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Grift to the mill at Mar-a-Lago

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THE GRIFTERS’ CLUB: By Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff, Jay Weaver; Hachette

 Good word, grifter. Not really an Australian word, more a Yankee thing but it pretty much lines up with our con artist: a person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling.

Thing about this book is there’s nothing really all that small, petty sure, and cheap but it’s more about some fairly sizeable swindling.

Ground zero is Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in South Florida’s Palm Beach, a swanky to the point of chintzy mansion built a century ago by cereal magnate/philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Any vestige of philanthropy it might have has long ago vacated the premises, as Trump’s low-wage largely immigrant staff might attest, if they’re game enough.

Cheap and chiselling is order of the day at Mar-a-Lago, behind its opulence and saccharine swish icing. That’s according to this account by four Miami Herald reporters who go to painstaking efforts to footnote every weird and wonderful account they offer of Trump’s briar patch stomping ground.

This means 50 pages of reference notes for 190 pages of mischief and mayhem. It also means they don’t want to be accused of writing fake news. I suspect it will guarantee it.

Hucksters, sycophants and entrepreneurs seem to be the stock in trade at Mar-a-Lago – what we’d call rip-off merchants, suck-holes and desperate wannabes.

Trump is like a shining beacon to them. They want to bask in his carotene glow, garner some of his success by proximity, borrow on his ubiquitous auriferous brand. And pose for selfies.

It’s the American way. He’s top of the heap. A number one.

Ironically, it’s also what happens when you drain the South Florida swamp, which is just what Hamilton Disston did to The Everglades back in the 1880s. This was smartly followed by miles and miles of new railroad and trainloads of northern holidaymakers.

“ … it’s safe to say Mar-a-Lago became the palace of the swamp creatures quite early,” write authors Blaskey, Ostroff, Nehamas and Weaver. You can almost hear them chortling at that one.

“At her lavish estate, which took a staff of seventy to run, Post entertained politicians, lawyers and businessmen who were crafting the industrial capitalism of the twentieth-century American state.”

Post hosted tycoons, moguls, movie stars, European aristocrats, all sorts of dignitaries, Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey. The old bootlegger Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, lived next door.

After Post’s death in 1973, the property languished. She bequeathed it to the federal government, who found it too expensive to maintain and gave it back to the Post Foundation.

It went up for sale and Trump, sniffing something special, stepped in. He called it an old beat-up, over-grown Rembrandt and before you knew it, the circus was back in town, with all its schmick carnies. The quiet, old-money neighbours weren’t impressed.

Trump didn’t waste time drawing folks to his gilded country club and helping them part with their money. Staff memorised members names and faces and treated them like royalty. Guests knocked the door down for expensive tickets to charity galas, upper-crust balls, flash parties with pretty girls and celebrities.

Loads of nouveau riche stuff, even as Trump’s casinos elsewhere were sliding toward bankruptcy. The neighbours shook their heads, appalled “this man whose parents didn’t come over on the Mayflower took over Mar-a-Lago and was going to get in anybody who could afford it”.

Trump’s ancestral family business dealings aren’t much to recommend him but that’s another story. At Mar-a-Lago, he was entertaining the monied multitudes including the likes of Billy Joel, Paul Anka, Tony Bennett, Don King, Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum, Barbara Walters, even a certain Epstein for a while.

Early in the piece, he claimed Princes Charles, Princess Diana and Henry Kissinger were members. They weren’t. Still, the Clintons were, and deposed Greek king Constantine, the Beach Boys, football and basketball stars, models in their hundreds – and  wealthy Jews and African Americans that other Palm Beach snobbish, racist clubs wouldn’t admit.

Trump’s reputation for racism seemed to dissolve where money was involved. “Palm Beach is very much changing for the better,” he said, tongue planted firmly in his cheek.

By the time Trump became US president, his status among the greenback garrison of Palm Beach was bordering on god-like. And he loved them back. To the point of championing their interests well ahead of more traditional constituent interests.

Nepotism, cronyism and corruption in liberal measure are par for the course at Mar-a-Lago, our authors report. Lack of security, poor property maintenance, unhygienic kitchens and food, too. Trump’s a serious cheapskate when it comes to the things you can’t see.

Trump’s rejection of presidential-level security regularly has the Secret Service in conniptions but the idea is to keep the place open for members, and their guests, and access always within at least a theoretical reach.

Trump’s generous with his nods, smiles, light-hearted asides and photo ops – aware of what they mean for Mar-a-Lago’s business and also for his members and their business connections.

