Australian Sayings And Quotes

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

It's always the accent that drives you American women crazy. I'd no idea you fancied it, too…” he trailed off. “Oooh, fancied it. Say more like that,” I begged, smiling into the pillow. “Like what, Grace?” “Talk British to me,” I whispered, only half joking. “Dustbins.” “More,” I encouraged. “Crumpets.” “More!” I demanded. “Knickers.” If I could hear Jack Hamilton say a second word for the rest of my life, it would be knickers. “Say put another shrimp on the barbie!” I cried. “Grace, that's Australian,” he chided. “Say it!” “Fine. Put another shrimp on the barbie. Bloody hell,” he muttered. “Aaaahhhhhhh!” I screamed into the phone.

They look at you odd. They say why don’t you do something? I HAVE done everything possible. It does occupy your mind, but like anything painful, you push it to one side. It’s in the bottom compartment; it comes out every so often. If I knew he was dead, I could grieve.

When we came and rented the North Perth home, my father had a little ice chest, and on top of the ice chest was a radio. And we were sitting at our lunch time on Sunday eating dinner after church, and my Mum says, ‘Look where we’ve ended up. We’ve got a table cloth on our table, we’ve got food on our plate, and we’re listening to music.’ That was a big thing for my mother. - Mrs Helen Doropoulos, Greece

She decided to donate blood to the Red Cross; she wanted to donate a quart a week and her blood would be in the veins of Australians and Fighting French and Chinese, all over the whole world, and it would be as though she were close kin to all of these people. She could hear the army doctors saying that the blood of Frankie Addams was the reddest and the strongest blood that they had ever known.

So, everything that’s happened, that’s just the way life is, and it’s never going to be the way you think you want it. I’m not embarrassed about my brother, but I just don’t want to relive it, because people ask, “Oh, where’s your brother, what’s he doing?” and I have to say I don’t know, I haven’t seen him in over 30 years.

Of course it’s taken many years to be able to express what’s been inside me. But nowadays I say to people I was born and brought up in a Latvian house in the country of Australia. So I consider that this house has always been a small part of Latvia, there’s always been Latvian traditions, Latvian foods, Latvian language and I’ve always considered that even though I lived in a large city, I lived in a Latvian ghetto. I mentioned the word ‘ghetto’ … which a lot of people consider negatively, but I consider it in a positive sense. I consider myself quite a competent schizophrenic—I am able to be very Latvian and very dinky-di strong. I don’t have any trouble switching hats. - Viktor Brenners, 2nd Generation DP

Once an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people in the last twelve weeks of their lives, recorded their most often discussed regrets. At the top of the list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”6 This requires, not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials, and not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good opportunities as well.

He was hard and tough and wiry - just the sort that won't say die - There was courage in his quick impatient tread; And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye, And the proud and lofty carriage of his head.

One thing that I find very weird here in Australia is Latvians in Australia celebrate Latvian traditions by a calendar, not by the seasons as they do in Latvia. It’s a bit strange for me, everyone said a few weeks ago, ‘Merry Christmas,’ in Latvian, or maybe Winterfest, and here I was sweating like a pig saying, ‘Merry Winterfest!’ – Viktor Brenners, 2nd Generation DP

I knew something was wrong the minute he didn’t come home,’ says Jo. ‘He always rang. Always. Jo is adamant he would have found a way to call her and let her know what was happening. ‘He would have found a phone and rung me. He had every intention of coming home.

Riley swings the door open and grins at me. "G'day mate!" I frown at him. "What the hell was that?" "Me," he says, "trying to speak your language." I push past him and plonk myself down on his sofa. "That was Australian.

Australians say 'pissed off.' Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss--that means to send someone up, make fun of them.

As we'd say Down Under, there's no point pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork on a hot day." "Are these real Australian sayings or do you come up with this stuff yourself?" I said. "It's genetic," Muz said, grinning."We're born with it already in our blood.

In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, ‘This is a rock,’ I could now say, ‘This is part of a net,’ or closer, ‘This, which everything acts upon, acts.’ When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.

It’s not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is “the bush.” At some indeterminate point “the bush” becomes “the outback.” Push on for another two thousand miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that’s Australia.

Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as "What is the most significant story that you have revealed?" […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is–and I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama; it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative; it is literally true–that the goal of the NSA and it's five eyes partners in the English speaking world–Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK–is to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that there could be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net; they want to make sure that all forms of human communications by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies. That means, to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state; you don't need hyperbole to make that claim, and you do not need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little premise of the planet where some form of communications might take place without they being able to invade it.

I was born on Ngurambang — can you hear it? — Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language — because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

An English friend says Australia seems so messy to her: 'Because of all the overhead wires - we don't have them like you do. Your country towns seem so untidy. The barbed wire for fences, all of that'.

People referred to the symbolism of the empty Cross more than once on its journey. It would seem obviously to point to our faith in Jesus’ resurrection. It’s not quite so simple though. The Cross is bare, but in and of itself the empty Cross does not point directly to the Resurrection. It says only that the body of Jesus was removed from the Cross. If a crucifix is a symbol of Good Friday, then it is the image of the empty tomb that speaks more directly of Easter and resurrection. The empty Cross is a symbol of Holy Saturday. It’s an indicator of the reality of Jesus’ death, of His sharing in our mortal coil. At the same time, the empty Cross is an implicit sign of impending resurrection, and it tells us that the Cross is not only a symbol of hatred, violence and inhumanity: it says that the Cross is about something more. The empty Cross also tells us not to jump too quickly to resurrection, as if the Resurrection were a trump card that somehow absolves us from suffering. The Resurrection is not a divine ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card that immunises people from pain, suffering or death. To jump too quickly to the Resurrection runs the risk of trivialising people’s pain and seemingly mapping out a way through suffering that reduces the reality of having to live in pain and endure it at times. For people grieving, introducing the message of the Resurrection too quickly cheapens or nullifies their sense of loss. The empty Cross reminds us that we cannot avoid suffering and death. At the same time, the empty Cross tells us that, because of Jesus’ death, the meaning of pain, suffering and our own death has changed, that these are not all-crushing or definitive. The empty Cross says that the way through to resurrection must always break in from without as something new, that it cannot be taken hold of in advance of suffering or seized as a panacea to pain. In other words, the empty Cross is a sign of hope. It tells us that the new life of God surprises us, comes at a moment we cannot expect, and reminds us that experiences of pain, grief and dying are suffused with the presence of Christ, the One Who was crucified and is now risen.

The reader should be warned that there are one or two colloquialisms in this essay, but Australian colloquialisms are either quaint and innocent or merely filthy. However, they are always sincere. The English have twenty-five ways of saying ‘sorry’ and they don’t mean one of them.

