Skullthorpe's Blog

That the media is owned by the same class of people who aspire to rule is self evident. In order to achieve high estate you must believe and play by the rules.  People who do not reflect that when the find themselves debating what color I phone to get or where to burn collosal amounts of fossil fuel to go on holiday they are compromising their children’s future. The employees of these people (just about everyone) have surrendered their ethical/moral autonomy in exchange for the opportunity to stack away their surplus wealth to fund the destruction of the planet and the killing and maiming of the third world so they can enjoy profligate retirement.

The media can only dominate our lives if we continue to support it.

So there is time
Slipping between the knots in our lives
To find corruscation
Bright forks, electric choices
Between the knots
In our lives.
The curve of a neck
The twist in a tree
A cascade of words
Falling down to silences
That snag on the knots
In our lives –
Painted maybe,
Etched in colored glass,
Sung in a ringing cave
Dripping with stone.
Found for free
Amongst the harping trees.
Sudden reason. Sudden meaning.
Dropped like a stone
In an ice sheltered pool.
Outwards the rings
To rime the rim with crystal rind.
Bigger than dreams:
They are reals,
Lensing life
shards into
New shapes.
New paths of mazey mind,
New mind mazey paths.
Foot falling through a
Trip, a dance, a stub,
A slip to a silky knot.
There is time
To dance
To new tunes.
Unriddling the rope
Unsnaggimg the skein
Unmaking the shattered egg
Into new skies
Above A new kind of day.

​A very curious thing occurred  this arvo. My son Taliesin and myself were preparing for the Artisans and Producers Market, which is happening at The Muddie, tomorrow. We needed to go to the bank in order to get a float happening.  We parked outside The Pub and were just getting out of the van when the publican burst on the scene informing us rather intemperantally that we couldn’t park our van outside his pub because it was a Greenie Van and his was a logging pub and he hated Greenies (or words to that effect).

I informed him mildly that it was public road and I could park if I wished. He blustered and boomed some more and stormed back into his pub telling me that I had better not park there very long. 

Is it just  me or do other people find this behaviour weird for Mallacoota? The last time something similar happened to me was in Club Terrace in 1972.

Well three…. I love the new WordPress editor.

The other things –

I saw this.

It turned up on my time line from Mark Manning. A Facebook Friend who I dont know, but we seem to enjoy each others posts.

Watch this video. It may change your life. It has certainly done something to mine. 

It is transformational art that takes place in a cabaret. A much better place than a gallery. Galleries ooze enui or are boredom places or places for when its raining. Not always of course but mostly. 

I gather the artist comes from a long line of circus performers. It shows in the rather silly costume.

Her work transcends. I wept with wonder. It capped any zen utterances or actions. It has left me feeling like I have experienced a rain shower after an impossible summer day.

Thank You.

The other thing is Neil Gaiman’s ‘View from the Cheap Seats’. After Terry Pratchett died Neil Gaimen has become my new lantern of hope. You need something to light your next step.

Terry Pratchett was clever and funny and wise and obviously wryly amazed at human antics. Neil Gaiman is these things as well but with more pain. I do not choose to read generic horror because I find it pointless and narrow. Neil Gaiman writes of horror that enthralls.  Of course, like all extremely talented writers he transcends genre and he has never just been a horror writer anyway. Writers like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman create their own private genres . Tolkien created his own and the locked gateway is mounded by piles of the old bones of wannabes trying to get in.

I have had my nose rubbed in more insights and good sense in ‘The View from the Cheap Seats’ than ten other books. Writing is hard, at least for me, but it is an itch I must scratch. The speeches, articles, reviews and blurbs in this book have threaded a clew through my labyrinth. This is a gift that cannot be exagerated in it’s wonderfulness.

I always seem to be writing a few stories at once. I start a new one when one becomes blocked or the main character is trying to work out what to do next. Suddenlu the blocks seem to be desolving and the characters are more decisive.  This is so liberating.

If this blog ever turns into anything I will try to expand on the possible whys and wherefores when and if I work them out.

Anyway I am changed and grateful.

Ok – here is the deal.

