The truth about the territories

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The propaganda war over Palestine continues unabated and largely unchallenged by Western media or politicians, as outlined here by Henry Ergas.

In the controversy over Israeli settlements in the West Bank – as in every
other aspect of that intractable conflict – the facts have disappeared in the
dust storm. Plainly erroneous claims are endlessly repeated, from those
made by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband in announcing a new round of
sanctions to Penny Wong’s assertion at the UN that settler violence had
displaced 15,000 children in the past six months alone.

With the settlements cast as the root of all evil, and any expansion condemned as a vast and
insidious obstacle to peace, basic realities are steadfastly ignored.
Putting the settlements into perspective is the obvious place to start in
righting the balance. Government-authorised settlement in the West Bank
began in 1967 under Levi Eshkol’s Labour-led government and expanded
under subsequent governments, especially Yitzhak Rabin’s first Labour
government of 1974-77.
The settlements thus long predate the Oslo Accords, much less the
governments of Benjamin Netanyahu. Although their legality was disputed
then, and remains so, the Accords neither required their dismantling nor
imposed a settlement freeze. Reflecting the territorial arrangements the
Accords established, almost all lie in Area C, the part of the West Bank left
under full Israeli control, including planning and zoning, pending a final
agreement.
Built almost entirely on previously unoccupied public land, their built-up
area has been and remains a minuscule share of the West Bank’s territory.
Settlements covered just 1.7 per cent of that territory in 2010; their footprint
has since expanded to some 2 per cent, mainly because of an increase in the
number of dispersed outposts with a mere handful of inhabitants.
Nor does the change in their footprint suggest a galloping demographic
takeover. Israeli settlers account for 15 per cent of the West Bank’s
population, an increase of just three percentage points since 2010.

And despite the proliferation of scattered outposts, that population remains very
heavily concentrated in blocs near the Green Line – the armistice line
established between Israel and Jordan in 1949 – and around Jerusalem.
The geographical concentration of the settler population matters greatly. In
effect, under the detailed parameters US president Bill Clinton proposed in
December 2000 (and which Israel accepted), annexing just 5 per cent of the
West Bank, with fully compensating transfers of Israeli territory to the
Palestinian state, would have brought 80 per cent of the settlers within
Israel’s borders.

A two-state solution was therefore technically feasible
without having to remove a vast number of settlers, even assuming the peace
agreement specified that no settlements were to remain in a Palestinian
state.
The spread of outposts would require more settlements to be removed under
a Clinton-type deal today than in 2000. However, those outposts have so few
inhabitants that the total number of settlers who would have to move has
not increased greatly – meaning that a two-state solution, were it politically
feasible, would not be vastly harder to achieve through a land swap now than
it was then.
Claims that mere increases in the settler population are, in themselves, an
obstacle to a peace deal are consequently seriously incorrect. But that hasn’t
stopped governments, including our own, from their incessant
condemnation. The latest sanctions, imposed by the UK, France and Canada
among others, are simply the most recent expression of that enduring
hostility. Yet the grounds on which they are based – the plans to build in the
E1 corridor and the issue of settler violence – are scarcely adequate
justifications.
Much invoked and little understood, E1 is 12sq km of open ground in the
West Bank that lies between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim – a city of about
38,000 whose residents overwhelmingly commute to Jerusalem, making it in
practice a suburb of the capital.
In announcing the sanctions, Miliband described the proposals to develop E1
as “crossing a longstanding red line”. Yet Israel’s commitment to developing
this sliver of territory is neither recent nor the invention of alleged rightwing extremists.

First authorised by Rabin in the 1970s, it was further
elaborated by Shimon Peres and elevated into a vital national security
concern by Ehud Barak. As for retaining Ma’ale Adumim and its link to
Jerusalem within Israel, it has been a consistent feature of Israeli negotiating
positions since the suburb was first mooted 50 years ago.

Nor is there anything in the present proposal’s scale that could possibly
justify the uproar. Its 1234 residential units, along with a commercial and
industrial zone, would occupy just more than two square kilometres out of
the West Bank’s 5700 – less than four-hundredths of 1 per cent. Even at 3.6
occupants per unit, the homes would increase the settler population by well
under 1 per cent and the West Bank’s total population by a tiny fraction of
that.

When a far more expansive plan, of which this is the first stage, was
approved in August 2025, the Starmer government issued a formulaic
statement of concern – a restraint that makes the sincerity of its outrage now
that much harder to credit.
The claim that developing E1 would destroy the contiguity needed for a
Palestinian state is no sounder. To begin with, the E1 corridor does not reach
the Jordan River, as it would have to do to split the West Bank in two. A
north-south passage would remain east of Ma’ale Adumim – and it would be
as wide as, or wider than, Israel at its narrow coastal waist. A width deemed
perfectly sufficient for Israel can hardly, in itself, make a Palestinian state
unviable.
Beyond territorial contiguity, critics argue that Palestinians would lose
north-south transport links under their own control. Yet Israel has invested
specifically to preserve those links. It compulsorily acquired 1.41sq km of
land in 2007 and spent close to $138m on Route 4370, which opened in
January 2019. In March 2025, the government committed a further A$154m to
extend the road south around E1 to al-Eizariya.
The case against E1 is therefore untenable. The question of violence is more
complex – and more troubling.
Any serious account must begin by recognising that the violence is far from
one-sided. Attacks on settlers intensified during the Second Intifada and
have continued, at varying levels, ever since.

In 2024, there were 6343 attacks on Israelis in the West Bank, leaving 27 murdered and more than 300
seriously wounded. The number of attacks declined in 2025, but not the toll
they exacted: there were 5051 attacks on settlers, with 24 murdered and more
than 400 seriously wounded – and the lethality of the attacks has picked up
again this year.
Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority has an explicit duty to
investigate and prosecute those offences and notify Israel of the outcome.
That obligation matters because many perpetrators live in, and retreat into,
areas where the PA is responsible for law enforcement. \

Yet, apart from a handful of high-profile cases in which it faced intense international
pressure, the PA has constantly refused to discharge that duty. Instead, it has
paid – and continues to pay – Palestinians convicted of terrorist attacks by
Israeli courts, openly boasting of its support.
In 2025, the United States cited the PA’s continued incitement and
glorification of violence when imposing sanctions. Australia, Britain, France
and Canada have not shown comparable resolve: they have left the PA’s
active promotion of attacks on Israelis entirely unpunished. While repeatedly
sanctioning Israeli ministers accused of tolerating or fomenting settler
violence, they have imposed no sanctions whatsoever on the leaders of the
PA who brazenly urge attacks on settlers and prevent their perpetrators from
being brought to justice.
Appalling as it is, that asymmetry cannot excuse settler violence. Although
Palestinian attacks on settlers remain far greater in number and severity, the
United Nations reports that recorded settler attacks rose from 535 incidents
in 2021 to 1828 in 2025. Those figures should not be taken at face value: they
have been marred by extensive double counting and by a definition of
“violence” that has, on occasion, included the mere act of entering the
Temple Mount.
Nor is Wong’s statement “that in just the last six months, settler violence
has driven 15,000 children from their homes” plausible: the UN itself reports
an estimate of about 1300 over that period, and going by careful analyses of
past UN estimates, that is likely to be a significant overstatement.