As Mahathir suggested, Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational. Australians, in contrast, are the most direct, blunt, outspoken, some would say insensitive, people in the English-speaking world.

The windows next to her is open a crack, spitting in rain 'Close the windows Rosa' She slides a small book out of her backpack, turning it so i can see the front An Australian passport. She opens it to the photo page: the horrible drunk from the plane. I lunge as Rosa pushes it out the window 'I win,' Rosa says.

You already know it’s hard to change old ways of behaving, however good your intentions. Or is it just me who has: sworn not to check email first thing in the morning, and nonetheless found myself in the wee small hours, my face lit by that pale screen glow; intended to find inner peace through the discipline of meditation, yet couldn’t find five minutes to just sit and breathe, sit and breathe; committed to take a proper lunch break, and somehow found myself shaking the crumbs out of my keyboard, evidence of sandwich spillage; or decided to abstain from drinking for a while, and yet had a glass of good Australian shiraz mysteriously appear in my hand at the end of the day?

Alcohol, the drug of choice in professional life, puts us to sleep, but then we wake and can't get back to sleep. 'Do you take a nip of whisky or not? Or do you put up with it? There are penalty clauses to all of these sleep-inducers,' [Former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown] says. I knew this from medical school. It turns on you in the middle of the night.'

Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation's inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.

It matters to me little whether they're on the Mongolian steppe, the deserts of West Africa, the Australian Outback, the marshlands of Southeast Asia... I can't escape the feeling of nausea... And this is just the tip of the iceberg - the ongoing spectacle of humans blissfully ignorant, boisterous, over-confident, scheming, and talking big about their dominion overthe world - a suffocating, self-absorbed, vacuous place called the wrold-for-us - to say nothing of how human culture has legitimized the most horrific actions against itself, a sickening and banal drama of the exchange of bodies, the breeding of spe ies, the struggle for power, prosperity and prestige. It just keeps going on and on, no matter how many films or TV shows imagine -like a myth - the disappearance of the human.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.

The winged human glanced towards Retina briefly. “It’s okay Dr. Blade. Scientists should never be blown away from the nature of facts.” Roma smiled. “And by scientists, are you one?” “That is dependent on your opinion Dr. Hill. I’m well versed by Dr. Sangha.” Roma moved towards him, narrowing his eyes. “It is my opinion that no respectable scientist will allow himself to be a subject of ridicule by turning in his human DNA to become a freak, a beast or whatever the hell it is you think you are.” The winged human was unaffected. “I’m sure Dr. Hill that freak or beast doesn’t apply.” Roma drew his head back slightly, studying the demeanor of the winged human. “What’s your name?” “I’m Seganus,” he replied humbly. Roma moved a little closer to him wearing a deep frown. “You don’t think the word freak or beast applies?” “No. I don’t think so.” “Is that the carnivorous beaks of the Titanis Walleri I see on you?” “No.” “Can you hold the 360 Degrees field of view of the Woodcock.” “No.” “The long bills of the Australian Pelican?” “No.” “Do you lay the large eggs of the Ostrich?” “Dr. Hill,” Retina cautioned. Lorenzo seemed amused by the situation. He was smiling. “No,” Seganus replied. Roma continued. “Then you’ll say you don’t have those qualities birds posses?” “No.” “You’ll say you’re human?” Seganus blinked before he spoke. “Yes.” Roma moved closer to him. “Then why the freaks are you wearing wings?

While she waited for Nedim to say something, Evelyn found an unexpected item in the corner of her coat pocket – a rough, crumbling, dried-up eucalyptus leaf. Her mother had sent it in a letter, along with some articles she’d cut out from an Australian newspaper about mining in north-eastern Bosnia and a drawing by her sister’s younger son. She’d put them all by her bedside and cracked the then-fresh leaf like she used to as a kid, overcome by the rush of familiarity as the scent burst out.

The Worst Man in Australia Australians love The Simpsons, except, naturally, the episode where the family goes there. That episode was condemned in the Australian parliament, which is a Hooters, by the way. They didn’t object to us saying the Australian penal system involved kicking offenders with a giant boot, or that their prime minister’s office was an inner tube in a pond. Nope. What they didn’t like was our cast’s attempt at doing an Australian accent. Mind you, the true Australian accent is semi-incomprehensible

sufficiently novel it was described from scratch – ‘this is really an open-faced tart’ – and recommended as the ‘masterpiece’ that would provide the ‘climax’ to any cocktail party. Not only did ‘real men’ forgo quiche; all Australians did. Sydney appears to be a small town, where everyone knew each other. The authors – Ted Moloney and Deke Coleman – were able to reveal how individual dishes first arrived. Steak Diane, they say, was introduced to the country by a chef called Tony Clerici. There are only two private homes,

In late 1998, the inhabitants were invited to become Australia’s seventh state and roundly rejected the notion in a referendum. It appears they quite like being outsiders. In consequence, an area of 523,000 square miles, or about one-fifth of the country, is in Australia but not entirely of it. This throws up some interesting anomalies. All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory. However, since the Northern Territory is not a state, it has no seats in Parliament. So the Territorians elect representatives who go to Canberra and attend sessions of Parliament (at least that’s what they say in their letters home) but don’t actually vote or take part or have any consequence at all. Even more interestingly, during national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. They’re just put in a drawer or something. Seems a little odd to me, but then, as I say, the people seem content with the arrangement. Personally,

First Lord of the Admiralty, long enough to engineer what an anti-Churchillian would say was an epic and unparalleled military disaster—a feat of incompetent generalship that made the Charge of the Light Brigade look positively slick. It was an attempt to outflank the stalemate on the Western Front that not only ended in humiliation for the British armed forces; it cost the lives of so many Australians and New Zealanders that to this day their 1915 expedition to Turkey is the number-one source of pom-bashing and general anti-British feeling among Antipodeans.

The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next. A more recent casualty of the phenomenon was a frog called Rheobatrachus silus, which was around for such a short time that it didn’t even manage to attract an informal name. What was extraordinary about R. silus (and it almost goes without saying that there would be something) was that it gave birth to live young through its mouth – something never before seen in nature inside Australia or out. It was discovered by biologists in 1973 and by 1981 it had disappeared. It is listed as ‘probably extinct’. My

There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith.

It goes without saying," Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, "but of course no police force is going to investigate this." The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she'd disappeared in international waters, so it wasn't actually Mauritania's problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.

