stand by and watch her hard work go unrewarded, despite the Canadian boyfriend wanting to retain all of his investment, and this unfortunate stand-off has begun. Fortunately the bar is in Kid’s name.
The usually effervescent Kid was visible depressed when I caught up with her, and it saddened me that it could not be resolved short of litigation; she has spent 30,000 Baht so far on legal fees and heads to court early next month for a hearing, and although I am one, I cannot stand what some of the farang, or foreigners, do here.
This is a common problem in Thailand. There are countless stories where foreigners, lust-struck ones in particular, buy businesses for their Thai girlfriends or with a group of unknown locals and then things turn sour. Unless companies are properly set up, farang cannot have the majority ownership of businesses, and so these curious arrangements are entered into which, unless very carefully managed, have the potential to turn to disaster. In this case it has.
We met Kid on our first visit to Phuket when she worked at the Kiwi Bar, and back at that bar on this visit I enjoyed listening while another of the staff, Pons (on the right of the picture), told me of her dreams, and I wondered how she will achieve them on 9,000 Baht or nearly $NZ390 a month. It is a good wage for a local here, but she has a twelve year old daughter in the north being cared for by her parents and every week sends money for her care and welfare. She is frugal and, instead of partying like many of the other young women, Pons has brought land in a village where her uncle lives and knows that every Baht she pays off the land will mean she no longer has to struggle or rely on anyone else when she is older. She has an Australian boyfriend and, although he wants to marry and support her, she maintains her independence and doesn’t want to be reliant on others for money. She is proud, intelligent and optimistic, and has a great wish in life to see “seernow” which I eventually figure is that white powdery stuff that settles in the mountains, and so I tell her that Mama, as Kaelene is affectionately known to them, would be delighted to have Pons come and stay so she can have a once in a lifetime chance to try skiing.
With Pons and Na, we took a late night down trip the infamous and colourful Bangla Road in Patong; we drank at a club and while there I was approached repeatedly by two women asking me to buy them drinks. I declined politely saying my companions, drinking water and Coke respectively, were more than sufficient company. They persisted but had no luck, and it wasn’t until the next evening I twigged as Pons and Na regaled Kiwi Bar owner Tiggy with the story. My intended companions were, in fact, Kathoy, or ladyboys; all I thought at the time was that they were not to most attractive looking women I had seen.
Earlier, on leaving Perth airport for this short sojourn to Phuket I was stopped, taken aside and swabbed all over for explosives. Just a random thing they assured me and it was as well I turned out to be clear of harmful substance, but it was the first time in all of our travels that this has occurred.
It is quite late in our travels for firsts, but returning to Perth flying on Tiger Airlines was another first and it certainly passed the test for a budget carrier. The flight from Phuket to Singapore was on time and the same from Singapore to Perth, the seats were comfortable, service good and the red wine effective.
But there may be one challenge, however, and that is to unionise Tiger Airlines; its staff clearly need something to get the balance right, an attendant returned to my seat en-route as they had wrongly calculated the conversion cost from Australian to Singapore dollars for my can, yes can, of wine. The attendant explained that, unless I coughed up the extra dollar I had been undercharged, his colleague would have it deducted from her wages. What else was I to do but pay up but as I did I pondered on the nature of employers who deduct the cost of genuine mistakes from the wages of staff, and wonder what would have been the effect had the same rule been applied to chief executives and investment bankers as their recklessness plunged the world into the last global recession?
Perhaps the world would be a better place.

Phuket life
Some places capture your heart while others don’t quite make it, and it is often hard to tell exactly why. I tried to explain this to a colleague in Australia who asked why he should travel to Phuket, and as I rolled into Patong on Saturday afternoon I thought I may have made a grave error of judgment in recommending it to him. Is this the place for a meticulous man, one who knows nothing other than a sense of order?
Patong is tawdry but appealing, an edgy, dusty beachside town on this Thai island, filled for most of the year by Australian, European and Scandinavian holidaymakers and men looking for a short term wife. The infrastructure is third-world, ramshackle, the authorities’ questionable and everything seems quite chaotic, so there is every good reason not to like it, but it is not quite that simple. There is a charm, Thais are delightful, their Buddhist way of life peaceful, the weather is warm, the scenery spectacular, and among the chaos there are the little quirks of amusing logic.
As in New Zealand, driving is on the left hand side of the road, except that is for the cross roads joining the one way Beach and Ratu Thitt roads where the opposite applies. Driving on these streets is done on the right hand side as saves right-turning vehicles from cross-crossing each other when coming on and off the one way roads, which is all quite sensible really.
The locals can also be also wonderfully hapless; there are signs up around town advertising a comedy night featuring Arj Barker, better known as Dave from Flight of the Conchords. Trouble is that none of them say where the show is on, neither does the ad in the Phuket Gazette, and it took an internet search to find the venue, the local Mercure Hotel.
A fact that cannot be escaped is that Thailand is still a poor south Asian country and Phuket has made its way selling its soul to tourists rather than continuing to mine tin from its rich, red soils. Being poor means there are two quite defined economies and the two rarely meet; the high-end multinational tourist corporations and property developers are all here but there’s not too much evidence of a decent trickle-down. A taxi driver’s salary is about $6,500 Baht or $NZ280 a month, the girls at the Kiwi Bar between 6,000 and 8,000 Baht; all work at least 12 hours a day and get only one or two days off a month.
The standard price of an hour-long massage is between 250 and 300 baht, no more than $13, and it would be fair to assume that the masseuse gets only a small portion of that. Each day, down at The Mango Tree, each staff averages just one massage in the off-season, on some days none. For the remainder of the time they just sit around waiting.
Then there are the vendors who supply the locals. Mostly weary looking, older people, they trudge the back streets lugging baskets supported by cane poles, or pushing hand carts with food and drink. Some squat on the sides of the roads cooking from primitive looking burners, and it’s hard to imagine how they make a living selling bits of chicken to locals at about 10 Baht, or forty cents, a pop.
This may be holiday island, but for those who work here it is a tough life.
One change from the last visit is the long-awaited re-opening of the Hard Rock Café and, while it might be passé, an inspection was warranted. The same menu, the same memorabilia and the same type of chatty, up-beat staff as every other Hard Rock Café, but what is here is a fine collection of The Beatles Monthly, the fan club magazine of the Liverpool foursome, dating from 1963. Now that is rare.
Another very clear favourite is Phuketwan, an internet news journal edited by ex-pat Alan Morison who we met on our last visit. Alan is not one to back away from expressing strong views and takes no prisoners, local or tourist, when the inclination takes him. Many of his stories arouse heated blog discussion, this week one about the funeral of a “Scamdinavian” vagrant. Alan’s clear view is that the authorities, both Swedish and Thai, should have stopped her repeated visits during which time “she begged from Thais who could not necessarily afford to give, she borrowed from others with no intention of paying back the money, and she quite deliberately did not pay her bills”. In response to being called hypocritical by one reader Alan responded: “It's such a shame that neither you nor the Thai or Swedish authorities reacted appropriately to our accurate and pointed headings between Christmas 2009 and Ms Strand's death. Now, you find a voice. Now, you shoot the messenger. Well done, Simon”.
In today’s wire feed, Alan is on the rampage against corruption. “The crookedness …handicaps virtually every aspect of honest governance and justice, leaving Phuket's hopes of even competing with other international destinations permanently crippled.
“Rip-offs also abound. As fast as the beautiful beaches and coral reefs turn on the tourists, the extortionate prices and everyday deceits turn them off.
“This is not a purely Thai problem: the expats who exploit the graft are even more evil, perhaps, because they know there are workable alternatives."
“How long has it been since someone on Phuket was charged with corruption? We don't know the answer, but we doubt that there has been a memorable instance this century.
This is typical of Phuket and Phuketwan and we love it, but I have emailed my colleague suggesting the safety of a resort hotel. Patong might just be a bit wild for him.