He’s selling influence, or purported influence, and it’s a red-hot commodity. So much so, in fact, that rackets have been sprung up with Chinese spielers flogging $20,000 travel packages overseas on the pretext of meeting the great orange at a Mar-a-Lago gala or conference. They charge in the order of $60K for pictures with the Don.

Lobbyists and business networkers have arranged meetings and links through Mar-a-Lago. Trump himself brings overseas leaders to Mar-a-Lago ahead of the White House – China’s Xi Jinping and Japan’s Shinzo Abe, for instance – then sends the taxpayer the bill. Nice little earner, that one.

Fall on the wrong side of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mates, however, and you can find yourself out of work. Like Veteran Affairs secretary David Shulkin, elevated to his post after meeting Trump and Marvel boss Ike Perlmutter and a Palm Beach doctor, Bruce Moskowitz – then demoted just as smartly when he didn’t play ball as they dictated.

So the White House has effectively been moved south. Political advice comes as much from the barflies at Mar-a-Lago as public servants. Buy a membership, if you can, and you can find yourself in the POTUS club.

It’s all about jobs for the boys, with the best obsequious or cashed-up courtiers whispering in the king’s ear – and receiving a solid hearing. Trump doesn’t read, remember, so it’s really all about what he wants to hear.

Oh yeah, this is a bloke who thinks his head belongs with the Mount Rushmore collection. He must have rocks in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheroots, spittoons and tickling the old ivories

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Not too many places are around these days for quaffing from brandy snifters, chomping on cheroots and expectorating into spittoons. It’s comforting, however, to find such luxuries do still exist, and in some of our finest establishments.

Better still, if you’ve an eye for despatching the ivory orbs over wide expanses of green baize, you can do so while despatching canapes and hazelnut and carrot soup as well. Maybe with a lusty durif or a crisp pinot gris, if you prefer. Rack up a sizeable break and you might mark the occasion with an antediluvian Scotch or cognac.

All of this beneath a soaring, clerestory-lit, timber-braced ceiling not unlike a clever cricket pavilion or a brass-band rotunda. That’s not to mention leather benches, moulded timber chairs, marbled fireplace, heraldry, ensigns, flags, polished timber honour boards, hat stand, trophies, score rollers, cues racked in leather, metal and canvas prophylactics — and, of course, two handsome sprawling 12-foot tables that also create the ambience of this club annex.

“Good God, man, that’s awfully civilised,” I can hear you gasp. And short of a small phalanx of heavily-whiskered gentlemen, ice clinking in their whiskey glasses, cigar smoke permeating the air, you’d be right. Right in the 19th century, that is, in the sprawling billiard room of The Geelong Club behind its pretty, and exclusive, Queen Anne facade on Brougham Street.

Long an enclave of Geelong’s wealthy and privileged, The Geelong Club has a history dating to 1859 when it was populated by pastoralists, lawyers and merchants. The roaring days of the Gold Rush had Geelong fairly buzzing as a port city, and demand for fine dining, claret and champagne, mahogany and cedar, billiards, cards and other diversions — along the British club model — led to the club’s inception.

The first lodgings were in Yarra Street, north of Ryrie, before the club moved to Mack’s Hotel on Brougham and, in 1889, built next door at its present site. Names tied closely to the club’s beginnings fill Geelong’s history books: Strachan, Armytage, Austin, Russell, Bell, Calvert, Murray, Fairbairn, Hope, Whyte, Russell.

Other familiar names also adorn the boards and cue racks of the billiard room: Fidge, Heath, Douglass, Annois, Vickers-Willis, Roydhouse, McKellar, Chomley, Inglis. If the hallows of Geelong’s early movers and shakers are to be found anywhere it seems the billiard room is a fair place to bring in the ghost busters.

Funny game, though, the old billiards. Likewise snooker, or pool, or Indian pool, pin pool, risk snooker, pyramid, black pyramid, carambole or whatever species of the game you might prefer. Long been associated with ne’er-do-wells and a misspent youth. Gamblers, hustlers, hoods who’d break your thumbs if you got too clever — think Fast Eddie Felsen — and even authorities who changed the rules to beat champions like Walter Lindrum.

Not really what the club’s fathers would have had in mind. But it’s funny, too, how things change. For instance, Lindrum’s Melbourne billiards hall, once a venue of certain angst for this scribbler as a curious young teen, is now a genteel boutique pub on Flinders Street. A classy 12-foot show table has survived but it stands alongside tables laden with Spanish almond cakes and pork cheek croquettes. A couple of boutique beers, too, fortunately but it’s a fair bet the ivory orbs are now phenolic resin.