So how did it come to this? Why did the Australian government have to provide a protection visa for José on the grounds that a religious organisation it deems a tax-exempt charity had trafficked him? How could a church that claims to believe in freedom and human rights enslave and traffic its members? How could a church that in its own religious creed says ‘that all men have inalienable rights to their own lives’ separate a loving couple who wanted to get married and have a child, and force the woman to have an abortion? How could a church use Australia as a penal colony in the 21st century? To understand the madness of modern-day Scientology, you need to go back to the source, and the thinking that marked its very beginning.

Self persuasion was a concept much loved by evolutionary psychologists. I had written a piece about it for an Australian magazine. It was pure armchair science, and it went like this: if you lived in a group, like humans have always done, persuading others of your own needs and interests would be fundamental to your well-being. Sometimes you had to use cunning. Clearly you would be at your most convincing if you persuaded yourself first and did not even have to pretend to believe what you were saying. The kind of self-deluding individuals who tended to do this flourished, as did their genes. So it was we squabbled and scrapped, for our unique intelligence was always at the service of our special pleading and selective blindness to the weakness of our case.

There was a moment of stillness before something in him seemed to snap. she pounced on her with a sort of tigerish delight, and clamped his mouth over hers. She squeaked in surprise, wriggling in his hold, but his arms clamped around her easily, his muscles as solid as oak. He kissed her possessively, almost roughly at first, gentling by voluptuous degrees. Her body surrendered without giving her brain a chance to object, applying itself eagerly to every available inch of him. The luxurious male heat and hardness of him satisfied a wrenching hunger she hadn't been aware of until now. It also gave her the close-but-not-close-enough feeling she remembered from before. Oh, how confusing this was, this maddening need to crawl inside his clothes, practically inside his skin. She let her fingertips wander over his cheeks and jaw, the neat shape of his ears, the taut smoothness of his neck. When he offered no objection, she sank her fingers into his thick, vibrant hair and sighed in satisfaction. He searched for her tongue, teased and stroked intimately until her heart pounded in a tumult of longing, and a sweet, empty ache spread all through her. Dimly aware that she was going to lose control, that she was on the verge of swooning, or assaulting him again, she managed to break the kiss and turn her face away with a gasp. "Don't," she said weakly. His lips grazed along her jawline, his breath rushing unsteadily against her skin. "Why? Are you still worried about Australian pox?" Slowly it registered that they were no longer standing. Gabriel was sitting on the ground with his back against the grass-covered mound, and- heaven help her- she was in his lap. She glanced around them in bewilderment. How had this happened? "No," she said, bewildered and perturbed, "but I just remembered that you said I kissed like a pirate." Gabriel looked blank for a moment. "Oh, that. That was a compliment." Pandora scowled. "It would only be a compliment if I had a beard and a peg leg." Setting his mouth sternly against a faint quiver, Gabriel smoothed her hair tenderly. "Forgive my poor choice of words. What I meant to convey was that I found your enthusiasm charming." "Did you?" Pandora turned crimson. Dropping her head to his shoulder, she said in a muffled voice, "Because I've worried for the past three days that I did it wrong." "No, never, darling." Gabriel sat up a little and cradled her more closely to him. Nuzzling her cheek, he whispered, "Isn't it obvious that everything about you gives me pleasure?" "Even when I plunder and pillage like a Viking?" she asked darkly. "Pirate. Yes, especially then." His lips moved softly along the rim of her right ear. "My sweet, there are altogether too many respectable ladies in the world. The supply has far exceeded the demand. But there's an appalling shortage of attractive pirates, and you do seem to have a gift for plundering and ravishing. I think we've found you're true calling." "You're mocking me," Pandora said in resignation, and jumped a little as she felt his teeth gently nip her earlobe. Smiling, Gabriel took her head between his hands and looked into her eyes. "Your kiss thrilled me beyond imagining," he whispered. "Every night for the rest of my life, I'll dream of the afternoon in the holloway, when I was waylaid by a dark-haired beauty who devastated me with the heat of a thousand troubled stars, and left my soul in cinders. Even when I'm an old man, and my brain has fallen to wrack and ruin, I'll remember the sweet fire of your lips under mine, and I'll say to myself, 'Now, that was a kiss.'" Silver-tongued devil, Pandora thought, unable to hold back a crooked grin. Only yesterday, she'd heard Gabriel affectionately mock his father, who was fond of expressing himself with elaborate, almost labyrinthine turns of phrase. Clearly the gift had been passed down to his son.

You cannot imagine, to give you another example, that you may have, one day, a prime minister (it would go against my modesty to breathe his name) who, one day, after announcing in Parliament, in a cool, impassive voice, that, as the result of a number of carefully thought out diplomatic manoeuvres he has refrained from discussing before (for he is not a man of many words), he has succeeded in annexing Britain as an ordinary colony of Hungary, and that he is taking this opportunity to apprise the House of the fact; - Well, as I say, after explaining this in a cool and impassive tone, ignoring the shouting, jubilant Members who want to carry him round on their shoulders, suddenly he takes up a fencing posture and, right there, on the premier's rostrum, employing a formidable, hitherto unknown jujitsu hold, floors the Australian world wrestling champion whom the British opposition treacherously hid under the rostrum in order to assassinate the greatest European.

007: What are the CIA going to say about all this? After all, it's bare-faced poaching. Tanner: They don't own Japan. Anyway, they're not here to know. That's up to this fellow Tanaka. He'll have to fix the machinery for getting it into the Australian Embassy. That's his worry. But the whole thing's on pretty thin ice. The main problem is to make sure he doesn't go straight along to the CIA and tell 'em of your approach. If you get blown, we'll just have to get the Australians to hold the baby. They've don it before when we've been bowled out edging our way into the pacific. We're good friends with their service. First-rate bunch of chaps. And, anyway, the CIA's hands aren't as clean as all that. We've got a whole file of cases where they've crossed wires with us round the world. Often dangerously. We can throw that book at McCone if this business blows up in our faces. But part of your job is to see that it doesn't. 007: Seems to me I'm getting all balled up in high politics. Not my line of country at all.

Alex is taking notes in a policy lecture when he gets the first text. This bloke looks like you. There's a picture attached, an image of a laptop screen paused on Chief Chirpa from Return of the Jedi: tiny, commanding, adorable, pissed off. This is Henry, by the way. He rolls his eyes, but adds the new contact to his phone: HRH Prince Dickhead. Poop emoji. He's honestly not planning to respond, but a week later he sees a headline on the cover of People - PRINCE HENRY FLIES SOUTH FOR WINTER - complete with a photo of Henry artistically posed on an Australian beach in a pair of sensible yet miniscule navy swim trunks, and he can't stop himself. you have a lot of moles, he texts, along with a snap of the spread. is that a result of the inbreeding? Henry's retort comes two days later by way of a screenshot of a Daily Mail tweet that reads, Is Alex Claremont-Diaz going to be a father? The attached message says, But we were ever so careful, dear, which surprises a big enough laugh out of Alex that Zahra ejects him from her weekly debriefing with him and June.

