Lone BeachGrit journalist refuses to join mass boycott of Adelaide Writers' Week.
Three months back, a biography I’d written, Fridays with Blanche, was loosed into the wild. It generated some praise but also incredulity at the volume of sex and innuendo contained within.
(Blanche) D’Alpuget says she was “nagged into” Fridays with Blanche, a book of conversations with author Derek Rielly. It forms a companion piece to Rielly’s well-received Wednesdays with Bob, about, well, you-know-who.
Fridays with Blanche has more sex in it than any book I have read in a long time, so much so that I felt like a prude as I read some parts. I have a similar response when d’Alpuget, later in our lunch, talks freely about her personal trainer’s “cock”.
As part of the promo drive, Blanche, the former wife of prime minister Bob Hawke, his biographer, an important novelist and, for a very long, Australia’s most notorious woman for her affair with Hawke while he was married to his sainted wife Hazel, we were both set to appear at Adelaide Writer’s Week in March to discuss etc.
Very exciting couple of days for your ol pal DR: a ride on a jet plane, a mid-range hotel with buffet breakfast included, and a stage to discuss love, life, metaphysics, geopols, and yeah sex, with my eighty-one-year-old subject.
And, then, all hell blew through the Fest, a left-wing love-in already notorious for its cancellation of Jewish speakers and hosting important seminars on the evils of Zionism, when one of its invitees Randa Abdel-Fattah was disinvited.
Randa Abdel-Fattah was gonna be in town to talk about her new book Discipline which, “critiques Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology, highlights censorship in media and academia around Palestinian voices, condemns Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and portrays silence/complicity as enabling harm—aligning with the author’s own outspoken criticism of Zionism and Israel.”
Like surfing’s own Lucy Small, Randa Abdel-Fattah celebrated the October 7, 2023, attack on Jews by Gazan commandoes and civilians by updating her Facebook photo with the image of a paragliding terrorist in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
One year later, in an essay, Randa Abdel-Fattah wrote: “If you ask me about hope, there was a glimmer on October 7. It was palpable, real, and exhilarating.”
Later in the essay Abdel-Fattah reprinted messages from her group chats.
“Massive prison break!”
“Gaza we did not see it coming! Just wow!”
“I’m betting on Gaza. It is unbreakable.”
“Hamas is reporting 35 Israelis captured.”
“It is a show of strength that hopes to return Palestine to the centre.”
“Taking over Erez crossing is such a symbolic action, that will give everyone in Gaza a morale boost.”
So, yeah, a little insensitive.
Abdel-Fattah described her removal from the festival card as racism, censorship and more evidence Palestinian voices were being silenced.
But, as Claire Lehmann pointed out in The Australian, Randa Abdel-Fattah wasn’t afraid of a little cancelling herself.
For years, Abdel-Fattah has campaigned to have people she disagrees with removed from public platforms. In 2017, she demanded the cancellation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Australian tour, arguing “hate speech is not free speech”. In 2023, she joined a push to disinvite the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish American journalist Thomas Friedman from the Adelaide Festival – a campaign Adler herself reportedly supported, according to according to Tony Berg, a former member of the festival board. In 2024, Abdel-Fattah helped drive Jewish Australian songwriter Deborah Conway out of the Perth Festival’s Literature and Ideas program for “normalising genocide”. And she refused to sign a code of conduct at the Bendigo Writers Festival, contributing to its collapse.
And this week she has launched defamation proceedings against Malinauskas for expressing his moral judgment about her work.
For Abdel-Fattah, it appears free speech is something to be demanded for herself and denied to her opponents. And Adler’s defence of it aligns, conveniently, with a cause she already supports. It is an alignment that does not appear to be accidental.
LONE WOLVES REFUSE TO JOINT BOYCOTT FOR RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH
Anyway, pretty much all the writers, as well as big-ticket guests like former NZ PM Jacinda Ardern, quit the festival in solidarity with Randa Abdel-Fattah with two notable exceptions.
Me and Blanche d’Alpuget!
We would headline festival! Six shows a day!
The local press was thrilled.
