Sunday, February 22, 2026

As requested, the lizard Oz farewell to Anna, with bonus FAFO from the WSJ ...

 

As a correspondent expressed an interest in reading how the reptiles decided to treat a recently departed member of the extended clan.

There are other obits in other places, but this is how the hive mind saw off one of a string of spouses, it being said that the Emeritus Chairman so loved the sanctity of 'death do us part' marriage that he's tried it five times...




Enough already, let us farewell #@:




The pond will withhold any commentary. 

The tone is pretty clear, and people will be pleased to read that Anna didn't much like Australia, preferring the freedumb of the disunited States, no doubt a great relief to the emeritus chairman, who sold off his citizenship for a mess of Wall St pottage.

The piece was littered with snaps, which the pond has downsized ...



That's because it really is quite a long eulogy that's been put together by Jamie in a most sensitive and caring way ...





Then came two snaps suggesting fame by association, though perhaps hanging with Hawkie and with Diana isn't the most optimistic presentation of the joys of failed marriages...





Patience, there are still two gobbets to go, and two more snaps, with that reveal of disdain for down under about to come ...




Uh huh ...




And so mercifully to the final gobbet ...




The pond trusts this placates its corespondent, and regrets that it had to be relegated to a late Sunday arvo post, wherein the correspondent might well miss it ...

As for being judged for what you do, the pond couldn't help but throw in more signs that the Emeritus Chairman has gone the full FAFO, courtesy the WSJ ...




Not just one ... but here the pond must pause for a message from a man that the emeritus chairman did so much to help, and still helps on a daily basis via Faux Noise ...




That doesn't sound like what the WSJ was hoping for, but that's the art of FAFO...

You can celebrate the man, then put on a mocking mask, as the WSJ did in this one, presented here in two grabs...





And so ends the late arvo bonus, and so to end with more celebrations of life in the disunited States, with nutlickers never far from view ....






In which Polonius pants over the beefy boofhead while he humps away, and the dog botherer does climate science denialism for the umpteenth time ...

 

The pond was pleased, neigh delighted, when later in the weekend, the reptiles put Tamworth's ineradicable, eternal shame at the top of the digital edition...




It shows that the reptiles are being diligent in their attempts to demonise Barners and his red-headed tyrannical shrewish consort ...

The pond has already been there and done that under a different header, and like everything else in the hive mind, it turned to digital fish and chip wrappings in a nanosecond, but it shows that Barners, and so Tamworth, will keep on battling to stay centre of the known universe ...

While taking that snapshot, the pond was reminded to again feature that intermittent archive link to the Angelic one ... and because the pond is always keen to give as many reptiles as possible a chance to bask in the Tamworth sun ...

ROYAL FAMILY
Rat-infested future if eighth in line to throne does time
If Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is convicted and jailed he’ll discover the brutal and squalid reality of prison life.
By Christine Middap
Associate editor, chief writer

Regrettably the reptiles dropped the "rat-infested" note from the actual story header ... 



Even worse the reptiles couldn't find a place for that snap, which the Graudian had already turned into a fetching piece of Royal mug merch ...




Credit where credit is due... the middling Middap managed to do her entire piece without a single mention of King Donald and his many appearances in the Trumpstein files, nor did she for a nanosecond wonder why the former prince scored an arrest while King Donald and his assorted nutlickers (and Lutnicks) roam wild and free ...




Still, it's always a treat to see that the monarchist hive mind FAFO'd and now have columns to write.

And so to another diligent worker in the reptile hive mind, diligently beavering away in the coal mine to make the world safe for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...



The header: Angus Taylor stacks the frontbench with rivals — and bets on unity over fear; The new Liberal leader has elevated allies and competitors alike, signalling confidence rather than caution. After dire polling and internal turmoil, Angus Taylor is wagering that strength beats factional score-settling.

The caption for the happy family snap: Angus Taylor unveiled a shadow ministry that includes key internal rivals as well as loyalists. Picture: Glenn Hampson

In an alternative world, outside the hive mind, the illustrative snap might have shown the beefy prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way consorting with his "key internal rivals"...




... but of course the point of this is that Polonius is a member of the outer rings of La Famiglia and so has no interest in Mafia snaps, so a snap of the smaller nuclear La Famiglia is much more fitting.

Polonius did his best to put a gloss on all this ...

It is a legend, possibly a true one, that right-wing Labor Party politician Fred Daly introduced a newly elected colleague to the harsh reality of democratic politics. When the newcomer visited the House of Representatives for the first time, he pointed to the Liberal Party benches and said, “That’s where our political opponents sit.”
To which Daly is said to have replied: “No, son; our political opponents sit among us.” Meaning that to get to the top of the tree in democratic politics, a politician has to prevail over their colleagues.
It would seem that newly elected Liberal leader Angus Taylor does not follow the teachings of Daly. What’s surprising about his frontbench announcement last Tuesday is that it contains all of his political rivals who might aspire to be Liberal Party leader someday.
Look at it this way: Taylor defeated Sussan Ley in the partyroom ballot by a significant margin, 34 votes to 17. Senator Jane Hume prevailed as deputy leader over Ted O’Brien, 30 votes to 20. She was elected on the back of the 11 votes that Dan Tehan won on the second ballot. Melissa Price was eliminated on the first ballot with two votes. As a senator, Hume is unlikely to become Liberal leader.
Tehan (who voted for Taylor in the leadership ballot) has significant support within the Liberal Party. He has retained his important position as opposition energy and emissions reduction spokesman. Tehan also was appointed to a significant role as manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives – a position held by Anthony Albanese before he became Labor Prime Minister.
Another potential rival of Taylor is Andrew Hastie. Taylor gave him responsibility for industry and sovereign capability, a key economic position. Hastie also was appointed deputy leader of the opposition in the house.
Tim Wilson is another potential rival to Taylor. He was appointed Treasury spokesman, the second most important position in opposition. Wilson presents as a moderate rather than a conservative in the Liberal Party ranks. He voted for Ley. Moreover Taylor, a conservative, accommodated O’Brien who polled second to Hume along with the best performing moderates (and Ley supporters) in his shadow ministry. Namely (in alphabetical order) Andrew Bragg and Wilson. In other words, there was no purge of moderates.

At this point, the pond could only marvel. 

Why it's one gigantic happy family, the beefy boofhead's happy nuclear family enlarged to the whole universe.

Polonius was in such a state of rapture that he'd completely forgotten to mention there was not a single conservative at the ABC.