It didn’t take long for us to realize, though, that we hadn’t eaten since the eggs twenty-four hours earlier. Eating was the one desire of the flesh we hadn’t fulfilled. I remembered seeing a McDonald’s near the entrance of our hotel, and since I needed a little exercise I offered to dart out for some safe and predictable American food, which would tide us over till the dinner we had reservations for that night. Our blood sugar was too low to comb the city, looking for a place to have a quick lunch. I knew Marlboro Man was a ketchup-only guy when it comes to burgers, and that’s what I ordered when I approached the counter: “Hamburger, ketchup only, please.” “Sar…you only want kitchipinmite?” the innocent clerk replied. “Excuse me?” “Kitchipinmite?” “Uh…pardon?” “You jis want a hamburger with kitchipinmite?” “Uh…what?” I had no idea what the poor girl was saying. It took me about ten minutes to realize the poor Australian woman behind the counter was merely repeating and confirming my order: kitchip (ketchup) inmite (and meat). It was a traumatic ordering experience. I returned to the hotel room, and Marlboro Man and I dug into our food like animals. “This tastes a little funny,” my new husband said. I concurred. The mite was not right. It didn’t taste like America.

My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond – or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. In the two million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don’t suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition. Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later when we met out front he was staring at the same scene. ‘I can’t believe we’ve just driven a thousand miles to find a K-Mart,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know.’ I started to protest, in a sputtering sort of way, but what could I say? He was right. We do. We have created a philosophy of retailing that is totally without aesthetics and totally irresistible. And now we box these places up and ship them to the far corners of the world. Visually, almost every arrestingly regrettable thing in Alice Springs was a product of American enterprise, from people who couldn’t know that they had helped to drain the distinctiveness from an outback town and doubtless wouldn’t see it that way anyway. Nor come to that, I dare say, would most of the shoppers of Alice Springs, who were no doubt delighted to get lots of free parking and a crack at Martha Stewart towels and shower curtains. What a sad and curious age we live in. We

Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. It took its first bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The first European landed on the Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established their first settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence. It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis). The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body contains many different kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture contains many different types of lifestyles and people, from New York stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they influence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and fight, but they argue using the same concepts and fight using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.

Remind yourself where you come from. I spent the majority of my life running away from Utah, from the life I led there, from the memories I associated with those early years. It felt very someone-else-ago to me. London changed me profoundly. When we were dancing on DWTS together, Jennifer Grey called me one night. She was having trouble with her back and wanted to see a physiotherapist. “Can you come with me?” she asked. She drove us through a residential section of Beverly Hills. We pulled into a house with a shed out back. Oddly, it didn’t look like a doctor’s office. There was a couch and incense burning. An Australian guy with a white beard came in : “Hey, mates.” I looked at Jen and she winked at me. This was no physical therapy. She’d signed us up for some bizarre couples therapy! The guy spoke to us for a while, then he asked Jennifer if she wouldn’t mind leaving us to chat. I thought the whole thing was pretty out there, but I didn’t think I could make a run for it. “So, Derek,” he said. “Tell me about your childhood.” I laid it all out for him--I talked for almost two hours--and he nodded. “You can go pick him up now.” I raised an eyebrow. “Pick who up?” The therapist smiled. “That younger boy, that self you left in Utah. You left him there while you’ve been on a mission moving forward so vigorously. Now you can go get him back.” I sat there, utterly stunned and speechless. It was beyond powerful and enlightening. Had I really left that part of me behind? Had I lost that fun-loving, wide-eyed kid and all his creative exuberance? When I came out of my therapy session, Jennifer was waiting for me. “If I’d told you this was where we were going, you wouldn’t have come,” she said. She was right. She had to blindside me to get me to grapple with this. She’s a very spiritual person, and she saw how I was struggling, how I seemed to be in some kind of emotional rut. Just visualizing myself taking the old Derek by the hand was an incredible exercise. I think we often tuck our younger selves away for safekeeping. In my case, I associated my early years with painful memories. I wanted to keep young Derek at a distance. But what I forgot was all the good I experienced with him as well: the joy, the hope, the excitement, the wonder. I forgot what a great kid Derek was. I gave myself permission to reconnect with that little boy, to see the world through his eyes again. It was the kick in the butt I needed. Jennifer would say, “Told ya so.

What’ll it be?” Steve asked me, just days after our wedding. “Do we go on the honeymoon we’ve got planned, or do you want to go catch crocs?” My head was still spinning from the ceremony, the celebration, and the fact that I could now use the two words “my husband” and have them mean something real. The four months between February 2, 1992--the day Steve asked me to marry him--and our wedding day on June 4 had been a blur. Steve’s mother threw us an engagement party for Queensland friends and family, and I encountered a very common theme: “We never thought Steve would get married.” Everyone said it--relatives, old friends, and schoolmates. I’d smile and nod, but my inner response was, Well, we’ve got that in common. And something else: Wait until I get home and tell everybody I am moving to Australia. I knew what I’d have to explain. Being with Steve, running the zoo, and helping the crocs was exactly the right thing to do. I knew with all my heart and soul that this was the path I was meant to travel. My American friends--the best, closest ones--understood this perfectly. I trusted Steve with my life and loved him desperately. One of the first challenges was how to bring as many Australian friends and family as possible over to the United States for the wedding. None of us had a lot of money. Eleven people wound up making the trip from Australia, and we held the ceremony in the big Methodist church my grandmother attended. It was more than a wedding, it was saying good-bye to everyone I’d ever known. I invited everybody, even people who may not have been intimate friends. I even invited my dentist. The whole network of wildlife rehabilitators came too--four hundred people in all. The ceremony began at eight p.m., with coffee and cake afterward. I wore the same dress that my older sister Bonnie had worn at her wedding twenty-seven years earlier, and my sister Tricia wore at her wedding six years after that. The wedding cake had white frosting, but it was decorated with real flowers instead of icing ones. Steve had picked out a simple ring for me, a quarter carat, exactly what I wanted. He didn’t have a wedding ring. We were just going to borrow one for the service, but we couldn’t find anybody with fingers that were big enough. It turned out that my dad’s wedding ring fitted him, and that’s the one we used. Steve’s mother, Lyn, gave me a silk horseshoe to put around my wrist, a symbol of good luck. On our wedding day, June 4, 1992, it had been eight months since Steve and I first met. As the minister started reading the vows, I could see that Steve was nervous. His tuxedo looked like it was strangling him. For a man who was used to working in the tropics, he sure looked hot. The church was air-conditioned, but sweat drops formed on the ends of his fingers. Poor Steve, I thought. He’d never been up in front of such a big crowd before. “The scariest situation I’ve ever been in,” Steve would say later of the ceremony. This from a man who wrangled crocodiles! When the minister invited the groom to kiss the bride, I could feel all Steve’s energy, passion, and love. I realized without a doubt we were doing the right thing.