Sadly, it wouldn’t be enough and my little vacay to Adelaide was cancelled as Adelaide Writers Week went down in flames. It even backtracked on its dis-invite to Randa Abdel-Fattah and offered her a slot in 2027, apologising for harm caused etc. which she graciously addressed online.
This episode highlights three urgent matters: the profound lack of racial literacy in our public institutions and the need for urgent anti-racism education that is informed by Indigenous perspectives and frameworks; the need for public institutions to have safeguards against political interference by lobbyists; and the imperative of accountability for those who shirk their governance duties in a failure to understand that their duty of care is to their stakeholders and to the community not groups acting in the interets of external political players.
No vacay for me but read an excerpt from Fridays with Blanche here!
(Set up: The final 24 hours of Bob Hawke’s life.)
Purification
FELLED BY STOMACH PAIN EXACTLY WHERE HIS SPLEEN HAD BEEN removed 72 years earlier, Bob Hawke staggered to bed, his agitation tempered with Midazolam, and 22 hours later took his last earthly breath, a long, melodious sigh.
Hawke had been a prime minister many years before but was now best remembered for his ability to shotgun beer, as well as the very public betrayal of a now-dead wife. He held a negative attitude towards death and refused to discuss its inevitability even as the shadows grew longer.
Three years earlier, Hawke had become exasperated when I asked him about his funeral, saying, ‘I just don’t think about dying! I’ve never been worried about death and I’m not now!’
He did allow that he would like ‘Ode to Joy’, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, to be played at his funeral, and that he was ‘agnostic with a slight question mark’.
He was almost 90 by then and crippled by a range of malaises that were moderated only by painting over the pain with fentanyl patches and morphine pills.
An immediate concern for the old man was to survive long enough to see the May wedding of his stepson, Louis, Blanche’s only child. It was a milestone he’d reach with five days to spare although he’d be too ill to attend the recep- tion. The newlyweds would recreate the marriage waltz in Hawke’s living room, the bride in her gown, the groom in his tux, dancing to a recording of the bride’s father playing piano and singing ‘True Love’.
As he watched, Hawke’s milky eyes became alive with joy. He imagined himself 50 years younger, limbs able to move without pain, heart filled with the thrill of a life still to be lived.
‘It was the last time we saw him. He was happy, serene, almost nostalgic. A very sweet farewell,’ the bride, television journalist Brianna Roberts, would tell The Guardian after he died.
With the end near—increasingly frequent trips to the emergency ward and the ever-present press crews camped outside their house evidence that no man can escape his fate—Hawke confessed to Blanche that he was overwhelmed by the intensity and sweetness of their love affair.
Blanche described those last four months to me as a crucible of emotion, all the negativity burnt out, leaving only purity and perfection. ‘We felt our love was not just without impurity but it had an intensity that neither of us had ever experienced before. Those little things that made us angry disappeared because we knew that very soon we’d be parted forever.’
The love, she would later confide, was many rungs above the ‘fiery, very physical and sexual love’ they’d enjoyed in previous decades. ‘That love is so, so strong and so binding, an electric force of some kind, but love near death is on a subtler and more refined plane. Refined in feeling and refined in texture and refined in colour. If sexual love is a deep red, our love was the beautiful iridescent violet of the rainbow.’
Love was important to Hawke, perhaps even more than it is to most people. He’d been the adored child of doting parents, their love sharpened when an older brother died aged seventeen in 1939 during a meningitis outbreak in South Australia.
He described his childhood to me as being ‘such a place of love and happiness. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.’
Such was his connection with the Australian public that even before he became prime minister women wept in the streets at the appearance of a ‘suntanned god made four inches taller by a beehive of meticulously whipped silver hair’.
His former attorney general would wryly tell me, ‘We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people perceived as God.’
Folded together in bed, Hawke and Blanche, who held firm to the belief that a soul is only taken when your earthly purpose is complete—even if, sometimes, the cosmic order is upended with a murder, say—agreed that after 47 years they’d finally reached the summit of their love.
‘It’s impossible to love you more than I do now,’ he told Blanche.
There was one concession to death.
