There has been a momentous vote in Australia this year. To celebrate I rewrote this Christmas Carol Classic!
The Gayest Reindeer of all!
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Category Archives: Current Comment
Spasming Vaginas, Dark Web News, Erotic IQ. Melbourne, we have to talk!
I nearly overdosed on Melbourne as you will see. But worth every minute. Here is the article I wrote for Independent Australia. You will find all the links to the various events here. I was a guest at TEDx Melbourne.
I wanted to be Annie Oakley when I grew up. I think this might be why!!!
One day last week I overdosed on Melbourne: 17 Tedx Melbourne talks and performances at the conference centre, South Wharf, and then 1 0 The Moth Melbourne open mic stories hosted by comedian Cal Wilson at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Throw in some single-origin coffee, boutique tea, smashed ava, mini-chirizo burgers, wine in tumblers and whinging about the weather and I experienced that singularity moment, Melbourne’s unique edgy, bookish, intellectual, artsy vibe condensed into one day.
Spasming vaginas, erotic IQ, buying drugs on the dark web, playing soccer on top of Mt Kilimanjaro. These are parasitic stories that invade your thoughts and colonise your brain. But, of course, I’m getting them all mixed up together when they are quite distinct. The TEDx talks cover the intellectual turf. They promote edgy ideas.
The theme this year was Rebels, Revolutionaries and us and criminologist Dr James Martin put a convincing case that buying drugs on the dark web improves safety. It’s a sort of eBAY for ecstasy with supplier ratings and product returns. Laura Young organsied 60 women from 25 nationalities to play soccer on top of Mt Kilimanjaro. My favourites were architect Mond Qu who invented an island off Mexico and now has it recognised by Wikipedia with maps and pics. That’s Fake Geography, I guess, and Lisa Leong the rapping, ABC DJ corporate lawyer, who wants to make lawyers less robotic. Fake optimism, perhaps.
The Moth open mic sessions, which have been popular in the states for some years, delivers personal – very personal – stories. Participants tell true stories from their lives in 5 minutes. Could you imagine standing in front of an audience talking about discovering you had a spasming vagina via awkward moments dating through Tinder? Then there was the girl who dated boys always waiting for her kiss-bliss moment to discover she was, happily, a ‘massive’ Lesbian. Is The Moth a platform for over sharing or authenticity?
I asked one participant what she gained from the experience. She had suffered a break down, driving for Uber while she recovered. ‘It’s a sort of therapy’ she explained. So telling your story to people who listen is, perhaps, the therapy you need when you are not having therapy.
My fascination with these two events is linked to an interest in starting a deeper conversation. Four years ago I started a Salon with a psychologist friend, Dr Doris Brett. We called it the Sybils’ Salon after the Sybils who had wisdom and insight and predate Plato. We devised some questions and asked 10 strangers to share their stories in a non-judgmental, non-competitive space. That’s when the magic happened. Women who hardly knew each other dropped their usual defenses and told stories, wonderful, hilarious, sad, heroic stories about their lives. Energy filled the room and the buzz remained with all of us for hours. Indeed, research is now showing that connecting through face-to-face conversation is as good for our physical self as it is for our psyche.
Meanwhile, research by University of Arizona psychologist, Matthias Mehl, found that people who engaged in deep conversations, rather than endless small talk about the weather or TV shows, rated higher for happiness and life satisfaction. You know how much weather small talk we do in Melbourne. If it’s not the weather, it’s football. Melbourne, we need to go deeper. Ditto the rest of Australia.
But how do you start a conversation? The TEDx Melbourne talks will be posted online. The Moth sessions are continuing in Brunswick. Or you could try one of the openers from the Sybils’ Salon. These questions get taken home and raised around dinner tables and even ten year olds have chimed in. A sample question, for instance, is: ‘The Fairy Godmother is able to make it to your birth, has remembered to bring her magic wand and can bestow upon you one gift and one gift only. It can be a talent, a life circumstance or anything you choose. What will it be?’
Ask someone today, even a ten year old, you might be surprised at the answer.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Naming Your Novel
The Porn Lite novel Fifty Shades of Grey unleashed a flood of books parodying the title. My favourite was about men’s sheds called, naturally, Fifty Sheds of Grey. Even in those genres considered more worthy – neither Fifty Shades nor Sheds of Grey will appear on the school curriculum – novel titles often follow a trend.
So here are 7 of the most recent and annoying novel title trends along with a few titles to avoid:
1. Curious and Cute
The Curious and Cute Title genre problably started way back with The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. So ethereal. So ‘don’t know really what it means, do you?’. Now we are over run with incidents, cute or curious or both.