But while those claims lack credibility, uncertainty about absolute levels does not
negate the fact that settler violence has grown, especially recently.
Three factors appear to be at work. The first is the arrival in the West Bank of
an estimated 300- 400 severely disaffected young Israelis. Some embrace
religious messianism; others resemble violent anarchists; many live in
makeshift outposts and transient encampments. Their motives are difficult
to fathom; what is certain is that their actions receive a prominence
mainstream outlets never accord to attacks on settlers.
The second is the pressure on Israel’s armed forces. Continuing threats in
Gaza and along the Lebanese border have drawn the Israel Defence Forces’
most experienced troops to those fronts. Patrolling the West Bank has
consequently been left to conscripts fresh out of high school, who lack the
extensive training, experience and discipline dealing with violent offenders
demands.

Divided jurisdiction between police and the IDF, the apparent
sympathy for the Jewish offenders by some soldiers, and the reluctance of
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to allow police to crack down on
violent offenders have all aggravated the problems that causes.
Last but no less significant is the corrosive effect of prolonged war. Hamas’s
savagery on October 7, followed by a conflict of exceptional duration and
intensity, has further embittered relations between Palestinians and Israelis,
making the West Bank a tinderbox. With fear and distrust pervasive on all
sides, violence becomes easier to commit and easier to condone.
Deplorable as that situation undoubtedly is, Miliband’s contention –
predictably echoed by UN secretary-general Antonio Guetteres – that settler
violence amounts to state-endorsed ethnic cleansing is absurd. Ethnic
cleansing means precisely that: removing an existing ethnic group from the
territory, entirely or close to it.
That was the case, for example, with the expulsion of the Jews from the Arab
lands and Iran over the period from 1943 to 1965. In contrast to the chaotic,
largely unplanned, flight of the Palestinians during the Israeli War of
Independence, those expulsions’ scale, persistence and severity deliberately
erased communities that long predated Islam, reducing the Jewish
population in the Muslim Middle East from 946,000 to less than 10,000.

More recently, after Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, the entire Greek Cypriot
community – some 150,000 people – fled or were expelled, leaving fewer
than 100 Greeks in Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus; the Greek Orthodox
were then deliberately replaced by tens of thousands of Muslim settlers from
the Turkish mainland. Turkey is now doing much the same in parts of
northern Syria, where Kurds are being expelled from their traditional
homelands. Last but not least, Azerbaijan’s conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh
in 2023 was followed by the complete removal of the region’s 100,000
Armenian Christians, with only some 10 Armenians (who were too old and ill
to travel) remaining behind. There too, Azeri settlers were moved into the
homes of those who had been expelled or forced to flee.

The contrast to the West Bank is obvious. Far from being “cleansed” out of
the territory, the Palestinian population has grown from about two million in
2000 to 3.3 million in 2024 – an increase of roughly two-thirds in just over
two decades.

There is no sign whatsoever that growth has been slowed by any
Israeli government, much less that any credible Israeli government could
believe removing the Palestinian population was feasible. And no Israelis
have ever been moved to the West Bank by the Israeli government, rather
than settling there by choice.
But Miliband’s political posturing inadvertently highlights a crucial point.
Not a single one of the Muslim states sponsoring and directing the regions’
recent instances of real ethnic cleansing has been sanctioned.

In fact, despite fierce attacks by Turkey on the Syrian Kurds, no international sanctions have
been imposed on Turkey, any more than Turkey has been sanctioned for its
continued transfer of population to occupied Cyprus. Equally, despite still
widespread attacks by Syrian military and paramilitary forces on the
country’s Druze, Alawite and Christian minorities, the sanctions imposed on
the Assad regime are being dismantled. And there are no sanctions
whatsoever on Azerbaijan.

It is therefore plain that Israel is being treated as a special case. The bias
against the Jewish state is not just morally repugnant; it destroys what little
confidence Israelis retain in the very Western states whose security
guarantees would be indispensable to any credible two-state solution. It also
convinces Palestinians that time is on their side, further weakening the
incentive to negotiate.

The result is to reinforce, perhaps irreparably, the conviction Israelis already hold that the other side is implacably and
homicidally hostile, putting reconciliation beyond reach.
It is impossible to think of any way in which the recent sanctions improve
that situation.

Rather, what is needed are credible measures that encourage
not only Israelis but Palestinians to enforce the rule of law on the West Bank.
And while Israel needs to do more to deter, arrest and punish any settlers
who engage in violence, it is undeniable that the Palestinian Authority
remains a fundamental obstacle to assuring the rule of law.

That is partly because of the PA’s refusal to direct its police force to
effectively crack down on the violent offenders who assault and murder
Israelis on the West Bank and in Israel itself. But the rule of law requires
more than mere policing – it also requires independent courts that are
committed to ensuring all parties, including minorities, benefit from the
laws’ equal protection.

Yet PA president Mahmoud Abbas has made it clear
that he has no intention whatsoever of moving in that direction.
He has, on the contrary, demolished the judicial independence the
Palestinian Basic Law of 2003 (that serves as the Palestinian constitution)
was designed to protect. Significant sections of the Palestinian judicial
system objected strenuously; but – with the exception of the US – they
received no practical support from Western governments, which continued
to bankroll the PA.

Nor did the Western media pay the slightest attention to
the destruction of the Palestinian judiciary, instead focusing to the point of
obsession on the Netanyahu government’s proposed changes to the Israeli
judicial system.

That has left Abbas free to issue 400 decrees touching the judiciary alone.
When the Supreme Court voided his choice of chief justice, he created a
constitutional court and staffed it with judges who had never ruled against
him. In 2019, 11 days after even that court struck down his judicial retirement
decree, he retired 19 senior judges, including 12 who had brought the case.
Thanks to those manoeuvres, Abbas sits at the head of every judicial body in
Palestine, leaving law enforcement drenched in corruption, arbitrary in
execution and permeated by human rights abuses.

And it is Abbas or his handpicked successor who would preside over an independent Palestinian
state, further hardening Israeli opposition to that state’s formation.
To make things worse, Abbas has repeatedly portrayed the settlers as entirely
undesirable aliens.

He has insisted that voluntarily selling West Bank land to
Israelis who wish to live there amounts to treason, turned a blind eye to the
torture and assassination of alleged sellers by Palestinian security forces, and
insisted Palestinian courts punish any sellers who go to trial with life
imprisonment.

Moreover, in implementing that prohibition, the Palestinian
Supreme Court has referred to it as a ban on selling land to Jews, highlighting
its manifest antisemitism. Last but not least, a requirement for the
settlements to be removed has been a persistent feature of the Palestinian
position in successive negotiations. Decades of bitter conflict help explain that hostility.

Even so, it is not self-evident why a future Palestinian state could not accommodate a Jewish minority, just as non-Jews constitute 26 per cent of Israel’s population. And the insistence on removing the settlers is particularly difficult to reconcile
with their substantial contribution to the West Bank’s economy.
Thus, spending on construction, maintenance and consumer goods and
services has directly boosted Palestinian incomes, while the settlements
underpin a thriving productive sector that, unlike most of the Palestinian
economy, does not depend on development assistance.

According to the World Bank, Israeli firms operating in the West Bank pay Arab workers wages
that can reach or exceed twice those available in Palestinian firms, generate
20 per cent of the area’s GDP and account for an even larger share of its
private economic activity.
The insistence on expelling the settlers, despite those economic benefits,
reflects the same underlying intolerance that has driven the wholesale
expulsion of Jews from the Arab Middle East, the elimination of the
Mandaeans, the incessant attacks on groups such as the Yazidis, Baha’i,
Zoroastrians and Copts, and the precipitous decline, from 10 per cent in 1950
to less than 3 per cent today, in the Christian share of the Arab states’
population.