Two weeks earlier, Hawke had summoned the then Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, Terence Brady, famous for his work with the poor and vulnerable, to see if Brady could convince him that there was an afterlife.
He couldn’t.
—
Hawke’s last night on earth, Wednesday, 15 May 2019, began with a dinner of butter chicken served in the house’s galley kitchen, Hawke and Blanche eating in front of the 7 p.m. ABC news. The meal had been prepared by their house- keeper, Chinese national Vicky Ma, who was a student living in Australia in 1989 when protesters were bulldozed by tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Hawke, who was the prime minister at the time, had been shocked by cables from the Australian embassy in Beijing describing the bloodshed and tearfully announced on television that any Chinese legally in Australia would be offered asylum.
The student, one of 42,000 in Australia, never went back to China.
Twenty-one years later, when an employment agency sent her for a housekeeping job at a five-storey mansion in Sydney’s Northbridge and Blanche mentioned whom she’d be working for, Vicky begged for the job.
‘I’m one of his children,’ she said through her daughter, who acted as interpreter.
Now, on the evening before he died, Hawke finished his dinner then suddenly stood up, stumbled into the adjacent sitting room and, on all fours, vomited and screamed, ‘I’m in agony! This is killing me!’
Blanche told him, ‘I know! You’re dying.’
She’d later confide that Hawke had always boasted of having no fear of death and, referencing the anguish of watching her own mother die, she remembered thinking, ‘Wait until you get there. It’s not easy.’
Hawke held the left side of his stomach just beneath the rib cage, a right-angle scar indicating where his spleen had been removed after a motorcycle crash in 1947. Blanche wondered if the angel of death had returned for its final triumphant strike.
Hawke’s doctor, fortuitously at dinner at a nearby restaurant, was summoned. He guessed that an ulcer had burst. Drugs were administered, morphine for the pain as well as the Midazolam to calm Hawke down.
Blanche lay down next to her husband for the night, noting the telltale rattle of pneumonia coming on, a common side effect of opioids.
Morning came and Blanche got up, attended to familiar chores, then went back and lay beside him throughout the afternoon. If death was close, she would help ease him to the other side.
Long ago, she’d embraced Pascal’s Wager, the philo- sophical argument of French mathematician Blaise Pascal that given the uncertainty of an afterlife, better to believe in heaven and live happily than be an atheist and to live without hope. ‘Death is a wonderful experience,’ the wife would often say to her husband.
Slowly, a warm colour returned to his skin and his breathing began to ease. A calm enveloped Hawke.
The housekeeper, relieved, said to Blanche, ‘He’s okay! He’s going to live!’ and left the house.
At 4 p.m., Blanche was confident enough in Hawke’s health to keep her appointment with a local acupuncturist.
She stretched out on the examination bench and the thera- pist felt pulse points on her wrist, a major diagnostic tool in acupuncture. Pulse qualities—fast, slow, strong, weak, thin or slippery—indicate various maladies.
‘What have you been doing!’ asked the panicked therapist. ‘Why?’
‘You’ve got no pulses.’
Blanche explained that she’d been lying with her husband on his death bed. ‘You’re dying,’ the therapist told her. ‘You’ve given him all your energy. You’ll die if you do that. You must not lie beside him. You can hold his hand, that’s all.’
When Blanche returned to the house shortly before five, the pink that had come into Hawke’s face had gone and his breathing had deteriorated.
Blanche sat beside her husband and held his hand.
At the foot of his bed stood a dear friend from the Labor Party, Craig Emerson, and his partner, Tracey Winters.
At five minutes past five, with the bedroom flooded with the pale yellow light of an autumnal sunset, Hawke died.
A feeling of elation filled the room, Blanche would recall. ‘His soul and his spirit were free. I sensed a room full of angels. His face had become very calm and smooth and lovely. His colour didn’t come back, of course. He was dead.’
The front door to the house opened, there was the sound of footsteps on the granite stairs and the housekeeper suddenly appeared. She’d forgotten her telephone.
When Blanche said Hawke was dead, the shocked house- keeper, who was convinced Hawke had cheated death at least for another day, said, ‘We must wash the body.’