Until the early twentieth century, Australians and Americans would go to Japan and say the Japanese were lazy. Until the mid nineteenth century, the British would go to Germany and say that the Germans were too stupid, too individualistic and too emotional to develop their economies (Germany was not unified then) – the exact opposite of the stereotypical image that they have of the Germans today and exactly the sort of things that people now say about Africans. The Japanese and German cultures were transformed with economic development, as the demands of a highly organized industrial society made people behave in more disciplined, calculating and cooperative ways. In that sense, culture is more of an outcome, rather than a cause, of economic development. It is wrong to blame Africa’s (or any region’s or any country’s) underdevelopment on its culture.

change was very difficult,’ he says. ‘But I think the best way to try to protect the legacy and the accomplishments of the past three years was for Kevin Rudd to be our advocate. Once we got into the election cycle, Labor needed to be competitive for the health of Australian democracy and Kevin Rudd provided us with our best chance.’ Shorten says it was difficult to call Gillard and tell her she had lost his support. ‘I really wanted someone else to make the decision. It was really difficult. I somehow wished the issue would fix itself up. I wished that Julia would get more popular or that, you know, Kevin and Julia could work

and I use that term precisely. You can understand exactly one-half of what an Australian person says. Generally, it’s the first half: “You know, if I was running your Congress I’d langa danga langa danga danga.” But sometimes you can follow only the second half: “Langa danga langa danga and I woke up with a dead hooker covered in shrimp.” I’ve made six wonderful trips Down Under and have met only one local who didn’t love The Simpsons—he was my tour guide to the city of Cairns. What follows is a verbatim transcript from the long day we spent together:

Should I talk to her friends?’ he asked softly, because he had to say something to take his mind away from the feel of her body against his and the rising desire to kiss her. ‘No, don’t,’ she turned her head and her mouth was suddenly tantalisingly close, lips moist and inviting. ‘Jax,’ he murmured. He smoothed hair from her brow. Her eyes met his, wide and surprised. She straightened, moved and his hand slipped from her shoulders. Mistake. Don’t make it again. She didn’t want more than comfort from him. Friends was as far they would go.

Jefferson and Becky and I step onto the rickety dock, which feels more solid under my feet than I expect. I can’t help gawking at the ships as we go. Jefferson, never one for shyness, cups his hands to his mouth. “The Charlotte!” he hollers. “We’re looking for the Charlotte!” Sailors shake their heads. One rakish fellow leans over the side of his ship and shouts in an Australian accent. “Oi! If you find Charlotte, tell her I’m looking for her, too!” “Rude humor is a mark of low character,” Becky shouts back. “Of course I’ve got low character,” the sailor responds. “I come from down under!” His crewmates laugh. Jefferson looks to me as if to share a grin, but I shake my head. Becky Joyner is on a mission, and this is no time to cross her. The sailor wisely returns to work. We pass another ship and reach the end of the dock. Still no Charlotte. “Maybe this is the wrong place,” Jefferson says. “I’m sure this is it,” Becky says. “I reread the letter and checked the directions with people at the mission before we came down to the waterfront.” If Becky says she’s sure, she’s sure. “Maybe they left already?” “I made inquiries,” Becky says. “The Charlotte was expected to remain in port.” Her knowledge doesn’t surprise me one bit. Thanks to her restaurant regulars, Becky now has more connections and better information than anyone I know. “We must have missed it,” I say. “We just need to head back and start over.

When I take people out into the land I say: 'Let's watch the land talk to us.' And you'll see some jaws drop. But that's what it's doin' - it's talking to us without a voice. Our land does that all the time; our water does that, our wind. Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun do it all the time. They show us things, what's happening. They are talking to us constantly. And what do we do? We ignore them; we ignore what the Mother, the land is telling us.

That evening he put me up at the Glasshouse Mountains Motel, a few miles from the zoo. Steve was very chivalrous. I met his parents and had dinner with the whole family. I also got my first taste of Australian humor. That night at dinner, I poured myself what I thought was a nice glass of juice. The entire Irwin family sat quiet and straight-faced. As I took a big swig, it nearly choked me. That’s when I learned about cordial, which is supposed to be mixed with water. I had poured it full strength. We all had a good laugh. The next night Steve and I went to dinner in Caloundra, a nearby town. He took me to a resort that featured an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner--seafood banquet, my favorite. I loaded my plate high with prawns, crab, oysters, and everything I loved. I didn’t know it then, but Steve was a bit worried that I was going to eat more than he did. At one point a little piece of crab flicked onto the crook of my arm. I deftly reached down with my tongue and managed to grab it off my elbow and eat it. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. Steve was staring at me. He looked at me with such love in his eyes, and I thought, He’s going to say something wonderful. Steve leaned forward and said affectionately, “ Gosh, you aren’t ladylike at all.” I burst out laughing. Apparently I’d done the right thing. I reflected back on my dad’s advice: No matter what, always be yourself. And it sure had worked. As we left the restaurant, Steve said, “You know, I smell ducks.” We walked outside, and sure enough, there was a flock of beautiful ducks bobbing around on a pond. “Steve, you are the most amazing bushman I’ve ever met,” I said. Of course, the resort and the pond had been there for years, and Steve had known about the ducks for just as long. “I smell ducks” was a Crocodile Dundee trick that had nevertheless worked its magic on this naïve American girl. And then, suddenly, the weekend was over. Steve drove me back down to Brisbane. I had the biggest ache in my heart. I had fallen hard. As we said good-bye, he put his arms around me for the first time, and I felt all his strength and warmth in that embrace. But it was over. I was going back to my side of the world. I had no idea if I would ever see Steve Irwin again.

What can I say, totLly hooked on Traci Hardings writing. An awesome Australian Author. Get your havs in a copy of her latest - the Storytellers Muse. And amazingly awesome read - highly recommended

Around the time Steve finished the eagle enclosure, we got our first blast of bad press. An Australian program ran an “expose” on the zoo, on our documentaries, and on Steve. There it was, on national television for all of Australia to see. Steve’s wildlife work wasn’t real. He was a magician, and what people saw on screen was sleight of hand. The program cut deep for Steve, who had spent his whole life cultivating relationships with wild animals and wanted to share his passion with the world. It really hurt his feelings, and I suffered to see him suffer. The incident was a lesson in the way the world worked. The fact that people actually made up stuff for the show got to me. In the end, Steve handled it better than I did. I experienced bad dreams and felt a little sick. I never minded if people said bad things about me. I knew who I was and what I stood for. But to hear someone say something bad about Steve really cut me to the core. Luckily, better days were just around the corner.