At its core is a virulent opposition to tolerating any religious
diversity whatsoever in territories regarded as historically Muslim lands.
Until there is credible evidence of some change in that attitude, including
and especially from the PA, it will be hard for Israelis, and even more so the
settlers, to readily accept a two-state solution. And just as a new Israeli
government needs to effectively deter and punish settler violence, so the PA
must be demonstrably committed to ending its antisemitic rhetoric,
stopping terrorism and upholding – as the Oslo agreements demand – the
rule of law.

The central obstacle to peace is therefore political, not a matter of geography
or of population. Land swaps could, if necessary, accommodate the great
majority of settlers; they cannot supply the security and mutual confidence
on which coexistence depends. Both governments must be genuinely bound
by their obligations if that confidence is to take root.

Yet the Western governments imposing sanctions on Israel, including our
own, invoke a two-state solution while doing nothing to secure its
indispensable conditions.

Their sanctions have become a substitute for a policy capable of bringing peace closer, leaving the two-state solution a
platitude to be piously recited even as their actions make it ever less likely.
But that doesn’t seem to trouble them in the least: so long as they can be
seen to punish Israel, they are content.

As for the cost in human lives, that is for others to bear.

This story appeared in The Australian 29 September 2026

Oh Errol ….

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Errol Flynn: the True Story of Australia’s Hollywood Icon

Patricia O’Brien

Golden Age screen hero, silver-tongued charmer, tough-as-nails swashbuckling sailor, swordsman and horseman with a virtual patent on historic hero roles. Dripping with money, ridiculously handsome and a back story of real adventures – every woman wanted him, every man wanted to be him.

So the conventional wisdom goes. But I’m not so sure I’d give everything just to be like him, as Aussie Crawl’s Guy McDonough sings.

When things were good, they were very good. When they were bad, they were very, very bad.  Fast, furious and fantastic as Captain Blood’s reign in the limelight was, Flynn’s course around the sun was ultimately short-lived and pathetic, badly fractured by drugs, booze and a faltering grasp on reality.

Author O’Brien, fascinated by the man and the legend, seems at pains at the outset to cement Flynn in the category of Weinstein, Epstein and the casting couch cabal that’s run Hollywood for decades. And there seems little doubt he paired up with more than a few ingenues busting to get him to get them into Tinsel Town. But the portrait she paints of the Tasmanian megastar is far more complex, pegged by some 50 pages of notes and bibliography references.

Truth is, it’s doubtful Hollywood’s hosted a heartthrob more arresting, magnetic, exciting or rakish than Errol Flynn.  Or troubled, because to his CV you can safely add fabulist, wife-beater, heroin and coke junkie, blotto alcoholic, hot-headed brawler …

“Don’t tell me it’s true, I don’t wanna hear about it”, as McDonough says. Oh Errol.

Unlike Flynn’s own My Wicked Wicked Ways autobiography, ghosted by Earl Conrad, O’Brien places his adventures, achievements, and failures, against the straitened social, moral and political contexts of the day, as well as today.

Hypocrisy is writ large, and often, but Flynn’s far from the only guilty party. His actions are aided, abetted and, perhaps most notably, forgiven by an adoring public every bit as addicted to him as he is to the superstar lifestyle. It’s a curious mirror on human behaviour.

The Flynn story remains rivetting nonetheless. His Tasmanian childhood, his Sydney years, are detailed comprehensively. Likewise, his teenage years abandoned in England public school system. His parents’ fortunes and careers are spelled in similar detail, as are his relationships with them, deferring favourably to his father while highly critical of his mother.

His New Guinea years overseeing copra and tobacco operations, his sailing adventures, writing and early acting efforts are all mapped out in a sharp contemporary context that stresses Flynn’s predilection for colonial-style management and attitudes. He might have easily made a plantation slave-master is the clear impression O’Brien delivers while rejecting Nazi spy claims levelled against Flynn.

As for womanising, and teenager-ising, it’s fair to say the apple didn’t fall far from the tree given Flynn’s old man Theodore’s philandering. Mum Marelle had more than just cause to cast her eye elsewhere. Flynn expanded the role exponentially, amid three marriages and an infamous rape trial.

O’Brien tracks Flynn’s movies and their production doggedly: Blood, Robin Hood, Sea Hawk, Charge of the Light Brigade, Santa Fe Trail, Don Juan, his numerous westerns – together with his co-stars, his work schedules, hard-nosed contracts and demands, and the eventual souring of all the above.

As age, health and dissolute lifestyle caught up with him, his career came under a cloud as did his finances. Grand plans on a Jamaica plantation, which looked promising for a while, failed to eventuate. Likewise, efforts to resurrect his film prospects. Taking up with a 15-year-old girlfriend while filming the Cuban Revolution, alongside Fidel Castro, perhaps highlights the degree of fame and farce of his final years.

Ultimately, getting sense out of Flynn was hard work at best, as Earl Conrad learned. His death at age 50 was a foregone conclusion. Same goes for his ongoing popularity, both assisted and perpetuated by O’Brien’s compelling if rather academic account of this intriguing celebrity.

Grab that cash with both hands ….

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The Summons

John Grisham

Nothing like second-hand bookshops to deliver the goods even if they’re so often full of pap, sap and crap. Grisham’s no stranger in these places, what with more than 50 runaway best-sellers and 50 million sales, and well worth a revisit.

When lawyer Ray Atlee’s father, a well-regarded judge, falls off the perch to cancer, there’s just him and a hopeless addict brother to figure in his role as executor of the old boy’s will. Mum’s long gone. Apart from a near-derelict antebellum home in old Mississippi, there’s a not-so-grand total of just six grand in the kitty.

Until, that is, Ray finds a cash cache of some $3 million squirrelled away in the house.

Where the hell did it come from? The old man was straight as a die. Never ever earned anything like this much. He’d given all his other money away, to charities and anyone who needed it.

What to do with it? Declare it in the estate and the IRS will help itself to half. Is it clean? Is it marked? Did the judge actually own it?

If Ray splits it with junkie bro, how long will said bad-arse last before OD-ing?

All the makings of a fair dilemma, and one which rapidly becomes a dilemma on steroids as other more serious bad-arses start intimidating Ray with break-ins, tracking his movements with millimetre precision, fires, phone and letter threats, phoney authority cautions ….

Ray’s a sharp lawyer himself and sets about figuring how to stash, launder and invest the money. If only his pursuers didn’t know every hidey-hole he tucks away the cash, forcing him into a wild nomadic lifestyle with a boot-load of cash while trying to investigate a mysterious trial his father adjudicated.

Enter the big end of town, unscrupulous lawyers, class actions, murderous flunkies and Ray’s basically at his wit’s end. Just when he thinks he get to the bottom of the mystery, with all its attendant moral ambiguities, you’d be tempted to think it’s a fair way to wrap up a scintillating tale.

But Grisham, as usual, has a few surprises up his sleeve. If you’re paying attention, you might anticipate them but then again maybe not.

Gripping, solidly-paced and clever stuff – at a good second-hand store near you.

 

Quick trip road trip

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Melbourne-Yass

Nothing like tripping over your feet and face-planting the footpath going in to the pub instead of coming out. Scone, knee and wrist all debatable for a day or two afterwards. Punters looking out from inside no doubt chortling for a week.

Someone lost their spirit level laying the pavement at Yass but the Guinness, porterhouse and State of Origin inside the Clubhouse pub, if not the punters’ sorry headshakes, compensated well enough.

So too, the colonial shades haunting The Globe Inn’s Georgian lodgings, the more contemporary spirits at the neat little Yazzbar, the heritage streetscape architecture and the Yass River, a pretty Murrumbidgee tributary, gurgling through the southern New South Wales township.