As Emerson and Winters left the house, the housekeeper brought a bowl filled with warm water and two wash cloths. Gently, the two women eased Hawke out of his navy blue Qantas tracksuit and rolled him onto his side.
Blanche noted that he smelled quite sweet. There was some blood coming out of his mouth from the pneumonia but ‘no nasty bodily fluids’.
For twenty minutes, the four hands lovingly washed the cadaver, bathing and drying as they went. They started at the head, moving to the trunk, the legs and the feet. Both women treated the body with great care, as if he were alive, gently massaging him, soothing him.
Blanche felt a sense of profound joy that Hawke was finally able to die and escape the prison of his frail body.
The housekeeper and Blanche dressed Hawke and the doctor arrived to issue Hawke’s death certificate.
As night fell and the press crews packed up after what they thought was another fruitless day, the undertaker’s refrigerated van drove into the garage.
The wife announced her husband’s death in a statement to the press.
Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and their governments modernised the Australian economy, paving the way for an unprecedented period of recession-free economic growth and job creation.
Bob’s consensus-style approach of bringing together the trade union movement and the business community boosted job opportunities while increasing the social wage through Medicare and extra financial support for low-income families.
Together with his highly talented Cabinets, he foresaw the Asian Century and positioned Australia to take full advantage of it through a program of sweeping economic reforms.
Among his proudest achievements were large increases in the proportion of children finishing high school, his role in ending apartheid in South Africa, and his successful international campaign to protect Antarctica from mining.
He abhorred racism and bigotry. His father, the Reverend Clem Hawke, told Bob that if you believed in the Fatherhood of God then you must also believe in the Brotherhood of Man.
Bob would add today the Sisterhood of Women. Bob was dearly loved by his family, and so many friends and colleagues. We will miss him. The golden bowl is broken.
Clem Hawke had used the line ‘The golden bowl is broken’ in 1939 at the conclusion of a death notice he wrote in the Adelaide Advertiser on the death of his seventeen- year-old son, Neil Hawke, Bob’s brother.
The full passage appears in Ecclesiastes 12:6: ‘Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well.’
The silver cord is life’s connection to the body, the golden bowl the body. The breaking of the golden bowl symbolises the moment when life’s spirit finally leaves the body.
When the coincidence was later pointed out to Blanche, she didn’t regard it in any way cosmic, despite her lifelong interest in the metaphysical, and said the Bible used to be the foundation of any decent education and that she was familiar with the phrase.
Eleven days after the undertaker’s vehicle exited the Northbridge garage with Hawke inside, a private ceremony for 30 people was held in the Lotus Pavilion at the Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium. Blanche had delayed the service and cremation to allow Louis and his new wife, Brianna, to complete their honeymoon in Bali and for Hawke’s son, Stephen, to make the journey from Western Australia.
When Hawke first met Louis many years before, he told him, ‘I just want you to know I think of you as my own son.’ At the funeral, Louis read a meditative verse from Rudolf Steiner’s book Guidance in Esoteric Training. Steiner believed that human beings consist of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, and that death is not an end but a transition.
Louis felt it was more important to help ease his step- father into the next world rather than deliver a litany of his life, which he knew would be covered in other speeches.
‘My love, given in sacrifice, shall be woven into the forms that now envelop you, cooling all warmth, warming all cold- ness,’ Louis recited. ‘Live supported by love, given the gift of light, as you ascend.’
Blanche read a poem from a piece of paper she had found in a jacket, several verses of which she’d recited at her son’s wedding two weeks before to the surprise of the bride who’d given her something entirely different to read.
‘She swore this was the poem I sent her, but now claims it must have been the holy angels,’ says Brianna. ‘After Bob’s death she asked me for a copy so she could read it at the funeral.’
The poem, ‘And Still the Constellations’ by the Christian Scientist and writer Peter Henniker-Heaton—a man who claimed to have overcome paralysis through faith—fitted Hawke as perfectly as a schooner glass curled up in his tanned paw.
The coffin was carried on the shoulders of Hawke’s sons, Stephen and Louis, and grandsons, Kell, Sam, David and Paul. Friends wept without restraint. Hawke’s longtime secretary, Jill Saunders, and his driver, Rob Copeland, struggled to hide their grief.