The age of enlightenment
We found the archetypal Australian this week and he’s an absolute cracker, much too good not to share. Speaking at a charity dinner on Wednesday night marking fifteen years of Aussie Rules footy legends, former AFL star Mal Brown complained about the lighting in the early era of night matches. “We were at a disadvantage,” he told the audience, “we couldn’t pick any of the cannibals”, adding that, because they didn’t have any white shirts, his Aboriginal team mates weren't selected because they couldn’t be seen in the dark.
This came in the same week as New South Wales Assistant Rugby League coach and former star Andrew Johns was in hot water over describing a Queensland player as a black c....t in the built up to the second state of origin match. And not long after current AFL player Jason Akermanis advised gays in the league to remain in the closet because “footy is not ready” for them to come out. It would break the fabric of a club and be unsafe, the now former HeraldSun columnist wrote.
But back to the enlightened Mr Brown, on his way out of the dinner he told journalists not “to go writing what I said about those Abos” and later told media that his use of terms like “cannibal” and “little black buggers” were terms of endearment. To illustrate the extent to which he isn’t racist he went on to say that he’d helped Aboriginal boys and grown up with them all my life; thankfully he stopped short of claiming them as some of his best friends.
A true dinosaur, Brown told the HeraldSun that, while not sorry for making the comments, some “sensitive” people had told him he’d made a dickhead of himself and he accepted that. He agreed his comments were inappropriate in 2010, but added that he had made those sorts of comments probably 5,000 times in the last five years and, not to be restrained, he thought that the attention paid to his comments was unwarranted in light of the fact that “we are being led by a dickhead of a prime minister”.
This man is a true gem and, as if had not dug a considerable enough hole for himself, when asked if he had learned anything from the furore, he responded that if asked do another charity lunch he would just tell them to go and get stuffed.
Don’t you just love Australians?
Charity fundraising must be all the go this week, in an EBay charity auction the winning bid for breakfast and a surfing lesson with Liberal leader Tony Abbott came from a group called “GetUp” which campaigns on social issues. It paid $16,500 for former Afghani refugee Riz Wakil to get the chance to bend Abbott’s ear about the plight of refugees. Wakil, who spent nine months in an Australian detention centre, intends to tell Abbott that his hard-line policies on immigration and detention arrangements for refugees are inhuman. He quipped that he was more qualified to talk about people smugglers than Abbott’s now infamous budgie smugglers.
Wakil hopes Abbot will listen, but it is difficult to imagine he’ll get a word in edgeways.
Incidentally, the winner of a date with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was television Channel 10’s Seven O’Clock Project starring the very, very funny Dave Hughes.
Not quite so funny was news that our friends, the Andersons of the trucking-across-the-Nullabor-story, were truckless and walking back to West Australia from somewhere near the New South Wales and Victoria border. A wayward, on-coming, four wheel drive wagon attached to a mobile home, sideswiped their brand-spanking new Kenworth (with only 6,700 kilometers on the clock), rendering vehicles and trailers in need of surgery, the mobile home strewn up the highway, the other driver injured and all others shaken.
By anyone’s standards, that an extreme way to get a few weeks off work.

The match
This was like watching an emerging Crusaders rugby side, the same daring, scintillating back pay, familiar defensive patterns and the same heart-in-mouth mistakes. But these charges were decked out in the green and gold of the Australian Wallabies and not the black and red of home. And it was a positively dangerous sign for New Zealand’s Rugby World Cup hopes.
Rugby is not viewed at its best when played in an AFL stadium, a rugby field is 80 metres shorter than its Aussie Rule’s counterpart, everything is seen long distance, but from high in Block 415 at Subiaco Oval, the stadium equivalent of being in the Gods, we had a commanding oversight of the entire field.
It is not often that a rugby test is played in AFL-mad Perth and so the opportunity to see Australia play England was a test match not to be missed. And while it is not in the nature of most New Zealanders to support an Australian side, it is even less palatable to show any liking for the English. Of course it is easier to support the Australians with its Canterbury coach, Robbie Deans, and it must have been an omen, for as we arrived at the ground the team bus pulled in with Deans in command up front.
Overcome with the moment, I almost brought a Wallabies jacket for grandson Jack, but was saved from such folly by my friend Rod who rightly suggested the poor lad might be scarred for life turning up to day-care or visiting friends in Christchurch wearing such a rivaled outfit.
But to the rugby and we witnessed sides of such contrasting styles. The Wallabies were expansive and attacking, taking risks and exciting the home crowd. The English were big and dour and without imagination, and they typified the very reason that English test rugby has such a poor reputation. If there was a game plan it wasn’t evident and they were just, simply, dull and brutish. Had the Wallabies front row not repeatedly collapsed, handing the English an unprecedented two penalty tries, the English would have been thrashed. In any event, the Australian’s 27 to 17 winning margin flattered the English, but in the meantime, take note of these names; Quade Cooper, Will Genia, Berrick Barnes and James O’Connor; these are stars of the future.
The lesson from this is that the Australians have an exciting young squad and the Rugby World Cup is still more than a year away. Time enough to get the front row ills to be sorted and, once done, this team will be an imposing force.
If there is blight on the modern game, that is aside from its corporatisation, it is the number of handlers and trainers who appear on the field during the game; at one breakdown alone on Saturday night we counted eleven, that’s almost another full team, and it is plainly ridiculous.
There was some relief though; après match we retired to colleague Rod’s home and watched a recorded version of the All Blacks versus Ireland test played in New Plymouth earlier in the evening. Just as the Australian backs were young and dazzling, so too were the new All Blacks, with Cory Jane and Israel Dagg having cracking games. Even the front row looked good, although these are not the imposing men of past eras, and the worry is that coach Graham Henry has the year ahead to knock every shred of of that flair and brilliance from their systems.
Despite the win at Subi, Australia was in mourning by Monday. Their team, the Socceroos, was hammered by Germany four nil in the Football World Cup and it was worse in Western Australia. Both local AFL teams lost their weekend matches, the hapless West Coast Eagles by a whopping 49 points. “At least”, said the radio newsreader, “we won the rugby”. Not in the least consoled, the announcer responded, “Yeah, but who cares about Rugby.”
On another note entirely, we were amused to learn that the fast food chain, Red Rooster has brought out new signage, a single illuminated panel to replace the separate, stand-alone lettering of the current branding. A spokesperson for the company says the appearance of the new panels has nothing to do with the frequency with which the “S” keeps getting stolen from the current signs. Yean right.