The Curious Tail of the Dog in the Night
The Lost Time Incidentals
The City of Elevators
The Fault in Our Stairs
The Ministry of Utmost Incompetence
2. Incongreuous
This genre takes two nouns that have nothing to do with each other and slams them together to garner interest, I guess. Grapes of Wrath by Jonh Steinbeck is an early contender. Eventhough the term ‘grapes of wrath’ comes from a line in The Battle Hymn of the Republic it still makes no sense even as a metaphor. Grapes just don’t conjure wrath-like images. Angels, God, emperors or armies might do the trick. But not grapes or gooseberries or cumquats.
The Gladioli and the Squid
Of Mice and Menopause
Milk and Sticky Stuff that Isn’t Honey
3. Three Small Awkward Words
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult and more recently Big Little Lies by Liane Moriaty all fall into, what is now, a definite title genre. Other names to avoid include:
Small Big Headaches
Damn Long Forks
Joy Lick Boots
4. Things especially Lost Things
We started losing things way back when, according to Milton, we carelessly lost the big one in Paradise Lost. Reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lost a great deal of time for readers of the seven volumes. Since then we have lost cities (eg. The Lost City of Z by David Gran), lost innocence all over the place (There are many such titles) and lost lots and lots of children. (eg. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante). But mostly, it seems, we just lose things. eg. The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan or things are structurally unreliable. eg. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
The Irrelevance of Small Things
Where the Wild Things Get Their Haircuts
When bad things happen to people who don’t expect bad things to happen
5. Wives and Daughters
When Amy Tan was out of joy and luck, she turned to daughters in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. If the bonesetter stuffed up, then The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates knew her dad had work to do. But it is the wives of Senators, Shoemakers, Soldiers, Saddlemakers, Railwaymen, Prisoners, Poets and Lighthouse Keepers, who are long suffering. Obviously, women still cannot live i nteresting lives of their own and are made interesting by their husbands form of employment. Really? Here are some titles to avoid:
The Axegrinder’s Daughter
The Clairvoyant’s Wife (He knew. Why did he marry her?)
The Ex-Husbands New Wife (See bad things happen above)
The Daughter who would not listen to the Preacher’s Wife
6. The Man
From The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway to A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt to the Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming there have been plenty of reasons why a man should tie up his man-bun, go to his man cave and settle down for a good read of his ‘man’ book. Anytime now we might see the following on the book shelves:
The Man with the Annal Itch
A Man Called Inkblot
The Man with the Golden Gut
A Man for All Seasonings (It will be a cookbook)
7. The Girl
The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence gave literary weight to the book with ‘girl’ in the title. The Girl in the Title! That could be a literary book title today, but ‘the girl in the’ title genre has been done to death. eg.Gone Girl, Girl on the Train, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
The girl on the train wasn’t even a girl. She was an over thirty, misrable, dysfunctional alcoholic. The book should have been titled ‘Girl on a Train Goes into Rehab’. Nevertheless I bellieve the following titles are still available:
The Girl with the Turkey Tattoo
Girl with the Green Moustache
The Girl with the Glowing Eyes (Really, it was just blue screen reflection)
Other Titles Currently Available:
All That I Could Hum
The Crack in the Big Thing
The Light Below the Other Big Thing
D is for D’Oh!
The Spy who came in for Mother’s Day
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for Someone Who Gave a Sh**
The Budgies of War
On Her Majesty’s Silver Service
Billionairres are for Bonking
The End of the Thing that I Should Never Have Started
The First Rule of Book Club. The sex discussed in Book Club stays in Book Club.
Sex sells books. And I’ve made a study of the sex that sells books. There are two types. Firstly, there are the Boys’ Own Adventure Stories. In these Blockbuster books with embossed gold author’s name above the title, a name which should leap out at you in the airport bookshop shouting ‘buy me, I’m a big, ballsy, blockbuster adventure book. Sshhhhhh!’ That is the sound of testosterone eminating from the hero’s armpits. These books are generally written by blokes for blokes and offer a peep show view of a well-packaged Male Sex Fantasy. In a Boys’ Own Adventure Blockbuster our hero has sensational sex on the second page with, perhaps, a stunningly beautiful nurse in a bi-plane over the trenches in France in the First World War to the accompaniment of a battlefield soundtrack. The sex takes one paragraph before he ressumes his testostrone-feuled life -threatening but heroic adventure, which continues at a clipping pace until his next rapid-fire sexual encounter, probably with a besotted milk-maid in a barn near where his bi-plane recently crashed. This could istart with a hand job. Those milk maids do have rare talents.