Random stuff starts popping into my head, like the time Bas and I were having a discussion at the train station in Denmark over whether it was okay to order a Danish or not. Gideon, it is rude. You’d never order an American, would you? Or an Australian? If someone asked me for an American I’d say, “You got one right in front of you.” You’re missing the point. They’re asking because they’re looking for food. I’m pretty sure I taste amazing. Okay. I dare you. Walk up to those girls over there and ask if they’re hungry for an American. I would’ve done it to make him laugh. But at that point I was already thinking about Daryn all the time. She was the only girl I would’ve allowed to cannibalize me.

South America is known as a “high contact” culture, meaning that residents stand closer to one another, touch one another more and are accustomed to more sensory stimulation than residents in, say, northern Europe, with Australians and North Americans believed to be more moderate in their cultural contact level.

The senior officers who recommended the award later confessed it could have been higher, one saying: ‘There was so much fighting at the time, we were not thinking of honours and awards. What always seemed more important was what his team did.’ Indeed, the entire task force was recognised with a Meritorious Unit Citation.

Mr. Teifert’s practically ancient – at least forty, I’d say – and so not sexy or cute or Australian.

Images are meanings in the art of Gerald Murnane, who says bluntly (in Words and Silk): 'The only things that really interest me are images'.

Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation’s inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.

What if you did and said all the right things, but you still get a no from your boss in your pay rise negotiations? The truth is, most of the time you are probably going to get a no. But in this week’s MONEY AND INVESTING show Andrew Baxter points out that it doesn’t actually end there. Most people may just throw in the towel and just give up after their boss says no, but there is a way to approach it differently.

traditional Chinese medicines, vitamins, and minerals, including a variety of compounds containing quercetin, zinc, and glutathione precursors.”177 March 19, 2020: President Trump endorses the use of hydroxychloroquine. April 3, 2020: Australian researchers publish an article, the title of which says it all: “Lab experiments show anti-parasitic drug, Ivermectin, eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cells in 48 hours.” The news creates a worldwide sensation.

Probably just presumed you were a child that they couldn’t remember having,” I say. He laughs, and I grin. “At least you weren’t subject to parents’ evening at school. My dad once came to one and pretended to be Australian for the entire session.

Soon we began to collect a little group of odd people who would drink with us every cocktail hour. Brigitte, who was a 22-year-old German, very beautiful, could have been on the cover of Stern magazine. Her boyfriend Volker was one of the most beautiful men I'd ever met - people said he looked like James Hunt, the English racecar driver. He was like Billy Budd. He was from Germany and had been a cowboy in Wyoming. Then there was Elford Elliot from England, who had something to do with producing garden gnomes. He was tripping on acid all the time and going out to Delos, this little island off Mykonos, chipping little pieces off the ancient ruins, which he then brought back in the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then there was Bryan, an IBM operator from Australia, who fancied himself as a kind of Oscar Wilde figure. I don't know why. The only story of his I remember was about some Australians who stole a garden gnome from the front lawn of a very elegant mansion and took it for a trip around the world. They would send postcards back to the owner saying things like, 'Having a lovely time in the Fiji Islands' and sign it, 'The Garden Gnome.' After six weeks, they brought the garden gnome back and left it on the lawn with little suitcases full of tiny clothing they'd knitted for it.

The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.

Norman claimed his first European Tour title in 1977, at age twenty-two, shooting a course-record 66 in the final round to win the Martini International by three. On a circuit populated by scoundrels and ruffians, he stood out from his peers with his sobering focus. “For the Aussies in the generation before Greg, it was almost a badge of honor to drink ten beers and then shoot sixty-eight the next morning,” says Mike Clayton, a fellow Australian pro and contemporary of Norman. “He took it seriously. He wasn’t out there to make friends, really. I never, ever went to dinner with him. I don’t think anyone did. He would get to the course early, put in long hours, and then disappear

The aboriginals have always known the four points of the compass and the four winds of heaven—the north, the south, the west, and the east. Traditions say that the aboriginals came to Australia from another land in the north-west. One of these tells that they were forced to Australia by fierce ants. This may mean that they were pursued by a plague of huge, deadly ants, or by a prehistoric race as fierce and as numerous as ants. Since coming to Australia, thousands of years ago, the people have probably made little or no change in their habits and customs. They kept the balance of nature even, and for centuries they neither advanced nor retrograded. Their tribal laws and customs were fixed and unchangeable.

Once an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people in the last twelve weeks of their lives, recorded their most often discussed regrets. At the top of the list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”6 This requires, not just haphazardly saying no,

We come into this world through women: a woman who is spent, broken open, in awe. No wonder women have been worshiped ever since men first saw the crowning of a head, here, legs spread, a brushstroke of light. We are fire. We are water. We are earth. We are air. We are all things elemental. The world begins with "Yes," Changing women: we begin again like the moon. We can no longer deny the destiny that is ours by becoming women who wait: waiting to love, waiting to speak, waiting to act. This is not patience, but pathology. We are sensual, sexual beings, intrinsically bound to both heaven and earth, our bodies a hologram. In our withholding of power, we abrogate power, and that creates war. The Australian poet Judith Wright says, "Our dream was the wrong dream, our strength was the wrong strength. Wounded, we cross the desert's emptiness and must be false to what would make us whole.

