Road trip from Melbourne, heading north: One

The following 25 images were made on 4 August 2008 between 10.41am and 3.30pm on the road from Melbourne to Forbes. I was on the way to Queensland by car and stayed overnight at the Plainsman Motel in Forbes, dropping in at the Services Memorial Club across the road from the motel after eating an enormous, country-sized steak in the motel restaurant. The meal was scrumptious.

Visual disturbances: Five

Sample is five images taken in Sydney’s inner west, on Sunday 15 July 2007 between 5.20pm and 5.27pm.

Book review: The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood (1993)

I wonder if this novel could be written nowadays. It’s a very good novel, although it flags a bit at the end of the fifth chapter, the one whose title is the same as the title of the book. At that point in the proceedings, the premise of the book, something which is not negotiable – the personality of the character of Zenia, who lies at the core of the book although she mostly appears within the recollections of the three main characters (Tony, Roz and Charis) – seems to overburden the machinery that serves to carry it.

On the other hand, the self-referential elements of the book are competently handled. This kind of thing is typical for the time the book was first published in. There are also a number of dreams that are recounted as part of the narrative: another trope typical of the era.

Beyond these there is the motif of war which appears from time to time throughout the book – Tony’s specialty at the university where she works is the history of war – and Atwood tries to use war as a metaphor for the relations between people. Between men and women and, also, between women and other women. I’m not entirely convinced that this strategy works and while the metatextual elements of the novel worked – Zenia gets what she wants merely by telling stories, after all – in my mind the most striking parts of the book were the individual stories, especially those parts that dealt with the childhoods of each of the three main characters.

Overall, I was pretty impressed by this novel of manners. It provides a detailed view of life in Canada in the period after WWII – all of the main characters are Boomers, born in the 1940s – and the issues it deals with were current not only in the period the novel opens in (the 1990s) but also during the war. The counterculture of the 60s features strongly and Atwood suggests that some of the main innovations of that decade – which carried through into the 70s, particularly in the form of feminism – stemmed from the global conflict that had just ended.

Structurally, the book is symmetrical (see table of contents in the photo above). Each of the women Zenia gets to know as a result of their attending the same tertiary education institution – Tony, Roz, Charis – has her own history and those histories contain compelling stories of abuse (in the cases of Tony and Charis). Roz’s background has its own drama. Zenia’s history is more mysterious. In fact she embodies the idea of mystery. She is also manipulative (objectively speaking) and malicious (so her friends believe).

If you were to try to select one dominant subject this book retails in you’d probably go with feminism or, alternatively, with the other side of the coin: what is sometimes referred to as “the patriarchy”. In this sense this book is a creature of its times but, as we know, Atwood’s reputation in recent years has grown precisely because her work anticipates the invigoration of such ideas in the public sphere. By a generation, as this book proves.

A note to editors in case anyone’s planning to bring out a new printing: the 1994 Virago edition in my collection was printed in 2003 and is full of errors that could have been avoided with better proofing. Some are confusing, such as missing quotation marks, others are less serious. 

I picked the book off the shelf at random earlier this month after having tidied up the room in my apartment where most of my bookshelves stand. Boxes from my move to Sydney from Queensland in 2015 had occupied almost all of the space in this room for the best part of five years until spring and, along with it, the end of the decade influenced me. A period of relative calm and confidence following treatment on account of two health issues probably also influenced me, as might have the problem of going out; if I was going to stay indoors all the time, my place had best be tidy. 

Atwood’s effort is one I’ve had in my collection for many years but had never read. It was bought at the Co-op Bookstore on one of my city’s university campuses, I don’t recall now which one but it was probably their shop in the swimming centre at Sydney University. A decade ago I worked just down the street from this building.

