The West: lawn and water

14/4/2007

I’m confused. But I’m certain.

That’s the way it is with me, I am able to live with contradictions no matter how loud they scream.

Here’s where I’m at: My current confusion centres on research into Yarragadee, because one lot says this and another lot says something else.

Clearly one lot is on one side and the other lot is on the other side. That’s makes two sides and I’m sure there/s another I have missed.

Of one thing I am certain: we need water to survive. And another: we don’t need this much lawn.

Ok, lawn is nice, it’s green, you can roll on it, run on it, drop a glass of red wine on it without breaking the glass and when the dog does his thing you can find it quickly and remove it.

But lawn is not necessary for the maintenance of life as we know it, unless you are a species that eats grass, like sheep, cows, kangaroos, ducks, or a nasty little thing called lawn armyworm.

So, unless those of you with lawn are prepared to put cattle, sheep and ducks on your grass and flog them off to neighbours when they are plump and ripe, then lawn is a luxury.

Not only does lawn cost water to keep, add to that the cost of the fertilizer, both as lawn feed and long-term pollutant, the armyworm killer-spray and the greenhouse gasses required to cut and groom the patch, then we are talking considerable savings for the household budget, the planet and a drop in income for local nursery and fresh meat retailers.

Right here, in keeping with the proposed new lobby laws, I must declare an interest, or rather, lack of interest, in lawn.

I hate lawn.

In Bridgetown, when I was a mere morsel, my family and other animals lived in an average sized house surround by an acre of lawn, plus a tennis court.

Tennis was big in those days and I was often trounced on that court by my father, all my brothers and even the sister I never had. The only person the in the vicinity I could beat was mum and only because she fudged the scores.

My family were orchardists, retailers and lawnmowers. Every weekend we worked in the shop, the orchard, or on the lawn. My memories of orchard are fine and without blemish, as are recollections of the shop, but my psyche was deeply scared by lawn.

As an adult I vowed that when I found the courage to form my own family unit there would be no lawn, none, not even a suggestion.

My first house had lawn front and back. We ripped out the front and let the back die.

This house I live in now, up high in the hills, once had a hint of lawn but we hid it quickly under an extension and now it is dead from lack of sunlight, fertilizer and water.

Water, good old H₂O, I love the stuff, can’t get enough of it. I drink it, wash in it, cook with it, I even swim in it.

But it never leaves my taps and touches lawn.

There is no doubting the water guzzling qualities of lawn and what have we done in the north of the city, right under the Gnangara water mound? Why, plant lawn of course. And what’s the new plan? Remove water guzzling pine trees and sell the land off to more lawn-growers?

Which brings me back to the Yarragadee and here again I must declare an interest.

This massive pool of pristine liquid-gold sits under my country, the Lower South West, inhabited for centuries by Noongars, for 160 years by Dousts and still farmed by my youngest brother and his wife on land drying up and without a trickle from the famed Hester Brook.

Those of us who have lived in and loved the big timber country can see its pain, its wilting limbs and its drying leaves.

The scientific research might confuse me, but I can hear my heart, soul and grandfather, the legendary bushman Roy Doust, whisper words of wisdom, don’t tap it, let it be.

The West, Saturday: Dullsville

7/4/2007

This is not a good idea, but I’m going to do it anyway, apologise, to the people of Perth.

In many ways, although I have lived in this city for over 20 years, I have never really been at one with it, its lifestyle, its vibe, its inner core. The boy from Bridgetown has always kept his distance, his separateness and has remained an amused observer.

This, hopefully, will allow you to forgive my seeming indiscretion.

When the big news broke, when it became a major news item for eastern states newspapers and national TV stations, I was one of the first quoted.

From memory, unreliable as it is, I seem to recall I was quoted on the front page of this very newspaper.

I certainly remember appearing on a daily TV breakfast show hosted by Steve Lieberman, or a man who was sitting in his chair.

In fact, it was not Steve who interviewed me but rather his offsider, a woman who’s name is no longer with me and who is no longer with the daily TV show or with any show I watch.

What occurred, of course, in typical media fashion, was that my comments were taken out of context.

Not only was the context re-contextualised, but what I said was also isolated from what I did not say and left unsaid.

Ok, I did say Perth was dull and that the bon mot, Dullsville, was well deserved, but nowhere was it pointed out that I continued to live in the place.

Many of you, especially those of you involved in the communication arts, know that what is unsaid often carries the most important message.

What I implied by offering comments from Perth, about Perth, was that although I would admit to a strong dullsville strain in Digger and Dealer City, it was only superficial, that the shallow dullness above, hid a deep, seething, vibrant underbelly beneath.

