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

Philistines at the gate

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It’s tough seeing Australia’s rich legacy of built heritage so often vanish before your eyes.

And tough watching important buildings slowly fall into disrepair, succumbing to the old ploy of demolition by neglect.

No fun seeing them surreptitiously knocked over in the night by owner-vandals or set alight by arsonists in friction-fire attacks where insurance policies rub up against mortgage papers.

Crook, too, when they’re disappeared by home renovators flying under the radar of planning laws.

Gets nasty and personal when you see the historic house where you and all your schoolmates were born demolished and replaced by a McDonald’s outlet. And worse when old mates who numbered the bricks to rebuild it haven’t done so decades later.

The aqueduct under construction, and the Bow Truss woolstore.

Not unlike the Marshall bluestone cottage demolished for Barwon Heads Road works where locals were assured it would be rebuilt elsewhere. Two levels of government presently shirking any responsibility.

It’s especially tough, however, when demolition of this built fabric of the community is legally sanctioned by authorities.

Nothing short of barbarianism how so many stunning buildings that made Melbourne the greatest city in the world during the gold boom of the 1800s failed to last even 60 or 70 years before they started being ripped down.

By the time of the Melbourne Olympics, most were considered a shameful, ageing disgrace that needed culling in a modern international city under the world’s gaze – never mind that cities in war-torn Europe were rebuilding their shattered architectural treasures.

All culled in the name progress, that weasel-word justifying the Philistine finance-driven destruction of the design, culture, social milieu and beauty within the built form that created our cities. Cradles burnt on the altar of Mammon.

Schools, pubs, churches, grand shops, public institutions, woolstores, any number of homes making up a living museum of Australian architecture have been fuel to the fires of progressive expediency.

Geelong’s been as much as shocker as anyone for bowling over anything with any semblance of legacy, history, heritage, social or cultural connection.

There might still a good bit about and, yeah, some praiseworthy efforts at restoration and preservation. But I’ve seen some sad losses in Geelong and I watching with trepidation every time I see a planning notice on the front fence of any old house in Geelong.

The Dell and The Priory mysteriously disappeared when the adjoining Ariston House was earmarked as a childcare centre. North Geelong Primary, learning centre of so any post-war migrants, almost disappeared to arson. Deakin Uni’s social housing museum of historic regional buildings was put to bed by none other than the uni that oversaw its creation.

Waverley House was knocked down to make way for the waterfront’s Crowne Plaza complex, with gormless CFMEU vandals hosing National Trust protesters for their temerity. Jack Mundey should have been cartwheeling in his grave.

Two lovely between-the-war homes next to The Palais gave up the ghost without a whisper. Now a heritage car park. An ancient forgotten chapel behind the old Aberdeen Chateau near my place was smartly demolished in front of me one Saturday morning without ceremony or recognition.

The CBD has long hosted vacant buildings left to rot in their footings. Buildings that can’t be knocked down but which also can’t be rebuilt, or renovated so they might be repurposed. I’ve also seen owners refuse to repair their properties.

I kind of like the idea of owners who deliberately destroy heritage buildings being forced surrender the land’s title. But I’ll admit it’s a bit heavy, there’s no doubt maintenance costs are real and not everyone can afford them. And that you’re unlikely to be able to readily sell such a property, making compulsory acquisition maybe not such a bad idea.

I do spy an irony in the architectural landmark that is the Geelong Heritage Centre, contrasting the fact so much of Geelong’s architectural heritage has vanished.

Similarly, in comparisons drawn between the heritage Dennys Lascelles Bow Truss Building on the site of the present-day TAC HQ and the heritage Breakwater aqueduct Barwon Water wants to bring down.

The former was demolished by the State Government in its own heritage advice, not to mention World Heritage condemnation. Now a government water utility wants to do the same to the aqueduct, renowned for its magnificent bowstring design akin to Scotland’s famed Firth of Forth bridge.

The move is driven by concerns about its deteriorating concrete collapsing and presumably some attendant legal liability, even if ducks are probably the only denizens of the underlying swampland likely to be injured in any such instance.

I can’t help but wonder if demolition crews might not encounter the same significant difficulties they did when trying to wreck the Bow Truss building. And yet it was purportedly in danger of imminent collapse.

Just like the aqueduct was 30 years ago, when a report for Barwon Water said the structure could collapse at any time. Funny, it’s still there. Fancy that, the ducks must be getting nervous.

Parmi punters prey in global gastro war

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So the Aussie national dish, our most popular culinary go-to, is pretty much the chicken parmi.

Been that way for a while, of course, though I’m not quite sure just how it superseded the old dog’s eye and dead horse, and barbie snags and roast lamb, let alone Vegemite on toast and Chinese fried rice, but there you have it.