Buying clothes online for the first time

The big advantage of buying online is that you don’t have to worry about setting off the security detectors in department stores. On the other hand, not all retailers who sell clothes have a single, central, warehouse where the items you order can be aggregated and put into one package. Myer, where I bought some things earlier this month, does not and so the items you buy from them using their online interface might come in dribs and drabs. The way they have organised their system, furthermore, means you have to sign for each item, so if you are not home when the Australia Post deliveryman arrives you will have to go to the post office to pick them up. But I’d put up with a lot to avoid using Amazon.

To start at the beginning: in July I bought socks from the branch of the Myer department store in the Sydney central business district. The socks have animals on them – sharks, French bulldogs, and parrots. Here’s a photo of them taken on 9 July, the day I bought them.

When I put on the sharks pair on 4 November, and walked in them on the kitchen floor, I felt that the right-side one had a hole in the heel, so when I got undressed in the evening I threw that pair away in the bin. Then the French bulldog ones went in the bin on the evening of the next day after a quick inspection showed wear on them, too. 

So on Wednesday 6 November I went to the Myer website. I bought a pair of black trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of olive-coloured socks with toucans on them. The socks were a brand I hadn’t bought before but the trousers and shirt were brands I usually wear. Delivery from the retailer is free if you spend over $100.

While ironing shirts after the order acknowledgement email arrived I remembered I had ordered an “XL” size shirt. I checked a shirt on the pile of clean laundry and saw that I sometimes wear an “XXL” size for the Gazman brand, so I went to call the store. There is no link to click in the email to let you amend an order so I called the phone number provided on the website. The woman who answered the call said I was too late, and that if the shirt didn’t fit I’d have to return it once the delivery was complete. The shirt I had ordered would come, she said, from the Southland store, in southeastern Melbourne, and my order had already been “released”.

After I finished ironing shirts I put them away in the closet. Following a hunch, I reached into its interior space, drew out an old shirt I hadn’t worn for years, and tried it on. It fit, so I added it to the section on the rack where my everyday shirts hang. I tried on a few more from the back of the rack and they all fit. Then I checked the size marked on the Gazman shirt I had been wearing on the day in question and saw that it was an “XL”, so I realised that I wouldn’t, after all, need to return the Myer shirt once it arrived in the mail. The initial size selection had been the right one. 

Nevertheless the time allowed to change orders seems to me to be too short for convenience. After submitting the order and checking-out on the Myer website, I had received their email acknowledgement at 11.46am and had called them on the phone at around 12.15pm. But within that time window you cannot, it seems, alter an order. There is no link on the website, furthermore, where you can “amend” an order, as there is in the case of Woolworths grocery orders. With Woolies, the acknowledgement email they send you tells you the last minute at which you can amend an order and in my case (I usually get delivery in the morning) it falls late in the afternoon of the day before delivery is due. With Myer you had better make the right choice first-up or else you might have to send something back to them in the post to get the item you need.

In any case I now had nine shirts taken from the back of the closet that still fit me, so I would be able to wear these. In December 2014 I was about the same weight I am now (in August of 2016 I was 10 kilos heavier). With the new Gazman shirt due to come from Myer plus a batik one I had had made at Bangkok Tailors up the road, using Malaysian cloth a friend gave me for my 57th birthday (see photo), I would soon have 11 additional shirts to use.

On the Thursday at 11.10am an email arrived from Myer informing me that my new shirt was “ready to be dispatched from store”. I got another one of these emails at 1.39pm referring to the socks. Both emails had in their subject line, “1 Item(s) In Your Order Are On Their Way.” At 5.37pm another email arrived with, “Your Order Is On Its Way,” in the subject line. This last email was about the trousers. It said, “Your order is ready to be dispatched from store. Australia Post will collect your parcel within the next business day.”

The same Thursday I also happened to look in a drawer in the corner of my bedroom that I don’t open often and saw some underpants that had once been too small. At some point in the previous two years I had put them away in this place and bought others to use instead. The next day I put on one pair and they fit, so I stacked the three old pairs I had found in the drawer I use every day. This was on the Friday, when I also got an email from Australia Post informing me that a delivery from Myer’s Southland store would be made the following Wednesday, the 13th. This delivery would contain the shirt.

