Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Lilith __,
There was some criticism of Ruth Park's account of her experience of the Queen Street riots when A Fence Around the Cuckoo first appeared. Not that anything she said wasn't strictly factual, but that it was unlikely that she was quite as close to the centre of so many events as she'd portrayed herself to be. Personally I'm not bothered if that's the case. It's one of the most vivid descriptions of a remarkable episode, and if Park felt the need to draw the eyewitness accounts of others into her own narrative then in her case it's a form of well-earned literary license.
Re. the "ghost story" - no problem to me, I wasn't there, though she brings the reader pretty close. Having spent a fair proportion of my adult life in Australia it had the authentic flavour that such things do when you happen upon them - or they upon you - in that part of the world. While there's still evidence of the vanished world of not so long ago in the rocks and hollows around Port Jackson, it was something of a shock to discover how much had still existed until so recently, in an area where it's now been totally exorcised.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Lilith __,
One of the anecdotes in Fishing in the Styx that lingers in my mind is when they move into a large and tumbledown house and D’Arcy selects a room for his study which Ruth and the children believe is haunted –
Ben Boyd Road, Neutral Bay. Where the Nilands lived has long been totally infilled with apartment blocks, but you can still see down onto the deck of the harbour bridge from there, just like she said you could. Viewed from across the bay, where I lived for ten years, you wouldn't have thought it possible.
Ruth Park seems to have dabbled in the saturated end of the palette when her marvellous storytelling skills demanded it - for example, her account of the wartime Japanese attack on Sydney has far more pyrotechnics than most other witnesses seem to recall - but she was spot on with that one.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Steve Barnes,
On the subject of Air New Zealand and “Culture” Has anybody else seen the Rico series of adds they are pushing out.
Funny thing is, if you read the Youtube comments it’s the kind of people that habitually refer to anyone they don’t like as muppets who are cacking themselves with delight at the antics of this little monument to arrested development.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to James Bremner,
At this point in time could and any countries seriously challenge the US militarily? No, not a chance. Now that might change over time, but at this point in time it is an accurate description.
The price of freedom is eternal chickenshit pointscoring.
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I doubt many other Kiwis ‘will get around to it’ – meaning of course that without the ‘official’ link to the good old fishwrap, they won’t exist as far as a lot of people are concerned.
This "good old fishwrap" is concentrating on the really important stuff.
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Speaker: It's called "planning" for a reason, in reply to Sacha,
. . . sort out the ‘freedom’ campers, the dirty bastards.
Maybe you need someone like former NSW Minister Michael Yabsley, who was supposed to have shouted "Come here and let me hammer a rubber bung up your backside" to a vocal heckler protesting a proposed sewage outfall.
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I'm pretty sure that the Listener wasn't flicked off to (I think) Wilson & Horton until the end of the 80s. Russell will know. The Warwick Roger-era Metro used to fulminate against what it saw as an unfairly subsidised encroachment on its turf. The view from Auckland back then was that a tiny cabal of Wadestown liberals wielded a disproportionate influence, and the Listener, operating from redecorated offices in a state services warren in Thorndon, was their Pravda.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
It was a long time ago Giovanni, and while I'm unable to quote chapter and verse my memory is fairly clear because it seemed significant at the time. By way of context, the Listener was at that time a state-owned rag of a progressive persuasion, and the mention of Major Mafart's subscription was presented mischievously, in a context somewhat like the Herald's current Sideswipe. The piece ended, to the best of my recollection, with the speculation that maybe Mafart knew something that the rest of us didn't.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Alex Coleman,
It wasn’t completely without lasting effects though.
A motorcycle hire outfit in Sydney's Surry Hills was attempting to hit French nationals with a Rainbow Warrior surcharge as recently as 1994.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Ross Mason,
The filthy French??
Although intense at the time of the Rainbow Warrior bombing, the nationalistic outrage quickly faded. After the jailing of the two straggler DGSE agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur the Listener reported that Mafart had taken a subscription to the magazine, but only for six months, implying that he didn't expect to serve anything like his full ten-year sentence.
When David Lange was asked if a deal with France was possible he laughed the suggestion off, saying that if National wanted to win the 1987 election they'd only have to show a picture of the two agents sunning themselves on some beach. In mid-1986 a deal was struck to send the pair to the French atoll of Hao for three years, in return for an apology and $NZ6.5 million. Mafart went home to Paris with stomach pains after 17 months. Prieur lasted a further 5 months until she managed to get pregnant. None of this was a major issue for Lange's Government.