Geelong’s baize pedigree lies across the city’s pubs, clubs, pool halls such as the Golden Cue, once resident next to the former Regent Theatre on Little Malop and for the past half century with Geelong Snooker ands Billiards Association. Also with figures such as Percy Shand who ran a Malop St saloon the better part of a century ago. Together with TV’s Pot Black they made for a breeding ground for a raft of Eddie Charlton and Hurricane Higgins hopefuls.   

The good folks at The Geelong Club tell me they’re dabbling with the idea of opening their inner sanctum to men’s events (cough) with a leaning to cigars, brandies and snooker/billiards/pool contests. Yeah, nothing it seems is as predictable as change but, hey, I’m in! Might I suggest a few celebrity exhibition matches, too, as Lindrum and his brother Fred did here back in the day at Percy’s.

Just one thing, please don’t change The Geelong Club’s exquisitely-tiled gents’ ablutions block and its XXL WC cubicles. They knew how to build thrones back in 1889. That was a Mr O.D. Figgis, by the way. Made them big enough to open and read a broadsheet newspaper. I can hear you again: “Good God, man, that’s awfully civilised.”

Yep, awfully.

This article first appeared in The Weekly Review, 26 May 2016

As Your Worship Pleases …

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Dispensing justice in a place like 1970s Rhodesia requires a mix of talent and accoutrement.

First thing you need is a gun. More than a few unsavoury characters about, and some menacing political rebels too.

A cool disposition toward stifling heat and professional scrutiny is handy. A cast-iron stomach, and a liking for the odd whisky or vodka, as well. No matter it might be illegal.

With a cast of witch-doctors, terrorists, fortune-tellers and crims to deal with, not to mention mandatory canings and clueless sentencing, your constitution better be pretty damn robust.

Magistrate Michael Neal does his level best to steady the reins across his bailiwick while fencing deftly with reckless and nasty colleagues, a haughty overseer and sensitive but ambitious juniors.

Author Terence FitzSimons is in his own briar patch, regaling the reader with horror stories of standover cops intimidating families with the severed limbs of their children. With moonshine drinking sessions over-proofed with the crushed and distilled mash of an aborted human foetus. With skin-crawling accounts of brutal canings and crooks with fevered dreams of setting him to rights.

Think women speaking in tongues, con artists, porn exhibitions, bloody knifings, prisoner dagga plant deals, assaults with bricks, boozy prayer meetings, gut-churning autopsies, illegal game hunters, naked door-knockers, klepto teachers …

It takes all types to keep a court running in the Rhodesian Midlands town of Gwelo but Michael Neal’s your man.

FitzSimons, with a clutch of historic tomes under his belt – and his clever Anglican priest Fr Michael Gale’s foray into war-torn Rhodesia in Nkosi as well – keeps a steady hand on the tiller throughout this entertaining judicial romp.

 As Your Worship Pleases: Tales from a Magistrates’ Court in Africa. By Terence FitzSimons, Mirador.

Limbo: Jungle bars, volcanic interruptions

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Above: OzPost’s Mt Elephant volcano stamp issue

Volcano watch wasn’t exactly what I’d planned. Things were meant to be more of an exploration mission. A search for faces, places, swimming pools, sort of stuff you do in the Bali tropics.

Ideally, it was going to be a search for jungle bars.

Something in the treetops, or nestled into a river gorge cliff face, maybe on the edge of python-riddled rice terrace. Bit of lazy exploring. There was a hippy Geelong expat I hoped to track down in one.

Things went sideways, predictably enough. The expat had gone to God, hanged himself in bankruptcy, I sadly learned. One bar I tracked down was riddled with sculptures of 200 rampant monkeys, and I mean rampant. Some artisan presumably had an awkward time explaining to the missus what he’s been doing at work. “Making LGBTI anthropoids for the tourists, darling.” Hmmm.

pH levels in the first swimming pool bar left me tingling at antihistamine level. Eyes red and skin itching for days. First mates I made in a bar, sideways on margeritas — and I’m guessing lithium, too — were great fun but also looking for a political argument, no matter how many times I agreed with them. Others were paranoid.

And then volcano ash grounded all the planes in and out of Bali.

Struck me the book I was reading, a biog of explorer Hamilton Hume, who ventured into Geelong back in 1825, with his arch-nemesis William Hovell, was a good pairing. Things didn’t go quite as planned for them, either.