The mourners were spared the sight of the crematorium door opening and the coffin disappearing into the flames.
Blanche said it’s one of the most horrible events a mourner can experience, the coffin, slowly at first, then quickly being engulfed by fire. Traditional images of hell.
At the State Funeral, held at the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall two and a half weeks later, Blanche, whose oratory concluded proceedings, had no prepared speech. She was wrapped in a soft peach velvet cape made by her dressmaker Hanna Kossowska and appeared to glow beneath the lights.
Blanche finished the event with ‘Long live friendship among nations and beyond all, long live love.’
Four months later, the contents of Hawke and Blanche’s house would be sent to auction, and an aggressive and very public challenge to the will would be launched by Hawke’s younger daughter, Rosslyn, over its perceived unfairness.
When Louis arrived at the executor’s office one week after Hawke’s death, a voice had muttered, ‘You’re not blood.’
—
In a $3.6 million pied-à-terre overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park, the new widow parted her nightie, a billow of pale blue silk bought in Shanghai, and stood in front of a bedroom mirror.
The sun hitting the north facing floor-to-ceiling window illuminated her slim-boned, pale body. It was a cruel white light that allowed no secrets.
She examined a protrusion, a little smaller than a ten-cent piece, in her left breast.
The widow had been around long enough to know that it was now her turn to face death, to test the validity of Pascal’s Wager.
‘Well, I didn’t expect . . . that,’ she thought.
Well done, DR — and a great wrap from FitzSimons on the book as well. Currently tugging through the Makassar Strait, revisiting Bounty for the second time. The man can really write.
… too long DR.
I need to type ‘CUNT’.
now there’s a story ….is randa a prophet, as she doubles down that Oct 7 was a great day for palestinne and gaza….she obviously has and is just a destructive influence , extolling the virtues of hamas……so she reacted with the below comments
OCT 7
“Massive prison break!”
“Gaza we did not see it coming! Just wow!”
“I’m betting on Gaza. It is unbreakable.”
“Hamas is reporting 35 Israelis captured.”
“It is a show of strength that hopes to return Palestine to the centre.”
“Taking over Erez crossing is such a symbolic action, that will give everyone in Gaza a morale boost.
Ok, so Oct 7 was for her a great day for palestinians…..so how’s the prison doing? How broken is Gaza as Israel has not finished yet? we now Know Hamas took 200 hostages 1/2 killed and no end to the war? Would she say Oct7 has created strength and hop for Gaza?
I can’t believe she got a visa !
Then the hawke story……
Backdoor shootout 6’ right tubes clean
The zio lobby is becoming the cancer of Australian cultural life
Tell us what you really think.
Also, is this really a new development or something that’s always been?
Thanks for the short summary Derek.
2 books I won’t be reading
said it before, I’ll say it again:
definition a functioning country:
borders, language and culture.
diversity = destruction.
How do you explain your “ home”?
Aren’t you diversity?
In this instance…
diversity = destruction (or at least a severe multi-generational limiting of the Hawaiian language and culture, apart from tourism purposes for the financial benefit of the border invaders)
probably have to take that up with Kamehameha and Kalākaua…but yes, to my point….”diversity = destruction”
“Diversity” comes from the Latin for “facing both ways”.
“divers” or “diverse” in English has meant “various” since the 13th century, also “several” or “sundry”.
Prior to the 13th century “Diversity” meant “wicked” or “perverse”.
These days, of course, “diversity” means a variety of ethnic, sexual and other identities, similar to many other words in which original definitions have changed to benefit societal or political ideologies and agenda.
Sovereign borders, a unified language and culture are what define a country.
Hawaii is a State within U.S borders. The Hawaiian speak English as a primary (first) language and are reresentative of the culture of the United Sates. various cultural representations and practices are part of the U.S. culture.
However, unity amongst the citizens is the only way a country survives.
Division is death.
Hawaii is welcome to attempt to secede, but Hawaii is currently under the protection and constitution of the United States.
you’re talking about race not language or culture.
