© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Hitting Uncle Rupert where it hurts

Kevin Rudd is my favourite living former prime minister of Australia. I quite liked him as actual PM, and was sorry when he was smashed out of office by a coalition of big mining companies and the powerful trade unions that didn’t like his plan to make Labor a more broad-based party (my opinion, that). I was always dubious about those alleged internal ALP polls that claimed his popularity had plummeted and which formed the basis of the coup that replaced him with Julia Gillard. As journalist Alan Ramsay wrote back then, Labor destroyed two prime…

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Read more about the article Fatal Meteor jet crash at Williamtown, NSW, 1957
Gloster Meteor jet fighters on service with the RAAF in Korea.

Fatal Meteor jet crash at Williamtown, NSW, 1957

Recently, while I was visiting old acquaintances Doug and Peggy Paton, Doug mentioned a terrible plane crash he said he witnessed while he was a member of the Royal Australian Air Force, working at Williamtown fighter base north of Newcastle. Doug said the plane crashed while landing at the base, and he feared at one point that it might have smashed into the building where he was working. It was around meal time, he said, and there were few people around. Doug Paton in his RAAF uniform in the 1950s. He showed me some photos he…

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Snakes and Ladders

Snakes will take you down, but ladders can lead you back up. The snakes are bad deeds and attitudes. The ladders are virtues and good behaviour. But, problematically, whether you encounter a snake or a ladder depends on the random roll of a die. I’m talking about Snakes and Ladders, of course, that old game some of us played when we were children. It’s a grid, like a bigger version of a chess board, and you roll a die to determine how many spaces you move your counter from square one to the top of the…

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