Thought they were at Westernport Bay. Hovell wasn’t the greatest navigator, of course; sunk one ship and ran another aground while working as a sea captain. How he got the exploring gig’s a good question.

Not that this intrepid pairing made it to the extensive volcanic areas immediately west of Geelong.

It was up to subsequent pioneers to discover the dormant volcanoes Mount Duneed, Mount Moriac and Mount Pollock right next door. Over time, the count expanded to some 400 volcanoes on an explosive arsenal across western Victoria.

About a dozen have blown their stack in the last 20,000 years or so, a minor blip in geological terms. Thing is, according to experts like Melbourne Uni’s professor Bernie Joyce, a fresh volcanic blast could erupt any time. In blip terms, we’re overdue for one.

Bernie nominates Anakie as a likely site. Yikes. Moreover, he says disaster services aren’t prepared for it – nor, I suspect, are tourism operators who might find visitors to the Great Ocean Road kept at bay by volcanic ash.

Volcano limbo is a curious thing, you know. Distracted as I was from my boozy-exploring terms of reference, I found myself tripping over all sorts of unexpected things.

People mainly. Frenzied taxidrivers, Hindu temple pilgrims, a sitar-playing prog-rocker, a failed businessman hiding out, kids in rockstar apartments, parachutists and BASE jumpers, lonely Eat Pray Love devotees, mad Aussie footy fans.

Not a one of them cared a bugger-me for the volcanic ash flight crisis. Stay there, go home, all the same to them. Nothing they could do.

Go figure. Looking for a rainforest bar and you find some nonchalant breed of couldn’t-care-less fatalism instead. Worry you die, don’t worry you still die.

Sounds like the law of the jungle. Instructional maybe. You could get eaten tomorrow. If you don’t get atomised when some mountain god cracks the sads, of course.

A Nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse ….

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The swaggie was out of sorts, no doubt about it. Just released from Geelong Goal, the old bluestone

gaol, where he’d been sequestered for a few days over unpaid fines, he came bellowing into the

office demanding a reporter. And roundly cursing the long arm of the law.

The plods had rejected his offer to have them drive him home to his bush hideaway in the Great

Otways National Park behind Apollo Bay. Told him to catch a bus.

“You’d think I was a criminal or something,” he groused. “You can’t just throw someone out of jail

on to the streets.”

But that wasn’t Noddy Hill’s only gripe. He was filthy on the food he’d been fed while behind

bars. Pure stodge, terrible for the bowels, and he was in pain as a result of the injustice, he moaned.

“It’s the constipation. You put that in your paper! The prison system is constipating innocent people.

It’s not right. It’s just not right!” he railed.

And, yes, there should be a law against it. And the cops should give you a lift home, in case you

didn’t get that the first time. And what’s the world coming to? Just not good enough …

You get the drift.

Old Noddy was about 45 back then, three decades ago. Looked for all the world like a latter-day

swaggy. Wild hair, wild eyes, wild demeanour. In fact, he was a hermit who lived deep in the forest

with a wild independence that rejected society and civilisation, and a head full of ideas that

reflected a powerful but eccentric intellect. An alternative lifestyle, if you like. Undiagnosed, by

other assessments. 

The Otways harbour all manner of unusual tales. Noddy’s hardly on his own. Panthers, carnivorous

snails, Tasmanian tigers, UFOs, German wartime submarines, shipwrecks, dinosaurs, quolls, giant

ferns and yowies are just scratching the surface.

Cut across the southwest hinterland and you’ll trip over rain-gauge crater lakes, megafauna trails,

volcanoes, large open maar craters, caves, scoria cones,  mystery ships, bunyip bones, early

Australian discoveries by Portugal and China, floating islands, exquisite waterfalls — all manner of

weird and wonderful, of believe it or not. Fascinating place. National Geographic would go silly for

it.

But for all the area’s extraordinary otherness — and the fact a few of these have problems of their

own, too — Noddy’s tough to eclipse.

For years a local identity quietly celebrated for his differentness, he was considered a harmless,

amusing and, generally speaking, acceptable outsider. A hermit. A swaggie. An oddity, a bit out

there but okay.

However, beneath the innocuous eccentricity, a darker side to Noddy Hill was brooding. Scheming

and plotting nefarious plans no-one thought him capable of hatching. And his plans were rather

nasty.    

No one doubts his lot wasn’t helped by drugs — hallucinogens like LSD, mescaline and magic

mushrooms. Mix them with an evangelistic obsession, multiple internments in mental institutions —

and gaol — and an autodidact’s love for biochemistry, microbiology, endocrinology and toxicology

and, well, you’re on the road to somewhere.