Wow you really put in some effort to avoid staying surf-adjacent today Dezza.
Not long after the start it looked like you might write about a famous Australian surfing ‘Bob’, like Evans, McTavish or Bain perhaps.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Though when it became apparent that former PM Hawke was the subject, it’s surf-adjacent commitment was obvious through Hawkes close mateship with Tom Carroll, as well as his prodigious beer swilling and sheila shagging exploits.
Well done Dezza
Goodness. War and Peace isn’t in the same ball park as this scripture. All I can add to this as a humble every day Aussie is Hawk eye had a remarkable life for a bloke who started off as a simple member of a workers Union.
Been learning a bit about Dostoevsky recently. Fella was a real trip.
You ever tackled any of those Russian tomes? I’ve always, and likely will always, keep my distance from those sort of massive books.
Closest I came was Shantaram by Greg Roberts and even that I had to skip from page 600-800. Lost interest and wanted to give up but I had to know how it ended so I read the last 100 (or so) pages .
Try Demons! Oowee.
I honestly think that his writing is too ‘intelligent’ for me but I may well give it a shot based on your recommendation.
I’m always interested about the concept of evil and how it resides in the heart of men.
go Crime and Punishment- take your time.
…well, he was a Rhodes Scholar, Oxford graduate and then trade unionist. Not too sure if he was ever on the tools, as such.
What a pity there’s no Left-Centrists like Bob left making any waves in Australian politics.
Yeah, he was one of a kind. Never a simple union man. Came swinging back into Australia after Oxford and got the Arbitration Commission to increase the basic wage. A towering figure long before he became PM.
I’m glad you stand firm.
After all nobody likes a flaccid half master….
Well shhheeeett, DR.
Just another reminder that you’re wasted here among this rabble.
Chas and DR are the definition of “mailed it in.”. Especially 15 yrs into it or however long it’s been.
Agreed.
Questionable politics, though 😉
What political bent would you decree as unquestionable?
Oh. I’m just talking out loud.
But as you ask, I’d say a nation state that decides that Expansionism is the way to go, when trying to solve a national problem. Such as if India decided it needed a bordering region of Pakistan or vice versa. Or Australia decided it wanted some small island state, and it decided that it had a good reason to invade (as opposed to working something out diplomatically).
I also would have said this before recent events.
That’s politics that I can’t get behind.
Where’s this nation state expanding to? It shrunk after 2005.
All politics are questionable.
Well done DR. Great writing.
This article was exhausting, from cock talk to Zionism I couldn’t keep up.
If I could’ve squeezed in real estate I would’ve…wait! Last paragraph!
Touché
Bob Hawke was 100% C.I.A. Also, wanted an except with more of the sex.
Ah, here’s a little sexy.
Blanche looks at me, ‘You know, she’s a platinum blonde?
Yeah?’
‘Go down on me. My penis in your mouth as deep as
you can, as deep as you can take it. Little bites. Now
rake your teeth slowly upwards and again and again.
Wrap your teeth around the head, bite soft then harder.
Flick your tongue, bite harder.’
His back arched.
‘You can bite my knob hard. Yes, let it out. I want
to see it.’
Her mouth had filled with saliva. She watched
bubbling drool slither over the head of his cock and run
down the shaft. Small bites, hard bites, his eyes were
gleaming. He was almost rough as he pulled her face
away. His voice changed. ‘Let’s fuck,’ he said.
Blanche sees the recording device in my hand.
‘You recorded that, you bitch!’
Come on Dez – we are all teenage boys here? How bout some furtive longing and forbidden fruits? Lingerie is sexier than nude, duh.
he also let his youngest daughter be raped by a mate of Bob’s……all part of politics…..ah what politicians have to sacrifice in the name of money/sex and power…!
Page 27, Fridays with Blanche, The Widow has a Fire Sale and a Will is Challenged! Briefly, and as nobody knows the truth except the dead MP and the accuser,
Why the seemingly unrelated hit on her dead father
and a dead MP’s reputation in an affidavit to get a bigger
bite of the old man’s will? Estate law favours children,
even those who have been disinherited, if they can prove
hardship. In Rosslyn’s case she claimed she still suffered
from the unreported rapes and had relied on the parent who had died.
yep , would ya trust a politician who abandoned his wife for lust , as his lust for sex and power…LOL…..?????