* Our part of the demo will be held at Genoa Camping Ground.
* Some will be staying-over Friday night to set up.
* The demo starts at 10.00am but we can start getting together at 9.00.
* Going to set up a bonfire because it will be cold.
Going to set up a BBQ so you can cook sausages, chops or what ever.
* Going to have huge pot of veg soup and bread.
* Bring your own banner or placard.
* Bring drums and musical instruments for a Jam kinda thing.

Ever been to a ‘sixties party’? People turn up in ‘psychedelic’ fright wigs, plastic peace medalions, chewing on a bogus spliff and saying ‘Hey Man’, and think they’ve got it nailed. The media/fashion industry makes electric sheep.  
I have never heard of anyone turn up sporting a copy of Marcuse, Rimbeau, Brook, Artaud, Mc Luhan, Lang, Fuller or a Leonard Cohen poetry collection in the back pocket of their jeans. That’s  all the costume you need.  The flamboyance was a ploy to try and make the sheep look up.  The sixties were (like the punk movement, which were the ashes of the sixties) about ideas. There was a dream to change the world.
The death of Bowie is probably the final post-script to this. He epitomized that brief shinning moment when ‘pop’ mattered. Before the academics, spin doctors, corporates and  venture capitalists got hold of it, there was a brief opportunity for something world changing to occur.
Bowie’s work combined inspired music, evocative ideas and imagery and sure theatrical sense into a body of work that fed the desire for positive human transformation that was such a hunger at that time. He gave energy  and purpose for those with a yearning to get out there and do stuff. John Lennon, Dylan and Neil Young were others.
Bowie made you ache. He made caterpillars dream of being butterflies. Out of the disasters of the Second World War and the dreadful neo-fascism of The Fifties stirred a desire for revolution. Bowie was one of the artists who proveded the language and imagery for such world change.
He was an artist. He was impulsive, egotistical  and self destructive. He was the icon, the channel for members of my generation who got ‘it’. For the rest he was one of a continuous succession of corporate pop moments.
The passing of Bowie represents one of the last reminders of the way the world might have been…. if only… ‘Can you hear me Major Tom?’

One of the first things I did on this last morning of 2015 was water the herbs and vegetables. A process that takes well over an hour. This is good reflection time. One of the things on my mind this morning was asking myself the question: what had motivated me to put so much of our garden under production? It wasn’t a rhetorical question. The growing season coincides with the busiest time of the year for me, so why add to the work load?
Much of what I grow are herbs. Many of them have historical associations with the old magic and I enjoy researching the human usage of these plants because I like stories. Some of them have genuine medicinal value and beautifully nuance the tastes of home cooking. I do not subscribe to the shonky lunacies of homeopathy or ‘alternative medicine’.
Reasons for growing vegetables are manifold. The food tastes better and is better for you. Shop bought fruit and vegetables are bred for longevity of shelf life, appearance and capacity to be transported, not for taste or nutrition. Home grown produce does not carry the burden of massive exposures to agricultural chemicals forced on mono-cropping farmers by the unsuitable nature of those sorts of agricultural practises.
Humans have difficulty imagining the reality of large numbers. Since humans have had the intellectual capacity to be aware of it, there have been more people living on the planet than can be comfortably imagined. But we didn’t know! We knew the people in our village or town and knew vaguely that there were others around over the horizon. With the invention (largely a function of the size of our population) of mass communications we daily have our noses rubbed in it by the media. If we have the huge misfortune to live and work in cities we meet them daily on the freeway or the train. Our reality includes huge steel, glass and concrete boxes full of people doing essentially the same things, wearing the same clothes, driving the same cars and drinking the same beer. We are ciphers, we try to live vicariously through the flatscreen, sport, drama, music or infotainment, but deep-down we know it is all a crock of shite.