Losing our marbles: a research project
It may be cold in New Zealand, so too it is here. Three hours south, Bridgetown recorded an overnight low of minus three degrees on Thursday, or so the television weather report said, and the days in Perth have struggled to make it to twenty. It’s hard to think back to those languid days of summer, when the mercury hovered around forty and our lazing on Swanbourne Beach was interrupted only by the occasional dip into the Indian Ocean. It all seems a very long time ago.
We did a blog entry back then on the Swanbourne Beach Olympics, the one where team uniform was described as immaterial and Marty an unsuccessful competitor in the egg and spoon race. A reworked version of the story made its way into the pages of gonatural, a New Zealand nudist magazine, and this is where the story take an interesting turn. A family friend, a nudist for more than four decades, spotted the article and reported to the editor that he was unfamiliar with any previous penchant on our part to enjoy the sun, all over.
He was curious, so was the editor who got in touch and invited a contribution on the reaction from family and friends to our baring all (in words that is, not pictures), publicly. We replied, explaining that it was no big deal, we wrote about it just as we did many other new and novel experiences on our travels, and that it appeared no big deal for readers either.
Earlier on our travels, we blogged about stopping in a place called Balatonbereny, a nudist beach in Hungary, where we made a tongue in cheek quip about the fashions du jour in pubic shaving, and we had in mind that this may draw a comment, but not a peep. The same in Croatia and so by the time we reached Swanbourne we were quite blasé about the whole thing. And still not a peep, so we responded to the request for our tell-all-expose with an opinion that family and friends seemed unfazed and probably just dismissed the reports as further evidence that we had, indeed, lost our marbles.
It may be our writing style, but the editor has persisted, repeated the request and, if only to confirm that we have indeed gone quite mad, we might just oblige. That is, if anyone does give a damn.

Little Jack Horner
The very day I became a great uncle, a young man stood up and offered me his seat on the train, and I was shocked. While there may be something to be celebrated in the safe arrival of a new family member, the dark cloud of being treated like a senior citizen on public transport is actually an unwelcome reminder of something else, something that none of us particularly want to acknowledge. Quite frankly, I wish the seat had been occupied by a self-absorbed sullen-faced, gum-chewing young lout; at least I would not have had to be reminded that I am nearer sixty than fifty and that it’s not going to get any better.
Back in the Middle East we were inclined to use reserved seats on public buses because they were set aside for ladies and, fortunately, the husbands of ladies, and we regarded this as something of a perk. But the priority seats on trains and buses in Perth are primarily for the use of the elderly, infirm, pregnant and mothers with small children, and today I looked neither like a mother with small children nor particularly pregnant, and I did not think that I looked infirm. Mind you, I hadn’t for a solitary moment imagined I looked old enough for a young man to get up and relinquish his spot, but there you are, clearly I did, and that is plainly distressing. Not that I hesitated to accept his kind offer, I was pleased enough to be able to travel in comfort.
Transperth, the local public transport operator, clearly wants everyone to travel in comfort; this week they launched a series of nursery rhyme posters aimed at reminding passengers of their obligation to be good citizens. Here’s one:
Mary had her iPod up
as loud as it would go
And every song that Mary played
she thought that we did know
The noise was unrelenting
and it made the people frown
Oh how we wish that Mary
would turn that damn thing down
And another:
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Scratching a window pane
He thinks that its funny, it costs us all money
I wish that Jack would grow half a brain
There are more, Humpty Dumpty got on a bus, Humpty Dumpty made a great fuss, Little Miss Shaw sat on the floor and so on; nine in all, produced by Cooch Creative, billed as humorous, tongue-in-cheek nursery rhymes illustrated in the style of a traditional storybook, all aimed at addressing negative behaviour on the city’s buses and trains.
As well as a rhyme, each poster has a message: Everyone has the right to a comfortable journey, please do not sit in the aisles; Everyone deserves the right to a vandalism-free train, and so on.
I looked at these posters and wondered whether the intended targets, the Jack Horners or Mary with her iPod would take the blindest bit of notice and thought it very unlikely. The verses are dull, they lack rhythm and the rhymes are, at best, laboured. In fact, I concluded that the copywriter hadn’t had a good day at the office.
But then again, maybe I am just getting old.

Envy
I have been unwell all week, at first I thought it was the flu but having reconsidered the symptoms it could be iPhone envy. The onset of a sore throat, headaches and blocked nose coincided with the arrival of an email from friends, Philip and Julie Cheyne, currently holidaying in rural France. It wasn’t the first such message, but this one was something to the effect of; here we are basking in the sun in the village square, eating citron crepes and drinking coffee, just relaxing after touring a local winery. At the bottom of each such message is the tag-line, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Similarly afflicted, we get messages from another friend, an obscure London publisher, who sends the equivalent of literary grunts, “I’m in Cyprus”, “Just landed in Macau” or “It’s 3.00am in Cannes”. Again, these come with that same footer, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Who wouldn’t be envious and there are a couple of observations to be made; these people are rubbing it in that they own iPhones while the rest of us are consigned to last-generation appliances which are restricted to making calls, text messages and taking grainy photos, and which do not have a zillion questionable Apps (techno jargon for applications) which do important things like telling us the time in Beijing, translating phrases into Arabic and providing the latest news about Paris Hilton.
Secondly, iPhones allow their owners instant bragging rights about the exotic fun they are having, and they do so deliberately while the rest of us are confined to mundane processes of life; cooking and cleaning, working and freezing at the hands of a southern hemisphere winter.
The same goes with Facebook where some postings come “Via Mobile Web”. Down the right hand menu there is often a list of your friends who use their mobile phones to upload postings, and this is also designed to create envy; it means that these people can post to Facebook in an instant and from anywhere in the world while the rest of us have to start up computers, find internet connections and go through a slow and now very uncool process of uploading.
"Sent from my iPhone", is a gratuitous message, calculated for one thing and one thing alone; to remind us have-nots of our inferiority, and every time I get one of these messages I take to my sick bed for another few days.
But it is not just I who suffers. Perth is a city built on envy; a little like that New Zealand thing where South Islanders believe that if it wasn’t for the Cook Strait cable sending power northwards, the entire North Island would collapse and disappear without trace. And many think that would be a good thing. Here it is the minerals; Western Australians believe that they create the continent’s entire wealth and somehow that wealth is sucked to the East with nothing coming back in return. From time to time there are dark muttering of seceding from the rest of Australia and creating an independent state, and probably the Easterners hope they would just get on with it.
But that is not the point here. As the third series of Underbelly, the television drama revealing the dark side of Australia’s organised crime draws a conclusion, Western Australians have only just twigged that they have been overlooked entirely. Melbourne and Sydney have both featured, as has the Kiwi-dominated Mr Asia drug syndicate, Queensland is ear-marked for the next series, but no-one takes the West seriously enough to do anything based on characters here.
Not to be overlooked completely, the local West Australian newspaper has run a ten-part series on organised crime around Perth, the first instalment targeting John Kizon, a self-styled wide boy with plenty of money, a fast lifestyle and, apparently, no visible means of support. The cops have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to catch him red-handed at whatever it is he is supposed to be doing for at least a decade, but in all that time they have been singularly unsuccessful. This suggests either they are completely stupid or Kizon exceptionally clever; and the latest attempt to get him on charges of insider-trading came spectacularly undone.
But what is intriguing about this is that, a few days later after the West Australian exposé, Kizon was featured at length on television’s Channel Seven denying all allegations and putting forward his own version of events. The intriguing thing is that the West Australian and Channel Seven are effectively one and the same; they have the same parent company, which really raises a question about media creating stories out of nothing and then breathing life in to them.
If there is one event which would give rise to the view that the cops here are more Keystone than clever, it would be the events arising from the murder of the owner of the bar across the road from work. The only suspect fled interstate, one step ahead of an arrest warrant; two detectives on the same flight as he while on the run to Adelaide, and who were coincidentally working on the case, recognised him but then failed to tail him once there; when he was eventually arrested in Townsville days later, the WA cops arrived without completed extradition documents and then had to wait a week for the paperwork to be ironed out, it took about three attempts. Once back in WA, these same police realised they had left the crucial charge sheets in Townsville and, at the time of writing, were unable to actually lay the murder charge, the purpose of the original arrest warrant. It is little wonder they’ve never been able to pin anything on Kizon or even stitch him up.
Meanwhile, I think I’ve found a cure for iPhone envy; it’s called Phuket and its less than two weeks away.

