ANZAC's Lost Meaning

In Martin Place pre-dawn chill the Last Post’s last note fades. An Australian choir sings an English song – Kipling’s Imperial Hymn – that shuffles bent with age.

Lest we forget.

Governors and premiers, vicars and priests, MPs and generals and admirals and their spouses, schoolkids and veterans and soldiers still on call raise chapped, pink faces to the cenotaph. Cold bronze sentries stand mute.

Lest we forget

A solemn murmur from this place ripples, out to others ringing a thousand memorials. Rippling mumbles like Sunday Catholics. Uncomprehending psalmody. Words so oft-repeated the meaning is lost.

We will remember them, lest we forget.

Lest we forget the soldiers, known and unknown – the boys in khaki boatloads steaming for Far side of Earth.

Lest we forget they died for no good reason,butchered and burned before Empire’s empty tabernacles. Lest we forget politicians and popes,

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There’s a story old women tell in Eastern Europe or the Middle-East. I can't remember which and it doesn't matter. A story told by old women in one of those places where old women – mothers and grandmothers, sisters and wives – understand suffering. I may embellish it in the telling, but that doesn't matter either. The things that have hurt you, the old women say, will never leave you. They talk about a box. You can’t keep that pain inside all the time and can’t keep looking at it, so you put it in a box. You're attached to the box – maybe by an umbilical cord. It’s part of you but outside you. To move anywhere you have to carry it. Occasionally the box will get too heavy – been living life one-handed – you have to set it down. This is when you stop, open the box, and remind yourself what’s inside. You remind yourself it’s real, a part of you, and that you’ve been able to bear it. There will be more in the box than last time you looked. If you’ve been paying attention the new pa

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Oswald killed Kennedy. That simple statement, three weeks out from the fiftieth anniversary of the event, remains more controversial than it needs to be. In any group of five people it’s likely at least two will vehemently disagree, while a third – and possibly a fourth – will have “unanswered questions”. It was the CIA. It was the Mob. It was pro-Castro Cubans. It was anti-Castro Cubans. It was the military-industrial complex. It was some combination of the above – maybe all of them. There were two gunmen. There were four. Even Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, didn’t “discount the possibility” of a conspiracy – commies, of course (Johnson himself was yet another at whom the finger has been pointed). All the conspiracy theories ignore one important piece of evidence: the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. Once you understand a little about this enigmatic figure, hidden for fifty years in plain sight, no further explanation is required. The assassination can be seen for what it was – a s

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www.heroinaddiction.com

"Are you not going to do up all of it?" asked Beni narkily.


"I was going to save some for later - for both of us, I mean." Not for the first time, Craig was a little taken aback that someone wasn't in tune with his thoughts without his having to explain them. "And I thought you could do without your neighbours seeing the paramedics arrive."


"If you're worried about dropping, take less yourself and give the rest to me - or don't give me any at all. I'm an old man with old veins. I'm not pricking my skin for half a twenty."


Craig sighed, shrugged, and emptied the rest of the deal into the spoon.


"And by the way," added Beni. "If I drop, don't call the ambulance. Just wash your hands, wipe off your fingerprints, and lock the door behind you."

This old trip. "Not a chance," Craig shot back, smiling an impatient grimace. "You have my permission to kill yourself,

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It’s one of the oldest clichés: the awful silence; the blank page, glaring and menacing; the lonely writer driven to despair by the keyboard's mute mockery. The image is powerful - just like all myths.


But there's no such thing as writer's block. No writer worthy of the name is ever unable to write something. Writing is a kind of mania: it happens to you whether you want it to or not. "Wanting to be a writer" is a daydream indulged by people with other things to do. Like any other mania, it alienates people upon whose understanding you may have presumed. Like any other mania, it will drag you by the hair to an absurd peak and show you the view; then - just when you’ve begun to feel safe in your own omniscience - it will dig its fingers into your throat, fuck you with a broom handle and hurl you from the precipice. Like any other mania, you either manage it or you don’t. No, the blank page doesn't frighten real writers. The

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“For those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share,
With courage let us all combine to advance Australia fair.”

So, here we are again, election time. Most of us have already made up our minds, based on what we’ve heard on talk-back radio or what we’ve seen on breakfast TV and the front page of the newspaper.

The rest don’t care, just want it to be over, and either won’t vote at all or will vote for whomever we hate the least. Politicians are all the same.

So are elections. Lost among the Who do you trust?; the Costings! Black hole! Surplus! Surplus! Surplus!; and the Yeah, but what are you gonna give ME? is the main reason for having elections at all. We don’t just choose our government, we also decide who we are and who we’ll be as a nation – either deliberately or by default.

Psychopaths Dressed as Clowns

First, discard the idea that politicians are a...