The more we are paid, the more we need to demonstrate our rise in importance and success. The only way to demonstrate this is to buy stuff. Stuff defines us socially. Stuff articulates our aspirations and/or provides evidence of our relative wealth. The Apple/android thing is a neat example of this. Buying ‘organic food’ from boutique shops is another example. As the wealth spectrum broadens between the mega-rich and the ultra-poor things become quickly dysfunctional. Mega-rich behaviour becomes more bizarre and the mega-poor become more desperate. Stuff has become decoupled from intrinsic aesthetics and utility and become markers for relative affluence. Modern cars need multiple computers in order to function and manage all the convenience and high-performance features built into them. The essential nature of the internal combustion engine powered car has not changes a great deal from the first models marketed by Henry Ford. Social and economic status is measured by the brand and number of ’features’ a car possesses. Other examples are many. The difference between a $1,000 domestic sound system and a $5,000 sound system, measured by performance, is between 5 to 10 percent (and that difference is only really audible to people with undamaged hearing) – it’s not about music, it’s about demonstrating your social and economic status. The building of hugely expensive oversized dwellings, the inputs for the construction of which have almost infinite environmental persistence and have carbon footprints sized way beyond any benefits they may incur in later energy saving, is another example.
Are you still with me? What has all this got to do with growing vegetables in your garden, community allotment, high-rise balcony or artificially lit basement? There are important philosophical reasons to grow your own. It is important for reasons of perception and empowerment.
Humans are highly adaptable. We have populated every part of the Earth from The Sahara to the Arctic. We can survive the most oppressive, vile, inhuman conditions imposed on us by our fellow humans. It is a universal human attribute that regardless of the conditions we will create socio-political hierarchies within them. As homo-saps are increasingly becoming city dwellers, dislocated from the natural cycle that sustains us it is important that we have things in our life that remind us that we are part of an interconnected life web. Growing things is (and keeping pets) a way of reminding us of our connectedness to our poor struggling planet.
It’s not about saving the planet except in a symbolic way. Nothing is going to save us from catastrophe. Some of the rich and the lucky will survive and the planets ecosystem will get a whole new sandbox in which to play.
It is quite clear to everyone but the most terrified or belligerently naive that our nation is largely in the hands of self-serving, corrupt, complacent, conceited and evil men and that there is nothing we can do about it. Well, nothing on a macro-scale. We can make it better around here though. To do this we need to empower each other.
So take time out from Face Book and/or vicarious flatscreen sport and grow some vegetables, it is real, there is a beginning a middle and a good feed at the end. Growing your own creates seasonal surpluses, these give opportunities for community sharing, and this enriches us all. These days more often than not the things we have in common are news of the antics of the likes of Pink or some temporary sports hero than the commonality of our own community lives. Growing stuff is relatively easy to do and provides an instant opportunities for sharing and conversation.
Next thing on the agenda for this morning before it got too hot was check out the holiday visitors who are using our halls. I visited The Main Hall to confirm that Mr Plumber had fixed the toilet leak and that everything else was going fine with the Cinema. I dropped in at The Muddie to see that everything was ok with Theo’s, reminding them of the changes they need to make in preparation for the community markets, and The Oval to make sure SUFM was not having any problems. These holiday visitors – The Cinema, SUFM and Theo’s do important work here in the summer both for our visitors and local young people. They offer safe places to interact and alternative things to do when sun and surf palls or the weather goes bad. When The Community Precinct Committee of Management completes the precinct redevelopment there will be even more opportunities for community interactions.