Myth buster
It takes just two and three quarter hours to fly from Perth to Adelaide, but more than thirty to complete the return journey by road, that is if you do it in a Kenworth rig hauling three big trailers stuffed to the gunnels with plasma televisions, computers and other electronic goods for cashed or credited-up Western Australians.
This is big country, theirs a big rig and this was a big journey across the Nullabor Plains over two nights and one day, but if that was a big trip, think on this; our friends and former neighbours, Terry and Barbara Anderson do a return journey from Perth to Sydney every week. Four thousand miles each way leaving Perth on a Tuesday night and getting back late on the Sunday night, or in this case at 2.30am Monday morning. Each drives a four hour shift while the other sleeps, or at least tries to as much as you can while their rig, with its tyre pressure three times that of a car, bounces, kangaroo-like, across a pot-holed continent.
To get some perspective, this rig has eighteen forward and three reverse gears, its four fuel tanks hold 2600 litres of diesel all up and at one stop we took on board $1900 worth. The return journey between Perth and Sydney consumes around $5,000 worth of diesel, their truck has clocked up 1.3 million kilometers but has an expected life of 4 million, the whole shooting box weighs more than seventy tonnes, is almost 40 percent the length of a rugby field and its twelve axles support wheels with tyres worth up to $800 each. This is statistics city and it would be easy to be overwhelmed, but we aren’t and cannot afford to relax; the roads across the Nullabor are so narrow in places that these huge beasts pass each other at 90kph with only 12 inches or more between them.
At more than 4.3 metres tall and with its three trailers this Kenworth is described as a long vehicle in South Australia and a road train in Western Australia. The cab has a small living room, the ceiling is at least 7 foot high, and there are two bunks, a fridge, cupboards and even a little cooker. What a life? Barbara, a superb and generous cook at home, plans this trip with precision. Cornflakes, fruit salad and yoghurt for breakfast, meatballs and lasagna for lunch and mince for dinner, there are chocolate treats to keep driver and passengers alert, and then there is the curious custom, once sated, of watering the wheels; while women use roadhouse toilets, men engage in the selfless art of cooling the tyres.
The Nullabor itself is hard to describe. Never ending with flat, short, scrubby bushes as far as the eye can see, a huge sky, bright stars, straight roads and trucks. Dozens of them, but only a few cars and camper vans, many home built. There are roadside trees decorated with shoes, bras and underpants, there is the occasional farm, more trees, and then the nutters of which there are a few. We passed a man pushing a wheel barrow carrying a life size brown bear, he had been on the road for weeks, a lone cyclist in the middle of nowhere, apparently without water or pannier bags for supplies, and a woman in pink walking across the plains raising money for cancer. Then there were the chaps in a tractor towing a mud-splattered caravan, and cops checking permits, driving licenses and running alcohol tests; it was as well I had banned my hosts from drinking while driving.
From Ceduna at one end of the Nullabor to Norseman at the other is 1,000 kilometers, in between only an occasional roadhouse with petrol pumps, greasy overpriced food and souvenirs the price for which a small mortgage is required. And a golf course. Billed as the longest in the world, the eighteen holes of the Nullabor links stretch 1400 kilometers along the Eyre Highway, from Ceduna to Kalgoorlie, and is billed as par 71 or par 72 course depending on which guide you read.
There were a few myths shattered on this trip, the first being that Kangaroos exist in the wild. No matter what may be claimed to the contrary, they do not. No question about it. We had been told by almost everyone that Kangaroos are plentiful, unavoidable and every day hazards, menacing innocent cars by bounding unexpectedly onto highways and being left as road kill for the eagles, dingoes and crows to devour and complete the eco-cycle.
But that was not our experience; previously when venturing north there were none to be seen and the same south. This time, east to west, day time, night time and dusk, not a single solitary one, except for Mitch, a tame thumb-sucking marsupial and its Joey at the roadhouse it shares with American space junk. Legends that the outback roads are paved with the bones Roos are just that, legends, perhaps even stories from the dreamtime.
But if that was a shattering discovery, what about this? There is no wrestling through eighteen forward and three reverse gears, doubling d' clutch, graunching cogs and fighting a recalcitrant gearstick here, these rigs are automatic with a dinky little push-button box on the dashboard for the manual override. But what's worse, and I saw with my own eyes, is that modern truckers wear slippers while driving. This is without a word of a lie and there was only one question to be asked; where have all the real men gone?

The whole truth
It is argued by some that people who habitually swear lack ability with language, in particular with adjectives, and equally that comedy which relies on profanity lacks real substance, but I disagree. There is something quite splendid about vulgarity and the Perth Wold West Comedy Festival’s opening gala night was evidence of this very special form of art. In fact crude gags, swearing and general coarseness gave the gala night an edge that had the audience baying for more.
I was reminded of the time we saw Billy Connolly with work colleagues and one insisted her twelve year old daughter come with us. We cautioned against it, suggesting that a live performance by the irrepressible and bad-mouthed Scot might not be suitable for an impressionable teenager, and then watched the daughter during a fifteen minutes portion of the performance which dealt with oral sex in a particularly graphic fashion. Daughter was doubled up with laughter throughout while the mother sat stony-faced. The following Monday her only comment was that Mr Connolly was very rude, and who could argue. We simply asked how her twelve-year old came to understood so much of the performance.
It must be hard work being a stand up comedian. Far from the gala night glamour and a packed house at the Astor Theatre in the leafy suburb of Mt Lawley, we ventured into darkest Northbridge (the home of glassings, the latest Australian sport) to the Brass Monkey pub to watch a young comedian who plays a guitar and writes cleverly acerbic songs about ordinary life. It was evident this wasn’t going to be a packed show; a few tables up front for the early arrivals and special guests and a dozen rows of chairs in an upstairs bar and at the allotted start time, nineteen people not counting the sound man, and that’s one thing that makes it so hard. The tables were filled but only one row of chairs. It must be difficult for an eager young man to bound onto a stage and enthusiastically work the crowd when playing to an eighth-filled room, particularly when it turns out that the largest group present were family. And that’s where it got even tougher. Most of the show was of observations about growing up with a stepfather and mother, family conflicts, wicked thoughts (mainly about the stepfather) and the mundane actions of life. The show itself was competent without being overly engaging, so we entertained ourselves watching the family and that in itself was worth the entry fee. Mum was, as would be expected, delighted that her pride and joy was on stage oblivious that there were only ten people there besides family, the sister cackled with delight at the naughty bits and stepdad just looked plainly unimpressed, and even less so at every crack or observation made at his expense. It was as well the last song was about flatting because stepdad did get a laugh about the lad's unhappiness at flatmates leaving pubic hairs on the soap in the shower, ginger ones at that. We laughed too.
An unintended comedian making waves nationally is our old friend Tony Abbott, the leader of the Liberal Party, the Australian equivalent of the New Zealand’s National Party. On television the other night, he told an interviewer that the only time people can be sure he is telling the “gospel truth” is when he is working from a carefully prepared script. He explained, in effect saying that he gets carried away in the heat of the moment in some situations and exaggerates or goes further than intended. During the interview he was explaining the contradiction between saying there would be no new taxes if his party was elected to government at the next general election, but that there would be a new levy on employers to pay for a proposed quite generous new parental leave scheme (something incidentally he announced on the hoof much to the despair of his colleagues). The West Australian described Mr Abbott’s interview as “shambolic” but, curiously, some commentators have described him as honest for telling the truth when he says he doesn’t always tell the truth. Figure that one out.