A regional centre forever, Yass is a tidy stop-off on the north road to old Sin City but it is morphing into a peri-urban aspect of Canberra as new greenfield estates pop up, reshaping the landscape and demography for its third century of white settlement.

Best get in soon if you want soak up its extant heritage elements. If you’re staying in motels, check them first. Some untidy over-priced 1950s jobs, poorly renovated somewhere in the ’70s, aren’t quite the heritage you’re probably after.

Yass hosts a fair scrip of music, arts, film and first nations festivals, along with theatre, classical and jazz concerts, exhibitions, markets and intimate acoustic music sessions, regulation ‘live music’ jukeboxes and trivia nights that speak to vibrant contemporary entertainments.

Even Tim the Yowie Man is revving up to poke a spotlight at the “hidden underbelly” of the explorer Hamilton Hume’s nearby Cooma Cottage. Hopefully, he gives his expeditionary offsider Hovell the spray he so richly deserves.

For all that, Yass is still a sleepy country town, so take that for the peaceable equanimity it garners the soul.

 

Colonial architecture, Yass

Yass-Sydney

Fighting your way into Sydney’s southern burbs on mid-winter, peak-hour, drizzly dusk is navigator catnip. If you have a navigator on hand.

Then battling your way into an unfamiliar domestic airport terminal to extricate an arrival is even more fun for any cartographer/surveyor/Gerard Mercators you might have in the passenger seat.

Failing those resources, your car’s nav system is sure to send you round in circles, rhomboids, parallelograms and geometric conundrums. Not quite the AI you’re after, so a co-pilot with a sharp eye is still a handy backstop.

Handy, too, when the frazzled passenger you pick up happens to know her way about without any need for cyber breadcrumbs. So onwards and upwards from the overpriced Crowne Plaza, which is cheaper and better than basically every hotel or B&B nearer the CBD, but which will lock you upstairs in the lift when you go to retrieve the room keycard you left downstairs.

Onwards to revisit Circular Quay for the first time in yonks. Ocean liners, Boaty McBoatface harbour ferries, a giant tessellated coathanger and Danish-inspired sails soaring crooked carapaces into the night … place hasn’t changed so much. Apart from a maze of eateries and thousands of office lights reflected in the water.

Obligatory pedestrianism out of the way left only one thing for it. Repair to the waterside Whalebridge retreat for a little Gallic charm a la d’Abricot sours, onion soup and no, garcon, not the burger, I ordered the bourguignon.  Quelle horreur but they were lovely about it. Might have all been speaking French, you know, if you check your Sydney history books.

Whalebridge, Circular Quay

Next morning, DiDi into town, it’s about half Uber, and ferry out to Taronga Zoo to find animals enjoying probably the best view there is of Sydney. Not for the elephants, though. That game’s had its day and the erstwhile pachyderm digs are now museum pieces to animal cruelty.

Set a couple hours aside to get a proper handle on this exquisite zoo and everything from its birds, tigers and meerkats to reptiles, farmyards and colonial cannonades.

Tooronga Zoo

After splashing your way back to town, head for George Street’s Hilton Hotel and its Marble Bar, the boozy architectural legacy of Tattersall’s founder George Adams. Mahogany and marble magyk at every turn, it’s a rescued heritage-listed piece of Victoriana on par with just about anything in the Old Dart antipodes.

Don’t hold back on throwing the bar-keep a curly cocktail request, either, they love a challenge, even if they don’t seem to know much about the history of the place. And don’t miss the jazz nights, either. Nothing quite like good underground music.

The Marble Bar, The Rocks’ Hero of Waterloo Hotel

When you’re finished there, a brisk walk north will get you up into the gentrified underbelly of an old Sydney once so over-crowded, unsanitary and full of bubonic plague it was all but demolished back around 1900. Much tidier now, but still leaching history and old ghosts from every crevice of its sandstone firmament.

Trick tip, get on to the EatClub app and you’ll save up to 40 per cent, maybe more, off your meals – and drinks – for last minute walk-ins at several of its pubs and eateries.

Still got a day up your sleeve? Head over the bridge and down Military Road for a ramble around the ridiculous real estate you would have seen from the zoo ferry. Neutral Bay, Cremorne, Mosman, Balmoral, plus the Platypus submarine base … plenty to ponder in the undulating well-treed waterside northern burbs.

Can’t go wrong at the Mosman Rowers Club for a smart lunch and early imbibe watching the McBoatfaces working their way to and from the Mosman Bay Wharf just a magnum hoik over the water. But don’t try that: “We don’t do that sort of theng in Mothman,” as the locals say, usually when newcomers prune the greenery for better views of the bridge and the Opera House.

Last trip I made there, some yonks ago, involved a water taxi race across the harbour with a very late and very miffed driver in pursuit. They don’t do that either, apparently, but I always thought it’s the quick and the dead in old Sydney.

Probably been that way a while, some 3000 years or so if you go by the overhang cave shelter by the road at Balmoral Beach. Been tidied up in recent times of the tip-site depredations it suffered for many years. The average age of the good folks grubbing inside the Balmoral Bathers Pavilion up the road a ways is probably not far off that, either, bless them.

Mosman Cove, Balmoral Beach

Another evening in the bosom of The Rocks, flitting between pubs, outside eateries, Guinness and pinot noirs – thankfully not face-planting anywhere – is a nice way to wrap up 48 hours in town.

But not before a requisite Negroni or two, in memory of Bourdain if need be, somewhere like Alleyway off the top end of St on the way out. The lava murals opposite are schmick but not a patch on the staggering sandstone ngarunga nangama calm water installation around the corner by artist Judy Watson in the lobby of 200 George St, tapping quite extraordinarily Sydney’s ancient Tank Stream, archaeology and the Aboriginal significance of the site. Worth a trip to Sydney in its own right.

 

Judy Watson’s ngarunga nangama calm water

Sydney-Wodonga

Back out on the road a rainy day, across the huge river gorges south of Sydney and before long into a landscape like a old National Bank calendar image, all rolling hills and ‘lightly wooded’ eucalypt stands as per the old surveyor parlance. Geology and geography all a reminder why it took Euro pioneers so long to get across the Blue Mountains.

Green Murrumbidgee country and its pretty off-freeway towns eventually cede way to the Murray and the Albury-Wodonga border and a new road game of dodge the Victorian pot/sinkholes. Into a Quest redoubt, with a polite upgrade, and off to the cleverly re-imagined Goods Shed with its pizzas, piano-singer background warble and craft beer-only totalitarianism.

Cold nights in this snow country neighbour, which is a jumping off point for northeast beauties such as Yack, Beechworth, the Mitta and Nariel valleys, Snake Gully Stanley and swags more tiny bush villages. If you’re up to it, head down to Omeo and Bairnsdale and come home the long way through Lakes Entrance, Metung and Maffra.

Maybe check out Lake Tyers and its Waterwheel Beach Tavern – aka the Devil’s Hole Hotel. You might like to drop a line but a word of caution from singer-songwriter Van Walker and his bandmates in The Ferriters:

“Be careful where you cast out,

“Cause there’s something down beneath,

“Nobody’s ever seen it but it will drag you down to hell,

“And nobody will save you at the Devil’s Hole Hotel.”

Fair drive back to Bearbrass from there. Get home safely.

The Goods Shed, Wodonga

Losing objectivity, surrendering integrity

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Image: The Australian 

Something’s been iffy about Australian media coverage of the Middle East since the October 7 massacre of Israel’s Nova festival-goers by Hamas.