Look through any pub kitchen’s order list and the chicken parmi’s first cab off the rank with the punters … steaks, battered fish and chips, sliders and spag bol and marinara all lengthy place-getters in the race.

Parmi nights are de rigueur in many pubs, often pipping trivia nights, happy hours, burger nights and half-price cocktail sessions.

But it seems keeping parmi patrons happy is still a bit of a tricky business. Which is probably why you’ll find chicken parmi morphing to meet the market.

Actually, it’s more than morphing. More like transmogrifying, if you can do that to a battered chicken.

That’s transmogrify, transitive verb: to change or alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect.

Yeah, strange, grotesque, bizarre. That’s about the only way you can describe the menu I tripped over up the bush this week.

It hosted no less than 18 different chicken parmi toppings. And two types of chicken, grilled and crumbed, plus crumbed eggplant if you didn’t fancy chicken at all.

All very cosmopolitan, multicultural: Napoli, Hawaiian, Italian, Mexican, Greek, French and Moroccan. Even Australia if you like barbecue sauce, bacon, onion, egg and mozzarella cheese, which was Italian last time I looked.

And diverse too: meat lovers, spice of life, pumpkin, carbonara, pepper, gravy, mushroom, garlic butter, creamy Dijon and seafood for the piscatorially-inclined.

Amid all these you’re talking jalapenos, chilli flakes, hummus, dukka, chorizo, pineapple, feta, goats cheese, corn chips, sour cream, ras el hanout, salsa, olives … and kilos of mozzarella.

In short, the humble chicken parmi is quietly assuming the role played for the past five decades by that evergreen European migrant, the pizza.

The pizza, of course, has already been through the mill, assuming every global gastronomic possibility to the point my favourite has morphed from Napoletana and pepperoni to the more-catholic quattro-gusti four-quarter job.

And the favourite of the four, what else? Satay chicken.

Yeah, sacrilege I know but perhaps not as bad as my effort at the bush pub parmi jamboree.

Sick to death of chicken, I ordered the scotch fillet.

“No probs mate – how do you like it?”

“Medium’ll be fine, mate.”

Then I was taken aback.

“Which topping do you want?”

“Topping? Like all the parmis? Gees, you’ve got ’em from everywhere.”

“Yair.”

I quickly eyed the menu again.

“You don’t have satay sauce by any chance?”

I already knew the answer. This was northern Vic, after all, not Bali or Thailand or Malaysia.

“Sorry, I can ask the chef.”

“Naah, don’t fuss, I’ll go the mushies. They’re not from Leongatha by any chance, are they?”

Fair to say I’m still smarting from the glare that attracted.

History-mystery repeats itself

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The Vanishing Place, by Zoe Rankin, Hachette

Okay, you emerge from the deep bush of New Zealand as a young girl after fleeing a mad/bad, abusive/loving dad who kept you, your siblings and your mum apart from the world.

Mum’s dead, dad’s clean off his rocker, a serious and paranoid boozehound killing blokes with shovels, so it’s get out of Dodge time, even if your siblings won’t follow.

Locals are flummoxed by your wild child nature, authorities never get a handle on anything and a new isolation, bar one or two tight friends, and haunting memories and grief, make life a painful, stressful daily travail.

Fast forward some 17 years and our protagonist, Effie, has long fled the Long White Cloud for Scotland when she’s petitioned back home by the policeman boyfriend she was forced to leave behind. The magnet is dynamic, she can’t resist.

There’s a curious job to investigate and he needs a very singular hand; an eight-year-old red-headed girl has just emerged from the wilderness, collapsing half-starved in a shop, with blood all over her hands.

She’s clearly traumatised. Won’t talk. Says her name, Anya, then slams the door shut. Shrieks at anyone trying to talk to her, attacks them tooth and nail.

Chillingly, she’s also the dead spit of Effie when she wandered out of the bush, red hair, green eyes.

History-mystery is repeating itself, with a poisonous unavoidable question: is her father still out?

Faced again with everything she’d tried to escape, the isolation and fear enforced by damaged parents, Effie is the only one who can get through to Anya, but it’s an agonising task, for both: one terrified, religious mania-like, of her new surroundings; the other of revisiting her horrific past – as well as her painful lost love.

Author Rankin employs a rapid-fire, present-past-present-past technique to relate the two stories. It’s a somewhat infuriating mechanism running two tales in tandem but it’s effective in maintaining a tense and compelling narrative. Mercifully, the to-and-fro annoyance is abated by short, sharp and fast-moving chapters.

That aside, Rankin delivers a harrowing account of murder and mayhem as police raid the bush home the still-mute Anya escaped. And as Effie, unconvinced by the all-too-neat findings of the police, inevitably and foolishly returns to the wilderness with Anya to find an unexpected, and very nasty, small but deadly cult. But no so sign of her father.