These New World practices (enslavement and genocide) formed another secret link with the anti-human animus of mechanical industry after the sixteenth century, when the workers were no longer protected either by feudal custom or by the self-governing guild. The degradations undergone by child laborers or women during the early nineteenth century in England's 'satanic mills' and mines only reflected those that took place during the territorial expansion of Western man. In Tasmania, for example, British colonists organized 'hunting parties' for pleasure, to slaughter the surviving natives: a people more primitive, scholars believe, than the Australian natives, who should have been preserved, so to say, under glass, for the benefit of later anthropologists. So commonplace were these practices, so plainly were the aborigines regarded as predestined victims, that even the benign and morally sensitive Emerson could say resignedly in an early poem, 1827: "Alas red men are few, red men are feeble, They are few and feeble and must pass away." As a result Western man not merely blighted in some degree every culture that he touched, whether 'primitive' or advanced, but he also robbed his own descendants of countless gifts of art and craftsmanship, as well as precious knowledge passed on only by word of mouth that disappeared with the dying languages of dying peoples. With this extirpation of earlier cultures went a vast loss of botanical and medical lore, representing many thousands of years of watchful observation and empirical experiment whose extraordinary discoveries-such as the American Indian's use of snakeroot (reserpine) as a tranquilizer in mental illness-modern medicine has now, all too belatedly, begun to appreciate. For the better part of four centuries the cultural riches of the entire world lay at the feet of Western man; and to his shame, and likewise to his gross self-deprivation and impoverishment, his main concern was to appropriate only the gold and silver and diamonds, the lumber and pelts, and such new foods (maize and potatoes) as would enable him to feed larger populations.

when India were set 360 to win the World Cup in 2003 against an outstanding Australian team that seemed to add a further 30 runs to the total by the way they caught, fielded and bowled. The dressing room in the break couldn’t have been the happiest place to be in. Until Sachin asked a simple question of them: ‘Can we score one boundary an over?’ It’s not easy but neither is it impossible. When he heard a few players say yes, he asked what the target would then reduce to… a boundary an over means 50 balls produce 200 runs and the objective shrinks to 160 from 250 balls. Very achievable.

It wasn’t the first time I’d come across someone named Tickets. It’s actually quite a common nickname among amateur Australian sportsmen. There’s something beautifully simple and predictable about grade cricket nicknames. Those stockily built players are given the moniker ‘Nugget’. My ‘Nugget’ was the sole exception to this law, on the basis that his actual name was ‘Alan Nugget’. Someone with a strong sense of self-belief will usually have the name ‘Tickets’ bestowed upon them, as this bloke did, to indicate that he has purchased ‘tickets’ on himself, such is his confidence. On a similar tangent, one bloke I played with had the nickname ‘Bridgestone’ — a reference to the old Bridgestone Tires slogan: ‘Bridgestone: That’s Confidence’. This was narrowed to either ‘Bridgey’ or ‘Stoney’ whenever he was bowling. He was an absolute nightmare of a bloke — arrogant as fuck — but the ‘Bridgestone’ nickname was our affectionate way of telling him so. Naturally, all ‘Daves’ are nicknamed ‘Danger’ — an abbreviated version of ‘Dangerous Dave’ — just as all Rods are automatically known as ‘Rocket’. Those new to the club are generally just referred to by their initials (i.e. ‘great fielding, JP’) until further notice. At one club I played at, there were three blokes called Nugget and four blokes called Tickets. Needless to say it got a bit confusing at times.

Carlton Church: Australia in Doubt on Building Nuclear Plant With the continuous trend of nuclear proliferation, the nuclear-free Australia is in critical dilemma on whether to start the industry in the country or not. On one end of the coin, the negative effects of nuclear generation will surely cause skepticisms and complaints. On the other side, nuclear fuel industry is worth exploring. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been reserved when it comes to nuclear talks but he did admit that “Australia should ‘look closely’ at expanding its role in the global nuclear energy industry, including leasing fuel rods to other countries and then storing the waste afterwards”. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill set up a royal commission in March to undertake an independent investigation into the state’s participation in the nuclear fuel cycle. Carlton Church International, non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear use, says there is no need for Australia to venture into nuclear turmoil as they already have an extensive, low cost coal and natural gas reserves. Other critics has also seconded this motion as it is known that even Turnbull has pointed out that the country has plentiful access to coal, gas, wind and solar sources. During an interview, he also stated, “I’m not talking about the politics. We’ve got so much other affordable sources of energy, not just fossil fuel like coal and gas but also wind, solar. The ability to store energy is getting better all the time, and that’s very important for intermittent sources of energy, particularly wind and solar. But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely”. A survey was also conducted among random people and a lot of them have been reluctant about the nuclear issue. Some fear that the Fukushima Daichii Incident would happen, knowing the extent of the damage it has caused even to those living in Tokyo, Japan. Another review also stated, “We only have to look at the Fukushima disaster in Japan to be reminded of the health, social and economic impacts of a nuclear accident, and to see that this is not a safe option for Australians.” According to further studies by analysts, 25 nuclear reactors can be built around Australia producing a third of the country’s electricity by 2050. But it also found nuclear power would be much more expensive to produce than coal-fired power if a price was not put on carbon dioxide emissions. Greenpeace dismissed nuclear power as “an expensive distraction from the real solutions to climate change, like solar and wind power”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot

Until the Pacific Solution was set up, Australia’s law and policy had honoured the principle of the unity of the family, which Australia had voted for at the Conference of Plenipotentiaries in July 1951. That Conference, which finalised the Refugees Convention, unanimously resolved that governments should ensure ‘that the unity of the refugee’s family is maintained particularly in cases where the head of the family has fulfilled the necessary conditions for admission to a particular country’.43 While the Australian government signed up to President Bush’s Coalition of the Willing, these women and children were held in detention on a remote Pacific outpost unable to join their refugee husbands and fathers lawfully residing in Australia. Mr Ruddock says, ‘There is no obligation under the Refugees Convention to provide for family reunion. As TPV holders are not permanent residents of Australia they are not eligible to sponsor members of their families for migration.’44

The aboriginals say that the stars are the children of the sons and daughters of the morning star and the lady moon, who were created by the Sun Goddess. Bajjara and Arna, the prophets of the Spirit World, said, “You, my children, shall remember to whom you owe your birth, and you shall not seek to change your state like the animals, the birds, the reptiles, the insects, and the fishes. Remember, also, that you are superior to the creatures, and that you and your children and your children’s children will all return to the Great All Father, the Eternal Spirit.

Interestingly, [Kevin] Anderson says that when he presents his radical findings in climate circles, the core facts are rarely disputed. What he hears most often are confessions from colleagues that they have simply given up hope of meeting the 2 degree temperature target, precisely because reaching it would require such a profound challenge to economic growth. “This position is shared by many senior scientists and economists advising government,” Anderson reports. In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.” Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.

Histories of botany have little to say about the suffering of the Aboriginal Australians, but they usually find some kind words for James Cook and Joseph Banks. Furthermore,

We headed back to the zoo, and back to the tangle of my immigration red tape. I had a renewed sense of confidence. I felt if I could face fierce snakes, I could face anything, even the Australian consulate. The lessons I took away from that trip always stayed with me. Give Steve the benefit of the doubt. If he takes off running after an emu, get the camera ready, because he’ll come back with one. If he says he’ll find a specific spot in a desolate landscape that he last visited more than twenty years before, don’t question him. Just ask him when he thinks we’ll get there. My education was just beginning. I would soon learn a few skills that no aspiring wildlife warrior should be without.