The next day, the Saturday, I got an email from Australia Post about something coming from the French Connection. The package was due to arrive at my place on the Wednesday. I guessed the socks were the item referred to in this email.

On the Sunday I received an SMS from Australia Post about the delivery from Myer Southland. The package would come on the Monday (not the Wednesday, as I had earlier been informed by Australia Post). An SMS arrived from Australia Post on the morning of Monday 11 November about the delivery. Replying to it, I advised that someone would be at home to receive it. At 12.37pm the intercom buzzed and I asked the Australia Post deliveryman if I needed to come down. He said I did. I got my keys and phone and went down in the lift. Outside, I signed on his phone (“Just down the bottom,” he said) and went upstairs with a flat package that turned out to contain the shirt. It was darker than I had expected, and very nice, so I put it away in the closet.

I wore it on the Tuesday. At 7.02am that morning an SMS came from Australia Post informing me that there would be a delivery that day from Myer’s Parramatta store. I replied indicating I would be home. The intercom buzzed at 10.42am the same day and an Australia Post guy standing outside asked me to come down. I grabbed my keys and my phone and went to the lobby. He was waiting there next to the mirrored wall and on his electronic device I signed for the packet of socks, which had a sender’s address in Sunshine West, a part of Melbourne. Here are the socks.

Then at 11.31am the intercom buzzed again and an Australia post guy outside asked me to come down. Outside the building he said my name and I signed on his electronic device where he indicated I should sign (“Signature here,” he said). The order was now complete and I had a new pair of black Reserve trousers to use, as well as a pair of olive-green socks (which I would wear the next day) and a lovely blue-and-brown check shirt.

Now, there’s a coda to this activity runsheet … At the end of that week, on Saturday 16 November, I went to iron my clean shirts but steam wouldn’t come from the holes in the appliance’s soleplate, and the spare iron I had in the cupboard under the laundry sink wouldn’t work – in fact the water I put in it from the tap just poured out the bottom through a hole in the container – so I went back to the Myer website to order a new one. To get free shipping I added three pairs of socks (the same brand I had ordered earlier in the month) and paid using my credit card (Myer doesn’t save your payment details in a database, so you have to enter them each time you order on the website). 

I had wanted to order a new bathmat but what they had in the displayed selection (only one item) didn’t appeal. I had just ordered some sheets from a shop named Moss River Outlet in Sydney and so I SMS’d the woman working there, whom I had been in contact with, asking if they sold bathmats. She SMS’d me a photo with three likely options and I paid by calling the store. The lot would be packed in one bundle, she said, and posted. At 2.40pm the next day – the Sunday – an email arrived from transport company TNT telling me that on the following day a 4kg package would be picked up from 80 Queen Street, Woollahra.

An email also came from Myer at 3.17pm. It was about the socks, which the message said would be picked up on the Monday. On Monday afternoon an email about the socks arrived from the company. And at 10.11pm an email arrived from Australia Post about the same items which would, I was told, arrive on Thursday (they would in fact arrive on the Wednesday). 

At 6.56am the next day – the Tuesday – an SMS arrived from Australia Post about a parcel from Myer Bondi that would arrive that day. I replied saying I would be at home to receive the iron. Then at around 10.45am the intercom buzzed and a deliveryman asked me to come downstairs to pick up a package, so I grabbed my keys and phone and got in the lift. Outside the front door I signed on an electronic device using a stylus the man provided and took the box upstairs to unpack it. It contained the sheets and the bathmat, so I put them away in their cupboards. The iron arrived the same way at 11.34am.

On the morning of Wednesday 20 November morning I took out three of the shirts with frayed collars intending to take them to the tailors to get new collars put on them. I had had this idea the previous evening; it just came to me that the tailor could fix the shirts that were getting a bit worn. I thought they would still be serviceable with a bit of maintenance. 

