Now is the Content of my Winter

This is SO counter-intuitive. It’s really hard to get your head around. It seems plain common-sense that much of the violence we see in our world is caused by religion. And here I am trying to tell you that it’s the other way round? That violence causes religion? It’s like saying UP is DOWN. Exactly. Up IS down. That is a reality that was kindly explained to me by that nice Indian optometrist at Specsavers. “You know that our eyes actually see the world upside-down,” he explained in his emollient tones. “Eh?” I replied. I could feel a stupid look on my face. In a moment I would look like a heavy-browed Neanderthal and be saying “Wha(t)” without pronouncing the ‘t’. “Yes,” Mr Specsavers continued amicably as if addressing a small child. “The lens in the eye inverts what it sees, and projects it upside-down onto your retina.” This sounded vaguely obscene, so I just said, “Oh.” “So your eyes see the world upside-down. But fortunately our brains are smart enough to...

     I'm a Presbyterian. Pray for me.      In 2013, the Presy General Assembly of Australia affirmed the biblical definition of marriage as a “lifelong  union of one man with one woman, voluntarily entered into, excluding all others…”      The proposition is not unreasonable. Marriage, according to the Bible, is one man and one woman. It's possible to debate if this is what the Bible says, of course. It's not hard to point out that lots of polygamists are splattered about the early part of the Christian Bible, but, well, nobody was perfect then.      Anyhow, let's now cavil. This is, as I say, a very reasonable position. The Church is certainly entitled to say it. And to believe it. Indeed, I rather like it myself, probably because Judy and I entered into such a relationship almost 48 years ago. And we're still in it. So, if the Church wants to say it's the proper definition, that's perfectly fine. Fo...

7/11 Church Street - about 1955 The people responsible for house numbers confused me at our second house. I am certain it was 11 Church Street, Parramatta. But apparently it had earlier been number 7. How these house numbering officials imagined that there could be six building sites between Boundary Road and our house tests credulity. I am sure that I could pace along to the corner in fewer than 50 steps. Where were these six buildings? On the corner was the grocery where Mum did most of her shopping. It was a convenience store simply because it was convenient. I remember it being tiny, and since I was myself quite tiny then, it must have been Lilliputian. The counters were high of course, and Mrs Kerfoops who owned the shop, lived upstairs. If there was a Mr Kerfoops, I don’t recall noticing him. And there were certainly no little Kerfoopsettes because they would have played in our back yard like every other child on the strip. So Mrs Kerfoops lived over her shop at Nu...

My first home: 50 years on    We lived at number 5. Or was it 3? There’s the trouble about writing a memoir. The memoir machine isn’t reliable. Memories get made and remade. Every remembrance of a memory writes itself over the old one. So was it number 5 Herbert Street or number 3?    I went back in 2013 to have a look. The suburb was Merrylands. It used to be 15 miles west of Sydney, but they changed the measurement and the old money got fixed as a memory. Change can be useful like that.    Woodville Road seemed wider and lots busier than 1953. I came upon Herbert Street too quickly, missing the chance to see if Glenys Davidson’s house was still there. She isn’t there, except in memory as my first teenage crush. I think I was her boyfriend for about a month before she dumped me. With reason. Ask me about it later.    For now, I was looking for the old house. The one we lived in until I was about six. Memory tells me it is two hou...

Among the many waves in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo  massacre, is a trenchant and rather abstruse contribution from Guy Rundle of crikey.com.au (you may be able to read the entire piece here , if the link takes you beyond the paywall). Allow me to quote a small part: " The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. ... The   Hebdo   massacre brought all these contradictions [of the Right] to the fore.   Hebdo ’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition". "What nonsense. "Until the 1...

The High Court has knocked down the Federal Government's funding for the School Chaplaincy program. Simply said, the Constitution does not permit the Federal Government to directly fund school programs. It must, and perhaps will, do it through the State Governments, if they agree. The unGodly commentators are rapturous, but so far not translated into glory. Crikey betrays its own particular bigotry by urging us to "Get God out of State Schools". How disappointing that a journal of commentary has to stoop to prejudice to make a point. Leave aside whether, if there be a God, we could keep him out by the authority of a human court, no matter how High. Once schools and Universities were places where a broad education was possible. Curricula are slimmer now than ever. Once you could do three foreign languages, including a few dead ones. Once you could be exposed to a view of the development of humanity that helped you to understand the role, for better or worse, played b...

About twenty years ago, René Girard said, "...in stable systems the persecutors don't realise that they're persecutors; they don't recognise themselves in the portrait that their victims paint of them when they start to complain." "I'm black and proud of it."  Nicky Winmar, 1993 Around the same time, sitting across the table in my office at World Vision was Kevin Sheedy, Coach of the Essendon Football Club. Even then Sheeds was a legend. We were talking about Nicky Winmar's famous response to being told by Collingwood supporters to "go and sniff petrol" and "go walkabout where you came from." To his credit, Sheeds had been appalled by the fans. I had been appalled by their defenders. "They just don't get it," I said. "The say 'I didn't mean it' and 'I wasn't saying it in a racist way.' Are they that blind?" Yes, blind. As Girard was pointing out in his interview on th...