Much more than iffy, actually, more a case of distinctly and disturbingly on the nose.

Almost immediately, the hundreds of innocents murdered and kidnapped were somehow deemed deserving of the horrors and terrors visited on them by their vicious, ruthless, rancorous attackers by extensive elements of the media that come down squarely in support of the Palestinian cause.

Never mind the manic and virulent bloodlust that erupted on so-called social media. That cesspool of humanity is the wild west of unchecked depravity.

But the mainstream media that likes to pride itself on producing breakfast for the brain, quality journalism, and fair and balanced, accurate and unbiased reporting has proven itself lacking in just about any of those attributes.

Israel, despite constant daily bombardment from Hamas and its affiliates for years, in addition to the massacre, has been villified as the aggressor.

Hamas, for all its human-shield defences, and starvation terror against its constituents, has been painted as hard done by, an  undeserving and tortured victim. As if it didn’t bring every Israeli defensive rocket 0n its own head.

More recently, we’ve seen an abject lack of concern from the West’s pro-Palestine camp for the massacred, tortured and executed victims of its backers, Iran, in its brutal purges.

How did we get to this? How did we find our purported media champions of integrity so off the mark?

I could bang on for some time but an article in The Australian by Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, says it better than I would and with considerably more clout.

Read on:

FROM JOURNALIST TO JEW TO ZIONIST

MICHAEL GAWENDA

In September 1997, I was appointed editor of The Age. I had worked at the paper, on and off, for almost three decades.

Neither the announcement of my appointment as editor nor the announcement that I was appointed editor-in-chief in 2003 mentioned that I was a Jew, although in the Jewish community the fact that I was the first Jew to be appointed to the position in the paper’s 150-year history was cause for some celebration.

In the decades before I was appointed editor there were few instances when the fact that I was a Jew was an issue; not when I worked for The Age, not when I worked for the Herald and Weekly Times and not when I worked for Time magazine.

What was important to me was that I was committed to the ethical rules of good journalism – open-mindedness, fairness, accuracy and something approaching balance. The idea of balance is often misunderstood.

It is not giving every view on any issue equal weight. What it means is avoiding giving preference to voices that you find agreeable and in line with your thinking but, rather, making sure that you have given not equal space but sufficient weight to the arguments and experiences of people with whom you may disagree, even vehemently so.

The fact that I was a Jew was not an issue. Not among my fellow journalists and not in the letters that came flooding into Time. This was what great journalism was about. Deep reporting during which the reporter’s preconceptions are put aside as much as is possible to get as close to the “first rough cut of history”.

Let us now fast-forward to August 2025. Sky News presenter and journalist Sharri Markson had just interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when Linton Besser, the host of Media Watch on the ABC, called.

He wanted to know whether I would be prepared to comment on the interview for his program. He had asked Ray Martin and Kerry O’Brien to comment as well. I agreed to do it.

I criticised the interview because Markson had not asked the obvious questions about Netanyahu’s recent criticism of the Australian government and, specifically, of its failure to deal with what was, Netanyahu said, an explosion of antisemitism. Indeed, Anthony Albanese was exacerbating the antisemitism problem, he said.

This was an extraordinary intervention in Australian politics. The Jewish community leadership criticised Netanyahu for his intervention. So why no questions about this?

Martin and O’Brien more or less agreed with me on this, but O’Brien went on to say Markson should have challenged him over the war in Gaza and this should have been the main thrust of the interview.

I thought he was wrong; Markson had a few minutes and the issue of Netanyahu’s intervention in Australian policies was clearly the main issue for Australian audiences.

Before Media Watch went to air, Besser called to read to me how he was going to characterise me on the program. Was it OK if he described me as a veteran journalist and a Zionist?

I asked how he knew I was a Zionist. And how was this important? Wasn’t it important that I had been a senior editor at Time and editor-in-chief of The Age? Was I not a Zionist, he asked. When I requested to be called a former editor-in-chief of The Age and nothing else, Besser said it was important to acknowledge my views on Israel.

What was used eventually was that I was a former editor of The Age and a contributor to The Australian who has written about his deep feelings for Israel. I agreed to the change, albeit reluctantly.

I wondered how it was that Besser could want to characterise me as a Zionist when he knew what the word had come to mean among many journalists and many people on the left.

Zionists were supporters of an evil, racist ideology and of Israel, a genocidal, apartheid state.

What did it mean that the host of Media Watch wanted to refer to me as a Zionist?

That question is at the heart of the way a large section of the media, a large number of journalists, have reported the rise of hostility and hatred towards Jews in Australia across the past couple of decades and that exploded after October 7, 2023.

It is the question that has to be answered in light of the attacks on Jewish institutions and assaults on Jews growing and culminating in the Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025.

Answers to this question need – that dreaded word – context. 5\

In 1970 when I started at The Age, the majority by far of journalists on the paper – including the legendary editor Graham Perkin – were not tertiary educated. Many of the journalists were working-class men – there were few women in journalism – including the sub-editors on the papers for which I worked, who in the main were masters of plain, grammatically correct English.

There were no celebrity journalists. They were reporters, wonderful reporters many of them, out there most afternoons and nights – for that was when we worked – in search of a story.

All journalists now have a university degree. They come, in the main, from the middle class, many of them from private schools. Most of them have done undergraduate degrees in journalism. Some have done a master of journalism.

I know something about university journalism courses because when I left full-time journalism I was hired to set up a journalism centre at the University of Melbourne and during my time at the university I helped plan a master’s program that started after I left.

The Centre for Advancing Journalism is thriving, I’m told, and the master’s program apparently is doing OK, although it is not the program I had wanted: one aimed at mid-career journalists who wanted to sharpen their skills, learn new skills and have the time to think about journalism in a digital age, when most media companies were in crisis, their economic model destroyed by the internet, their future cloudy at best.

This master’s program didn’t happen. What happened can be summed up by the fact that one of the senior lecturers in journalism and international journalism in the master’s program at Melbourne University is Jeff Sparrow, who was the editor of Overland magazine when it published an open letter titled “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” on October 21, 2023, 14 days after the October 7 Hamas attack and before there had been any ground invasion by the Israel Defence Forces.

The letter was signed by hundreds of writers and artists. To understand the significance of Sparrow’s position and that of journalists who signed his letter, one needs to understand the ethical conflict this created.

When I was editor of The Age, the publisher and I, together with the staff, drew up a code of condict for the paper. The code sets out ethical standards expected of The Age.

Central to the code were these principles:

  • Staff should seek to present only fair, balanced and accurate journalism.
  • It is in the best interests of The Age that real and perceived conflicts of interest be eliminated.
  • Staff involved in a story who believe they have an interest that could be seen to influence their views on the issue at hand should acknowledge that interest during preparation and at publication of the story.

These principles of what constituted ethical journalism were – and remain, it must be emphasised – widely shared by most newspapers, the ABC, commercial television networks’ news services, the Australian Press Council and the journalists union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

The ABC editorial policies document is clear and unequivocal about this. Its journalism must be independent and responsible and practised with integrity. The ABC has a statutory duty to be accurate according to “recognised standards of objective journalism”. And its journalism must be impartial and include “diverse perspectives”.

This was before social media took hold and journalists became brands and the young journalists, armed with a journalism degree, came to view the old ethical rules as quaint and outdated.

This produced the sort of coverage of the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists, their taking of 251 hostages and the subsequent war in Gaza, most of which only newspaper editors and television executive producers who are wilfully blind and wilfully deaf would be proud.