The same morning at 7.32am an SMS arrived from Australia Post saying that a package from French Connection would be delivered this day. I replied saying I would be at home to receive it and at just after 9.05am the intercom buzzed at the instigation of the Australia Post deliveryman. He told me to come down to collect a parcel and in the lobby, when I got there, a woman from another unit was taking receipt of a box he held in his hands. I then signed to acknowledge receipt of my package and went upstairs with the socks (see photo below). One pair has cactus on it, one pair has seagulls, and one pair has reindeer (red; for the festive season).

I took the old shirts to the tailors’ shop a bit later and this time a woman was there as well. She wore a hijab in a fawn colour. The tailor charged me $85 for the three collars and he said I could pick them up the following Wednesday, a week away in time. He asked what colour I wanted and I replied, “Just any white.” He said the collars of cotton shirts are always the first part of the shirt to go.

When I got home I did the rest of the ironing. I had started doing it the day before but the steam had stopped midway through the task and I had called the manufacturer but they said that I would have to send the iron back to see if there was something wrong with it. This seemed like a lot of trouble so I just turned the device off and left it overnight. In the morning it worked fine – maybe I had filled the water reservoir past the limit (which is marked on the side) – and so I did the four shirts remaining and put them away.

Book review: Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Mark Isaac (2019)

A couple of months ago I reviewed a journalist’s account of a Silicon Valley startup that was run by a woman who used, let’s say, less than ethical means to achieve her aims. Theranos didn’t survive the backlash that revelations of the CEO’s tactics produced. In Uber’s case investors wanted to get rid of the company’s founder so that it could prosper. This was tied to a strategy characterised by self-interest. If investors wanted their shares in the company to keep their value, they had to get rid of the CEO. This book is the story of how Uber grew large and how the poor behaviour of its CEO almost led to the firm crashing, and burning.

It’s a tale well-told in short and drama-filled chapters but the point has to be underlined: Uber was a creature of a large group of people who sought to make money at all costs. If you decline to accept the theory that Travis Kalanik alone made the company what it was – a toxic place to work, especially if you were a woman, and a place that lacked consideration for the wellbeing of secondary stakeholders, principally drivers of the cars that relied on its app to do business – then you are on the right track.

But Isaac shows how the worst aspects of Kalanik’s temperament and character bled into other parts of the company through close associates who ran things on a day-to-day basis. The strip-club nights and the paid escorts and the expensive alcohol, the parties on yachts and dinners in tony restaurants: all of this appears in the light of what happened at Uber to be tawdry and cheap. As though the only things worth doing in life were things that are paid for with loads of cash. This story is an indictment – like journalist Carreyrou’s account of Theranos – of an entire class of people. Silicon Valley culture is sick. The ways companies abuse their power, companies like Uber and Facebook that allow people to communicate online, is symptomatic of an illness.

But if you read Isaac’s account you’ll find that in the early days of Uber’s existence even bringing in people from outside the small world of Silicon Valley didn’t help things. Kalanik recruited many bods from industries beyond the confines of IT but they quickly morphed into super-pumped bros with nothing but pecuniary gain on their minds.

The get-rich-quick and winner-takes-all mentality that underpinned Uber’s success is symptomatic of Silicon Valley more broadly. Kalanik’s mistake was not that he was driven and ambitious and unethical, but that he was just a bit too driven and too ambitious and excessively unethical. The error was merely a matter of degree, not of intent. Kalanik was on the right track, it’s just that he went too far. 

Odd shots, 07: Misogyny aimed at female journalists

This is the seventh post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August but there was an earlier post on 18 February this year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

This survey started on 3 September and went until 29 October. Times shown are Australian Eastern Standard Time except after 6 October when daylight saving kicked in, meaning times shown on days after then conform to Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

There is general awareness in the community of the problems that women face on social media. This was illustrated well on 30 September at 9.13pm when an account called History Scientist with 14,371 followers tweeted, “This tweet is okay because Twitter only let on sober and responsible people who wouldn't use it as a license to harass women they come into contact with.”