Meanwhile, in the Girls’ Own Romance Novel, aimed obviously at the chic-lit aficionado, the Female Sex Fantasy ambles aimlessly over many pages. Our hero and heroine meet in the first chapter and are then tragically separated for the next 17 chapters. They finally meet again in chapter 18, declare their true love and have sex in an historical setting, perhaps in an old castle that our hero, The Earl of Essex, recently inherited among his many estates. But they don’t just jump onto each other’s bones. The sexual tension must build until the air is fraught with anticipation. There will be a small break in the middle of Chapter 18 for a sensual meal with flowing wine, furtive glances and a searing accidental contact of, say, his finger tips brushing her, um, wrist. When the shagging finally takes place it will be in an historical four-poster bed and the process from the first kiss to the Halluhejah chorus will take an entire chapter.
This is, of course, my take on the genres. But I am grateful to Judith Newman for throwing more light on Male vs Female literary sexual fantasies. In her article, Dear Book Club: It’s You, Not Me (MAY 11, 2017) in the New York Times, she told the story of one couples Book Club that came to grief following a discussion of the sex in Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” According to book club member Elizabeth St. Clair, a lawyer, “the main character is staying in a bunkhouse, and over the course of several nights a gorgeous strange woman comes to his bed and has sex with him. The men in the group thought this was the most romantic thing ever — dark, anonymous sex with no consequences.” The men in the book club thought this was a very romantic scenario.
The women just roared laughing. ‘Guffawing’ was the term used. No woman, they argued, would turn up to have anonymous sex in the dark with a man they couldn’t see. Was he old? Was he diseased? Does he smell? Was he a psychopath? Moreover, he was in a remote cabin, in a bunk bed. Are you joking? This is not going to happen. Apparently, the men were offended. Arguments ensued. St Clair suggested this set the seed for the end of her relationship.
So there it is. Enjoy reading your blockbuster novel. But try to remember the first Rule of Book Club. The sex discussed in Book Club, stays in Book Club. Or you might find yourself very lonely tonight.
It’s the End of the World. Again.
There’s an energy crisis in Australia today. I hate to say ‘I told you so’. Actually, I really, really enjoy telling you I told you so. Here is the article I wrote on this topic in 2008. My main point was DON’T LISTEN TO THE POLITICIANS. WE NEED A RELIABLE POWER SUPPLY.
The end of the world is coming to Melbourne. Again. In the 1959 film, On the Beach, Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner waited in Melbourne to die from radiation poisoning. Now, according to friends, life as we know it will end soon for us. Let me explain. I hang out with engineers. They’re strange folk. I’m married to one so I know. They do calculations in their heads. My beloved, HRH, doesn’t yell at us to ‘turn off the lights’. He lectures us on how many mega watts will be consumed over a 20-year period. The family tends to turn lights off just to shut him up.
My friends and some esteemed institutions are hot and bothered about power outages. Summer has been hellishly hot. Power consumption hit a record in Victoria on the 10th January. It was, admittedly, a 40 degree scorcher, but schools and many businesses were shut. In the meantime, folks are rushing out and buying air conditioners. But each new swishing, hissing unit adds a burden to the system.
There’s no power crisis claims Rob Hulls while advising Victorians to turn off air conditioners. There’s no power shortage say suppliers while explaining recent blackouts as problems with individual electricity companies. You can believe them or do the maths yourself. Victoria has a supply capacity of around 10 million kilowatts. Let’s assume Melbourne has 1 million households-a conservative figure- and that we all want to be cool, which we do. If every household installs a mid-range 10 kilowatt unit, at peak demand, air conditioners alone will use up our State’s full power supply capacity.
READ MORE HERE: It’s the End of the World. Again
Here is an earlier, more light hearted peice I wrote for the Canberra Times in 2006.
READ HERE: It’s the End of the World. Take 1.
MELAND: the story of our times
Here is an extract from my book, MELAND published in 2013. It not only explains changes to our western culture, but also the trends in politics. Look at the cover (below). It says it all. Who do you think is waving the ME flag now?
The Me-Me mindset swamped mainstream culture when political parties abandoned trying to build a better society in favour of ‘building a better you’. In his article, ‘Blahspeak’ in the London Review of Books , Stefan Collini commented, ‘Politicians of all parties are committed to giving the aspirational society more of what it is thought to aspire to’. Today, just over 50 years after JFK’s Ask-Not-What-Your-Country-Can-Do-For-You 1961 inaugural address, politicians seduce voters with the What-We-(if-elected)-Will-Do-for-You! Promises. Moreover, voters expect fiscal lerv to be spread their way with every election, every budget, every bailout, and every cutback.