And in one particular bit of the under-belly, I and my friends lived a culturally rich and eventful life.

I could have added, as does Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, James Dean and Al Pacino.

Or, if this is your first time in this column, Brian Burke, Julian Grill, Ben Cousins and Daniel Kerr.

Oh yes, these past few months have certainly made a few of those Easterners sit up and read their papers.

Not all that long ago, their columnists and street-mockers took great delight in having fun at our perceived parochialism and, indeed, many of them refused to visit, claiming that the five-hour flight was the most exciting part of the journey and there was no point in it because all you had to look forward to at the and was the return and they had no interest in going over old ground.

Perhaps that’s why so many of them are still with us now, not used to the distances, they can’t face the long trek back.

But back to the underbelly that hangs beneath this great state of ours. And I’m not talking Yarragadee.

Let’s face it, it’s put us on the map, it’s a mark of our maturity, of our continued rise up the ladder of high-profile cities.

Who wants to visit a town where the major attractions are a couple of bells stuck up a tower, a mob of kangaroos just down the road from the CBD, lovely white sandy beaches with no surf, or an adolescent clogged island with nowhere to sleep.

What we have always needed is human drama, scandal, on a scale to match Profumo and Keeler, Stalin and Trotsky, Kennedy and Monroe, Starksy and Hutch.

And now we have it: Sydney (Brian Burke) Greenstreet versus Humphrey (Alan Carpenter) Bogart, James (Ben Cousins) Dean up against Clint (John Worsfold) Eastwood and Rupert (Hancock) Murdoch up against Conrad (Wright) Black.

Such reckless, self-indulgence by our high profile citizens can only enhance our image in the east, full as it is of your educated and sophisticated modern tourists, who shun base natural beauty and seek the glamour of cultural contrivance, deceit and good old sex, drugs and money.

This week I will attempt to right the injustice of my earlier “dullsville” comments. I will be contacting Steve Leiberman and, as soon as I remember its name and channel, the producers of the breakfast TV show.

I will claim I was disoriented at the time, heavily medicated following a number of losses on the property market, suffering from mild heavy-metal poisoning, and depressed following my break-up with Megan Gale.

The West, Saturday: a bad week

31/3/2007

I am writing this on the third day of a bad week, well not quite a week, but if it goes on much longer I can call it a week.

Bad weeks start innocently enough for most people, usually, I guess, on a Monday.

The Monday-thing is not normally a thing for me, given the way I work, well not really work, sort of follow my hobbies and wonder where the money comes from.

It all started when I woke up, not unusual in itself, because I often do that, but never before have I woken with my right leg twisted at such an angle. My left, sure, but my left has a life of its own and normally the right stays swell clear.

At first it seemed fine and I lay there marvelling at its flexibility, but when the pain hit I marvelled at its inflexibility.

Those of you who suffer regular pain, like my life’s partner, Hildegard, she of the terminal back-thing, well know that pain can cause grumpiness, irritability, irascibility but rarely, at least in our case, infidelity.

Normally when I wake I get up, it seems to help me get things done, so I did, but forgot to do my neck bends. A day without neck bends is bad enough, because it sets me up for neck-stabs which lead to neck stiffness, which leads to instability.

That was two false starts, so I gave up on the normal round of floor and standing exercises, deciding breakfast was the way to go. Go it did, all over the kitchen table and some made its way to the floor.

I’m ok with eating recently prepared debris and sucking up soy-milk off a table, but our floor hadn’t been ironed in a while and I couldn’t sort out the breakfast debris from the other debris.

Sorry, not ironed, we don’t iron our kitchen floor, slate is not a thing you iron, what I meant was swept. Well there was that one time, a long time ago, but I was heavily medicated and my father-in-law was visiting.

I’m not sure about you, but after I have eaten early in the morning this seems to lead to the other thing that is a logical consequence of eating. I don’t think I need to go into detail here but if you require it, please consult your local doctor.

Nothing untoward happened in the small room, but on leaving it, I forgot to flush it, not the room, you don’t flush rooms, well not in our house, but the water-thing that sits above the place that holds the debris.

Not a pretty thing for the nose when you happen upon such debris later in the day. After opening the small-room door you usually stumble backward and hit your head on the shelving above the washing machine, which is exactly what happened.

After all this, a person really needs their computer system to collapse, just to remind them how important it has become in their lives and how incompetent and insignificant they will feel when it has been removed by the technicians who shake their heads as they carry it down the driveway without a definite promise of a return date. Which is exactly what happened.

Over the years, due to an inability to cope with bad days in the manner taught me by a Zen Master, I have sore feet, as a result of kicking things that don’t kick back and generally stay where they are, like brick walls and granite outcrops.