Would this mystifying, meaningless interruption remind him of his sacred duty?



Of course not ...

As I wrote in these pages on October 18 last year, on becoming leader after the Coalition’s disastrous defeat in the May 2025 election, Ley erred in not appointing some of the party’s best performers to her frontbench. They included (in alphabetical order) Claire Chandler, Sarah Henderson and Hume. Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did not get significant positions. Hastie resigned from the shadow ministry and Nampijinpa Price was dropped. All are on Taylor’s frontbench.
When the above are added to the likes of Michaelia Cash, Jonno Duniam and James Paterson, the opposition has the strongest frontbench available. Those Ley supporters whom Taylor demoted were not strong public performers.
Then there is the leader. Taylor seems to be speaking more directly than previously and has started to deliver a simple but coherent political message. Which does not mean the Coalition (the Nationals’ frontbench is chosen by David Littleproud) is close to government. But it is showing signs of taking the political fight up to Albanese and his colleagues.
Four conservative leaders have come back from partyroom defeats to lead their party: Robert Menzies, Andrew Peacock, John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull. Peacock stepped down after losing the 1987 election and Turnbull was replaced as leader a few years after losing 14 seats to Labor at the 2016 election.
Menzies and Howard learnt from the errors they made the first time around, particularly with respect to their handling of colleagues. They went on to become, respectively, the longest and second longest serving Australian prime ministers in their second term as party leader.
It’s early days yet. But according to the report by Sarah Ison and Greg Brown in The Weekend Australian last Saturday, Taylor has learnt from his mistakes when dealing with colleagues as Treasury spokesman during Peter Dutton’s leadership. Competent politicians learn from failure as well as success.

Polonius spends his time absorbing the hive mind? What's new?

But then the dastardly ABC did attempt to ruin things, by daring to interview the savvy Savva...

Some ABC and Nine journalists have run the line that the Liberals will suffer politically from removing their first female leader, overlooking that Labor brought down Julia Gillard, its first female leader.
Political commentator Niki Savva is no fan of the contemporary Liberal Party or Taylor. However, when interviewed by Sally Sara on ABC Radio National Breakfast on the morning of the partyroom ballot, Savva said: “I know people, particularly moderate Liberal women, are distressed by the … impending loss of the first female leader. But no man would survive these poll numbers … and every politician, male or female, lives or dies by the polls.”

Ah, all good, full steam ahead, victory is assured ...

There was a collapse in the Coalition vote after Christmas. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation had been creeping up in opinion polls throughout 2025 and was polling in the high teens by late 2025. A Newspoll conducted on November 17-20 had One Nation at 15 per cent to the Coalition’s 24 per cent.
The first Newspoll after the Bondi massacre of December 14 was conducted on January 12-15. It had One Nation on 22 per cent to the Coalition’s 21 per cent. The Newspoll conducted on February 5-8 had One Nation at 27 per cent to the Coalition’s 18 per cent. No Liberal leader could survive this.
This suggests that Australian politics has changed, to some extent at least, following the massacre. For whatever reason, support on the non-left side of politics moved from the Liberal Party to One Nation. Current polling indicates this move has been reversed under Taylor’s leadership.
Whatever critics of Taylor may say with respect to the female vote, women in the party have never held such senior positions as in the current shadow ministry. This is another indication that the new leader wants the best performers on his frontbench and is not worried about internal competition.

Uh huh. The lettuce will wait and see ... because there's plenty of room for snark ...







And speaking of migrants, as the reptiles will likely be doing at nauseating length over the coming months ...

Tony Wright, in that other place, and so in the intermittent archive, took to wondering how it might all play out ...

When Angus Taylor delivered his first speech to parliament in December 2013, he devoted part of it to the memory of Sir William Hudson.
Unsurprising, really. Hudson remains a giant of 20th century Australian history.
He was credited with building Australia’s single greatest infrastructure project, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, of which he was commissioner and chief engineer from its inception in 1949 until 1967.
He was also Taylor's grandfather.
“My grandfather, William Hudson, was, and remains, a pervasive role model in my life,” Taylor, the newly minted parliamentarian, told the House of Representatives.
“He conceived of the idea [the Snowy Mountains scheme] and insisted, against resistance, to bring in large numbers of refugees from war-torn Europe.
“He insisted that people from over 30 countries, who had just been fighting each other in the Second World War, live and work together in multi-ethnic camps.
“The Snowy scheme, quite literally, changed the face of our nation.”
These years later, Taylor is the new leader of a federal Coalition gasping for relevance as disaffected voters fall for the easy, right-wing populism of Pauline Hanson and her followers.
Taylor has flagged his priority is to take a hardline stance on immigration, including supporting measures to block or expel people “who hate our way of life”.
Sussan Ley left him to mull over an as-yet untried scheme to ban arrivals from certain troubled areas of the world, including countries in Africa and the Middle East, and, for pity’s sake, Gaza. Oh, and border control would have the Trumpist power to check the mobile phones of arrivals.
Precisely what cuts to Australia’s immigration numbers Taylor might deem suitable, or whether he might ban applicants from specific countries, is yet to be revealed.
More intriguingly, perhaps, is the open question of how Taylor might square his reverence for his grandfather’s life’s work with his determination to exploit a rise in anti-immigration sentiment for his and his party’s political survival.
Grandfather Bill Hudson’s Australia in 1949 was, of course, a different place to the nation we inhabit now.
World War II had shaken Australians’ belief in their nation’s security.
“Populate or perish” was the cry of a country of fewer than 8 million.
The vast majority of Australians – about 90 per cent – were of Anglo-Celtic heritage, and the White Australia Policy was an article of faith.
The Australian census of 1947 identified just 38,653 Australians as “foreign” (the census papers also declared all numbers were “exclusive of full-blood Aboriginals”).
Xenophobia, like institutionalised racism, ran deep.
When Ben Chifley’s Labor government first decided to broaden Australia’s intake of postwar immigrants to include Europeans in the cause of the “populate or perish” policy, immigration agents took ham-fisted care to assuage public unease about “foreigners”.
They carefully chose light-skinned, often blond, men and women, most of them from the Baltic nations: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
It worked: journalists witnessing the first immigrants travelling by train from Port Melbourne to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre near Albury-Wodonga enthusiastically called them “the beautiful Balts”.
Still, wharfies at Port Melbourne in late 1947 were reluctant to dock the first ship carrying these new arrivals, claiming they would “take Australian jobs”.
When Hudson was appointed in 1949 by the Chifley government to build the massive Snowy scheme – to divert water from the mountains to irrigate the nation’s food bowl and produce reliable hydroelectric power – he knew there were nowhere near enough Australians capable or willing to tackle the work.
He chose to upend Australia’s monoculture.
Hudson settled for the bulk of his workforce on the great pool of Europeans whose lives were shattered by World War II.
Displaced persons’ camps overflowed with refugees. Poverty and hopelessness had its grip on villages, smashed cities and ruined agricultural regions across the continent.
Many of the people Hudson and his people persuaded to take their chances in far-off Australia had also been at each other’s throats during the war, and sometimes long before.
Germany, having invaded Poland, waged war everywhere; Italians were drafted into Mussolini’s fascist fever until they turned on him and killed him; Greece was occupied by Italians, Germans, Bulgarians and Hungarians; ancient hatreds divided Serbs and Croats. After the war, Stalin’s Soviet empire swallowed the countries of eastern Europe, leading to a frantic exodus.
Hudson’s scheme employed people – almost all of them men – from 33 of these broken nations.
Few spoke English or even shared languages with their former European neighbours.
There could easily have been a backlash from everyday Australians and hysteria over importing enemy aliens that would make One Nation’s stance today look tame.
But Hudson had an ace up his sleeve.
He had the full support of Australia’s political leaders from both sides of the fence: Chifley initially, and the Liberals’ Bob Menzies through the 1950s and ’60s.
They lauded immigration and the Snowy scheme as nation-building, and a potentially sceptical public went along with it.
The likes of Pauline Hanson wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways.
Now, Hudson’s grandson has a choice.
He could choose to embrace a non-discriminatory immigration policy while promoting a perfectly legitimate and overdue debate about how many immigrants Australia should welcome.
He could temper the wilder fears promoted by cynical populists by pointing to nation-builders like rural doctors from the Middle East, aged care workers from Asia, technologists from the subcontinent and the army of recent arrivals who undertake unheralded and often unpleasant tasks in the cause of building a future for their kids.
Or he could buckle to those in his party who are terrified of the racists and xenophobes intent on exploiting the concerns of everyday Australians who are abandoning mainstream political parties because they feel leaders aren’t speaking to them any more.
And, of course, he could muse about what the pervasive role model of his life, grandfather Hudson, might have advised.