After scuttling around on my bike till about 2.00 pm when it got too hot to be outside. I picked up Neil Young’s autobiography. This has been nagging me quietly from the bedside table since my friend Paul sent it to me some time ago. I have greatly enjoyed Neil Young’s music since I bought his eponymous disc all those years ago. The group of musicians, of which he was a part, including David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graeme Nash, Jerry Garcia, JJ Cale, Ry Cooder, George Harrison, Paul Kantner, Roger McGuinn etc defined a musical generation and continues to influence.
Having dipped briefly into the book I am not surprised to discover a standard type of U.S. celebrity. Childlike/childish, obsessed by stuff, sentimental and slightly addled. As usual it is hard to accept that the 75 year old author of this rambling narrative wrote ‘The Old Laughing Lady’ at 25. Of course when I reprise some of my writings from 1975 I find it initially hard to believe I was the author.
Punters have unreasonable expectations of the people they elevate to famousness. Of course they do, that is the point. The average punter is a vicarious creature who espouses, purchases and mimics. There is a desperate desire to acquire some of the glory that they have vouchsafed to the very normal human being lionized. A weird process, where people are built up to impossible proportions and when found wanting or crack under the strain are torn down and vilified: for sundry alleged ‘sins’, for growing old or for speaking their minds. Sometimes they are crucified.
All this aside, Young has stacked up an impressive body of work.
Oddly enough after delving for some time into Neil Young’s obsessions with model trains, Yankee gas guzzlers and exotic audio file formats I felt the overriding urge to decobweb my bedroom. This is especially strange when you consider it hasn’t been treated so, in a thorough manner, for about ten years. It was quite cobwebby in places. Why on this stinking hot last day of 2015 I should emerge from Neil Young’s life with ancient cobwebs on my mind is a mystery. I decobwebbed. The room looks amazingly different. I don’t think the impulse came from one of those ludicrous notions that you should start The New Year with a clean sweep or anything like that. Calendars are maps of things to do not signifiers of places to be. That last sentence sounds quite clever but I don’t think it means anything.
During the day I have fielded a couple of phone-calls and a visit from some friends and acquaintances who wanted to grizzle about the state of some of our community organizations. This happens often these days and has accelerated as the year ends. We are currently in a particularly depressing part of a cycle that afflicts small communities more or less continuously.
One of my ongoing projects is interviewing local people about their Mallacoota life: history, thoughts and feelings within our community. One of the most often repeated comments from people who were born here or who have been here for a very long time is that the sense of community is rapidly dissolving. This needs to be arrested if our community’s social health is to be maintained.
We are isolated physically and we are small. We don’t have city resources or city distractions. We don’t need city thinking. Too often ambitious and socially and personally insensitive people move into our community and try to ‘show us how to do it’. For a period of time they flail around trying inappropriate strategies learnt at a city campus or organization causing social upheaval and community damage. They generally eventually flounce off, complaining of ungratefulness, leaving us all to pick up the pieces. I have been involved in our community for nearly thirty years and I have seen it happen here, many times on different scales.

We have to leave city thinking behind. Hierarchical thinking is deadly. Small communities need to celebrate and demonstrate their commonality. Imported from urban environments – ‘Committee think’ is an ever present trap for our community organizations. Committees that become internally involved with petty politics, personal ambition and procedural ephemera become dislocated from the organizations membership or service group. This causes a lack of interest by the membership in the organizations activities and governance. The organization become irrelevant and ineffectual. Too often a city solution is then tried, as an easy option, and a paid position is created to do the organizations job. To pay someone to run a community organization that is dedicated to empower people to be involved and act collectively is a nonsense. You have to seriously wonder about the sort of dislocated reasoning that gives birth to these sort of ideas and the ethical and intellectual qualities of a person who would contemplate attempting the job. Sometimes organizations reach the end of their use-by date and should quietly fold their tents and leave the field clear for fresh blood with fresh ideas.

We need to think everything we do carefully through and create strategies to empower ourselves. We have a country community with country community issues. We need to empower each other by giving each other the space to do what we do well for the benefit of each other.
Just prior to writing this I was scrolling through my Facebook page. As usual global warming and the evil, lunatic antics of our Federal Government are trending in a fairly major way. Having been a grass-roots social/political activist since the far off times of Vietnam and Apartheid I have not much cause for optimism. As I said earlier, there is nothing we can do go avert the catastrophe of global warming. The populations are too huge, human neurology too conflicted between our past evolutionary imperatives and our current rational needs to adjust these behaviours.
Locally however I do believe we can make a difference to our lives, the lives of our children and to a very small extent (by example) the wider world. We do need to adjust our behaviours to try and minimize the effects locally – to try and ride the change.
This means personal and community based activities. This means reducing our dependence on manufactured stuff, being as self-sufficient we can be, making things to last, only making things that can be easily and efficiently recycled and then recycling. Plastic bag free Mallacoota is only the tip of the iceberg for our town but a very important start if we can pull it off.
It means stop using planes except in emergencies.
It means leaving our cars at home unless we need to transport major items. It means riding our bikes everywhere. It means developing our local public transport system from just a shuttlebus to a service that will help free-up our roads for the safe use of pedestrians, cyclists and skateboarders. This will reduce the community’s carbon footprint. Use public transport to travel out of town.
Stop using our oceans as rubbish dumps – I was horrified to see that recently a regional organization on an information sharing visit was handing out balloons in a coastal community!
It means turning the ecological desert called our golf course into a multi-use golf-club, environmental park and food farm for everyone.
It means turning largely vegetarian, only eating meat that you have known personally or are genuinely free-range and encouraging our local food outlets to stock accordingly.
It means getting Mallacoota off the grid in a meaningful way. To do this we not only need to install the appropriate technology but we also have to revolutionize our power usage. Energy sustainability is not just about replacing one power source with another that is less polluting it is about using less power altogether. We need to build dwellings that don’t need air-conditioning and minimum active heating and that need minimum fixed light sources. It means building public and private buildings with materials that require the absolute minimum carbon footprint – mud and wood, with modern design tweaks, still seem to best fit the bill. We need to train ourselves to think about energy in a way that minimizes its effective use, not as a convenient thing to be thoughtlessly employed.