Why should I care if some in our culture choose to believe they are ‘the most significant Pole Star in their own universe’? I care because their egocentric ways are having a significant impact on me and mine, you and yours and on our culture. The first 12-year-old to turn up at a Grade 6 Graduation wearing make up, a designer frock and professionally-styled hair in a chauffeur-driven stretch limo with snakeskin seat covers puts pressure on all parents of Grade 6 students. At first we are shocked by the crass ostentation of it all and then we get used to it. This is Ostentation Creep and I strongly object to our culture turning into a mindless Look-at-Me Fest. I more-than strongly object to the Hollywoodification of our culture and the Red Carpet Strutting Celebration of Mediocrity (Grade 6 students don’t even have to know their times tables to graduate):
Now I shout it from the highest hill,
I am truly over this ego overkill!!
(These lines could be sung to the tune of Secret Love performed by Doris Day in Calamity Jane, 1954.)
The problem with MeLanders is there is no WE in their vocabulary. No country. No community. No neighbourhood. Parents, who provide stretch limos for their 12-year-olds aren’t thinking about other–perhaps, less fortunate–parents of students at the school whose income can’t stretch to limos. MeLanders don’t think about anyone else. They don’t acknowledge anyone sitting beside them in a theatre or near them in a restaurant. They park on pedestrian crossings; they talk on their mobile phones doing one-handed U-turns from kerbside parking spaces; they don’t even believe anyone has the right to drive a car at the speed limit in front of them in traffic; they tailgate the car ahead. ‘Get outa my way! I’m in a hurry.’
The concept of co-operative living (or driving) has hardly been embraced in the West. I could tut-tut and point the finger-of-scorn at our contempt for the extended family, the high divorce rates and the increasing number of us choosing to live alone, but co-operative living barely exists within the family itself these days. Spread around the house in their own rooms with their own TVs and computers and eating meals at different times, family members lead separate parallel lives, each isolated in their own Me-World.
Read more here. Yeah! Yeah! It’s Amazon. Authors are funny like that.
Forget the Plebiscite! Scrap the Marriage Act.
I wrote this for Independent Australia. The Sex-Life Stasi actually exist. And, unfortunately, they are after Same Sex couples too. See the end of the article for an update.
Did we get lost on the way home from the Sexual Revolution? The answer has to be ‘Yes’. Here we are merrily working our way into a new millennium and the government is still acting like some prim regulatory great aunt tut-tutting on and on about personal relationships. Isn’t it time we dumped the Marriage Act?
Let’s start with the same-sex marriage kerfuffle. I totally understand why couples of any gender combination would want regulatory acknowledgement and kinship rights. But do not imagine for one minute that all Gays, Lesbians and others not included in the previous categories will vote for same sex marriage if the plebiscite ever manages to limp into voting booths in Australia. And here are the reasons why?
The young same-sex couples will, I suspect, want legal acknowledgement and all the romance and glamour of a wedding. But once the certificate has been signed, the cake cut, the confetti swept up and the wedding dress or outfit stowed and turning stale with age, the idea of being legally married loses its gloss. Imagine we’ve leapt over our coy electoral reluctance and you belong to a same sex couple now legally married and about to apply for a pension. Currently, two Gay males living together will receive two single pensions. This amounts to, currently, $797.90 each a fortnight. If that couple marries when they apply for a pension they will receive $601.50 each a fortnight. Even the most dedicated Gay Rights activist has to consider self-interest when the end-of-earning-life stage is just over the horizon. Each of those extra dollars counts. Ditto for unemployment benefits. The current payment to a single citizen without children is $578.20 per fortnight. But a partnered citizen with no children – note the Department of Human Services wording – is entitled to only $477.70 a fortnight. That’s 100 bucks each less a fortnight. When you are counting pennies 100 dollars counts.
Some pension-aged married heterosexual couples have tried to separate by dubious means – say, using a false address – to get those extra dollars. And they could, if found out, end up in front of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and be asked to give the overpayment back. But this is not the end of such indignities.
We have Common Law marriages in Australia. A Common Law marriage – once called a defacto relationship – applies to couples who are living together and present to family and friends as a married couple. Currently, the Gay couple above may* never be questioned on their married status even if they lived together and therefore they are entitled to the full pension or unemployment benefits. But once the Same Sex Marriage Act is introduced they will be living in a Common Law marriage and therefore only eligible for a married couples pension or dole. It gets worse.