The pond already knows the answer, courtesy Golding ...




And so reluctantly to the dog botherer ...



The header: Harbour no illusions: Coalition should ditch the climate groupthink; Harbourside mansion owners don’t fret over power bills. A wealthy Liberal supporter’s climate advice from her Point Piper mansion exposes the problem. Evangelism won’t win wealthy voters; a potent energy case may.

The caption for the snob-bashing snap: The view of Sydney Harbour from harboursdie Potts Point. Picture: Supplied

The pond was reluctant because as soon as you read the word "groupthink", you know the dog botherer is on his usual projection path, what with him being a certified member of the hive mind climate science denialist groupthink cult ...

The dog botherer wants you to know he's not one of them ...

A week or so ago I happened to be sipping on a drink at a harbourside mansion, just a few moorings down from Malcolm Turnbull’s Point Piper pile as it turns out. When the conversation turned to politics, a wealthy and successful woman who is a friend and supporter of Turnbull shared what she believed was a critical insight into the Liberal Party’s dilemma.
She said her adult, professional daughter would not vote for the Liberals until they were doing more to tackle climate change. The implication, in fact the assertion, was that the Coalition needed to dramatically increase its commitment to greenhouse gas emission reductions to win back right-leaning people, especially in the younger cohorts.
This is a common argument, often put by political pundits on the ABC and in Nine newspapers as well as by members of the Liberals’ so-called moderate faction and, indeed, by former prime minister Turnbull himself.
It is often portrayed as a binary choice – the party is stuck with a choice between promising climate action to win back the teal seats or rejecting action in favour of cheaper electricity to win regional and outer suburban seats.
Here I was in the middle of teal territory, surrounded by the nation’s most expensive real estate and many of its richest people, and I was being offered a political reality check.
I do not doubt the sincerity or good intentions of these Liberal barrackers, but their logic is warped. Instead of telling the Liberals to change their policies, this woman needed to tell her daughter to wise up.
No one with a harbourside mansion frets over their electricity bills, they don’t even fret over the salaries they pay to the people they employ to take care of daily mundanities such as power bills.
This is a classic demonstration of the post-material concerns that can influence the voting patterns of the wealthy. The accepted wisdom of many in the political class is that the Coalition parties must indulge the post-material concerns of people who want to save the planet if they are to attract their votes and win back seats such as Wentworth (in which we were drinking), Kooyong, Warringah, Mackellar, North Sydney and Curtin.

Just to emphasise the point, the reptiles flung in a snap of Malware's shack, Malcolm Turnbull's Point Piper pile. Picture: Supplied




The pond has no time for Malware, destroyer on onion muncher instructions of the NBN, but what's with the dog botherer, at one time fellow traveling with him as a minder minion up to his neck in Utegate?

The pond knows for a fact that he's a latte-sipper in his own home, posing with mug and poncy read...



And he too fell for the emerald city, shameless in its floozy charms...

Chris Kenny: My two homes — Adelaide and Sydney — and why I love them

For years there was this horrible sense of being unfaithful.
Falling for an overwhelming beauty, enticed on each encounter by a sparkling sense of excitement, I had to constantly remind myself of that more subtle loveliness back home.
For a long while — as you do — I remained loyal.
Then it happened, and life hasn’t been quite the same since.
We were flying into Sydney late one afternoon on the approach from the north, where the flight path takes you over Cockatoo Island and you look east to see the setting sun reflecting in the towering glass of the city, the grand bridge arching over glistening water, the stark curves of the Opera House and ferries chopping up the harbour as they cut their way out to towards the heads in the fading light.
I’ve seen more than a few cities but this one always takes your breath away.
What was different this time was how, for the first time, the dazzling beauty was overwhelmed by another sense, a stronger and more comforting feeling.
It was a feeling that, until that day, I had only ever known when arriving in Adelaide.
My shoulders relaxed, I let out a sigh and just felt comforted in the knowledge that I was home. Sydney had become home.
From that moment on, there was no point in feeling as though I was unfaithful to Adelaide.
It’s what happens when you build a life in a new city — buy a house, forge a career, make friends and expand your family.
By that time I was even on first-name terms with the butcher and drycleaner — of course, Sydney was home.