What the world needs now is love
Bunbury is just a couple of hours drive south of Perth, down the unusually named Kwinana highway, and it is in Bunbury that the Western Australia’s latest attraction can be found. A new “space age” public toilet at Koombana Bay beach welcomes visitors through a sound system and then plays a version of Burt Bacharach’s tune; What the World Needs Now is Love. How splendid is that?
Some unsupportive people have taken umbrage at the spending of $250,000 on the new toilet, the Sunday Times reporting that, at the same time this is happening, 3 percent is being cut from State expenditure in areas like the health service. It turns out however that the funding for the new toilet comes from petroleum royalties earmarked for regional initiatives and this is just one of them; along with 80 fibreglass cows in Margaret River and a few golf carts down at the Boolbardie Country Club.
It seems just a distant memory but was only a week ago that the land of the long white cloud was sighted through the window of flight DJ60 from Melbourne to Christchurch. And it was a timely visit. The first item on the radio news was an announcement by the seventy-two-year-old Jim Anderton that he would be standing for the Christchurch mayoralty, his impending campaign the perfect prompt to ponder a return. And that’s not to forget a grandson who insists on calling his grandfather grandma, a goddaughter who has had to find an assistant godparent to compensate for an absence and, of course, Kaelene trimming the buxus hedges to within an inch of their lives just to ensure the place looked familiar.
And mostly Christchurch did look uncannily familiar. The airport is still a dog’s breakfast and the billboards explaining the painfully slow reconstruction process which read Change is Good, are unconvincing. Down the road from home, the Beckenham shops have been bowled over and replaced with a new block of functionary buildings, thankfully they still retain Tandoori Palace the second best Indian food outside of India to GoGo’s Madras Curry House in Perth. At the University of Canterbury most of the experienced and best qualified library staff are being sacked to make way for digital replacements. It seems that in the new world order librarians, including a head librarian, aren’t really needed to run a library, the irony being that, despite the unstoppable move towards information technology, IT staff are also being shed by the university. The once-called Lancaster Park, now AMI Stadium, has been reconstructed and looks fantastic but is being blandly re-branded Stadium Christchurch for the Rugby World Cup. Whatever is wrong with Lancaster Park?
Almost as quickly as the trip began it was over. Air New Zealand to Auckland, a brisk walk to the international terminal and a seven hour flight back to Western Australia to find that mining magnates, each worth billions of dollars, are moaning about a proposed new tax on “super-profits” for mining companies and one of those magnates, Gina Reinhart, reportedly the richest woman in Australia, is calling on the Government to cut award wages for immigrant mine workers so they can be hired more cheaply than locals, of which there is no shortage. It’s as if she needs more money.
Closer to home, the owner of The Basement, an inconspicuous and usually empty bar across the road from work has been murdered allegedly at the hands of his bar manager. Curiously the manager was sacked but not charged and given that degree of liberty has taken the opportunity to flee interstate. The State Premier is reportedly furious.
And even close to home, there was a sighting in the backyard last night, the curious mix of a gorilla, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and a pug now named Toto.

It's been a while
There are times when you want to sleep, and there are times when you want to sleep but deep in the subconscious there is awareness that something is not quite right. With one eye hesitantly opening there was, in the row immediately behind, a young man in distress, surrounded by flight attendants being bottle-fed oxygen and having his head mopped. From premium economy, there is no business class here, appeared a doctor who took charge for the remainder of our midnight flight from Perth to Melbourne. Whatever had happened, this young man was in good hands as they cleared out a row of seats and he lay prone still with oxygen and still having his head caressed.
If this had been Jetstar that young man would probably have been charged for the three seats he lay across and for the blankets and pillows they fetched. Heaven knows what the oxygen would have cost, and they possibly would have invoiced the doctor for working on their airline. Fortunately this was Virgin Blue and for a budget airline (even though my seat cost more than for the Air New Zealand return flight) they deserve a nod.
Right from check-in the service was impeccable; the helpful young man at the booking counter spent time running through available seats, offering the emergency row with plenty of legroom on the trans-Tasman sector. He thought our pet didgeridoo may be too big for hand luggage, so went away, got tape and secured it so it could go as checked luggage and then didn’t bat an eyelid as the baggage weight snuck cheekily over the limit. On first impressions, and they count, Virgin Blue is right up there with the best, even the New Zealand-made food was agreeable.
Once awake, there was little to do but browse the West Australian, known for its high-quality journalism and in-depth analysis of world events. In Germany a postman married his obese and asthmatic cat, saying he wanted to marry her before she dies; in Perth at the weekend a Catholic priest lay a mentally and physically disabled young woman on an altar and ordered her to walk and talk and in Oxford, England, an Australian who has spent 37 years in prison for pedophilic offences against boys has been filmed leering at children just down the road from my cousin's house.
Mid-journey, at Melbourne airport, an Emirates flight to New Zealand was being called. It must have been careless of me but just before leaving I received notice that a cluster of Emirates air points were about to expire. That was only after I had booked and paid for a seat to New Zealand, but if there was one good outcome I did donate the soon-to-be-expired points to a seeing-eye charity, so as a result some poor young child possibly has vision. Next, the last remaining passengers on an Air New Zealand flight to Auckland were being called. The land of the long white cloud was getting close.
International travel requires a passport, no secrets there, but what many people may not realise is that there are many countries that do not permit entry to their borders if the intended travel is not completed within six months of the passport expiring. This begs the question of why have a passport of a particular duration if it is virtually useless for the last six months. Mine is close enough to that six month period to mean immediate travel to places like Thailand and Bali is out of the question, but at almost ten years old, it tells an interesting and exotic tale. In no particular order and without repetition; Greece, Switzerland, Korea, Sri Lanka, Great Britain, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Germany, Hong Kong, Macau, China, Barbados, Oman, Holland, the Republic of Ireland, Japan, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Belgium, France, Egypt, an unused visa for India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia. There may be more but some stamps are indistinct, and then there is New Zealand. On the immigration form a question asks how long the applicant has been out of the country. At one year, four months and about twenty days, its been a long time.