I know who I believe!
There’s belief and there’s truth and with no one around to defend the accusation, it’s impossible to arrive at a verdict. IMHO.
politician vs young daughter……..truth /belief….depends on your source of information and willingness to form an opinion based on…..truth………which explains maga only limiting themselves to Red States opinions/narrative…….the verdict will be the best I can offer after reading all the relevant information!
It’s worth examining motivations for these sorta things. A pal did three years on the word of a vexatious gal.
fuck I did a total of 7 years because of Surfing Australia…..and yeah injustice everywhere, misinformation everywhere….
Seven years is quite the haul. Over two stretches?
on bail 2 years reporting to police every day, served 2 years and 6 days , and then did 3 years parole……..
Cunts, bruz. How’d you tamper the anger when you came out?
haha…still dealing with it……I was very angry young fella when I came out…not realizing I had picked up PTSD/Depression, and the kid they sent in came out a Psychotic madman.LOL……who now had been trained and educated by Stan Taylor….John Sylvester called Stan ,Australia’s most violent Psychotic criminal…my mentor,LOL…….had a huge impact as I was so young and impressionable…….upside was I learned to handle myself and trust no-one especially the 3 x P’s……Police/Politicians and pedophiles……story coming……film coming……still….
Jeebus. Seems like he was the right man for the job, then. Would have no problem having his country raped by its ol Uncle Sam.
Au contraire. It was an in-depth piece covering his rise to writing, alongside his longtime friend and editor.
It was also highlighting his new method of researching scientific literature and his new book.
Oh what was his new method? Chas turned me onto My Struggle, Knausgard, not Hizzy.
His new method was to bury himself in his study with what looked like a metric fucktonne of books and read non-stop about topics in the natural sciences , that he was unfamiliar with. New TO HIM method.
I gather that he’d use those books to determine what was the next book he needed to buy/acquire. Strikes me as a voracious reader (as all good writers should be ; as stated by King in his brilliant On Writing)
I found a 5 min ad for the 23 (+\-) min program.
https://youtu.be/Dr-dPzhzrx…
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Lol. That’s a good one.
And one of them offed himself, absolutely tragic
ah a golden horn for the golden taco…..fake….???
The writing from the excerpt was interesting. Great job, DR.
Sorry that you missed out on the big event. What a cock up.
As a progressive thinker I’ll never understand how that woman, who you now inform me wanted to cancel people, hasn’t been ‘canceled’ from western society with her missives. I would have thought that the paraglider thing would make a person persona-non-grata instantly. But then, what do I know? Strange times bring strange behaviour.
Hope that you make it to the next one. Hope that you get some good surf, on a trip to Byronshire maybe, to wash off the stink of the last couple of months. I just learned last night, from BBC World, who the author Karl Ove Knausgård is and ……….phew, things could always be worse.
Some context that Derek must not have come across in his Newscorp bubble:
Sydney Morning Herald:
She was also criticised for posting an illustration of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag parachute as her Facebook profile photo the day after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. She has since apologised. “At that point, I had no idea about the death toll, about what was happening on the ground,” Abdel-Fattah told ABC News on Monday. “Of course I do not support the killing of civilians.”
https://www.smh.com.au/national/cannot-be-party-to-silencing-writers-louise-adler-resigns-from-adelaide-writers-week-20260113-p5ntkp.html
The Guardian:
She told Guardian Australia on Sunday she rejected any allegation of hypocrisy, having called for Friedman’s removal from the festival in 2024.
“Friedman’s widely criticised NYT article compared various Arab and Muslim nations and groups to insects and vermin requiring eradication at a time when talk of ‘human animals’ was being used to justify wholesale slaughter in Gaza,” she said in a statement.
“We were concerned about the impact of Friedman’s views on socially and historically marginalised people who have been dehumanised and discriminated against by the use of such racist tropes. Indeed, one of the examples we supplied was how Jewish people have historically been likened to vermin.