What a shameless philanderer, what a wretched adulterer, ready to abandon the great aunts on the verandah for life with an emerald-glittering harlot ...

But the pond digresses ... and there's the usual climate science denialist work to be done ...

On the contrary, this is a recipe for surrendering core right-of-centre values that should prioritise sensible policies and sound economic management over political posturing. The Liberal Party should never acquiesce to people who want it to espouse economically harmful policies that will do nothing to improve the climate just so they can feel better about their voting choices.
What the Coalition should do is advocate, explain and convince voters about the environmental futility and economic harm of the climate policies imposed by the current Labor-Greens nexus. It should have faith that successful professionals will be as capable as working families when it comes to assessing what is logical and beneficial for the economy and the environment.
Frankly, it is embarrassing that any educated professional would seriously propose that emissions reductions in Australia could alter the global climate or that a modern industrialised economy could run on a renewables-plus-storage model.
Just because this stuff is repeated ad nauseam by green-left politicians, media and activists does not make it believable; at some stage intelligent voters must consider the facts.
And this is where the right-of-centre has let people down in public debate. Driven by political popularity it has flirted with net zero and renewables, allowed a functional national electricity grid to be largely demolished in favour of a renewables build-out that makes power prohibitively expensive and precariously unreliable. At the same time, some elements on the right have pushed a resurgence of coal-fired power, denied the climate science, turned to gas and promoted publicly funded nuclear energy.
Slow-motion disaster
In short, the right-of-centre parties have been divided and confused on climate and energy policy. While they have run around in circles on this stuff, their traditional constituencies of suburban and regional families and small businesses have been crushed by soaring electricity bills. Manufacturing has been decimated, moving offshore, and heavy industry increasingly is kept alive only by government energy subsidies.
It is a slow-motion, long-running policy disaster. The Liberals have seen too many of their well-heeled supporter in teal seats drift to candidates who reflect their self-identity – women of their community who care for the environment, hate major party politics and perhaps consider themselves just a little superior to the huddled masses of the mortgage belt.
Those who suggest the Liberals must find salvation by appealing to this political trickery are promoting political suicide.
The clear distinction between the political right and the political left is the rejection of ideology and fashion by the right in favour of practical ideas that deliver economic and social benefits. If they chase the left down the path of climate evangelism and virtue signalling the Liberals can only make a mockery of themselves.
The Coalition needs to argue the facts, cogently and consistently, for an extended period. In 30 years of climate and energy policy they have never managed to do that.
The Nationals and Liberals need to ensure they are not distracted by members dismissing concerns about global warming or denying the need for constant scientific research and assessment. By the same token, they must expose climate alarmism rather than endorse it.
There are three central points that must be sheeted home to everyone in the country and they are all buttressed by an army of facts. First, cheap, reliable energy is the essential lifeblood of our entire economy and civilisation, and it is being undercut by the push to renewable energy.
Second, whatever Australia does cannot have any discernible impact on the global climate, so that to the extent that policy decisions can alter the climate, we will get the climate the world deigns to give us.

It goes without saying that the reptiles flung in yet another terrifying snap of those infernal machines that litter the Hume highway down beefy boofhead Gouburn way with dead whales, There are rising regional concerns about wind projects. Picture: AFP



The pond likes it because there's a chance to run a balancing 'toon ...



And there's also a chance to reference other yarns in the area.

Perhaps out of shame or guilt, or simple Hollywood-style hysteria, WaPo has taken to running shock horror climate stories...



That's just a titillating teaser. If you haven't seen that movie, there's more at the intermittent archive ...

Instead the pond had to be content with some more bog standard denialism ...

Third, there are smarter ways to reduce carbon emissions without undercutting our energy grid or alienating vast areas of countryside, bushland and coastline with renewables and transmission projects.
These arguments need to be made relentlessly, leveraging daily controversies about rising electricity costs, increasing cases of load-shedding and blackouts, and regional concerns about solar, wind and transmission projects. The energy debate feeds strongly into the pivotal cost-of-living debate because power prices impact household and business costs, directly and indirectly.
Obviously, the Coalition needs to detail an alternative strategy. This needs to recognise there is no rush to meet targets.
We can afford to extend coal-fired generation and use more gas while we bed down the existing renewable assets and switch to nuclear for fixed, baseload, emissions-free energy. Nuclear is the irresistible mainstay of a low-emissions grid, as most of the developed world has recognised.
If Australia is to be a modern economy, running nuclear-powered submarines and hosting AI data centres, then a domestic nuclear industry is inevitable. Every day of delay is a day wasted, and private investment can be leveraged for this task, as is happening in the US, Europe and North Asia.

Why do they want to nuke the country to save the planet, when the planet doesn't need saving, and in any case what could Australia do to help?

Okay, the pond isn't responsible for the weird illogicality of hive mind types of the dog bothering kind, and nor is the pond responsible for the way that, as sure as terrifying windmills must feature, even more terrifying solar farms must follow in a 'fry them to a crisp' way ... Solar farms pictured in Glenrowan, Victoria, next to the Hume Freeway. Picture: Aaron Francis / The Australian



So there's another chance to run a cartoon ...



And that's a chance to catch up with the latest Graudian moan, The heat suffocates, the fires rage - even by brutal Australian standards, this summer is brutal ...(sent to the intermittent archive because of email extortion threats) (it's not because the pond couldn't use a fake email address, it's not because the archive is remotely reliable, it's the bloody principle of the thing).

Inter alia ...



And there's also The New Yorker...with Bill McKibben reminding readers how King Donald was determined to do for the planet just what the dog botherer was proposing ... The E.P.A. Rescinds a Landmark Finding (*archive link):




And then, as likely the Sydney-infatuated dog botherer hadn't caught up with the news of SA's algal bloom disaster, it was a doodle to finish off this tepid repetition of snowflake reptile whines ...