Things turn very pear-shaped when she’s predictably trapped, chained, starved, humiliated and menaced with a misogynistic religious zealotry. Effie’s outlook is even bleaker when Anya reappears beside one of the cult’s monsters to chastise her and order her to repent for not fulfilling a biblical female submission to men.

That’s enough spoilers for one review. Rest assured, sufficient twists and turns exist to make the book one that will keep you reading well into the night. You might find daytime just that little bit more comfortable.

Little art of murder

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Odd, the things that can come your way unexpectedly. A late aunt some years ago presented me a large envelope of unusual sketches and prints.

A swag of etchings and proofs of rural scenes in New South Wales. All rustic radiance, bucolic beauty and pastoral pulchritude if I can labour the alliterative allusions.

Lots of landscapes, mountains, eucalypts, post-and-rail fences, barns, stables, slab huts and farm buildings, cattle, horses, bushmen, timber bridges, bush tracks, gullies, rivers, creeks … a fair old Cook’s Tour of the Aussie bush, in fact.

Many of them depict scenes in and around the Burragorang Valley west of Sydney, where their artist, David Little, lived in the 1940s. Fair way, in the day, from Werribee where my grandfather, who supplied him with hard-to-source paper back in the wartime years, lived. Lot of the valley’s now underwater, flooded for Sydney’s Warragamba Dam in the 1950s.

David Little came out of Bacchus Marsh and Ballarat’s St Pat’s, same as my grandad, Leo Bartels. Both were born in 1893.  Little’s old man, also a David, was a rate collector, hydraulic engineer and secretary across various local councils, Romsey, Bacchus Marsh, Melton and Werribee.

 

He lived in a Wattle Ave heritage home in Werribee I visited years later, as a kid, to hang out with a young schoolmate. By then, a scrap metal collection , with impressive aircraft fuselages and car bodies, had amassed at the rear of the property. A few years later, I recall 21st birthday and bucks turn parties.

Little the younger pursued a career in electrical engineering, earned himself a pilot’s licence in 1918, joined the Australian Flying Corps at age 25 and headed off to war only to have the Armistice signed while he was in transit. Took him a year to get home again whereon he settled in Sydney as a telephone engineer.

   

He’s listed on the Bacchus Marsh & District Roll of Honour and has a tree planted in his name in the town’s famed Avenue of Honour, not far from the old Woolpack Inn, one-time watering hole of the notorious bushranger Captain Moonlight with whom I share an odd connection (https://noelmurphy.com.au/portfolio-item/im-being-followed-by-a-moonlite-shadow/).

Little took off to the US and Canada in the 1920s, details are sketchy, returned to NSW where he married and moved about a bit – Armidale, Bondi, Burragorang and Avalon in a luxuriously furnished cottage among gum trees on a hill overlooking Pittwater. He worked in the public service and developed skills as a successful artist.

 

He suffered a nervous breakdown and while his artworks fetched  impressive figures, one painting as much as 200 pounds in 1951, he described himself as an invalid pensioner. Well-educated, qualified and read – he was friends with the poet Paul Grano  – his preferred art medium was oil but he produced a significant number of etchings as well.

A letter from my grandfather to Little, now in the University of Queensland’s Grano Collection, discusses everything from his paper supplies to Shakespeare, Grano himself – who was a St Pat’s old boy – and the nuns at Geelong’s Sacred Heart College, where my mother and her sisters boarded.

 

In his late 50s, however, Little’s life unravelled horrifically. He went to various doctors, including a Macquarie Street specialist, for mental problems. His wife, Ada, was diagnosed with a cancer which treatment was unable to contain. Her problems, however, deteriorated in catastrophic fashion.

As The Daily Telegraph reported on 19 August 1951:

“Detectives late yesterday charged a Sydney artist with having murdered his wife. They allege he killed her in their luxuriously furnished home at Taylor’s Point, Avalon.

“The dead woman was Mrs Ada Adeline Little, 52. David Little; 58, appeared at Manly Court, and was remanded until August 27.

“Detectives found Mrs Little’s body, battered about the head, in the living-room of her home.

“Little and his wife, who were childless, lived in a three-roomed cottage in Wandeen Road.

“The cottage, set amid high gum trees on a hill, overlooks Pittwater.

“Little, a successful portrait painter, bought the cottage six weeks ago.

“Neighbors said Mrs Little had a growth. They said that recent treatment had failed to stop the spread of the growth

“Early yesterday they saw Mrs Little collect the morning paper from the delivery van at the front of the cottage.

“About three hours later they saw a man leave the cottage and run down the road.

“Detective-Sergeant A. Garlick (Manly) found Mrs Little’s body.