And on 3 October at 3.29pm a female lawyer I follow and who has 1820 followers tweeted, “Dude who lost his shit and sent a string of abusive emails after innocent inquiries to clarify meaning then thinks he can lecture others on appropriate behaviour.” The tweet contained an animated GIF showing a female singer tossing her hair as she stood on-stage.

But when it comes to journalists who are also women, some in the community think special rules apply. For example, on 3 September at 4.09pm an account named “Voltaire’s bastard” (with 5381 followers) tweeted, “Sharri *hairflick* Markson. Chris Lilleys [sic] greatest character yet. #BoycottMurdochNumptyNews” Markson works for the Daily Telegraph, a Murdoch paper.

One person who understands the problem well is Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV host Julia Baird. On 3 September at 10.05am she tweeted, “Just got this email in response to my latest [New York Times] column. It's truly amazing, how hateful people are. And don't worry I am ok, just illustrating what can happen when you exist in a public space and express an opinion.” The image included with the tweet said, “Here’s to cancer! We cannot wait until cancer eats your bones you baby-murder-supporting bitch!” Baird had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2015. It looked as though, from using Google, Baird’s column had been removed from the New York Times’ site. I checked to try to find it on 24 October.

Guardian journalist Melissa Davey brought my attention to the problem of misogyny against female journalists again, on 17 September at 9.03am, when I saw a tweet from her that said, “This piece made me cry, not least because Kate is a dear friend of mine who has overcome so much adversity and who does so much for others yet was attacked in the most vile way, attacks which continue to this day.” It came with a link to a story by a freelance journalist named Kate O’Halloran that detailed how, one day when she was using Twitter, she had been attacked mercilessly for a mistake she had made in relation to something seen on TV during the broadcast of an AFL game.

On 3 October at 6.36am Jessica Huseman, a reporter with the US media outlet ProPublica, tweeted an image showing a threat from someone she had received (see below).

Huseman commented, “Ah, social media. Thanks @instagram!” In response to this, Patricia Rossini, an academic at the University of Liverpool Department of Communication and Media, tweeted, “If that doesn't go against @instagram's community guidelines, I don't know what does.” Then, adding her own take, Julie Posetti, a research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, tweeted, “Dear @instagram via @facebook, How on earth can you decide that this threat of sexual violence against a female academic ‘does not violate community standards’?? The patriarchy is alive, vulgar and threatening online.”

What to do about it though? Maybe some humour? In this vein the ABC’s Julia Baird tweeted on 5 October at 3.35pm, “Spent the day at my mum's aged care home, visiting residents with my oversized dog. He licked hands and faces, made people giggle. A nice antidote to the ongoing onslaught of nastiness in my feed today. Here's a happy Saturday cartoon.” Here’s the cartoon that came with the tweet:

In response, on the same day at 11.01pm freelance journalist Sandra Eckersley demonstrated solidarity by tweeting another cartoon:

On 7 October at 3.19pm a long thread started on Twitter from a former journalist named Jennine Khalik. She has over 15,000 followers and used to work for Crikey. It seems that she angered some people in the Muslim community by supporting homosexuality. The sniping had gone on for years and she had moved to a job outside journalism because of the bad conduct of some people. Some of her comments follow here.

I tweeted one thing, and it has completely spiralled in the last 24 hours. The same people have gone after other women journalist friends, but have gone after me the hardest. I don’t know how else to say this: leave me alone. I saw a lawyer when one of them threatened to confront me in person at the Sydney Writers Festival because I was speaking at two events. She was basically encouraging a pile-on which might have led to me being removed from the events. 

I did not want to bring attention to this. But I have to defend myself for posterity. It has been 2 years of quietly speaking to friends & employers about what to do re rumours, defamatory tweets. 