This is particularly true when it comes to the way the rise and then the explosion of hostility to Jews and Jew-hatred after October 7 was covered in large sections of the media.

I mean by this the ABC and the Nine newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and Guardian Australia.

In my view, The Australian’s coverage of these issues – I mean in particular how the rise in Jew-hatred had affected the lives of Australian Jews and threatened Australian multiculturalism – has been pretty good.

I must declare that I write for The Australian. I am happy to do so, but I would have also liked to reach the readers of the paper I wrote for and edited, but The Age has not wanted to publish me. Not a single piece by me has been published since October 7, 2023.

To understand how many journalists see their role in the coverage of Israel and the Palestinians and the rise in hostility towards Jews, we need to go back to 2021.

In May 2021, a letter signed by 400 journalists and publishers during the short war between Hamas and Israel that year started with a preamble that these journalists and publishers presented as a guide to the way the war should be covered.

Here are the main points:

  • Israel’s government led by Netanyahu had unleashed an unprovoked brutal war against the besieged population of Gaza.
  • Seventy-five years after the Nakba – the expulsion by Israel of 750,000 Palestinians – Israel was maintaining an apartheid regime against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and inside Israel (my italics).

This was the potted history – the context – that the letter signers wanted journalists covering the Israel-Palestinian conflict to sign on to and use whenever they reported on any aspect of the Israel-Palestinian story and, importantly, when it came to covering the Australian Jewish community and its formal leadership, a community that was overwhelmingly attached to Israel and its central role in Jewish life.

The preamble ends with this: “We believe that the coverage of Palestine must be improved, that it should no longer prioritise the same discredited spokespeople and narratives and that new voices are urgently needed.”

The letter went on to say that journalists must prioritise the voices of the oppressed, the Palestinians, and avoid “both-siderism” that equates the victims of the “military occupation to its instigators”.

What is more, media organisations must respect the right of journalists to publicly and openly express personal solidarity with the Palestinian cause without penalty to their personal or professional life.

How all this would not compromise their reporting is wholly unclear, as if such old-fashioned considerations no longer mattered.

Then, in October 2021, Monash University Publishing – as part of a series of small books on government policy commissioned by the then Monash University guest publisher Louise Adler – published Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment by ABC senior editorial executive John Lyons, who was head of investigations and oversaw some of the ABC’s highprofile programs, including Four Corners, when he wrote Dateline Jerusalem.

By the time it was published he was the ABC’s global affairs editor. The thesis of his book was that a powerful lobby, variously referred to as the Israel lobby or the Jewish lobby, had exercised its formidable powers to bend  editors and journalists to its will, to make them too frightened of retaliation to properly and vigorously cover the Middle East, especially what Israel was doing to the Palestinians.

This “exposure” of a powerful Jewish lobby and its nefarious work by Lyons was not new.

For decades sections of the left had worried about the way “powerful” Jews forced weak-kneed Australian governments – prime ministers and foreign ministers – to act against our national interest when it came to Israel.

Lyons had been a long-time, Middle East correspondent for The Australian. He also had overseen iconic ABC programs and investigations.

How it was appropriate for him to write about the way powerful Jews were distorting and censoring the journalism of reporters under his control is beyond me.

Instead, Lyons was given the softest interviews on the ABC. He was clearly a hero to many ABC journalists.

He went on to become an award-winning journalist for his coverage of the Gaza war. He continued to argue that the Israel lobby was desperately trying to silence him.

The letter signed by hundreds of journalists in May 2021 – similar letters were signed by thousands of journalists in the US and Britain – and the Lyons book in which he argued so fiercely against the Israel lobby/Jewish lobby became the blueprint for how journalists would cover the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and the taking of hundreds of hostages, and the subsequent Gaza war.

The goal was to expose the nefarious doings of the Israel/Jewish lobby, that bunch of powerful Jews who were trying to silence journalists and were using the exaggerated threat of antisemitism as a weapon to counter criticism of Israel’s “genocidal” war in Gaza.

The journalists who signed the letter were, in the main, the product of university journalism courses in which they were instructed by academics such as the aforementioned Sparrow, the editor of Overland magazine.

Days after the October 7 attacks, Sparrow organised and published the now-infamous letter signed by hundreds of writers that urged the massacre by Hamas of 1200 Israelis to be seen as an act of “resistance”.

He was teaching journalism and what constituted good, ethical journalism in the masters course at Melbourne University.

In the weeks after the October 7 massacre of Israeli men, women and children and the taking of hundreds of hostages, including children who were still toddlers, a dozen or so letters signed by hundreds of journalists and supported by the journalists union, the MEAA, were distributed.

The first of these letters was released and distributed to all media organisations on November 10. The signatories to the letter, hundreds of them, identified as members of the MEAA.

The letter condemned the Australian government’s support for “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza”. The letter went on to demand that the government change its policies and condemn Israel for its “genocide” of the people of Gaza.

Some of the letters urged journalists, with the support of the MEAA, to give equal weight to statements coming from the declared terrorist group Hamas to those from the IDF.

Scores of letters and petitions were circulated and signed by thousands of journalists in the Anglosphere that not only called on governments to end their support for Israel but urged journalists to side with the Palestinians, preference their voices and implicitly silence the voices of Zionists and Israel defenders, defenders of a “genocidal state”.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of this was the news coverage and the commentary that followed the release last July of the report by the government-appointed envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal.

The report was released by the Prime Minister at a solemn press conference. There, too, was Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who is also Arts Minister. Albanese spoke about the importance of Segal’s work and how the government would carefully examine the report’s recommendations and act accordingly as soon as possible to curb rising antisemitism.

The actual report and its recommendations barely had any coverage on the ABC, in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

The plan had taken 12 months to prepare, with significant contributions from major Jewish institutions such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

The recommendations in the report came from the mainstream of the Jewish community.

Not long after the press conference, social media was full of hate and abuse directed at these Zionists who had conjured this plan to protect and provide cover for “genocidal Israel”.

The posts maintained these people were powerful Jews, Zionist Jews, supporters of genocide and adherents of an ideology that was evil and racist and was designed to oppress and eventually ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, the indigenous people of Palestine.

In The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, a Jewish lawyer, Josh Bornstein, wrote of the way the plan was designed to subvert Australia’s legal system. Bornstein is an anti-Zionist who believes an Israel lobby of powerful Jews has worked in the interests of Israel and not Australia.

In Guardian Australia, Adler, another anti-Zionist Jew, wrote about the way the plan weaponised antisemitism – surely a shocking and grave accusation – in the service of Zionism and Israel. And she saw in the plan the work of the dreaded and dreadful Israel lobby.

Both are on the advisory board of anti-Zionist group the Jewish Council of Australia.

Not only has The Age, The SMH and the ABC given the JCA space beyond what could be considered fair, but editors of opinion pages, when it came to giving space to Jewish commentators who may not be anti-Zionist but who hate Netanyahu, believe that Israel has committed major war crimes in Gaza – if not quite genocide – and believe that somehow, if there has been a real rise in Jew-hatred, Netanyahu and his criminal government are responsible.

Writer Richard Flanagan wrote this in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in response to the Segal plan:

“The report creates an attractive template that could be broadened to silence dissenting voices that question the state’s policies on other issues … Despite the Segal report’s claims about rising antisemitism, some of which are contested as exaggerated by leading Jewish figures (he is referring to Adler in particular), it fails to provide a single citation in evidence.”

And he goes on to attack Segal’s credibility because her husband had made donations to the lobby group Advance which, Flanagan writes, “advocates anti-Palestinian positions”.