That reclaiming our natural advantage of cheap, reliable energy is good for the economy and our national security is indisputable. But there will also be political benefits.
Nobody doubts the electoral popularity of better and cheaper energy policy in the suburbs and regions. But how to convince those wealthy voters in the teal seats with their post-material concerns?
The first thing to remember is that you don’t need to convince all of them; winning back one in four teal voters will be plenty for the Liberals to reclaim those seats. Most teal voters are green-left types who have drifted from Labor or the Greens (which now tend to run dead in those seats to assist teal victories).
Analysis this week by former ABC election analyst Antony Green shows the starkness of the leftist trend. In Kooyong 83 per cent of the people who voted for Monique Ryan sent their preferences to the Labor Party; for Zoe Daniel in Goldstein it was 80 per cent; and even for Allegra Spender in Wentworth it was 74 per cent. The teals are not centrist. Their preference flows to Labor are almost as strong as Labor gets from the Greens.
Sure, some voters switched from the Liberals to the teals. But this happened even when the Liberals took net zero by 2050 to the last two elections.
Climate posturing has not helped the Liberals in the past, so why would it work now? More to the point, voters need to be presented with a policy alternative.
The Coalition should try to convince voters with logic rather than emotion. After all, if the climate poseurs of Point Piper really believed their alarmism, there would be fire sales of their waterfront properties as they head for the hills.

The hive mind heat is going to be on in relation to migrants and climate science, and the beefy boofhead down Goulburn way is going to wilt in the sun, as sure as a drunk Barners can trip over a planter box, but still manage to stay on the phone ...

And so to a novelty item, courtesy The Atlantic, because it's not just SBS that starts frothing and foaming at the thought of a Nazi angle ... Hitler's Greenland Obsession ...(*archive li nk)



And so on, and credit for writer Timothy W. Ryback for not making the King Donald connection explicit ...just hinting by way of contrast ...

...The Americans, like the British, recognized the distinction between a fascist takeover by force and the prerogatives of a democratically elected government. So just as de Gaulle was recognized as the legitimate representative of France, Kauffman was recognized as the legitimate representative of Denmark and Greenland. Over the next four years, Greenland became a vital transit point for the Allies—it had as many as 17 military facilities, including airfields and naval installations that protected the cryolite-mining operation at Ivittuut—and assisted in the liberation of hundreds of millions of Europeans across the continent. When the war was over and the democratically elected government in Denmark was restored, it willingly reaffirmed this American protection in the 1951 Defense of Greenland agreement, which remains in effect today.

Speaking of Nazis, as the pond often does ...

Tesla slashes Cybertruck prices as it tries to move (unpainted) metal

... Appealing to neither traditional pickup truck buyers, who have largely rejected going to electric vehicles, nor the majority of EV enthusiasts even before Musk’s politics further soured things, fewer than 39,000 Cybertrucks were sold in 2024, and just over 20,000 found homes in 2025. The Edsel might be Ford’s most famous failure, but even it posted superior sales numbers during its relatively brief life.

There's no escaping King Donald, Uncle Elon or AI ...





And speaking of AI ...




Saturday, February 21, 2026

In which the reptiles offer sundry news items, including Tamworth's eternal shame, before the pond turns to the Ughmann for an abysmal closing ...

 

The reptiles went big with ISIS brides this day, as any dinkum fear-mongering foreign-owned corporation would do:



Taking a break from her MAGA cap, climate science denialist, court and judge bashing themes, Dame Slap led the way ...

How Tony Burke’s electorate politics sparked ISIS brides national security debacle
How much longer will Australians tolerate Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke reacting to political pressure rather than making considered decisions in the national interest?
By Janet Albrechtsen

Fundamentalist Catholic, the Angelic one, chipped in ...

Our values on trial: The ISIS brides, their children — and who we choose to be
As debate rages over the return of Australian ISIS brides, sympathy flows to their children but rarely their mothers. The controversy exposes deeper fears about Muslims — and tests what we mean by ‘our values’.
By Angela Shanahan

The pond thanked the long absent lord for the intermittent archive, which allowed the pond the chance to present this dross to correspondents, without having to do anything more with it ...

It was only down the page that the reptiles were reluctantly forced to pay attention to King Donald and rats in the Supreme Court ranks ...



Joe Kelly, lesser member of the Kelly gang, was on hand to observe the folly ...



Joe was full of gloom, as the war with China surged to the surface ...

...Initial reports suggested that Trump was enraged by the news, with sources saying he attacked the Supreme Court and its ruling – labelling it “a disgrace” – during his White House breakfast with governors on Friday morning local time.
Posting on his Truth Social platform last year, Trump warned that an unfavourable decision by the US Supreme Court would be “1929 all over again” and plunge the country into a second “great depression.”
The Supreme Court decision now overturns the basis on which the US President was able to negotiate his sweeping global trade deals and obtain leverage over a host of other countries including China, with the ruling leaving America vulnerable should the trade war with Beijing reignite.
Trump, who is visiting Beijing in April, will meet with Xi Jinping from a position of weakness with his trade policy in tatters after China emerged as the sole nation last year to retaliate against the US President’s trade war.
The Supreme Court on Friday local time found that the IEEPA tariffs were illegal because they gave the US President no grand authority to impose tariffs and that this authority would need to be granted by the US Congress.
Writing the majority opinion of the Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the President “asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorisation to exercise it.”
He said that while IEEPA did grant the President the authority to “regulate” importation, this was not sufficient to justify the sweeping tariffs that had already been implemented.

This is a China war crisis of the first water for the reptiles, yet where was the bromancer? Still MIA ...

He was last sighted on 24th January, furiously scribbling...

A tale of two Trumps: good, bad and bluster
The US President seems to value NATO’s vast security network at nothing. That’s not only insulting, it’s untrue.
By Greg Sheridan

Not a peep since.

Sorry world, we're on our own, and what a sorry mess it is ...

“The Constitution lodges the Nation’s lawmaking powers in Congress alone, and the major questions doctrine safeguards that assignment against executive encroachment,” Gorsuch said in his opinion. “Under the doctrine’s terms, the President must identify clear statutory authority for the extraordinary delegated power he claims. And, as the principal opinion explains, that is a standard he cannot meet.”
“Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield.”
In his dissenting opinion, Brett Kavanaugh warned that the “United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others. As was acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’”
Earlier this month, The Tax Foundation – a Washington based think-tank – estimated that the tariffs imposed by President Trump had raised a total of $132bn in net tax revenue over 2025. Over the decade, the group said the tariffs were forecast to raise $1.6 trillion.
The decision by the Supreme Court now means the administration will need to resort to fallback options to salvage its trade policy and preserve its revenue stream – but the back-up options do not offer the President the same level of flexibility.

That's enough of that - the intermittent archive will sometimes provide, if it happens to be in the mood...



Besides, there are plenty of other non-paywall sources to have a chuckle over King Donald's dismal day with the rats, as he laughs all the way to the bank ..

As a result of these shenanigans, the former prince now known as randy Andy slipped way down the page ...