“Dr H. Sanders, the local government medical officer, found Mrs Little had died from head and brain injuries about 8am.

“Many oil paintings were hung on the walls of the living room where the body was found. Most of the paintings were signed ‘David Little’. In the studio police found a half -finished portrait of an elderly woman.

“Neighbours said Little last week told them he had sold a painting in Avalon for £200.

“They told police that the Littles were a quiet couple.

“Little, grey-haired and stooped, appeared in Manly Court wearing a khaki wind jacket, grey trousers, and blue shirt.”

Three weeks later, Little was committed to stand trial for murder after the Coroner found Ada died from injuries feloniously and maliciously inflicted by her husband. Details that emerged in the coronial inquiry, as reported in the broadsheet Sydney Morning Herald, were class-A tabloid fodder.

“Francis Blackwell, retired, of Hudson’s Parade, Taylor’s Point, said that at 9.15 a.m. on August 18 he saw Little standing at the entrance of his (Blackwell’s) drive.

“Little, he stated, said to him: ‘Will you drive me to Newport, please? I have murdered my wife’.

“Blackwell said he led Little to a grass embankment near his house. Little appeared agitated and when questioned by Blackwell on the murder said: ‘I hit her with a mallet — I did it in cold blood’.

“At this stage, Blackwell said, Little was in a ‘terrible way and pulling up grass and muttering’. 

“Little said to him: ‘They will hang me for this’.

“Detective-Sergeant Allen Garlick, of Manly police, said Little told him later that day that he had killed his wife and was prepared to take the consequences.

“Detective Garlick said he asked why he had killed his wife, and Little replied: ‘Well, it is a long story. A certain situation had built up in my mind concerning my wife and myself and something had to be done about it.

” ‘I had my breakfast. I got a mallet and I hit her four or five times on the head and killed her’. “

Little was duly sentenced to life imprisonment but on October 10 was taken from Long Bay Prison to Parramatta Mental Hospital where he died of natural causes on 29 November 1951.

David Little and his one-time Burragorang home before being flooded.

Truth, reality and other fictions

/in /by

Hard to watch, hear or read anything of politics without thinking of the razor-sharp wisdom peppered through TV’s Yes Minister.

“Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied’.”

“I don’t think we need to bring the truth in at this stage.”

Sir Humphrey, Bernard and Jim Hacker possessed an unerring ability to confuse and manipulate issues, generally to a point of ‘creative inertia’ protecting their behinds.

Timely to remember because in these days of mass disinformation, misinformation, fake news, AI, hate speech and free speech/outright lies, there’s more obfuscation than ever.

So much so that facts, to many people, don’t really matter. As George Constanza says: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

Your truth can be the truth – even if you don’t believe it, I’d submit. And it might be nearing its use-by date but, to some, facts and reality are still important.

A couple of recent instances where they went on sick leave:

  • Albo versus Chief of the Defence Force David Johnston over exactly just when Australia discovered China’s live-fire war games. Truth seems MIA.
  • RBA cuts interest rates because inflation’s dropping, prompting immediate inflation-triggering election pork-barrelling. Was it asleep at the wheel or pushed into it following the government’s recent RBA restructure? MIA.
  • Nazi-saluting drongos arrested while others demanding total annihilation of the Jewish nation in weekly demos shrieking vitriolic, murderous hate speech are fine. Guess the drongos aren’t Muslim voters in western Sydney seats. Sieg-hail.
  • Trump v Europe, Ukraine, Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world. His ambit deal pitches are always wild. He rolled over to Mexico, Canada. Ukraine might still come around if Vance and POTUS can cool their hyper-extended jets. Trump’s  cooled his Gaza Riviera plans. You have to call BS on him.

In fact, facts can be very illusory.

If you really think the US will come save your bacon when things get tough, think again – and Trump’s hardly the first Yank slow out of the stalls. The US were very tardy to help the Allies in two world wars.

The first saw massive shipments of US supplies and a huge line of credit to the Allies before they finally joined the fray mid-1917.

And prior to the Pearl Harbor trigger, late 1941, US industrialists were actively helping the Nazis: Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, GE tungsten carbide with Krupps, Ford and GM with vehicles, Coca-Cola, ITT with phones ….

It is the biggest capitalist nation on earth, after all. It’ll probably come if there’s a buck in it somewhere. Why would y’all think otherwise?

So yeah, worry about these new forms of falsehood but don’t overlook your own illusions of truth. That’s confirmation bias btw. It’s not new, been around forever.

Thing about truth, it doesn’t really bend. You can try but it’s really like maths, chemistry, biology. And no matter how you dress it up, it can often feel like a fair punch in the nose.

Am I getting too cynical? Maybe, but as Sir Humphrey tells me: “A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.”