But that road struck out into no-man’s land when Noddy decided to posted an image of a bomb on

the internet — what he called ‘bushfire bomb mark 3. Police were staggered by the detail he knows

of explosive devices and feared his mental health status might lead to terrorist attacks and

holocaust-type bushfires through the Otways.

Coming on top of emails comparing himself with mass murderers Julian Knight and Martin Bryant,

and with Jesus Christ, on top of suicide threats and references to Bali bombing, World War III,

holocausts, doomsday and nirvana, it’s fair to say they were a bit concerned. The swaggy seemed

pretty deranged.

Noddy had managed to email stalk some 600 people or agencies, including Premier Daniel

Andrews, in his mission and police saw his so-called ‘Placebo Park’ hideout with its dozen huts

and satellite dish as more terrorist bunker than bush retreat.

Eventually, after seven months in jail and a court case, and in a frail state of health, he was

transferred to a nursing home where the judge was happy to see him stay. 

So in the end, with his menace muted, his mental status noted, Noddy Hill found the care and

warmth he’d been missing since the 1970s when he went off the rails after two deckhands on his

abalone boat died near Portland.

Better late than never, I suppose. It’s funny but it makes me think of the old story of the

unexpected warmth nature has provided in another of the great southwest’s many anomalies, Mount

Leura near Camperdown.

Odd thing is that a holocaust might well have been in the wind there, too. For all we know, it could

still be so today. Vulcan mischief is commonplace across the southwest, as recent as maybe 4500

years ago. Hence the  Dead Sea-like salty crater lakes — great for a lazy Saturday afternoon’s beer-

drinking — the spooky Stony Rises, igneous outcrops, strange subterranean gurglings and more

you’ll find there.

Indigenous folk have it invested in their oral tradition. When volcanic bombs from the scoria of

Mount Leura’s cone were shown to one Aboriginal bloke, he said they were like stones his

forefathers claimed were thrown from the hill by the action of fire.

Back up a little to 1911 and you might get my Noddy-nature-nurture drift. That’s when

Geelong’s News of the Week paper reported “a strange occurrence’’ at the Curdies River:

“All the water became quite white, with froth upon it, which afterwards turned to green slime,’’ it

said. “Large numbers of fish in the stream died. The water gave out a peculiar odour and cattle

refused to drink it.’’

It wasn’t the first time the locals had witnessed such peculiarities. Same thing happened 20 years

earlier; all supposedly the result of a volcanic disturbance in Lake Purrumbete, not far from  Mount

Leura.

“It is said that divers were sent down into the lake on the previous occasion to investigate, but the

water was so hot that they could not stay in it,’’ the News of the Week reported.

 

The paper also reports that blokes humping their waggas through the district took advantage of the

heat around Mount Leura, reporting: “Swagmen frequently camped in such places to obtain

warmth.”

No doubt our Noddy, with his liking for self-sufficiency, would appreciate the fact. But a bloke like

him would also appreciate the many other mysteries and curiosities of the Otways and the

southwest.

In the early days of white invasion, it seemed a wild place. It landscape was bizarre, queer, crawling

with the unknown and the dangerous, with Aborigines and with unfamiliar wildlife. It drew only the

toughest of pioneers and even they battled to stave off the superstitions of bunyips and pookahs in

the region’s splendid isolation.

Yet artists such as Nicholas Chevalier were alert to that splendour early in the piece, capturing the

likes of Red Rock’s crater lakes in the 1860s with a dreamy pale green and blue vista. Similarly,

photographer Fred Kruger preserved Mount Leura to an 1880s moment in history with its lightly

timbered slopes high over the wide verandas of Camperdown. Artist Eugene von Guerard exercised

his draughting excellence to capture the flora and fauna of Koroit’s Tower Hill, outside

Warrnambool, presumably dodging its curious resident emus in the process.

A powerful sense of place and wonder lives on in the works of Otways laureate Gregory Day,

whose exquisite studies of life, love and environment along the Great Ocean Road are some of the

best documents we have.

Some time ago, Geelong Art Gallery exhibited the powerful work of several artists in a charming

essay on Lake Gnotuk.

Drawing on history, geology and indigenous stories, their combined opus was as exhilarating and

captivating as it was outworldly: bottles plugged with cork, stones, sand and water from the lake;

photos of tiny ostrocods; draughtsmen images from the 1850s; russet rock, soil, stone and granule

textures; sepia takes of the crater welded to ochre impressions; prehistoric fish bones; fossilised

shell necklaces, magnetic swirlings of rock and soil reflecting the lava tubs and underground

vortexes of the antediluvian landscapes.