Another "c" word
Crusaders. It has taken a week for the trauma to subside, to get over such abject failure, but over it we are. This was the ME Bank stadium in East Perth, Friday a week ago and there were six of us, prepared to taunt supporters of the Western Force rugby team, habitual losers, as they prepared to take on the mighty champion Canterbury Crusaders. We were decked out in black and red among a sea of blue; the temptation was to ask these people, 20,000 of them in all in their team’s colours, what it feels like to live in expectant hope every week and be perpetually disappointed as your team faces defeat. Again and again.
Uncharacteristically my tongue remained still, even as the Crusaders strolled over for a soft try after only two minutes. Fortunately so, that was the only good moment. The first half was lacklustre at best and even though “our” team was ahead 13 nil at halftime, it was less than convincing. And then we watched as that lead ebbed away in the second half, the Force outplaying the Crusaders at every step to win by about ten points. A Crusaders team littered with All Blacks a cause for concern a year out from the Rugby World Cup.
In hindsight, there were some dead giveaways for the loss; insipid grey and red jerseys have replaced the red and patriotic black of the past, but worse, there were players with iridescent yellow boots and even white ones. These lads may be just too big for their fancy coloured boots and the only salvation for us was that rugby union is such a minority sport in Western Australia that even a rare Force victory failed to get much media attention.
If media attention counts, then the funeral in Melbourne of gangland killer Carl "family man" Williams last Friday was a real attention grabber. Carl could have been a Crusaders’ player such was the glitz; his $30,000 oversized coffin was gold and bronze plated, and his grieving widow turned up in a menacing-looking black, stretched Hummer, about forty feet long. Television cameras and news teams weren’t permitted into St Theresa’s Catholic Church in Essenden for the service, not because there was no room (even given the size of the police contingent present), but because all indoor filming rights were reserved for a documentary crew; it seems that even the rights to the funeral had been auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The funeral goers were an interesting looking lot, big burly men mainly, shaved and tattooed heads being the order of the day, and the women, either very elegant or as rough as guts. The exception was the slightly bizarre figure of a woman outside the church dressed to look like Judy Moran whose family and associates, about fourteen in all, were decimated in a series of reprisal killings by Williams and colleagues. Judy Moran’s husband and one of her sons were direct victims of Williams. It isn’t quite clear who she was or exactly the point she was making as she prowled up and down the footpath but there she was.
But if life continues to imitate art, Matthew Newton who starred as New Zealander Terry “Mr Asia” Clark in the second series of Underbelly entered rehab this week at a private hospital dealing in drug and alcohol addiction. It seems that, since playing the infamous drug baron on the television series, he has become a regular at Kings Cross, developing friendships with nightclub bosses. Newton was seduced by Sin City, according the Sunday Times.
Not the be outdone, Firass Dirani who plays Kings Cross lynchpin John Ibrahim in the Underbelly’s third series, The Golden Mile, currently playing on Australian television, was named as Cleo magazine bachelor of the year.
Fremantle is a quieter spot than Kings Cross, it played host to Mayday celebrations on Sunday and, as the weekend paper advertised, gave the public a chance to see “big burly unionists” marching through the streets. With advertising like that, next they’ll have these unionists on display at the local wildlife park, although hopefully not as an endangered species.

The misadventures of Troy
It is said by some that Australia is the most governed country in the world, and that may be so. Perth is a collection of independent cities, each with its own council and an overarching Lord Mayor. Surrounding the cities are shires, probably the equivalent of counties or districts, and above all of them the State Government with both an upper and lower house. At Federal Government level there are also upper and lower houses and they are Australia’s supreme law-making and governing bodies. With both state and federal governments making laws, and cities and shires similarly empowered, there are rules aplenty, but all within a strict pecking order. Federal laws take precedence over state laws and so on down the chain, but it is not quite that simple. It is a quite complex myriad; here in Western Australia, for example, there are state labour laws, conservatively based on those of the last Liberal Federal Government and federal laws which come from the ever-so-slightly more progressive Labor Party. The two sets of laws come from diametrically opposing philosophical points of view but somehow they co-exist, federal law prevailing only where there is a conflict between the two separate sets of legislation.
Confused? Then add in the relationship between contract and legislation and what should be the international principle that legislation takes precedence over contract. Simply put, people cannot enter into contracts which conflict with existing laws. But here it is not quite that straightforward; some contracts enabled under federal legislation can take priority over state laws. In the university sector, for example, collective agreements are formed under federal law even though each agreement is made with a local university on an individual or enterprise basis. And in what seems completely inconsistent with the law of contract, these agreements override state laws even though they are enforced within the state. And on that basis I’ve given up trying to understand it all.
But if that is a problem, the State Liberal Government has a greater problem of its own this week. Treasurer, Troy Buswell, who has survived a “chair-sniffing” incident with one of his staffers and another where, at a function, drunk, he snapped open the bra clip of a Labor opposition member, has today been forced to admit an affair with the local Green member for Fremantle. Buswell had little choice; the story broke at the weekend with Green Adele Carles admitting the truth of rumours of a four-month affair with Buswell. In a written statement, Carles said that, although she could portray herself as the vulnerable one who had been taken advantage of, this was not true and that they made a mutual, albeit stupid decision as two consenting adults.
In a press conference today, Buswell admitted the affair and of misusing parliamentary entitlements so he and Carles could meet, and between the pair of them they may have set the world’s record for the number of resulting apologies. Perhaps the Guinness Book of Records should be consulted? Carles publicly apologised to her husband and three daughters, her mother, father and brother, mother-in-law, father-in-law and brothers-in-law and their extended families, to Troy Buswell’s wife and their children, to her fellow State Green MPs, Bob Brown and the federal Greens, their voters and supporters, the Premier, state parliamentary colleagues and staff at Parliament House, the Labor Party and to her constituents in Fremantle. Buswell repeatedly apologised to the Premier, his wife, boys, colleague and constituents.
To Buswell’s credit, his misadventures have been with women from the broad range of political hues which shows that, sexually at least, he is not driven by ideology; and it is as well, he says these incidents haven’t affected the way he has done his job.
Buswell has become well-practised at apologies; when confessing to the chair-sniffing incident, after two-years of denial, he broke down and cried. Today the admission was less emotional, he having clearly toughened up in the face of adversity. His was a prepared speech in which he neatly sidestepped all major questions of public interest.
This is a tough one for the State Government, and it is always a pleasure to watch conservative governments struggle with their demons. Buswell says he won’t be stepping down but he may have to think again. Despite being Treasurer, he was recently done twice for incorrectly claiming parliamentary travel expenses; it seems he did not know the geographical difference between Perth and Busselton, some two and a half hours south. This time, however, he has admitted using his ministerial car to facilitate the affair and to paying for accommodation on his parliamentary credit card and this may be his undoing. Odds are that the Premier, Colin Barnett will have no choice to sack him, despite only a week ago describing Buswell as the best treasurer in the world.
And while there may be trouble in state political circles, we have had trouble on our own doorstep. Just down the road at the Bayswater Hotel, there was a brawl on Saturday night. More than thirty people started scrapping in the pub, moved to the car park and then, with authorities on the way, “fled” to the nearby Bayswater train station.
That’s my station and this is all a bit too close for comfort. It is as well I was tucked up asleep at the time.

Postscript: Buswell resigned today after discussions with Premier Barnett. It was claiming expenses wot did 'm in.

