Write Left, Left Write: The MWF's Marching Band

MANY VISITORS to this little blog, perhaps most, will already have read this week's edition of Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog, but tardy souls should get over there chop-chop, Victorians in particular. As Henderson notes in his lead item, the Melbourne Writers Festival is upon us once again and this year's guests make a choice lot. Here is the gabblers' chorus:

Louise Adler, Gay Alcorn, Waleed Aly, Tim Costello, Sophie Cunningham, Robert Dessaix, Tim Dunlop, Tim Flannery, Raymond Gaita, Jonathan Green, Germaine Greer, Rodney Hall, Marieke Hardy, Jenny Hocking, Tom Keneally, Marilyn Lake, David Marr, Maxine McKew, Ross McMullin, George Megalogenis, Tony Moore, Ben Pobjie, Henry Rosenbloom, John Ralston Saul, Margaret Simons, Jeff Sparrow, Laura Tingle, Don Watson, Margaret Wertheim, Arnold Zable.

The Age, a sponsor of the gathering, has a programme in today's paper, which means few Melbournians will have seen it -- certainly none outside the St Kilda-Northcote-Yarraville triangle, where remaining Age readers would not need to consult the festival's agenda in any case. If The Age is backing something -- and that does not mean putting FXJ's stock price into reverse -- residents of those precious pockets will know for a certainty that they need not fear being confronted by ideas from outside the collective comfort zone. But for others, people whose taxes Ted the Twerp insists on pouring into gatherings of those who believe Liberals are the spawn of Satan, a little background might be in order.

It is worth noting, for example, that many of the locally recruited participants move in the same small sphere, much as spawning fish swim in parallel and shower each other with sperm. Consider all the links in the following daisy chain. The names of those invited to share their wisdom with MWF audiences are in bold:

Louise Adler, publisher at Melbourne University Press and promoter of quality literature by, er, noted scholar and criminal Mick Gatto, hired as her deputy Sally Heath, who is married to Radio National's Jonathan Green, who in 2007 hosted a party at which former MUP employee and ex-Meanjin editix Sophie Cunningham joined others in whacking a John Howard pinata. Cunningham, by the way, has just been installed atop the Australia Council's Literature Board, so all her mates should reduce carbon emissions and save on postage by simply handing her their grant applications at the festivals opening cocktail party. Green is cobbers with fellow Radio National chatterbox Waleed Aly, generally regarded by ABC types and Q&A bookers as your go-to tame Muslim, even though he keeps his little woman covered up when she is outside the home and open to the gaze of hair-besotted infidels. Wally wrote for the Drum when Green was the editor and another festibator, Tim Dunlop, still does. Endlessly -- though his work is seldom seen anywhere else. Then there is Overland's editorial tyro, Geoff Sparrow, whose co-authored book Adler has just published, along with Sunday Age titanide Gay Alcorn, who worked with Heath at Fairfax and, although nothing more need be said, is also Margo Kingston's half-sister. Just for good measure, the festival's spear carriers include the Parkville Asylum's most advanced journalist Margaret Simons, who wrote for Green at Crikey, plus down-in-the-dumps Drum boy Ben Pobjie and fellow rib-tickler Marieke Hardy, who did so much on Green's watch to lift tone, eloquence and accuracy at the Drum.

Do you get the impression that, if being a lockstep luvvie was an offence, all of the bold types above would go down for consorting?

To make the local participants feel special, and to give them some hard-bound international names to drop at the next Westgarth dinner party, the organisers have filled out the bill with a spin-the-Rolodex list of have-doom-will-travel scolds and wowsers, starting with Germaine Greer (who also catches Henderson's attention), the only person known to have been willingly exposed to the Tourette's virus.

Ted Baillieu will continue to fund all this, of course, because he would not want to be mistaken for one of those nasty conservatives who believe that, if taxpayers must pay for literary festivals, those conclaves should at least represent a slightly broader range of views and backgrounds than found at the annual Drum vs. Crikey picnic cricket match.. Not our Tame Ted, never him. All the same, simple decency demands that he be warned.

Mr Premier, if you notice the intermission biscuits are just a bit, er, soggy, put them back on the plate and find a serviette.   

Gillard, A Crook's Love Slave And Accomplice

FAIRFAX won't touch it and News Ltd is running scared, but Alan Jones and Michael Smith are still on the case. Young and naive? A Bunyip's bottom she was!

Blubbering For A Plankton Pig

LAST NIGHT, after returning from the hospital, a good feed of greasy fish and chips seemed in order, as few things lift the spirits so much as a cutlet of shark dipped in batter, deep fried and served with potato cakes and, for dessert, a steamed dimmy. Very tasty -- and safe to eat, too, because it seems that human sentimentality extends only to sea creatures which break the surface periodically to fill their lungs with air.

No one is eating that stinky whale which washed up on the Western District's shore, but your caring and compassionate sorts are dining out on the outrage they have whipped up against a local teenager who was snapped standing atop the corpse.  The latest instruction is to approach the dead whale no closer than 150 metres on either side and, if you can believe it, "to show respect" to its stinking carcass. Insufficient reverence, by the way, may draw a $32,000 fine, which would make the two chaps below liable for stupendous penalties, By the way, don't miss the whales' national anthem at the 2:50 point of the clip. Oh, and it comes with a salty language alert as well.

Or how about this kind of respect? Would that do?

UPDATE: Another bloated specimen accorded more respect than deserved.