I resigned from my job at Crikey (a team I adore) for another non-journalism job get away from being in the constant firing line. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for bullies. I am laying low.

On 9 October at 6.27am the auto magazine Jalopnik tweeted, “’Not to be sexist, but...’ What it's like to be a woman who works in car journalism.” The tweet came with a link to a story on their website by Alanis King that went, in part:

For those of us who work in and around cars, the hate and harassment comes at work, where we should just be able to clock in, do our jobs, and clock out, without all of that.

Journalist Michelle Rafter retweeted Jalopnik’s tweet with a comment of her own, “Even though women represent half of all drivers and most of new car buyers, women journalists who report on cars get all the trolls.”

The stories were coming regularly from different women who practice journalism. On 12 October I saw a post on Facebook from a person who used to teach me, for my journalism degree, at university, and who still works as a journalist, and who had appeared on a TV program in recent days. She said, “More on trolling. I've been trolled a lot and most of it has focussed on my gender. I have learned to manage this, no problem, and I rarely engage because life is short. This time, because I suggested we open our borders to Kurds, it's all been about my religion. Amazingly anti-Semitic. I've reported about 30 accounts to Twitter and not one has been found to be in violation of Twitter's policies. Anyhow, I think I've blocked them all now but there is one tweet which just says ‘She's Jewish, isn't she?’ As if that explains anything or everything.”

Network Ten ran a story on its website on 29 October about a journalism student who had been at a climate change rally in the Sydney CBD and who had then gone, with friends, to the Paragon, a city pub. The bouncer had told her to take off her hijab and she had refused. The police were called. She later received an apology from the company that owns the hotel, but they gave her an account of events that was, she said, incorrect. 

"I was humiliated, I felt violated, and more than that -- now I was being gaslit to convince me that my response to the violation of my basic rights was an 'overreaction'," Iqbal wrote [in an article on the website 5why].

The problem also extends to female politicians. On 9 October at 8.37am Ginger Gorman, an author, tweeted, “I'm about to address the Commonwealth Women's Parliamentarians at the Parliament in SA. I'll be explaining why #predatortrolling against female MPs and journalists is a democratic threat. Here's the latest example via @abchobart.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the ABC’s website that was titled, “Tasmanian councillor Rachel Power announces resignation citing 'personal attacks', social media comments.” The story by Lucy MacDonald was dated 2 October and the first paragraph ran:

A Tasmanian councillor has announced her resignation live on radio, saying ongoing "personal attacks" and social media harassment have taken "too much" of a toll.

Gorman’s book is titled ‘Troll Hunting’.

“Many thanks to all who responded to my thread on the importance of airing different views. I do still worry about the level of abuse aimed at some of our guests, & it is especially targeted at women of colour, Indigenous people, Muslims. Respect matters & has a material impact,” Baird tweeted on 7 October at 12.44pm. I haven’t included the Twitter thread she referred to, at least not in this post. It will be in another post in this series, a post about the ABC’s ‘The Drum’ panel show.

Jay Rosen, of New York University, tweeted on 12 October at 1.02pm, “I get a lot of hate tweets. (But nothing like what outspoken women and people of color receive. No comparison intended.) Recently there has been a shift. I have always been a corrupt poisoner of young minds. In the last two weeks I have also been called mentally ill. This is new.”

The types of criticism that outspoken women in the public sphere are burdened with can be quite specific. On 5 October at 2.02pm BuzzFeed tweeted, “’Narcissistic, self-indulgent, worthless, cruel: criticisms leveled [sic] against social media influencers and young women who write about themselves sure sound a lot a like [sic],’” the tweet came with a link to a story by Shannon Keating, the media outlet’s LGBT editor, who is based in New York, about how self-revelation stories and the internet culture of today had resulted in writers being recognised on the street as well as criticised by some in the community. The story contained this:

“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist,” [writer Emily] Gould told the New York reporter, Curtis Sittenfeld. “If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?”