This attack was subsequently amplified by other journalists who considered Segal a creature of the Israel lobby, given she had once been the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

In its coverage of the plan, the ABC concentrated on one recommendation: that the ABC and SBS as publicly funded broadcasters should be monitored to ensure the coverage of the Gaza war and of the Jewish community in Australia was fair and accurate.

In a major interview on the 7.30 program, Segal was vigorously interrogated about this recommendation, and nothing else in her report, by host Sarah Ferguson, who was clearly outraged by Segal’s “attack on the independence of the ABC”.

After the Bondi Beach massacre, despite the shock expressed by many journalists about what had happened, there was great enthusiasm about the reluctant and late decision by the Albanese government to set up a royal commission into antisemitism and what it called “social cohesion”.

The Age published a cartoon by Cathy Wilcox that suggested the outpouring of support for a royal commission from people in business and professional sport was not spontaneous but the work of a certain powerful group whose conductor was the evil Netanyahu.

There was a time when journalists were faithful servants of the institutions for which they worked – the ABC and the big newspapers in particular – by which I mean they were proud of these institutions and felt privileged to work for them.

That time has gone. The decline of trust in institutions, generally, has infected journalists. Many journalists now see themselves as individual “brands” who happen to work for the ABC or The Age or the SMH. There is little pride – or trust for that matter – in their employers.

It is important to know how we got here for there to be any real hope of reasserting the ethical principles that once governed what was considered good journalism.

What is needed is brave editorial leadership; for editors and ABC senior editorial executives to reassert their authority, to consistently insist that journalists adhere to the ethical principles of the organisation.

They must be the enforcers of ethical best practice. They must do the work they are paid to do.

Michael Gawenda is a former editor of The Age and the author of the book My Life as a Jew. This is an edited version of a paper published by the Centre for Independent Studies. Gawenda will appear as a witness on these issues at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion led by Virginia Bell SC.

This article appeared in The Australian 2 May 2026

 

Happy birthday, Keni, and keep ’em coming

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Been hearing a mountain of stories lately about sick kids, hard-pressed parents, dedicated medicos and carers, and a fair tribe of corporate, trade and everyman supporters looking to help the old Royal Kiddies Hospital in Parkville.

Lengthy family history with the place going back 40 and 50 years now; one that remains a bruise and a scar, a stab of cold old grief as much as a well of warmth, care, dedication, even gallows humour fun in the face of that intransigent shrew, fate.

So it’s lovely to see things like the Good Friday Appeal in its 95th year kicking hard to raise bucks for a place that’s a world-class backstop and saviour for the families with sick kids around the country but which, for reasons unfathomable, can’t garner enough recurring funding from government to do all the work it needs to do.

I’ve found myself amid a remarkable exercise, with remarkable people, building and donating a house-and-land package to the appeal to flog off at auction and then hand over all the proceeds to the hospital. Half a million bucks worth of land, another half million and more of tradie services and materials, all gratis. My gig’s been to help plug it to media.

It’s all just one part of a much larger citizen action that generates upwards of $25 million to a fine cause but in its own right has raised more than a million bucks a year the last five years running. Which is good, and so much so, I suspect, that Spring Street’s getting embarrassed, and been donating a million itself in a crocodile-tears attempt to negate its neglect.

But my cynicism can’t eclipse the emotion tied to those people in there for all the right reasons, driven by everything from grief to gratitude, hope to humanity.

On auction day, I find myself standing beside mother-of-six Teigan Fono as her two boys, Keni and Kobi, are presented with birthday cakes on auctioneer Paul Tzamalis’ stage as 600-plus supporters of this fund-raiser sing a beautiful ‘Happy Birthday’ to them led by singer Marcus Hayden. Auspicious day for a birthday and a wonderful moment.

Teigan’s fronted every single promo event we’ve staged for this house, determined to help the hospital that removed a brain tumour from Keni in 2023 and which is still keeping close, close tabs on him.

She’s in tears. I’m not far away myself. But she has to move, Keni has to run through the banner at the Good Friday clash between North Melbourne and Carlton, and they’re dyed-in-the-wool Shinboner fans. No time to get emotional, too much to do. Lives to be lived.

Two weeks earlier, the boys were at the house for a promo when North’s Charlie Comben fronted for a bit of a kick-to-kick and an Easter egg hunt for the cameras. Major hoot for the boys. Curious intersection of things too, I thought, for Charlie’s great-uncle Bruce’s ties. To the Carlton opposition.

Bruce was the Blues captain back in the day, from 1958 to 1960. He went to God back in 2002. Charlie, born 2001, didn’t know him but has heard lots about him since. He hadn’t heard, however, how Bruce helped my kid brother during his time at the Royal Children’s, battling leukaemia back in the ’70s and ’80s.

Young Damien, aka Jack, was a dyed-in-the-wool Bluebagger. Our darling old man, Jim, played cricket against Bruce. The two also ran a barley share-crop operation on Skeleton Creek near Werribee.

When Bruce got wind of young Jack’s strife, he rounded up The Age sports journo Mick Sheahan and Blues superstar Alex Jesaulenko and sorted them up to The Royal Children’s with a footy and a photographer.

Story and pic ran back page of The Age. Just huge at the time. Been a family heirloom ever since and a masterpiece in league with the grand masters as far as we’re concerned.

Jezza and young Jack, 1976

I could probably relate any number of other connections and stories about Brucie and Mick, which are lovely, and amusing, but they struggle to match the fact Jezza turned up at the hospital again, a while later and unannounced, to say g’day and see how young Damien was going.

None of us knew until after. Brilliant. For a nine-year-old kid, something else again.

So, yeah, the house raised $1,212,000 through the effort of my mob, Villawood Properties who coughed up the land and a swag of marketing, Henley Homes and its army of tradies and suppliers, and a host of supporters including the sadly injury-prone but otherwise champion Charlie Comben.

I have to say, though, my heart goes out to Teigan, and her husband Jason, and I hope that house somehow returns the favour to Keni. A bit of positive karma in their troubled times would be just lovely.

 

Crusades and Richard’s lying heart

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Coeur de Lion

The Journals of Richard the Lionheart

By Isla Tate

Impossible to read Richard’s fictitious journals about his 12th century Holy Land warmongering without drawing parallels with the unholy oil wars in the Middle East as we speak.

East versus West for possession of Jerusalem – ground zero of Islam, Christianity and Judaism – is now about access to oil reserves, buttressed by logics equally mediaeval.

Iran, battered, brutal and belligerent, will fight its ideological/religious cause to the last civilian. The US, foolish, confused and denied oil it had untrammelled access to before the Iran conflict, is looking for a way to exit its Epic Balls-up with its dignity intact.

Fair chance it will declare victory if Tehran somehow acquiesces to providing that access once again. Which is probably what you’ll find in future dictionary definitions of vainglorious. Along with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezeula, Cuba …

Richard the Lionheart, shrewd son of the Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane, was as French as he was English and spent most of his working life at war with his family spread across two countries. The hatred, betrayal and cruelty attendant to this was oddly and ironically eclipsed, at least partially, by the Saracen Saladin’s regard for him.

No such esteem forthcoming from the East for our contemporary Richard I avatar. His fervour’s nothing on that of the Templars. His attention span’s incapable of anything resembling a siege and his military record is a draft-dodging zip. The bone spurs might have been in his head.

Richard, by contrast, was a veteran battlefield commander deemed the sharpest general in all Europe. History’s written by the victor, of course, or used to be. Nowadays it’s written by the loser, too. Neither are too accurate.

