I saw a T-Shirt with "yeah, right...whatever" on it and it made me laugh out loud. I should have bought it, expressing as it does for me, a feeling Ive been increasingly troubled by since getting back to Australia. For me its saying "actually youre talking bullshit but I cant be bothered arguing with you". I'm thinking mostly about the political scene in Australia at the moment which is completely dominated by Tony Abbot the Oposition Leader, a man with extraordinary political skill, ruthless beyond belief and utterly focused on getting rid of the Government by whatever means he can. This week has been typical - he and his party are attempting to unseat the governemnt by digging up dirt on a Government backbencher from a time before he was ever an MP, hypocritically lamenting that until the Government sorts out what he was up to back then, the Government is "in paralysis" - when of course it is the Opposition who are in paralysis, having done nothing but muck rake all week. Given that the Government has a majority of one, its obvious to Blind Freddy that whatever they might want to do with the MP under attack, they are not going to allow the Government to fall over such an utterly irrelevant incident, no matter how sordid it may be portrayed by the Opposition. Sadly, even though Australians are doing better than probably everyone else on the planet, Abbot has them believing in large numbers that they are sufferring, their Government is wasteful and corrupt ,- and this latest episode just confirms it- they are secretly beholden to the crazy Greens and led by a liar, that action on Global Warming is optional and shouldnt cost anybody anything, that somehow the pathetically few asylum seekers who manage to get to Australia by boat are a serious menace to the Australian way of life, and the country is on the brink, like Greece and Portugal. Yeah, right...whatever Tony!
Ive been back in Australia 3 weeks, and managed to find a weeks work in Swan Hill Victoria . Its on the Murray River and as far as I could tell there were neither Swans nor Hills there, but it was a small friendly country town and work was quiet. I drove the 400 odd km out and back from Melbourne and therefore managed to see more of Melbourne that I had ever before. I was hugely impressed by their Museum and generally preferred the City of Melbourne to the City of Sydney, but of course Sydney has that wonderful Harbour. I saw the home of the Royal Society of Victoria, the place from which the ill fated Burke and Wills departed for central Australia exactly 150 years ago. A fascianting book to read about that expedition is "The Dig Tree:" by Sarah Murgatroyd, who, aged 34 was herself dying as she wrote about the fatal journey of Burke and Wills.