Science meets art, environment meets art, palaeontology meets art; I don’t think it would have been

lost on someone like Noddy. I’m sure he’d wonder at the idea of clear hyper-saline water covering

the stumps of 2000-year-old trees. Maybe he’d think, too, that such volcanic dreaming of the

southwest is just an opening foray into a broader church of natural science, history, mystery and

folklore.

Maybe, just maybe, had his mental health issues been identified and acted on earlier — had he been

closer to the society he shunned — he’d have contributed differently to that oeuvre than becoming

the rather sad piece of folklore he is now.

Pity, really, that we’re all still a bit constipated that way towards such people.

Link: https://regionalnews.smedia.com.au/geelongadvertiser/TranslateArticle.aspx?doc=NCGA%2F2019%2F10%2F22&entity=ar01703

Three decades of innovative, creative design

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Now here’s an interesting project: 70-plus stories on what it takes to build some pretty special new towns, suburbs and communities.

Think planners, designers, engineers, artists, landowners, bankers, investors, clubs and community groups, sales crews, marketers, maintenance crews, apiarists, traditional owners, mums, dads, kids …

Think also creativity, innovation, experience and a good bit of commonsense nous. Villawood Properties has the lot in spades.

This book, 30: Fun, Happy, Communities, marks three decades since Villawood’s beginnings in Bendigo. Over those years, it’s expanded across Victoria, Melbourne, NSW and Queensland.

All up, it’s 164 pages showing a vibrant developer who’s about creating lifestyle and community, not just blocks and houses. A few features:

. A block donated to the national forest system for every block they sell;

. A huge amount of support to community groups, including a house-and-land every year to the Good Friday Appeal;

. Getting people together through activities, facilities and under-the-bonnet design detail;

. Folko Kooper’s extraordinary artwork;

. Getting kids outside for healthy, adventurous childhoods in great parks and playgrounds;

. Sustainability with 70% water and 60% non-renewables cuts.

LINK: https://villawoodproperties.com.au/

 

Parsons, strathspeys and rough justice

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Well strike me pink, I’d sooner drink
With a cove sent up for arson,
Than a rain-beseechin’, preachin’, teachin’
Cranky bloody parson.

The old rhyme’s banging through my head like a tattoo as I try to concentrate on the tune at hand, an elegant strathspey the parson beside me is pumping out on his squeezebox as we labour away musically at Sovereign Hill.

Not that he’s a cranky bloody parson; a while back, in fact, he delivered last rites to an unfortunate infarction victim whose ticker didn’t quite carry him fully up the hill. Very white of him.

The poor deceased was in troublesome health and he’d been well warned about our goldfields precinct but, committed patron he was, he thought what the devil, you only live once.

Regrettably, you only die once too. Unless you’re one of the worthies from the Sub Continent who arrive with their orange beards, pink turbans, lurid purple and lime shirts and retina-burning white trousers. They come back all the time.

It’s an old hack’s maxim, too, that musicians don’t fear death because they do it so many times when performing. Yes, very droll but most neo-colonial fiddlers’ spiritual leanings don’t extend naturally to reincarnation and deathbed sacraments. They’re more, umm, secular.

That strathspey’s bouncing along with a sweet jaunt as one of the corpulent worthies feigns to park his carcass on top of mine to have his daguerreotype taken with a lumpy i-tablet camera. Or maybe it’s a phablet, I don’t know. All I know is he’s stopping me from playing and couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about it — not that I really care, that’s what we’re there for, our good looks.

They’re only human, of course. Who wouldn’t want their photo taken with a clutch of craggy, weather-worn, ruggedly handsome goldfield musicians? Pity they’ve landed us slack-jawed, rheumy-eyed, bewhiskered darlings.

I glance at my parson confrere, who’s seems inured to the intrusion. He’s had his day putting worthies and their likes in their place. Such as the magnificently named James Bond Moussaka — maybe it was Mousenka or somesuch epithet but I prefer the Hellenic tag.

The hapless, recidivist crook with the 007 title came up against the parson when the latter parked his carcass behind the bench as a magistrate in a Zimbabwe jurisdiction. James, in desperation, had robbed a postman on his bike. Together with his priors, it earned him a sentence at the governor’s pleasure, with a minimum of seven years.

