Monthly Archives: April 2005

Miscellaneous

Australia’s ‘religious’ prime minister

Watching the SBS news last night (this is Australia’s second, ‘multicultural’ public service broadcaster, although sadly it now has adverts) I was astonished to learn that the Prime Minister, John Howard, who is now on his fourth term of turning Australia back to the 1950s (since March 1996), was yesterday visiting an Aboriginal community for only the THIRD time ever.

It fitted nicely with my current reading, Marion Maddox’s God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics. She argues that while his extreme views on social policy have commonly been attributed to his “Methodism”, despite the fact that he has been an official Anglican for decades, this is in fact used as a smokescreen for pure political cynicism. She notes that the Methodist church, which no longer exists, being part of the generally very liberal Uniting Church, was anyway much more catholic (yes a lower-case C)and liberal than is generally imagined, with as much concern about the societal damage of capitalism as of permissiveness.

More (hopefully) tomorrow.

Miscellaneous

Australian humour

There are not many things about Australia that I miss, but I do sometimes hanker for the local irreverent, dry humour. So I enjoyed reading The Australian newspaper this morning with a piece on the British royal wedding. It had small pictures of Charles with Diana, then with Camilla, with captions that read “first wife”, “next wife” … implying there might be more.

In the “best” bookshop in Castle Hill, Dymocks, which isn’t saying a lot (one length of serious non-fiction, one of ‘literary fiction’, loosely defined), I was somewhat surprised to find six hard-back copies of Cherie Booth’s book, The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997, only $59.95 for the signed copy. (The only option on offer.)

Now I’m not a member of the Be Nasty to Cherie Blair Club: I think that like so many women in prominent positions she’ll cop heaps of criticism no matter what she does, but these kinds of stunts – if they are here they must be everywhere – don’t do anything for her image.

Friday Femmes Fatales

Femmes fatales No 3

“Where are all the female bloggers?” HERE, in my weekly “top ten”. Why “femmes fatales”? Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

* Trish Wilson, posting on XX, assembles a formidable array of statistics to tackle that old slur about single mothers “causing” child delinquency.

* Two takes on the Schiavo case: Frogs and Ravens finds there is a “relentlessly infantilizing”” of the body of Terri Schiavo that is typical of the tactics “Culture of Life” campaigners. It reflects, she argues, an attachment to an idealised infant and child, rather than the actual difficult, messy, self-conscious reality of human life. Brutal Women takes a look at it from a different angle, relating it to the pressure to martyr yourself “for Christian America and the MTV beauty machine”.

* Completing the political roundup, Body and soul explores the lengths to which evil can go in the creativity of rendition, an old word acquiring a whole new range of meanings.

* Scribbling woman reviews a novel about “a time of looming war and terrorism” – that’s the late 18th century – and finds that while there’s plenty to be critical about, it s worth persevering with the character’s “evocative opacity”.

* Who’s a big cheese? Jane Peppler, posting on Blogcritics, explores America’s enthusiastic venture into giantism in honour of Thomas Jefferson.

* Purse lips square jaw just missed out on participating on a seminar on IT and ethics, but looks at the ways the issue is being explored, stressing that the two words don’t operate in different worlds.

* Vitriolica webbs’ ite ponders the apparent sourness of the world just now, with a little help from the wisdom of Aesop.

* Living in Egypt, one of the most interesting blogs on my roll, relishes the healing power of women, and along the way introduces some living fascinating lives.

* Blogs often seem to be about anger, but I find some of the most poignant to be about grief.
Seedlings & Sprouts tells how she found a symbolic way to record the loss of her brother.

If you missed last week’s edition, it is here.

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Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think “that deserves a wider audience” (particularly someone who doesn’t yet get many hits), send me an email (natalieben at gmail dot com) or drop a comment here.

Disclaimer: the views here might not reflect my own. I’m trying to choose from as wide a range of female bloggers as possible.

Miscellaneous

So…. The Da Vinci Code

Well I’ve read The Da Vinci Code and it seems like a bog-standard airport novel thriller with the addition of a couple of days of library research and occasional reference to a Lonely Planet Europe guide or similar. Presumably it got a fair bit of promotion when it came out, but why it has developed into a phenomenon is utterly beyond me.

Posting may be non-existent for the next few days since Castle Towers shopping centre, in the far north-western suburbs of Sydney, despite having more opportunities for consumer frenzy than you would think possible, has only one public internet machine. I guess you are supposed to buy a computer instead.