“In contrast, I was cancelled because my presence and identity as a Palestinian was deemed ‘culturally insensitive’ and linked to the Bondi atrocity.
“I was cancelled because I, a Palestinian, have been a vocal advocate against the actual extermination of my people.”
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jan/11/adelaide-festival-did-not-not-dump-jewish-columnist-from-2024-program-despite-request-from-randa-abdel-fattah-and-others
Read ol Tommy Friedman, who describes the Bibi government as ugly and nihilistic so he ain’t no Israel apologist, below.
My guess is that the next week or so is likely to be the most important in the Gaza war since Hamas launched it on Oct. 7.
The U.S. will probably retaliate against pro-Iranian forces and Iranian agents in the Middle East that Washington believes are responsible for the attack on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three soldiers on Jan. 28. At the same time, we could get a Gaza cease-fire deal, with an exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken is going to try to bring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel an option: normalization with Saudi Arabia in return for a commitment to engage with the Palestinian Authority on a long-term plan for a Palestinian state.
How all of these are going to interact, I do not know. Personally, I sometimes prefer to think about the complex relations between these parties with analogies from the natural world.
The U.S. is like an old lion. We are still the king of the Middle East jungle — more powerful than any single actor, but we have so many scars from so many fights that we just can’t just show up, roar loudly and expect that everyone will do what we want or scamper away. We are one tired lion, and that’s why other predators are no longer afraid to test us.
Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.”
Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host — Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq — and eat it from the inside out.
We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
Hamas is like the trap-door spider. The way trap-door spiders operate, according to a nature site, is that “the spider leaps out at great speed, seizes its prey and hauls it back into the burrow to be devoured, all in a fraction of a second.” Trap-door spiders are adept at camouflaging the doors of their underground nests, so they are hard to see until they’re opened.
Finally, Netanyahu is like the sifaka lemur, which I got to observe in Madagascar. Sifakas are primates that use bipedal sideways hopping as a primary means of walking. They advance by moving sideways, waving their arms up and down, which makes them appear to be moving even more than they are. That’s Bibi, always shifting side to side to stay in power and avoiding going decisively backward or forward. This week he may have to.
Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.
Fucking brilliant read
I don’t believe Freidman was cancelled from the festival though? And Abdel Fattah was cancelled for being a vocal critic of Israel rather than anything she said about the Bondi massacre? Just that being critical of the Israeli government’s actions is somehow antisemetic and led to Bondi? You wouldn’t call someone racist against ethnic Chinese people for criticising the CCP would you?
Pretty sure you can join the dots.
Top THAT, Stabnertia.
Come for the surf-adjacent chat, stay for the long-form international intellectual smogasbord on human rights interwoven with the glissando of aching personal heartstrings.
They blanche at their lack of gravitas.
Dez appears to be taking tips from Nerdtia with the little header titles above some paragraphs.
Hey the shark expert I mentioned posted today, doc dormeier. He works for the app called expedition white shark that you can download. They have multiple tagged females of the central coast of California with live tracking. https://uploads.disquscdn.c… He posts pics of the map himself off and on.
Hey the shark expert posted on ig that I was talking about. His name is doc Dormeier. He works for the expedition white shark project
that has live tracking of multiple large females that were tagged off the central coast. You can download the app. He posts pics of the tracking map once in a while.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Sweet, I couldn’t find it myself.
Apparently v good for SEO. Everyone does it I noticed. Also a little contents thing up top, like Surfer. The whole SEO biz, though, is like medieval medicine, all smoke, leeches, prayers etc.
It’s called GEO now, dontchaknow…
Generative Engine Optimisation.
Which is just fucking tragic in the extreme.
Yike? It is?
Jesus christ! That buffet breakfast must have been good. You’ve really lost your shit over missing out!
Because he created some content ? Don’t see anyone losing their shit here. Just some good writing
I’ll say what I want you positive cunt
Toxic positivity 🙂
Like Chris Cote! https://beachgrit.com/2023/12/chris-cote-on-the-killing-of-the-surf-industry-and-the-joys-of-toxic-positivity/
It’s the fruit platter that I thrill to and the filter coffee.