He didn’t take kindly and bellowed his approbation from his cell beneath the court: “There’s no fecking justice!”
To my parson’s credit, he didn’t send James off to be flogged, they still did so in those days, but off to the high court.

Curiously enough, James had literary ambitions but probably cruelled his chances with a short story he penned about the jurist banging away on the accordion beside me; a pithy little fiction about torturing and ultimately despatching him. Seems he had a thing about cranky bloody parsons.

None of this, of course, is insinuating its way into the grey matter of the worthy spreading his plump, powdered anatomy across me. I smile diligently, with a thumbs up for good measure, but demur as he tries to snatch my fiddle for his amusement. Nothing doing sport, I smile. Insurance.

His grin assumes a rictus normally associated with too strong a curry and he finally separates himself, making way for a dozen more who take his lead.

We bound into a tune called The March of the King of Laois; seems kind of fitting but it’s awkward with your elbows cramped by visitors. The parson stares into the distance, another dimension perhaps.

Fair bet it’s not The Raj. Wherever it is, it triggers a story about another African encounter, one in which he imbibes a confiscated witchdoctor’s brew made from various well-fermented ingredients, including an unborn human foetus.

“A little like the Irish poteen,” he recalls, citing the illicit potato drop of preference in God’s green land.

“Fortunately, it tasted better.”

Facts first casualty in the truth wars

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If you think crying fake media is the first refuge of the scoundrel, you’ll be delighted to hear what might happen if you put artificial intelligence, revisionist history and political ultra-idealism all in the one room.

Yeah, yeah, should you really care? Maybe not, this is fiction after all, loopy theory at best. And it hangs loosely on the premise of an unnamed US president who rearranges facts into fiction at will.

If a galoot can ignore history and reality willy-nilly and get away with it, what might happen if some sharper tools in the sack decided to do likewise?

Like some shifty Holocaust deniers and US slavery deniers with a knack for picking holes in survivors’ accounts, and doing so in high-profile court cases. What might happen if, suddenly, the primary sources used to defend against such attacks disappeared?

We’re talking disappeared from the great libraries, museums and repositories of the world holding them, and from all the hidey-holes in cyber-space. A latter-day burning of the Library at Alexandria. Lots of smoke, lots of screen vacuums.

Without references, without the books and diaries and letters and official documents that hold our history, and without techno back-ups, did any of it really happen?

And what might happen if historians, academics, survivors and other high-profile figures are suddenly being killed off as well? And bookshops firebombed?

Maggie Costello is the poor sap charged with figuring the who, how and why of it all. A former special assistant to the president she’s whip-smart but a sucker for punishment.

She’s targeted by would-be killers, goes viral in a manufactured sex tape, has her voice replicated in fake conversations, half-frozen, half-baked and hung out to dry, by herself, as an emotional, lovelorn basket-case.

Frailty and courage face off with a clutch of semi-deranged college alumni convinced that the only way forward to world peace is eradicate the past. War, they argue, is simply a revenge fixation – which humans are happy to exploit back into deep time. Get rid of the official record and peace might stand a chance.

Deranged hippies with degrees, basically. But someone has a lot of money and a lot of high-tech nouse because the world’s libraries and museums are all going up in smoke one by one: in London, Oxford, Cairo, Moscow, Addis Ababa, Kolkata, Mexico City … and no amount of security seems capable of stopping the book-burning inferno.

Maggie very quickly becomes persona non grata but with the aid of a former love interest working in the shadows, deftly pokes into the right corners and spaces where such feverish plots might be hatched.

Armed with a college incubator checklist, she throws all caution and good sense to the wind as she homes in on her target. But wait, there’s a twist you don’t expect. And then another. And wait up again, there’s also …

Okay, go find out for yourself. This scoundrel’s not telling.

TO KILL THE TRUTH

By Sam Bourne

Hatchette

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Q Train takes out peak restaurant awards

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It’s only been operating for 10 months but fine-dining restaurant The Q Train has just taken out two peak industry excellence awards.

The Drysdale-Queenscliff gourmand rail operator on Monday won both Restaurant & Catering Australia’s prestigious Victorian Tourism Restaurant and Consumer Vote awards at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The Q Train was also a finalist in this year’s Telstra Business Awards in the “emerging and energised” category for Victorian businesses held at Crown’s Palladium Room on Tuesday night.

The Q Train, which travels along the heritage Bellarine Railway between Drysdale and Queenscliff, opened for business last October.

It is the brainchild of Michael Barclay and Andrew Bridger.