The Sittenfield story referred to in the quote above was published on 22 April 2010 and was titled ‘The Art of the Confession’. Keating’s story went on:

Futile as it might be, we’re all trying to cling to these distinctions — to maintain our humanity, our selfhood, our creative drives, as things separate and apart from the capitalist internet project.

And later:

It’s horrible to admit it, but part of the reason I wrote about my experience of falling in love with someone on a cruise, and leaving a long-term partner in the process, was because I was trying to convince myself — as well as all the strangers who’d read about it — that, in the end, I’d done the right thing. Some writers have gloriously thick skins, or the whole reason why they write is to offend and get a reaction out of people. I wish I could say I had a stronger sense of self, but the truth is, for the most part, I just want to be liked. To be assured that I am good: if not a good person, then at the very least a good writer. Why write anything at all — in a throwaway tweet, in an online article, in a book, wherever — unless you want someone to appreciate what it is you have to say?

Posetti announced this month that she would be helping to conduct a study into the misogyny that is aimed at female journalists. She would be canvassing widely within the profession to unearth information about the problem.

Book review: The House of Youssef, Yumna Kassab (2019)

This collection of short stories is separated into four parts. The first section is a series of stories mainly about young people and what they think. The second section is a series of stories about a family named Youssef (hence the title of the collection).

The third part is the first of two long narratives, this one focalised through the monologue of a father who is a migrant from Lebanon. He is speaking directly to the reader, as though the two were sitting face to face in a room. The fourth section is the monologue of a mother of about the same age as the man whose story occupies the third section; she is talking to one of her daughters. The man and the woman who focalise the narratives in these two sections seem to be husband and wife.

This is a wonderful book that is full of rare insights into a way of life that will be familiar to so many Australians. The tug of home and the ways of the old world compete with the opportunities offered by the new world, and with the ways it uses to organise the lives of the people who live in its communities. The normal problems that characterise relations between parents and their children are influenced by the demands of two, separate, cultures: two homelands.

As with all good fiction, you get a nuanced view of the world the author creates. While the demands made by a pluralistic Australian community are strong for the children, and sometimes rub the parents up the wrong way, the wisdom that is available from obeying the precepts of the foreign way of life – for example through frugality and through the deliberate exercise of restraint as a consumer – are equally worthy. Neither one way or the other offers answers to every single question; both deserve to be followed, each at different times.

I found so much here to think about and I put the Kindle down feeling replete. The way the book ends is perfectly fitting and lovely. I could have read twice as much and still have been entertained.

Meditation: Bondi Beach, dusk

It’s summer soon and I have been spring-cleaning. Tidying up a room brings with it memories from the past. For many, with the hot weather thoughts turn to plans for a day at the beach, so I give you both memories and a beach in the form of 46 photos taken on 9 March 2008. For some people going that far back in time could mean traversing in memory half of a lifetime.

These photos were taken after 6pm during daylight savings. They show a Bondi Beach already with the shadows lying over it, and people getting ready to go home. Or not. But you can see sunlight out of the west shining in the windows of some of the apartments on the north side of the beach, and the lights already bright out the front of the pavilion and out the front of the Bondi Icebergs, which is located on the southern side of the beach. The lamps set along the promenade are likewise glowing.

To the east a placid cloud sits, tinged pink by the sun, over the horizon. Heedless of the hour, a man with a metal detector makes his rounds. Joggers jog, some in groups. The last of the surfers wait for waves to arrive, while others carry their boards under their arms and head home. Two girls are dancing on the sand.

Appropriately, the day before this post went up, “Harold Holt” was trending on Twitter. The former prime minister had gone missing while swimming off a beach in Victoria in December 1967. His name was being freely deployed because the current prime minister, Scott Morrison, had been absent from the public sphere for, allegedly, three days. No explanation had been unearthed to justify this kind of manoeuvre on the part of the PM, so people were having fun at his expense.