The future will be hard but easier for us living in the country. We can make it even easier if we are prepared to revolutionise how we behave. We can help sustain a bearable living environment for our grandchildren or would you rather have a pink IPad, a 4 wheel drive monstrosity, a holiday in Bali and a boutique beer?
Well there is my New Year’s Eve. I employed the last few hours of 2015 writing this.
Have a great rest of your life and I will see you around town.
Don A.

Christmas full Moon brings to mind one of my most unforgetable life moments. Max and I were driving into Mallacoota for a festival and Patric was about one year old. We were driving my beloved old Nissan van, so Patric was in his baby seat between us in the front. As we breasted a hill the Moon rose dead ahead. Patric became transfixed and kept trying to take the Moon in his hands. The look on his face all Moonlit made your heart want to break.

Made a great program this morning with prerecorded Mallacoota memories from some locals interspersed with some great live original music from Milli and Jim. Thanks M and J. Then did Popz as per normal. I am playing selection tion from this years releases. Australian music is such high quality and there us so much of it is impossible to keep up with everything.
Then off to the Muddie to set up for tomorrows market.  Hot and extremely windy. I don’t  mind doing the work but apparently there are hardly any stall holders. This is a bit futile. I have decidsd to cancel the stilts at the market as the weather is too wild. I have also postponed the book stall for the same reason.
I was doing

some extreme whipper snippery the otherday and I excavated Dusty’s  blue pig. She greeted it like Ghods big toe and is A Very Happy Dog.
Just defended from Dusty and ate my Christmas Dinner – blue cheese and tomato sandwich,  Vegemite and cucumber sandwich,  a peach, grapes, plums, pear and a chocolate chip muffin. The dogs were very attentive.
Tali has gone up to Philips with Marc to play Cludo. All that remains is to pick him up hopefully not to late as I have a 4 o’clock market start.
I am re-reading, for at least the 30th time, The Lord of the Rings, it is an annual end of year ritual. It is the most perfect example of tale telling I have ever read. Good tale tellers are ere extremely rare. Oscar Wilde comes to mind  Alan Garner another. Joan Aitkin of course, James Branch Cabel..
I am returning to Middle Earth. Have a Kool Yule.

An exercise  in traditional tale telling with a bit of modern up-beat and not a ‘Bah Humbug!’ In site.

Mangle the Mysterious Mechanical  Mouse had lost it and just couldn’t find it anywhere. ‘What is the point of being a Mysterious Mechanical Mouse if you were just going to go about the place losing things?’ he thought to himself. He was looking under the carpet for the forth time and it still wasn’t there. He had looked in the butter dish and up the chimney and it just refused to be found.

Mangle was getting cross and that was no good. He knew if he got cross it would be all over. Once cross he turned into a hot angry fog and couldn’t do anything but swear and throw things. He took a deep breath. ‘Nothing for it.’ He muttered to himself, ‘I need help’.

‘That’s  what I am always telling you! Said the stuffed crocodile in the corner sharply.

‘Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,’ grumbled Mangle the  Mysterious Mechanical Mouse, ‘ I never listen to you so I wouldn’t  know.’

‘Humph!’ the stuffed crocodile  in the corner huffed and sulked.

‘I need to see my friend Petunia, she is an aardvark and knows a great deal.’