Which is a kind of undercurrent to Tate’s Coeur de Lion journals. Alluring as they are, loaded with chilling violence, gratuitous sex and Machiavellian palace intrigues, they’re also patently bullshit. He didn’t write them, just in case you’re unclear about things.

These journals, like history, politics and journalism, don’t really let the facts get in the way of a good story.

But brother versus brother, versus mother then with mother, for and against dad, not to mention in-laws, with the body count mounting all the while, make for grand coliseum stuff.

There’s nothing like a brutal evisceration or 20, let alone a terrifying flaying that makes getting burnt at the stake look good, to keep you glued to the page.

And yet there is a fair degree of truth in there.

Richard’s wife’s travails are chilling, horrifying and mysterious, their love story tragic. His brother Henry, the young king, is a bombastic, ignorant dolt. His favourite brother is a turncoat while his mother is expert at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds. His purported ally, Phillip II, King of France, is a duplicitous poltroon of the first order.

All good fodder for lovers of historic faction, naturally. Throw in a sniff of the supernatural, if religion’s not enough, such as the Hashishiyyin, or the Assassins, and their leader, the Old Man of the Mountains, and you have more than enough adventure, politics, religion, sex, violence, exotic and enigma for a best-seller.

Which, of course, is what Coeur de Lion is. And a book about what the current Middle East crusade could possibly become too. I’ve got a working title: Cur de Guerre – The Journals of Jeffrey Epstein.

High-flying jungle bungle just bananas

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Took a while but I finally figured out who was responsible, thanks to young Gex’z Anei of Ubud. And all in the middle a torrential tropical Indonesian downpour.

It wasn’t Warren Buffett, or Milton Friedman, whose names and portraits are emblazoned across the mysterious Boeing 737 deep in the Balinese mountain village of Penestenan.

I know Boeing has its issues but I wouldn’t have thought it’s been crash-landing these suckers in the Ubud jungle.

Tell the truth, it’s not a wreck, it’s a hotel room, and yours for about $100 a night at the Villa Biyu Siyu, which means the hundred bananas villa.

It has most things you’ll want: wifi, aircon, hot tub, tv, workspace, swimming pool, free parking, a river and a waterfall.

You can even jump into the cockpit to play Flying High if you’re silly enough. I missed the plantains but you can pick the fattest passionfruits you’ve ever seen straight off the trees.

I’d been trying to figure the plane’s provenance since discovering it on Google Earth and visiting briefly a couple of years back. All I’d figured was some bloke named Hugo someone assembled it on his estate.

Young Anei explained he was the late Hugo J. Van Reijen, a Dutch-born economist and champion of free-market ideas, smaller government and free immigration, and head of an import/export business handling large quantities of bank notes and stamps between more than 80 different countries.

Hugo was an entrepreneur, globetrotter, artist, photographer and author, and clearly a fan of Buffett and Friedman. But why the plane?

Turns out he was a regular critic of airlines which might have something to do with things. He published the 1997 book, Why Not Fly Cheaper? How to Save in Air Travel Costs, which has become a collector’s item with Amazon asking a not-so-cheap $780. That’s a good few bananas.

Hugo was a well-known and well-regarded economic commentator, who ran conferences and discussions at his Ubud estate.

He published a photo book, Love them or hate them, more than 1000 articles, addressed international conferences and also ran up annual calendars, made by villagers in Nepal, to help along his Libertarian cause.

Funny thing, for all his celebrity, for the fact he pulled a thumping great 737 together in his back yard, locals know bugger-all about the place.

I spent a couple of hours with a GPS and a surveyor trying to locate the place a couple of years back. Even the neighbours were unaware of the aircraft.

It’s easy to find now I know where to go but, man, in the middle of an Ubud monsoon? I know who’s bananas …

See also: https://noelmurphy.com.au/blog/bushwhacked-by-the-jungle-again/

And also: https://noelmurphy.com.au/portfolio-item/fortune-favour-and-crocking-fnq/

 

Ingenious boardwalk marks Indigenous heritage

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A sleek floating boardwalk and lookout on a rocky knoll at developer Villawood Properties’ Rathdowne, shortlisted in this year’s Planning Institute of Australia awards, highlights the possibilities of design underscoring Indigenous and heritage elements.

With views as far as the Melbourne CBD, and taking in local waterways and surrounding landscapes, the lookout is an exemplar of touch-the-earth-lightly engineering, and a striking celebration of an important Wurundjeri meeting place.

Rising alongside the entrance to the 1000-lot Rathdowne, as well as the UDIA Great Place-awarded Club Rathdowne, the boardwalk/lookout has been expertly engineered with a bespoke steel frame sitting atop in-situ rocks, leaving insects, reptiles, small animal habitats and grasses and shrubs undisturbed.

Villawood’s team workshopped the project with Wurundjeri elders and developed the innovative no-ground-disturbance design to accommodate the hill’s challenging stony topography.

The boardwalk features a viewing platform with seating, offering a stunning panorama and a welcoming space for reflection and connection. It bridges the past and present, preserving the site’s heritage, protecting significant artefacts and honouring its history as a traditional meeting place.

The Planning Institute of Australia has recognised the project, shortlisting it for its 2025 Planning with Country award.

See also: https://villawoodproperties.com.au/news/rathdownes-ingenious-boardwalk-celebrates-indigenous-heritage/

Mick’s got the mail on heritage post boxes

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They’ve been handsome sturdy fixtures of the Australian social and geographical landscape since the Gold Rush days but the ravages of time and progress have seriously depleted their numbers.

Heritage rescuer Mick Slocum says the historic postal boxes that once numbered in the thousands have been reduced to just 180. And he’s on a mission to help preserve a rare example at Geelong’s Eastern Beach.

A cast-iron postal box at the corner of Swanston and Alexandra, a square pyramid style shaped liked an obelisk with a large cornice, is up for a little of the TLC he’s rendered to more than 60 of these treasures to date.

His work in Ballarat recently earned him a National Trust excellence award, after restoring and painting 18 post boxes across the city in their original colours. He’s also turned his brushes to numerous post boxes throughout Melbourne, Bendigo, Castlemaine and other regional towns.

Now he’s eyeing Geelong and some other nearby sites.

What started as a graffiti clean-up on his first pillar post box, a local job, became a mission for the 76-year-old history buff.

“I’d driven past it 1000 times. It was covered in graffiti. One day I stopped and thought I’ll just clean it off for a minute,” he says.

“I bought some cleaning material, cleaned it up and looked at it and thought, I’ll just keep going.

“Then I bought cans of red, gold and black, went back and rubbed it all down and sanded it and resprayed it.

“It was a work of art and made me want to keep going.”

Mick’s love of Aussie heritage goes back a while. He’s celebrated Australia’s musical tradition since his youth, heading up national icon The Bushwhackers as frontman for many years as well as The Sundowners and Slocum & Co.

He’s earned himself an OAM along the journey for his service to the performing arts and if you cast around Flemington pubs you’ll still find him regularly displaying his accordion skills in sessions with long-time music mates.

There’s no mistaking him on the job either. Mick’s been a fashion model of the past for decades, resplendent in checks, tweeds, tartans, boaters and blazers, although he tones down a smidgin with more utilitarian clobber while working on the post boxes.

As for the boxes themselves, while common in Europe in the 18th century, they arrived in England in the 1850s and Melbourne in the 1860s.

They follow three main designs: two circular styles which are similar and cover the periods 1860 to 1875, and 1890 to 1920, respectively, and the more unusual square design of the Eastern Beach model – a design prominent between 1875 and 1890 across country Victoria.

Geelong Advertiser 15 November 2025