Mother Bunyip's Ordeal

MORE than a week has passed since Mother Bunyip nosedived into the coffee table and, as of yesterday, she had been shuttled between three different hospitals. Her injuries are nasty but relatively minor, and if she was 30 years younger there is no doubt she would have been home by now. Instead, and at considerable expense to the taxpayer, she has been swallowed by the public health system, where care and compassion are filtered through the bureaucratic imperative. Don't draw the wrong take on that remark -- with the exception of a former East German lady weightlifter pretending to be a nurse ("You vil sit up NOW!") the medical staffers are almost universally lovely, even when on the receiving end of this particular patient's sometimes sharp tongue. The problem is the system, as has become obvious to all the family members who have spent some time sitting by her bed.

Mother Bunyip needs to be in a rehab unit, but no beds are available, so she has continued to occupy a "chronic bed" while being kept on ice until the preferred option is available. In the meantime, other people's ailing mothers are being shunted from this hospital to that because of the general shortage of beds being occupied by people who should be elsewhere. Getting Father Bunyip into and out of the hospital for his daily visits has been an ordeal, again because of an administrative attitude very much divorced from the needs of the moment. The Pater can barely walk these days -- a terrible cross for a man who, in his vigorous youth, represented Victoria in three different sports -- so he needs a wheelchair. Now you might think those conveyances would be easily found in a modern hospital. Not so! On average it has taken over 30 minutes every day to scout one up, get it down to the lobby and load Dad into the seat. If he vacates it, perhaps to sit in the chair by Mum's bed, chances are some  questing soul will stick his or her head into the ward and ask to "borrow" it.

One of the nurses blamed Victoria's semi-absent Premier Ted Baillieu, insisting that things had been, and would be, better under Labor. She will not have all that long to wait, as the next election will surely see this do-nothing state government turfed out on its ear, at which point the coven of kept creatures who isolate Baillieu from increasingly anxious members of his party, up to and including out-of-favour members of his own Cabinet, will have to find someone other than themselves to blame. Expect this effort to be entirely successful, as Ted the Twerp's inner circle has demonstrated a remarkable ability to explain away all the very obvious reasons why their boss is on the nose. What they won't talk about, however, is the government's lack of achievements and the absolute void where its conservative principles should dwell.


Now a good start would be roll up the sleeves and reform the hospital system, but that is not likely to happen. With Health Minister David Davis anxious to move to the lower house, where a bid to replace Baillieu is likely to follow in short order, his top priority appears to be scheming and plotting to winkle Prisons Minister Andrew McIntosh out of his safe seat of Kew. In the meantime, the hospitals go unreformed, nurses preach the virtues of voting Labor, and Mother Bunyip is as low as any members of her family have ever seen her.


For God's sake, can't Victorians get just a little taste of a government that believes in at least one of the traditional conservative virtues? You know, like efficiency?

FOOTNOTE: While wheelchairs are in short supply, social workers are laid on thick. Yesterday, a slip of a girl stopped by to see Mother Bunyip, addressed her without invitation by her first name (as if speaking to a child), and then opined that "we wouldn't let you go home until we have sent someone over to see how you can cope."

Wouldn't let! It would be folly for Mother Bunyip to check herself out of the hospital, but she doesn't need the arogance of someone who, unable to satisfy entrance requirements for teachers college, made a career in professional stickybeaking.

Family Matters

MOTHER Bunyip took a nasty turn the other day and is in the doctors' care. She should be back home in a day or two, but is neither happy nor comfortable in the meantime. Apologies for the trickle of posts, but family matters have left little time for pottering about at the keyboard. Back to normal soonish with a bit of luck.

Margaret Simons' Retirement Home

FROM deep within the bowels of the Parkville Asylum comes word of yet another publicly supported mouthpiece for approved leftoid thought – although that was not the chief reason the Billabong’s  informant passed along the ad now running on Seek.com.au. But first, here’s the ad:

EDITOR

Location: Parkville

Centre for Advanced Journalism – Graduate School

Faculty of Arts

Salary: $99,827 - $103,862 p.a. plus 9% superannuation

This new fixed term position will be located in the Centre for Advanced Journalism in the Faculty of Arts. You will act as the editor of the planned online publication - The Citizen - to be launched in the second part of 2012. You will also assist in the Master of Journalism by providing training and industry experience.

Close date: 15 July 2012

Position Description & Selection Criteria

0029455_revised_v2.pdf

Moved by compassion for those about to be shown the door at The Age, the Asylum insider wonders: “Margaret Simons will be the lead hand doing the selecting. Which one her mates from Spencer Street or Swinburne or the feminist vegetable collective has first dibs on this job?” 

Let us wait and see, shall we?  In the meantime, for those whose applications prove unsuccessful – perhaps because they lack an adequate background in abetting lame hoaxes on conservative magazines – it is worth bearing in mind that the Parkville Asylum has a long-established and formal protocol which obliges the selection panel to explain its reasoning. And if that does not satisfy you can always bring legal action.

Dead Men Walking

THEY'RE all gone now, with Ernest Borgnine the last of The Wild Bunch to join the heavenly choir. First it was William Holden, then Strother Martin Warren Oates and Ben Johnson, the Gorch brothers. And finally, at 95, Borgnine as well. Here's the most famous stroll in cinema history:

All very slow and meticulously paced, which makes what follows all the more striking:

If you haven't seen The Wild Bunch, or haven't seen it lately, get a copy and settle down for a treat. More than 40 years after its release, director Sam Peckinpah's mad genius still shines. Two years ago, Borgnine spoke about one of the five greatest flicks ever made:

The sad thing is that most people will think of Borgnine as McHale. He was a great actor and The Wild Bunch would not have been half so good without him.

(Thanks to commenters who noted that Strother Martin is not Warren Oates, and also that the Professor is a dill.)