If that couple owns two houses the situation edges into the murky mud of a legal quagmire. If they share the same main address they are deemed to be a Common Law couple then that second house should be subject to Land Tax. Why should only married couples pay Land Tax on a second property? So our government is really interested in how many sleeps you have at your partner’s house as this might turn you into a Common Law married couple. And how many sleeps a week is that? Is this what we want? A government that insists on knowing how many sleeps we have with our partners? Do we really want the Sex-Life Stasi snooping around our lives?
Currently, many heterosexual couples are in this legally dicy limbo. These are the post-divorce couples with two houses and sleep overs. The Australian Institute of Family Studies calls them LATs. (Living Apart Togethers) There are, at the last count, 1.1 million LATs in Australian. And the Tax Office is interested in their relationship. Are they a Common Law couple? Do they claim the single pension rate? Should they pay Land Tax on the second house? There is another alarming legal time-bomb for this post-divorce-with-sleepovers heterosexual couple. If one partner dies the other partner’s offspring can make a claim on the deceased’s will regarding assets, super, whatever.
Meanwhile, the current Marriage Act is making fools of all heterosexual couples and it has been doing so for years. We go to the chapel or park or beach or wherever to sign a legal document we have never read. What are your legal obligations when you sign that marriage certificate? I think most of us haven’t got a clue.
We should scrap the Marriage Act. All individuals should receive the same legal rights regarding financial benefits. The government can produce a standard marriage contract and couples of any gender can opt in. Or couples can draw up their own private contract. Many already use a binding Pre-Nuptial Agreement, but it mostly applies to financial arrangements. This contract should spell out all obligations. Finances will be shared in this way. This marriage will be one which, hopefully, produces and raises children. Or not. Young women today can end up in Common Law relationships or even legal marriages assuming that they will have children, but as soon as she hears the loud ticking of the biological clock and puts pressure on him, he’s outa there. I’ve known women in this situation. She’s made assumptions that weren’t in his contract. Even a clause stipulating that children will be reared in Australia might help clarify intent.
When going to the chapel, or wherever, is not the time to read the contract, but it should be in writing and carefully read before the big day. We might be fools in love, but if we scrap the Marriage Act and use private marriage contracts and make entitlements equal for every Australian citizen, living together or not, at least, when we marry we know our legal obligations and the government won’t become the Sex-Life Stasi making fools of us all.
*I have corrected the article to read ‘may never’ instead of ‘would never’ because I have found out that the Sex-Life Stasi do, indeed, investigate the relationship status of same-sex couples even though there is, currently, no proof of that relationship in the form of a marriage certificate. A Facebook status, maybe. From 1 July 2009 changes to social security and family assistance legislation mean that all couples are recognised, regardless of the gender of a partner. And be warned, your family and friends can be called as witnesses in front of the Administrative appeals Tribunal. So, currently, Australia has the hypocritical stance that self-declaring Same Sex couples will be recognised as a Common Law couple and, where applicable, paid less benefits, but they cannot legally marry.
Orlando, Fl, 2016
While doing reasearch for a novel on American Gun Culture I discovered that following the Dunblane School mass-shooting in Scotalnd in 1996 (16 children and 1 teacher killed) the UK banned handguns totally. Following the Port Arthur mass-shooting in 1996 (35 killed) Australia banned all automatic and equivalent rifles and pump action shot guns. Other countries are not so fortunate.
New Ways to Die: The Snuffie
The world is my ant farm. Human behaviour fascinates me in all shades of crazy. So the advent of the SELFIE continues to intrigue. Are we more self-obsessed now? Or do we simply have access to the technology to indulge our self-obsessions? 
Or are we becoming more stupid? The Guardian, UK, recently ran an article about DEATH BY SELFIE. People do unbelievably stupid things to capture a look-at-me snap such as:
- get up close and friendly with bears, bison and tigers!!!
- perch teetering on cliffs
- photograph themselves running in front of charging bulls
- and shooting themselves in the head taking that GANSTA pic.
Since the SELFIE is a word invented to describe a new behaviour, I think we need to invent another new word to describe DEATH BY SELFIE. I suggest THE SNUFFIE. Will it catch on? I hope not. 
My Comic In-Your-Face Feminist Manifesto for the Modern Young Woman
I’ve written in the media, all types, for 30 years.
And in all this time, I’ve avoided what is quaintly called the F-bomb. But, OMG, I forgot to keep myself nice and wrote this article for The Independent Australia to king-hit the idea of niceness.
I also wanted to suggest to young women that they should be careful what they choose to care about.
kerrycue 