If you leave here, you know what is going to happen don’t you? People are going to stop and stare at you the very instant they see the colour of your skin, and they will say: She is one of those wild Aboriginals from up North, a terrorist; they will say you are one of those faces kept in the Federal Government’s Book of Suspects. Bella Donna said that even though she had never seen this book for herself, she had heard that it had the Australian Government’s embossed crest on the cover, and was kept at the Post Office where anyone could study it. What was a post office? The girl had listened. This was the place where they kept faces plucked from the World Wide Web by Army intelligence looking at computers all day long, searching for brown- and black-coloured criminals, un-assimilables, illegal immigrants, terrorists – all the undesirables; those kind of people. Never ever leave the swamp, she said, adding that her own skin did not matter, but the girl was the colour of a terrorist, and terrorism was against the law.

Speaking at the end of the summit, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said countries will hold each other accountable by monitoring implementation of their commitments to boost growth. The G-20, criticized in recent years as being all talk and no action, was urged to deliver measurable results this year. Perhaps in response, the group said the International Monetary Fund will also play a role in monitoring progress and estimating the economic benefits of the growth plan. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde dismissed concerns that countries might fudge their growth figures, saying the monitoring is a thorough and detailed process. “We’ll make sure they keep their feet to the fire,” she said. The G-20 communique says that if the $2 trillion initiative is fully implemented, it will lift global GDP by 2.1 percent above expected levels by 2018 and create millions of jobs.

I received this premonition — a spiritual experience, you could even describe it as. A nun quietly opened the door behind me. As soft as air, she walked around and looked straight into my eyes. Then, without saying a word, she placed a bottle of Queen Ann whisky and one glass in front of me, walked out and closed the door behind her.

All I’ll say is that the stockman used his own particular style of vernacular to get his point across in a crystal clear manner.

Well,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve heard of the saying “as full as a boot” — but, Padre, I reckon you might have gone one better there!

If the dingoes in question are causing problems, then they are referred to as wild dogs and have to be controlled (the politically correct way to say killed or culled) under Australian legislation. Alternatively if the wild dogs or dingoes in question are useful or hail from an iconic stature, then they are referred to as dingoes and afforded a level of protection by legislation and the public.

SBY had not asked for an apology. So by ostentatiously refusing to apologise, Abbott was setting up a straw man. Having set it up, he then demonstrated faux toughness by knocking it down. A seasoned Australian intelligence chief suggested privately that Abbott would have been much smarter to say something along these lines: ‘I was surprised to read this information in the newspapers. I will be seeking urgent briefings. I will speak to the president personally as soon as I can.’ This offers no concession and no apology but it signals concern, promises action, and takes the matter out of the public realm and into the private.

The NATO treaty says that an attack on any party would automatically be regarded as an attack on all. Instead, the ANZUS treaty says only that an attack on any of the signatories would oblige the others to ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’.56 There is no mention of the use of armed force. And the phrase ‘in accordance with its constitutional processes’ was included by the United States to give it wriggle room, says a former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf.

A more concrete example happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked

A book written by PLA Chinese military scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015, titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, was obtained by the US State Department as it conducted an investigation into the origins of Covid-19. The 263-page volume was published in 2015 by the Chinese Military Medical Science Press, a government-owned publishing house managed by the General Logistics Department of the PLA. It describes SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons” and says they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before”. Some of China’s senior public health and military figures are listed among the 18 authors of the document, including the former Deputy Director of China’s Bureau of Epidemic Prevention, Li Feng. Ten of the authors are scientists and weapons experts affiliated with the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, which the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Defence Universities Tracker ranks as “very high-risk” for its level of defence research, including its work on medical and psychological sciences.

Oh look,” I say when everyone looks at me. “Percy has a rare Australian jumping table. What were you saying, Percy? Something about us flirting with each other, which would of course lead to getting to know each other better and all sorts of other wonderful things?” He blinks. “Oh. Oh. Well… I suppose we were flirting, after all.” Yessssssss.

Australia had mallee, a semi-arid ecosystem with grasses, shrubs and small trees. Retallack’s research demonstrates that African grassland soils contain significantly more carbon than do Australian mallee soils, even when mean annual precipitation is the same. Retallack attributes the difference to the wealth of hoofed mammals in Africa’s savanna. “Australia presents us with a view of what the world was like before the evolution of grasslands,” says Retallack.13

So how do we ease our subconscious mind, which inconveniently revives our old regrets, past grievances and midnight 'staircase wit'? "I think there is a discipline about going to sleep and I don't know if it works more generally for people, but for me, it's got two parts to it," [former Australian Prime Minister] Rudd says. The first is to distinguish the things you can and cannot control, to reconcile them and hopefully stop your mind returning automatically to those things that are, as Rudd says, "outside your purchase".

So, in [former Australian Prime Minister] Rudd's words, the process is first to engage with the person who done you wrong, second to set the record straight, third to forgive, and then fourth to stick it in the Forgettory. If you don't, then all you are left with is 'a bucket of simmering hatreds' that stop you getting to sleep, he says.

both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Over the years, putting his [former Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown] anxieties down on paper, and later on iPad, has helped put his sleep worries into context: the absurdity of worrying about the impact of one night without sleep on his performance in the day. On this particular night, 'It made me think about it, about people in the world with much worse situations for whatever reason, who can't sleep', he says. 'And in a way, how absurd, how silly it is that we find ourselves unable to sleep over some immediate discomfort ... [over] anxiety to perform, but that's how it is'.

Some, like [Former Australian Greens Leader] Bob Brown, favour a greater overhaul of the political system, restricting sitting days to normal business hours, and compressing sitting weeks iinto longer blocks of time, allowing parliamentarians and their staff longer uninterrupted periods back in the electorate and at home with family. 'I think it would be better to have four or five full days a week and hav ethe evenings off - all of them,' Brown says. 'If peopel want to, they can have their party-room meetings and inevitable discussions after, but earlier, and have more sleep time at night.'

[Former Australian Greens Leader] Bob Brown, who spent much of his political life lying awake at night worrying about the ecological destruction of the planet, immediately leaps on the idea of 'curing sleep'. 'We are going into terrifying technologies which define our role as human beings on a beautiful finite planet and as far as we know is the only one that has got anything like us,' he says. 'We are in an age of unbridled technology for profit, and as people are spendin billions of dollars to avoid looking old, we'll have people spending billions of dollars if an answer comes along to avoid sleeping.' We are mortal beings with natural fears about existence and mortality. Sleep, he says, is part of that mortality and of being human. Sleep should be honoured, just as we should respect that we live and then we die. 'It's a little bit like winter; it's a grounding period for the exuberance of life which follows. The next round.' he says.