The malignant Magnay could only summon up three minutes of brooding about what the monarchist rag had helped FAFO into the ether...

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor: Caught in headlights, downfall complete ... nightmare just beginning
After 12 hours in custody, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faces an expanding misconduct inquiry tied to Jeffrey Epstein emails —plunging the monarchy into fresh turmoil.
By Jacquelin Magnay



Over on the extreme far right, Fergo decided he had to drag Queen Liz into the action ...

Did Queen Elizabeth II think Andrew was above the law?
No senior British royal has faced trial in 500 years. Now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor stands accused, friendless and titleless. Elizabeth I put the Crown before family. Elizabeth II could not. Her legacy is now on trial too.
By Richard Ferguson




It was doom and gloom all around...

...We all want to remember Elizabeth in the best possible light. She was the last great link to the world before World War II and after it. The last stateswoman everyone respected. But Elizabeth was not just some Mother Earth who appeared in delightful skits with Paddington Bear and James Bond. This was a powerful, savvy head of state who knew her deeply flawed children were often the greatest threat to the monarchy’s survival.
The queen had access to enough damning information about her favourite son and Epstein, and did next to nothing. While she retired Andrew from public duties, she never considered taking away the protection of the titles. Andrew still stayed with her and went to church. She even left his disgraced ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, some of the corgis in the will.
What else was a mother to do, you may ask. But if anyone knew she was queen before she was a mother, it was Elizabeth. Her namesake, Elizabeth I, didn’t want to punish her Scottish Catholic cousin Mary either. Good Queen Bess feared spilling the blood of another anointed queen would send her to hell. But the last of the Tudors ultimately put the institution before the family and silently allowed Mary’s trial and execution.
It is now clear Elizabeth II could not summon up the same steeliness when it came to Andrew. At best she was soft. At worst, she thought her son of royal blood was above the law. This trial may yet prove her critics right, that Elizabeth acted more as if she were the last great monarch than a queen who cared about securing the monarchy’s future.
For her not-so-favourite son and successor, Charles III, time will tell what this trial will mean. This King has had enough personal dramas in his short reign already: his cancer battle, his daughter-in-law Catherine’s cancer issues, his never-ending feud with his youngest son, Harry.
Maybe this will allow Charles and his heir, William, to move on. But it is likelier that it will cement the idea that Charles’s short reign has been defined by turbulence and trouble.
When Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I were on trial, even their greatest haters were impressed with them. They were both doomed to die, and dreadful in their own ways, but during their trials both monarchs were eloquent and dignified.
Eloquence and dignity are not two concepts associated with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Andrew’s peers will now judge him, as will God. But the legacy of his mother, the future of his brother and nephew, and the fabric of Britain are about to go on trial alongside him.

Great days ahead ...



After indulging in that republican fantasy - there's always a Cromwell to follow - the pond was more more than bemused by this item ...

Mortified, as Jason pandered to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...



The federal government seemed determined to enhance the traditional Australian value ... of chucking the useless bludgers out on their ears ... especially preening gooses caught in a pose-down ...



The pond knows all about the fair go ...



Will they be teaching about the current ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza and the West Bank, or the way that the some of the key founders of the state of Israel were judged terrorists by useless British colonisers?



Yes, and idle propaganda can turn up in the ballot box, and bring down governments that fancy themselves as untouchable.

Speaking of FAFO, the reptiles also went out of their way to celebrate Tamworth's undying shame ...

Barnaby Joyce demanded Pauline Hanson ‘stop the stunts’ in secret One Nation deal
The former deputy prime minister thought he could tame Pauline Hanson’s controversial antics, but colleagues warned this political marriage was doomed from the start.
By Jamie Walker and Sarah Elks



Say what? The reptiles had begun dumping on Tamworth's least favourite son?

The pond apologises, but what with having been born in the same hospital as Barners, the pond is always interested in the effects of the Tamworth sun on mad dogs and stray dinkums ...

The New England MP’s unease with her language was evident this week when he refused to endorse her blanket denunciation of Muslims. In a late-night discussion on Sky News on Monday about the ­Islamic State brides seeking to return to Australia from Syria, she said: “You say, ‘well there’s good Muslims out there’. How can you tell me there are good Muslims?”
Hanson subsequently issued a partial apology, saying she was sorry if she offended anyone who “doesn’t believe in sharia law, or multiple marriages, or wants to bring ISIS brides in, or people from Gaza that believe in a ­caliphate”.
The Australian Federal Police has now received “reports of crime” in relation to those comments, and is assessing them. The agency did not offer any further comment.
Joyce on Thursday suggested that Hanson’s interpretation of what constitutes a “good” Muslim had been misunderstood.
“I do believe there are good people who are Muslim,” he said. “The problem you’ve got is, if people are literal in their religion and that is defined by good as following a literal interpretation, then that is incompatible to Australia.”
His former colleagues in the federal Coalition partyroom and its merged Queensland division, the Liberal National Party, said Joyce’s move to One Nation was always going to be fraught.
“I told him ‘you’ve got to keep her (Hanson) on a leash or the wheels will fall off,’” said another Coalition MP who still talks to Joyce after his defection.
“And there we are, this is not unexpected. Pauline and Barnaby are both chronic narcissists. Most politicians are, but for both Barnaby and Pauline, ‘it’s all about me’. It’s only a matter of time before they clash egos.”

Chronic narcisssists? (To go the full Susssan)

One sure way of telling if the reptiles are intent on a hit piece is to look at the illustrations, and sure 'nuff ... Barnaby Joyce. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman; One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. Picture: Martin Ollman




There's Barners looking like a sunburnt prune who has spent a little too long in the pub and the sun, matched by a classic snap of Pauline, looking like a wrinkled, bitter, shrewish, pursed lip stewed prune.

It was on for young and old ...

Another Coalition MP who remains close to Joyce said his former colleague had been appalled by Hanson’s burqa ploy, the second time she had worn the garment in parliament. She was suspended for seven sitting days and formally censured.
It happened at a time when speculation was rife Joyce was preparing to jump to One Nation, and his then friends and colleagues on the Coalition side were trying to talk him around.
“She did the second burqa thing and he didn’t like it at all,” the MP said.
“I was trying to get him to – at least – postpone his decision for a few months. Get some distance,” the MP said, noting that Joyce’s relationship with Nationals leader David Littleproud had broken down.
“I think that was weighing him down more than it should have.”
The MP wasn’t surprised that Joyce would want Hanson to tone down her language.
“But any person with half a brain cell knows that’s not going to happen,” the MP said. “Pauline is Pauline. She is not going to change.”
The irony is that Joyce – on the outer with the ­Nationals due to his own antics, including the infamous 2024 incident in Canberra where he was videoed lying drunk on a footpath, and his barely concealed contempt for Littleproud - was clearly wary of Hanson and her crew. It took One Nation fully a year to woo him.