Three more “c” words
Australia is agog following the death in Barwon high security prison of Carl Williams, the baby-faced gangland killer who was serving 35 years for the murder of four people and who was believed to have been associated with the deaths of at least ten others in a series of vicious reprisal killings. His life-story was the subject of the original television series of Underbelly, Williams was one of the kingpins of Melbourne’s underworld and none too pleasant a chap it seems. But for days now we have relived the moment of Williams’s death, again and again, bashed from behind with the stem of an exercise bicycle all under the constant watchful eye of the prison’s CCTV system. Apparently there are some questions to be answered about why it took twenty-five minutes after the bashing for any of the guards to pay any attention.
But agog we are, the media are howling outrage about the fact that Williams and other gangsters have been glamorised by the media, other media than the ones howling that must be. The Underbelly series, which dramatises real-life organised crime, has been so successful that it is hard to know whether life is imitating art or vica-versa and the third series, which started a fortnight ago, has been subject to relentless media coverage. We have the real-life characters on magazine-style shows telling viewers what they think of their television portrayals, being filmed attending socialite functions and occupying favourite spots in corporate boxes. Just a week or so ago, another Melbourne Underbelly identity, Mick Gatto, was in Perth, feted by the television cameras, walking the celebrity carpet into the Danny Green boxing match, a big thing here; this week he was back on television giving his views on his foe, Williams’s death. Interviewed on television news, Gatto said that, while he felt sorry for William’s daughter, he was going to enjoy a lovely day. With that he sat back, grinned and lit a cigar, almost as big and fat as Williams himself.
More forthcoming was “veteran criminal” Chopper Read who told media that when he heard the news of Williams’s death he spat out his drink and laughed his head off. “He was just a big, fat, wobbly-bottomed boy from Footscray. He wasn’t much of a man at all. He was nothing,” continued Read.
He added, for the sake of colour, that he and Gatto are the only two of the major Melbourne underworld figures left and is predicting, probably rightly so, that no-one going to kill Gatto right now because he is much too popular.
Meanwhile, the widow, Roberta, spent the day after the death at the beauty salon to look her best for her New Idea interview, reportedly worth as much as $250,000.
At work, we too have encountered shadowy figures of our own from the twilight world. Or almost, as a meeting between the Corruption and Crime Commission and my boss took place behind closed doors in an internal, windowless room; my involvement limited to ensuring that the clutter from my desk was cleared away should that create a bad impression as these fighters of crime moved through the building. So silent were they that I neither saw them arrive or leave, but I knew when they were there because of the hush throughout the building as those not invited craned to hear whatever their business may have be through the muffled walls of that windowless room.
With a staff of 154 in Western Australia, the Commission, reverently referred to as the Triple C, is empowered to combat and reduce the incidence of organised crime but I learned and this is true, it is not actually empowered to investigate organised crime itself.
And that, I think, explains why they were at our work. Not that the boss has revealed any details, but a paper subsequently obtained reveals that the Triple C has been doing the rounds of universities telling vice-chancellors and senior managers that investigating bullying “may well” be within their statutory brief. They are hot on it too, and who would I be to disregard their vigour when it concurs so uniformly with mine. Bullying in universities occurs, the Triple C believes, because of the skill level of staff (managers) involved in change management, stress on staff and students, an absence of sanctions on perpetrators and a lack of commitment by VCs and senior management to zero tolerance of bullying and violence. Better still, the Triple C believes some universities are more careful about protecting their reputations than managing misconduct, and are prone to attacking whistleblowers rather than investigating their complaints.
As every day passes, I like this country more.

A rugged encounter
There are times when it is perfectly acceptable to mock a person for their physical appearance and this could well be one of them. While it may be common knowledge outside our sphere, it transpires that Australian cricketer Doug Bollinger is also known as Doug the Rug for reasons that became obvious when his Chennai team tasted success in the Indian IPL cricket league the other night.
Bollinger has been previously mentioned on our travels, he is one of those is thoroughly dislikeable Australian players, a real lad, full of it, looks indulged and gives the appearance of being completely self-absorbed. So, while things are going his way, all is well and good, but when not, look out, and that’s just what happened here.
Doug, we learned, has something called “replacement hair” and things turned more than a little bit sour when his Chennai teammate Suresh Raina tried to remove the rug during celebrations after the team’s win against the Kolkata Knight Riders. Bollinger furiously extracted himself from Raina’s grasp, and with both hands brushed back the hair which had “clearly moved off the scalp for a brief period.” Reports are that he is so sensitive about his hairdo that, when asked recently by an Australian journalist whether he was worried that the ferocious Wellington wind might play havoc with his thatch, he tersely refused to answer the question.
Of course the papers have had a field day after Doug’s hairy or rug-ged moment? "Bollinger keeps his Head" trumpeted the Australian Associated Press after his "hair-raising encounter", while Raina was credited with being after a scalp of his own.
Also none too impressed are the tourism people in Margaret River, about two and a half hours south of Perth by car. A little like New Zealand’s Marlborough, the landscape around Margaret River is dotted in vineyards with boutique wineries popping up in every nook and cranny and the town’s main street awash with craft shops and trendy eateries. Without a doubt this is the place in Western Australia for wine, its Semillon Sauvignon Blanc rather good, and with that, the region has a new found popularity among the upwardly mobile as a trendy weekend destination. Imagine then the shock to have the region’s service industry described in the autumn edition of a no less august a publication as the Western 4 Wheel Driver as people so unfriendly they have stony faces that look like they have been sat on by a rutting stag. “Talk about service with a frown,” says the magazine’s editor, Nick Underwood, tourists are clearly seen as the “human equivalent of weeds.”
With subscribers in such far-flung places as Oman and Cyprus, W4WD is clearly a magazine of international influence, and Underwood would not have enhanced the region’s prospects with his continuing descriptions. Along with about twenty others, his first encounter with locals left him needing “something to wash the bad taste of indifference from [the group’s] memories” and so they pulled into a winery only to be “accosted by the person in charge who must have just taken a swig from a seriously corked bottle of Chateau Vinaigrette”. That person told him he couldn’t just turn up with a large group; they needed to phone in advance. “Fair dinkum,” continued Underwood, “it was all we could do not to speed as we bore north to open shops and better attitudes.”
It was as well we didn’t stop as we passed through Margaret River one recent Sunday; we hadn’t phoned ahead, the place was chocker and we would not have wanted to be served by people who looked as though they had been sat on by a rutting stag. The winery we stopped at had run out of the particular tipple we were seeking and the young woman told us it was unlikely it would ever be made again because the winemaker didn’t like it one little bit. That was, despite it being their only variety to sell out completely and the subject of requested orders. As Mr Underwood rightly surmises, the customer is not always right.
On a completely different topic, a study has shown that the longer couples are married, the less time they spend talking to each other. According to The Sunday Times, the survey reveals that older couples restrict their conversation to about three minutes per hour, the topics limited to the weather and practical things like passing the tomato sauce. As would be expected, young lovers hardly shut up while newlyweds are down to 40 minutes of chat per hour, couples together sixteen years at 16 minutes to the hour and veterans of twenty years or more down to five minutes.
On that basis the Braithwaite-Churtons should be at about 4 minutes per hour, which seems quite a lot really.

