Now that really is the end of an era

Sitting on the laundry floor at my grandfather’s place around 1953 or 1954 reading my way through the piles of the old pink Bulletin magazines he had stored there… Sigh! He of course had probably been reading it since the late 1890s.

It has had its ups and downs for sure, but I have to say the recent summer edition was really very good, and there was some excellent coverage during last year’s elections.

But now the party is over.

 

Australian poem: 2008 series #3 — anon. "Botany Bay"

Does everyone in Australia know this? Anyone who has been educated here should, probably does.

 

Catching up

After tuition (a bit thin on the ground at this time of the year, I’m afraid) I decided yesterday to wander up to Oxford Street, not having been there for quite a time. I dropped into The Shift but saw no-one I really knew, and of the few I did no-one I really wanted to talk to. I did see someone that could have been Adrian, though I have never met Adrian in the flesh; but I was probably wrong. (No, they don’t all look the same. I am sure it wasn’t M, who is after all in Argentina right now, nor was it the Fujian lad I had just been tutoring.) Time was around 5.30 pm.

So I walked further and encountered Bandjalung artist Andy, whom I had not seen since Lord Malcolm’s memorial service last year, sitting with a couple of others outside The Stonewall — reviews there, but not their website which killed my IE7 and is the object of malware warnings from Google and Finjian. So I sat down with him for a while, and then we went on to The Flinders. Good conversation, and only three beers. (I am more and more a very moderate drinker. My last visit to the pub was with The Rabbit a couple of weeks ago, and I hardly ever drink at home.)