There was a lot of goss going down, and a snap of that staffer ...Pauline Hanson and her chief of staff James Ashby. Picture: Jane Dempster




The pond understands what it's all about.

To mix metaphors, the beefy prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way is a bear of little brain, and will struggle, and the threat comes from Pauline's mob, and so the reptiles know their duty ...

One conduit for Hanson was her chief-of-staff James Ashby, who gets on well with Joyce’s wife, Vikki Campion, a former journalist.
Ashby, 46, also has a media background. He has been at Hanson’s side since she entered the Senate in 2016, capitalising on the break then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull cut her by calling a double-dissolution election that halved the Senate quota.
Ashby has political ambitions of his own, having run unsuccessfully for Queensland parliament in 2024, and is seen as a likely ­successor to the 71-year-old were she to relinquish or lose her seat in the red chamber.
His relationship with Joyce will be intriguing. Ashby is used to running his own race as his ­mistress’s voice, the power behind the throne in One Nation, and so is Joyce, 58, reborn as a player in Canberra.
If the party’s surge in the polls stretches to the next federal election due in May 2028 – a big if – there might be room for both of them in the parliamentary team. If not, their jockeying could well add another layer of volatility to the mix. It was ever thus in Hanson’s orbit.
Joyce seems to be aware of the risks. A fourth former Coalition colleague told The Australian Joyce was warned by friends that he needed to “change One Nation’s business model”. This person said: “We told him they needed to look like someone who could govern and not someone to just throw protest slogans around.”
Another longtime Nationals identity, now out of politics, but who had cordial dealings with both Hanson and Joyce, said neither was a team player and that spelled trouble.
“When Barnaby was leader it was the Barnaby party, not the National Party,” the identity said. “Pauline runs the Hanson party, and good on her. I can’t see this ending well.”

How desperate were the reptiles in their desire to please the beefy boofhead's mob?

Why the even turned to the Canavan caravan ...Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce at the state funeral service to celebrate the life of former Nationals Senator Ron Boswell in Brisbane. Picture: Tertius Pickard




He should have been shown holding a shiv ...

Joyce’s former chief-of-staff, Matt Canavan, a one-time cabinet minister regarded as being one of the shrewder operators in the Senate, wonders what happened to his old boss. Writing in The Courier-Mail on Friday, he recalled how Joyce had taken on Hanson when she proposed ­banning Muslim immigration 10 years ago.
“Barnaby pushed back saying that ‘every group has their ratbags, even Catholics. We had, in the past, the IRA, but if someone says every Catholic is a member of the IRA, I’d say no. They have nothing to do with the religion that I practise. Islam at the moment also has a lunatic fringe’,” Canavan wrote, quoting Joyce.
He continued: “That was Barnaby speaking plainly and sensibly. It is disappointing that One Nation has now locked that Barnaby away.”
But for how long?

Pending the great rupture, the reptiles slipped in a snap of the rogue pair gone wild in the deep north ... Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce touring flood affected north-west Queensland.




Just to wrap up, there was time for a little Shakspere ... uneasy lies the head that wears a Tamworth crown ...

Canavan tells The Australian he was pleased Joyce had eventually sought to separate himself from Hanson’s comments. “Clearly, Barnaby’s the one with the experience and common sense, so if One Nation wants to become a serious alternative government they should make Barnaby the leader,” he says.
As for any second thoughts Joyce might have about joining One Nation? Canavan says it’s too late for that.
“I can’t see Barnaby changing now,” he says. He’s made his bed, he’ll have to lie in it. It might not be a restful sleep.”

Barners has murder'd sleep,
Shall sleep no more, Barners shall sleep no more

But enough of all that, because all these yarns qualify in their own way as reptile "news" stories, as the reptiles try to cope with the consequences of sundry monarchist, bigoted follies, and their own cultivation of the extreme far right ...



The pond's beat requires it to focus on certifiable loons, and who better qualifies than the Ughmann for an abysmal closer?



The header: Our past is not set in stone but chalk; From Arthur Stace’s chalked ‘Eternity’ to a Prime Minister’s silence on Lent, a meditation on memory, faith and the fight to reclaim Australia’s story before it fades from view.

The caption for just one of two illustrations designed to relieve the burden of the verbal sludge: The copperplate “Eternity” written by Arthur Stace on a Sydney pavement – a humble act that became a city legend. Picture: AAP

Here the pond must introduce a qualifier for this five minute ramble.

Australia is Sydney, and the Ughmann's memories of himself and the quaint old town ...but absolutely no more.

Anyone outside Sydney need not apply ...

The childhood memory may be unreliable but it is vivid: a chalk inscrip­tion of a single word slashed on the pavement in Sydney – Eternity.
Our family was usually a long way from Sydney in the 1960s, traversing the country following my soldier father’s postings. But between 1964 and 1966 we were within striking distance, living on the outskirts of a then embryonic Canberra, just a five-hour drive from the Emerald City along an old Hume Highway that used to weave through every town.
My maternal grandmother lived in a Housing Commission home in Malabar on the edge of the eastern suburbs and we visited her twice: once to go to the Royal Easter Show and once for Christmas. We made several journeys into the city on green and cream double-decker buses.
Everything in Sydney seemed big, brash and vibrant. On one of those trips, I recall Nanna drawing our attention to the word Eternity chalked in fading, fluid copperplate on the pavement and passing on the lore that no one knew who the mysterious draftsman was or why he scrawled this one word everywhere.
We do now. Illiterate reformed alcoholic and World War I veteran Arthur Stace converted to Christianity in the 1930s and spent the next 35 years writing the same word on walls and pavement in the hope that passers-by would turn their thoughts to heaven. Prosecuted in his day for defacing property, he was celebrated at the 2000 Olympics when Eternity lit up the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Stace’s Sydney and the mark he left on it are long gone, eroded by the ruthless footfall of time.

Actually it's never gone away, not since Martin Sharp became obsessed with it back in the 1970s ... and produced all sorts of images to match ...