Sittin' on a Docker the bay
For a fleeting moment I thought I was at a Hurricanes rugby match. Inside an oval stadium the crowd bayed for the umpire’s blood, the home team’s lead ebbing away as penalties mounted against them. But such thoughts were only fleeting, this stadium was bigger and an almost capacity house of 38,000, almost all dressed the purple of the Fremantle Dockers, roared in support and spurred their team on just as it looked they would crumble at the hands of the Geelong Cats. Welcome to the Australian Football League (AFL) or Aussie Rules Rugby as it is commonly known.
And that is where this match differed from a Hurricanes’ encounter. The stadium was bigger; the pitch 180 meters long and about 120 wide and the crowd, instead of whinging and wilting before the final whistle and heading home in the face of defeat, started a cacophony of relentless chants, thunderously so, urging their team to pull back from the brink. It was ear-splitting, deafening; these were fans like nothing else, infinitely more passionate than rugby union supporters and at the same time somehow more civilised than English football fans.
It would be pointless to try and explain Australian Rules football, it is helter-skelter, seemingly a cross between Celtic and other forms of football, the various rugby codes, handball and netball all at once and played at a frenetic pace, the players each looking like they’ve had a methamphetamine hit before running on the field. And perhaps they had, last week two West Coast Sea Eagles were fined for making mobile phone calls in the three-quarter time break, they claimed to their ruck coach but in reality probably to their dealers.
Before the game there are five, four, three, two and one minute sirens, each one resembling an air raid warning and I looked overhead, waiting for the rumble of World War II Lancaster Bombers, but then I realised the war was more than sixty years ago and we were in allied territory.
That aside, there are a stack of goal posts at the each end of the field; a kick, punt-style, between the centre ones earns six points, a kick between the outside ones a single point. There are four, twenty-five minute quarters, but each quarter runs to about 33 minutes for no apparent reason, the game taking more than two and a half hours in all. There are about ten umpires, the main one bounces the ball on the ground at the start and at breakdowns, each time initiating a melee for ricocheted possession, and then there are the throwers in. They’re a weird mob, when a ball goes into touch one of these odd people, back turned to the players, returns the ball to the field of play by a carefully choreographed, blind-throw over the head. And if that is strange, whenever goals are scored, tight-panted umpires go into an almost orgasmic frenzy comprising something resembling the bird-dance, popular in the 1980s, followed by waving of flags, semaphore-style, quite to whom it was impossible to tell.
Subiaco Oval is the shrine of AFL in Perth, and the name is something in itself. Kiwis may pronounce the ground as Sue-be-ar-co, in Australian it is Sue-be-ack-o, and while pronunciation lapses can result in mocking, talking Australian, or ‘Strine, just isn’t right. My boss is named Lyn, in New Zealand pronounced Lin, but here in the West it is Len. Aside from the obvious comparison to the Johnny Cash tune, A Boy Named Sue, it just feels plain disrespectful to call a female boss by a boy’s name. So I don’t.
But back to Subiaco Oval, we, some work colleagues and I, had seats the equivalent to being in the God’s at a London West End Theatre, perched high, ever so high, above the field while the players scrambled their way through what seemed about three days of football below. “Subi” could never be described as a comfortable stadium; the seats are more rigid and upright than on a Jetstar aircraft and seemingly built to paralyse anyone with poor posture. Slumping would certainly have resulted in being unceremonially catapulted to certain death several stories below, so we didn’t dare. We watched, riveted, instead.
If the game was entertaining so too was the young man seated next to a couple of youngish women directly to our front. Clearly unknown to each other before the match this young man commenced a a flirting ritual, his confidence buoyed in direct proportion to the amount of beer he consumed. As the Dockers pulled back from a twenty point deficit he became more animated, as they took a slender lead his hands tentatively, then confidently, clasped around the buttocks of the nearest woman, and as they took the lead he pulled her, vice-like, in close embrace. When the final air raid siren sounded giving a seven point winning margin to the Dockers, our young man was as keen to score a winning goal as had been the Dockers; the poor woman, also in an almost choreographed sequence, was attempting to wriggle out from under him. This could have been the Kama Sutra, although clearly she was experienced in escaping such encounters; last heard she was telling this clumsy but eager young man that she was leaving the ground in the opposite direction to him, but this was no obstacle; he was leaving in whichever direction gave him the most hope, and he thought her accompanying him to the Subiaco Hotel was a suitable option.
A couple of hours later, after drinks and a dinner at an overpriced but delicious Subi Indian restaurant, the northbound platform at the train station was all but deserted. That is aside from me and that same young man, forlorn, drunk and alone. Clearly the fortune of the Dockers hadn’t translated into equivalent success for him but I refrained from asking for a score card.
Perhaps next time because I’ll be back for another game now that I’m a true, fair weather, Dockers fan.

Barely rooted
There are some stories, even among our favourites, which should have died a natural death, and it was expected that the Tree Man of Thornlie would become one of those which amused and entertained us for a while and then quietly went away. But it is not the case; this story just refuses to go away. Richard Pennicuik has come down from his tree after 110 days aloft claiming a moral victory after his favourite eucalyptus melliodora withstood the big Perth storm. Immediately he was whisked off to a local radio station to be given a makeover, a shave, haircut, new suit and silk tie, all televised for our new celebrity, and that could or should have been an end to it all.
But so often with fame or infamy comes complication and while Pennicuik was getting his makeover, a supporter climbed the now fenced off tree and, mysteriously, a new platform appeared lodged between the branches. It was enough to spur on the enraged council to proceed with its prosecution against Pennicuik.
The complication is not so much the new tree man, but the fact that Pennicuik’s new advisors are the sort of people who, to put it mildly and in Australian, are drongos. The sort who possess that sort of smug, superior, know-it-all, cat that swallowed the canary, confident moral authority that has foundation only in their well-oiled imaginations. Think social creditors and crimplene trousers.
The trouble with relying on social credit lookalikes for advice, as Pennicuik should have been able to figure out, is that their form of flawed logic and unimpeachable self-belief can only compound rather than resolve problems, Consequentially, support, credibility and respect can be lost in a flash and people like Pennicuik lose the moral high ground and be relegated to the same turf as every other inconsequential nutter.
With his advisor, Pennicuik turned up in the Armadale Magistrates Court yesterday and then refused to enter a plea to a charge of obstructing the Gosnell City Council in its bid to chop down his tree. The basis of the refusal, that the prosecution notice spelled his surname in underlined capitals and had his surname preceding his Christian name rather than the other way around as it appears on his birth certificate. Not surprisingly, the Magistrate described Pennicuik’s argument as absurd, accused him of wasting the court’s time, adjourned the hearing so he could get legal advice and, quite sensibly, refused to allow his so-called advisor to act as a “McKenzie Friend”, a legally unqualified person who helps another in court.
This man’s name is James Dean and unlike his 1950’s namesake, he could be described as a rebel without a clue. Pennicuik now leaves all of his public comment to Dean, the latter telling The West Australian newspaper that the Magistrate might be ignorant of the definition of a McKenzie Friend, that a plea couldn’t be entered under a name other than that exactly on the birth certificate and that local authorities were unconstitutional and didn’t have the jurisdiction to “manage or control our commonwealth land.” Oh dear.
Former neighbours Terry and Barbara Anderson came for dinner the other night, and Marty set out to impress them with the purchase of wine branded Catching Thieves. The name wasn’t mean to convey any subliminal, negative message; it was just a nice looking bottle from the highly regarded Margaret River region.
What the purchase apparently showed, however, was a susceptibility to be taken in by “childish” names which, according to the experts, are making Western Australian wines and wineries an international laughing stock. The Sunday Times reports that names such as Greedy Sheep, Moaning Frog, Mongrel Creek, Devil’s Lair, Howling Wolf, Swooping Magpie and Wombat Lodge have drinkers scratching their heads. The worst offender, the Bare Rooted label, illustrated by copulating Koalas.
Wine makers are defending their naming rights, saying it is all a bit of fun and that only wine snobs would object to names that create a unique selling point. Not to be outdone, wine writer Peter Forrestal suggested that there were no howling wolves at Margaret River last time he checked.
Next time, we will be more careful when choosing wines.