Mangle the Mysterious  Mechanical  Mouse put on his helmet and went out to the shed to get his bike. One of the mysterious  things about Mangle the Mysterious  Mechanical  Mouse  was how much he hated big smelly, noisy, bossy and wasteful cars. ‘Hello  Bike’ he said when he went into the shed. The bike didn’t  say anything which was a relief to Mangle who thought  that one  mysterious   mechanical thing in a story  was enough, especially when it was him.

Past the Witch Wood and making a wide detour around The Shopping Mall, that he hated even more than motor cars, our hero peddled happily along. Once out in the sunshine and away from the annoying stuffed crocodile and The Lost Thing, Mangle the Mysterious  Mechanical  Mouse day had already improved.

Then suddenly coming around a corner he had to brake suddenly to avoid running into three small  boggarts sitting in a row in the gutter and crying their eyes out.

‘Now Now! ‘  spoke Mangle the Mysterious Mechanical  Mouse cheerfully, ‘ We can’t  have this, why the tears?’

‘Please sir,’ snivelled the smallest, ‘we woke up this morning and our stockings were empty.’

‘Is that all?’ chortled  Mangle the Mysterious  Mechanical  Mouse  leaping into the air, ‘just put in your foot and everything will be fine, what a too-doo to make over something so simple.’

‘But sir,’ they all wailed,

‘We want chocolate oranges and marshmallows.’ The smallest grizzled.

‘Water pistols and balloons.’  Moaned the second.

‘Chocolate and nuts! Sobbed the third.

‘And we want our Mummy and Daddy!’ from all three.

‘What, both of them? Mangle said in surprise.

‘Even one!’ the three chorused.

Mangle fossicked around in his bag and was surprised to find twisted peppermint  rock canes, chocolate oranges and similar. ‘Good Heavens!’ he thought, ‘How did they get there?’  He passed some around amid cries of delight. He called over his shoulder, as he pedalled off,  that he would send a parent along directly if he found one.

‘Gosh, what a day!’ he thought as he neared Petunia’s  house. On arrival, at the gate, he was greeted by a gaggle of square dancing reindeer and had to fight his way through a crowd of small green persons in pointy hats playing cricket on the front lawn. So, rather breathless, he arrived at the front door and knocked. It was opened by Petunia who cried ‘Noel!’

‘Oh come off it, you know me (he struck a pose)  I am Mangle the Mysterious  Mechanical  Mouse!  Who is this Noel person ?

Petunia looked skywards, ‘Come in, come in, you look like someone who has lost a tenner and found fifty cents!’

‘Well I have lost something, that’s  for sure, that’s why I  came around.’

‘Tell Auntie Petunia all about it.’

The words came tumbling out. ‘Oh Petunia, I have been looking all morning and I just can’t  find it any where!  I came upon these  sad boggles who couldn’t  put their foot in it and had lost both parents. At least I  don’t  have any parents, so I am safe there.’

Slow down, slow down, now take a deep breath…… What-have-you-lost?’

‘I don’t  know, he wailed, how can I know if it is lost?’ He  burst into a flood of tears.

Petunia quickly handed him a hanky. ‘Steady on, you will go rusty!’

‘Thangks,’ He snuffled with a blocked nose and applied his oil can, just in case. ‘My bag is full of treats and I don’t  know why.’ He said more matter-of-factly.

Light dawned on Petunia curious  aardvark  face. ‘What day is it?’ She said in an unconcerned voice.

‘Friday!’ said Mangle the Mysterious Mechanical Mouse promptly.

‘Just Friday?’
‘Don’t know about Just Friday….. but yesterday was definatly Thursday. I know because it was Christmas Eve………. Oh… Oh dear!’

‘Yes, you duffer, it is Christmas Day. You have lost Christmas Day!’

‘Gosh, that explains the treats and the reindeer  and the elves  and the sad boggarts’.

‘Not sad any longer.’ Petunia was looking  out of the window.

Mangle the Mysterious  Mechanical  Mouse looked out too. There were the three young boggarts sad no more,  climbing all over a parent, too buried in arms and legs and gaily clad bodies to work out which sort.

‘Christmas day seems to have found them.’

‘It  has found me as well,’ said Mangle laughing. I am going out to play cricket with the elves.

Petunia, laughing quietly, set another place for dinner.