.. and they've been flogging it ever since to hipsters, in the Sydney way ...




And that's just the half of it ... as the Ughmann turned Xian, as he always does ...

These memories of an exciting, optimistic and vanished Australia came flooding back on Ash Wednesday. The news was awash with stories about Ramadan and the Chinese Lunar New Year while Lent barely rated a mention. All three of these events move with the moon, and surely this rare convergence was noteworthy.
Anthony Albanese, had posted a video for the Chinese Lunar New Year and released a statement to mark the beginning of Ramadan. Again, there was no word about Lent from our culturally Catholic leader. Perhaps he had boned up on the scripture readings of the day, which cautioned against pompous displays of piety. Perhaps he just forgot.
But forgetting, too, tells a story.
It is good that the Prime Minister offered his best wishes to the Chinese and Muslim Australian communities, but surely the most important season on the Christian calendar also rates a mention. It is the tolerance of the Western tradition we inherit, with its deep roots in Judeo-Christian beliefs, that allows all faiths, and none, to flourish here.
You can over-read these things, but it is easy to place this wilful forgetting within the canon of a creed that deems white settlement an irredeemable stain on the national soul. Yet the fault is not shared. The burden of guilt falls only on what we might call, borrowing an old colonial insult, the currency lads and lasses. These locally born children of settlers were seen as lesser beings than the British-born “sterling”. The crime of dispossession is thus laid solely at the feet of the descendants of the various waves of largely British, pre-World War II settlers. Later migrants enjoy a kind of automatic absolution, despite sharing fully in the benefits of colonisation.

Sheesh, he's even worse than nattering "Ned", and for some reason, he had to drag Kenneth Slessor into it ... Poet Kenneth Slessor, whose work captured the shifting light and shadow of Sydney Harbour.



On and on he went in a way only an unreformed seminarian could manage...

This dismal doctrine of hereditary sin pervades our academic, bureaucratic and cultural institutions and stains our national discourse. It is a joyless, nihilistic cult with a discipline of endless penitence that is robbing us of hope. A once optimistic Australia seems trapped in a permanent Lent with no promise of Easter.
This caricature of our history is deeply damaging and our national story is sorely in need of resurrection. Former prime minister Tony Abbott has done the nation a great service in producing his short history of Australia, which does not shy away from the stains on our past but does seek to reclaim the good in it. And there is much good.
It is past time to redeem the stories and storytellers of the currency lads and lasses who built one of the fairest and freest nations on Earth. Among those storytellers was journalist and poet Kenneth Slessor. There is no one working in the media today who matches Slessor’s gift with words.
He was highly cultured, steeped in literature, and loved Sydney, warts and all. Save for a couple of “vexing intervals”, Slessor lived on the margins of Kings Cross for 40 years, with the harbour “never out of my window”. In a poem on the hidden virtues of a seedy William Street, his refrain is, “You find this ugly, I find it lovely.”
In an essay on the city he wrote: “The character and the life of Sydney are shaped continually and imperceptibly by the fingers of the Harbour, groping across the piers and jetties, clutching deeply into the hills, the water dyed a whole paint box’s armoury with every breath of air, every shift of light or shade, according to the tide, the clock, the weather and the state of the moon. The water is like silk, like pewter, like blood, like a leopard’s skin, and occasionally, merely like water.”

There's a lot more to Slessor than serving in the Ughmann's ranks ...

...Slessor remained agnostic to the end of his days.
He dismissed the poems of 'Banjo' Paterson, Henry Lawson and all the bush balladists. To Slessor, poetry had only begun 'any consistent growth in Australia' 'with the publication of McCrae's Satyrs and Sunlight' (1909). In 1923-24 he helped Jack Lindsay and Frank C. Johnson, a bookseller, to edit Vision: a Literary Quarterly, which ran for only four issues. It was strongly influenced by Norman Lindsay; it tried to jolt Australian writing out of the bush and into the city; and it promoted Nietzschean ideas, discussion of sexuality, debate about aesthetics, and writing about the inner life. Allied to the magazine, and creating the same sort of stir, was an anthology edited by the trio, Poetry in Australia, 1923. (ADB here)

It would have been fun to see Slessor dishing it up to the Ughmann in the roughhouse Smith's Weekly, but alas, instead, we're confronted with one of those mystifying, and so far as the pond can see, utterly meaningless interruptions ...




At this point the Ughmann reminded the pond that there was a whole world of alternative reading available in the real world, none of which included him ...

The harbour looms large and foreboding in his masterpiece Five Bells. The poem meditates on time and the death of his friend Joe Lynch, a tall, gaunt, red-headed “mad” Irish cartoonist.
One rainy Saturday night, Slessor and Lynch heard there was a party in Mosman and jumped on a ferry. Lynch had his coat pockets stuffed full of beer bottles and, when the wake of a big liner hit, Joe fell into the water near where the Sydney Opera House now stands and drowned. His body was never recovered.
In Five Bells, Slessor says time “moved by little fidget wheels is not my Time”. He recalls when time on the harbour was measured by the tolling of ships’ bells and says he has lived many lives, including this one life “Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells”.
He is haunted by the memory of his friend, who has gone from earth, “Gone even from the meaning of a name”.

“Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips
“And hits and cries against the ports of space,
“Beating their sides to make its fury heard.”

I remember a lunch with renowned Australian artist John Olsen who, even in his 80s, radiated delight as he retold the story of discovering Five Bells and of finding an ageing Slessor playing pool at the Sydney Journalists’ Club. The poet and his poem inspired the mural Olsen was commissioned to create, which now sweeps across the Northern Foyer wall of the Sydney Opera House. An echo of Joe Lynch can be heard there.

The reptiles couldn't be bothered showing a snap, even though they had one in their own files?




So quickly they forget ...

The poet and the artist are both dead. The old Journalists’ Club is long gone. But their stories remain, for those who care to look.
Memory is a strange custodian. It preserves, it disturbs, it distorts, softens and erases. Without actively working to protect memories, they can fade, and a nation’s understanding of itself can blur.
But forgetfulness is never neutral. If we do not reclaim our past, others will decide what is remembered. It falls to us to beat against the ports of space to make our story heard.
Or, like chalk on concrete, what was once vivid will vanish. 

Speaking of forgetfulness, of not paying attention, of not remembering, of wilfully distorting and avoiding and shamelessly hiding and erasing the past ... let the immortal Rowe wrap up with a reminder of the many ways that the reptiles have refused to dig into the Trumpstein files ...