Tuckerucci Fairytales

I come late to many good things, the books of Jane Austen being a regrettable instance. I was put off in my wanton youth by that sentence. You know the one: the most celebrated 23 words ever written in English. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. I was 22, six months out of military service as a Nasho in Vietnam, and a fresher at James Cook University of North Queensland (to give it its name at the time). Pride and Prejudice was a prescribed text for English 101. I read the first sentence and closed the book - slammed it shut, actually, and threw it against the wall - and never read another word of Jane Austen. It is said, by people who claim to know - though I don’t know how they can - that at the moment of death, when confronted by the perfection of the beatific vision, we judge ourselves. Fifty years after my run-in with language used so skilfully that it provoked harsh judgement - I thought it sop...

  OPENING SEQUENCE Flags & Magpies audio, Title, Warriors Graphic PROEM On ANZAC Day The Word ‘Remember” Is On Everyone’s Lips But What Is It To Remember To Re-Member ON RE-MEMBERING Studies of memory show that a remembered experience has hundreds if not thousands of parts. When I remember an experience it is constructed anew from the ground up, each time with a slightly different set of parts and in a slightly different order. Every memory I have is not only about a thing or event in the past but also about the way I choose to re-member in the present. Every experience I remember is re- membered. The way I remember is mostly shaped by what is going on around me at the time. Context shapes the way I re-member. Though I am rarely deliberate in the way I choose to remember, I can deliberate. I can shape, change and choose the context in which I re-member. Today’s ceremony is about deliberating on who and how we choose to remember. MCs INTRODUCE THEMSELVES (RW) Welcome everyone to...

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE DAY WHEN JOHN HOWARD WILL SHUFFLE OFF THIS MORTAL COIL AND CLICHES AND PLATITUDES WILL RAIN DOWN LIKE AN APOCALYPSE This was written in March 2008. Nothing has happened since then to change my views on JWH. Johnny who? What a pathetic coward. John Howard waits until he’s out of the country before he makes any comment about current affairs in Australia, and when he does, (in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Thursday 6/3/08) he pretends that he wasn’t given the most humiliating thrashing any political leader in Australia, and possibly the world, has ever had. Howard slams the Rudd government for abandoning Work Choices as though it wasn’t the single most significant issue on which Labor won the 2007 election. Oh, and he makes no reference to the fact that the party he lead to utter ignominy abandoned every last link to Work Choices after being thrashed yet again by public opinion when Julie Bishop foreshadowed opposing the abolition of...

  Hey Lori, I said in my reply to your text message that I would get back to you about “Woke culture” which you mentioned at lunch last week. You asked what I think of the idea that you can’t call men, men any more or women, women .Trying to address that issue to the depth needed would have been too disruptive to the spirit of get-together that we were there for, so I didn’t even try. I just said that if anyone ever says that to you tell them to GF themselves; and I made a mental note to get back to you about it. The word Woke originated in African-American culture and was used for decades before a distorted version of it found its way into the broader American society, and from there to the rest of the (Western) world. In African-American language the word Woke means awareness of what keeps racism alive . That awareness is a critique of the sense of entitlement of many (or probably most) white Americans who are, but won’t admit to being, white supremacists . Entitlement assumes...

Remembering who we have been as a people, while honouring those who fell, serving the nation we are still becoming.  Illustration by Luis Crista Designs, commissioned by the author This structure is intended as a place to connect with a story , not merely to lay flowers three or four times a year; and not merely to connect, but to engage in a life or death struggle for the soul of the nation.  Here’s that story in just 33 words: A little more than a hundred years ago we went to war in support of an empire to preserve White Australia, yet today we are a multicultural society that supports self-determination where ever that is possible in the world. Those 33 words should set us dancing, rejoicing, even boasting! As a nation we have every reason to proud. And yet the race riot on Cronulla Beach in 2005 ( 1 ) sent a shudder down the spines of anyone who saw what was really happening and realised what was coming.  Nationalism as an issue of race is not a thing of the past. T...