The Q Train offers two classes of dining, Q class and first class. Q class is public dining with a six-course degustation. First class has seven private dining compartments for a more romantic experience for couples with matched local wines.

The Q Train’s handsome refurbished dining cars offer diners a delicious rail journey, and unique views of Swan Bay and the Bellarine.

The moving restaurant’s restored six carriages once travelled Queensland rails as part of the “Sunlander” running between Brisbane and Cairns.

Their converted interiors now offer a first-order menu by chef Greg Egan utilising delectable local produce such as Sage Farm beef and lamb, Portarlington mussels, Barongarook pork and Wattle Grove honey. Locally-crafted beers, ciders and exclusive red and white wines shine.

The R&CA Awards for Excellence are independently judged awards that recognise exceptional service and culinary talent across Australia. R&CA represents 45,000 cafes, restaurants and catering businesses across Australia.

LINK: https://www.theqtrain.com.au/

Cricket: Aborigines, elephants and barbecued chickens

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Just spotted a great collection of stamps just released by Australia Post to mark 150 years since the first Oz cricket team toured England. All Aboriginals, neatly enough, and they fairly scared the socks off the Poms.

Great stamps of the team; mainly mono images, one with the lads resplendent in red, white and blue. If you’re into things philatelic, you’ll love them.

All reminded me of a kids book I picked up a while back called Boomerang and Bat. It was put together in memory of one of the team, a bloke called Bripumyarrimin. Mighty cricketer in his day. One of Australia’s best. Buried in England, after succumbing to tuberculosis while on that famous Aboriginal cricket tour in 1868.

Also known as King Cole, he was one of that extraordinary team initially coached and captained by Geelong’s Tom Wills, same man came up with Australian rules football. The team surprised the life out of England’s toffee-nosed cricketing aristocrats.

Smacked them all over the shop then put on corroborees, whipcracking tricks, close-up stunts belting away cricket balls thrown en masse, somersaults, tumbled backflips and threw demos with their spears and boomerangs. Johnny Mullagh, Unaarrimin, was the star of the team, carting the Poms all over the place.

Wills’ role is remarkable for the fact his father was slaughtered in the largest massacre of whites by Aborigines, five years earlier. But Wills had grown up with Aborigines and his 1866 job leading the team around Victoria and New South Wales, while a natural exercise for him, was often controversial to many colonials who saw Aborigines as savages.   

Wills was widely considered the best cricketer of his time but he’s not Geelong’s only claim to fame from the era. When Australia’s first Test team played England at the MCG in 1877, it included batsman Bransby Beauchamp Cooper, a cousin of the great W.G. Grace. He’d migrated to The Antipodes in 1869.

Cooper, a gentleman, eschewed anything resembling hard work. He refused to practise, deeming it a form of slavery, and demanded professional cricketers do the hard work of bowling and fielding. Oddly enough, he didn’t mind wicketkeeping.

Well-credentialled after playing with Grace’s teams in the 1860s in England, he later beat Grace’s team while playing for Victoria, with a personal knock of 84. Playing at South Melbourne in the 1870s, he drew such a large crowd that visiting tightrope sensation Blondin said Melbourne “had gone mad with cricket”.

Cooper worked at Queenscliff as a customs officer, dying in 1914. He is buried at Eastern Cemetery in plot CEO/6/48 if you’re curious.

I’ve had my orbs running over another book, too; Parachutist at Fine Leg, by Geelong scion and cricket encyclopedia Gideon Haigh. Veritable treasure chest of weird cricket tales. Like Sid Barnes’ 1948 jab at an umpire when a dog ran onto the field after an unsuccessful appeal: “Now all you want is a white stick.”

And South Africa’s exit from the field in Sydney 1995 after player Symcox was pelted with golf balls, fruit and a stuffed barbecue chicken. Then there was the sparrow killed by Indian bowler Jahangir Khan at Lord’s in 1936 which landed against the wicket, without dislodging the bails.  And in 1982, British customs found a consignment of bats from India  that had been hollowed out and filled with cannabis.

It’s not just the game, the old cricket. So I discovered some years back, at Barwon Heads, when a visiting circus elephant grabbed a cricket ball with its trunk after a batsman belted a four.

You’d think it happens all the time in India. You’d think maybe the pachyderm was trained and could throw it back. Nope, he just scoffed it, quick as look at you. Burp.

But my favourite cricketing yarn has to be Tarpot from that Aboriginal team toured England way back when. He could run 100 yards backwards in 14 seconds.

Like Lillee in reverse.

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