When I arrived at the podiatrist for my appointment she said: “Well, you have the right month, and year, but it’s next week.” Her reception desk was made of a flimsy material and I decided against kicking it.

I tried to drive home but the car wouldn’t start.

I called home but Hildegard was busy ironing the patio.

My son, Hansl, said he would come and pick me up as soon as he remembered where I lived.

It was then I realised how important getting out of bed is, because if you get out wrong and the feeling lingers the wrongness will infiltrate the entire day, polluting it with its venom and nastiness and by the end, even though six things went right, you will not have noticed them, or their cousins, the almost right and, as far as you will be concerned, the world is the work of the devil and you are the only one who can see him.

Thanks for that. I feel better now. Not quite a week, just the three days. Good luck with your week

The West, Saturday: toothpicks

24/3/2007

In most restaurants you will find a small container of toothpicks sitting on the counter and while waiting for your bank to say, yes, you can rip money from this person’s credit-card, you can dig into your gums with a piece of wood.

Nice.

Wasn’t always like that.

When I say restaurants, there must be a range at the top-end where toothpicks are frowned upon, maybe banned, where picking could lead to ejection, but I don’t go there.

The toothpick is an essential tool among my eating apparatus.

I have no idea how it started, the thing with toothpicks, but more than likely it was dad’s idea.

Dad loved nothing more than to consume a side of pig, with healthy portions of potato, beans, liberally splashed with apple sauce, followed by a family block of fruit and nut chocolate, then poke a stick in the mouth for the hidden portions.

He had plenty of spaces to store the uneaten bits and the probing could take up to an hour.

Mum didn’t appreciate it, not the probing itself, but the way he probed. Her style was more your dangling hand-in-front with soft finger thrusts accompanied by downcast eyes.

Dad had no shame: he had a lump of wood in his hand, there was food in there, he was going in after it.

Given there were four boys in the family, not surprisingly we all took after the manly dig and these days, after a good solid meal together, people sitting on either side shift their chairs to make way for the raised elbows.

It should be noted, by the way, that the toothpick has been around since BB, before-before.

According to Wikipedia, my choice for all important information, it is probably the oldest instrument for dental cleaning.

Not surprising.

You’re living in 567BB, you’ve just eaten a woolly mammoth and some of the wool is stuck between your back molars.

What do you do? It’s obvious. You grab one of the tusks, whip out your Swiss Army knife and whittle it down to a manageable size.

There is much to like about a good pocket knife, but the Swiss knew from the start that any knife worth its cut should contain a toothpick.

Not my favourite, the plastic pick, but handy in an emergency if there is no available wood, or all the old well-used picks left in the back pocket have broken or frayed too close to the end.

When it comes to favourites, I don’t mind the standard pine, but I am partial to sandalwood, marri, wattle, wild grass is always handy, but wandoo is a bit too tough.

Yes, I know, you’re still thinking about the bloke in 567BB with the ivory pick.

If you took the time to peruse the Wiki, or even add your personal knowledge to its massive database, you would know that the humble toothpick was not always made of wood.

Picks of bronze and silver have been found, sometimes buried with their dead owners, which suggests the pick may have been a symbol of prestige.

A long time after BB, BC and well into AD, toothpicks were sometimes manufactured as luxury items, well crafted, styled, enamelled and encrusted with precious stones.

It certainly opened my eyes and, as a consequence, I have changed my burial instructions to read: To be buried in the Bridgetown cemetery, facing north for winter warmth, along with various personal items, including his favourite toothpick, the one he whittled out of Japanese bamboo.

Some dentists, I know, frown on the toothpick, but only those who don’t realise the work it brings in.

I mean, if you dig around inside your mouth for 45 years with a piece of wood then you are sure to wear great gaping gaps between teeth, gaps any self-respecting dentist would love to plug. And invoice for.

As for me, even though I floss and use the very modern electronic round-brush technique, there’s still nothing I love more than a damn good dig with a lump of pine accompanied by the tongue and cheek double act.

As for those restaurants that don’t supply picks, no concern to me, because, like dad, I never leave the house without one.

A letter to the West Australian Premier and the Minister for the Environment

Dear Alan and David,

As you well know, I am a Bridgetown boy.

What might not be so clear is that I am a somewhat radical boy from a very conservative family.

My brothers are upset.

They don’t get upset very often.

My sister-in-law was recently on the front page of that wonderful publication, The West.

She hated being there.

But she had to, because Hester Brook is a vital water source for their farm.

Now her husband, my brother, Jamie, has penned his first ever letter to the press.

It frightened me.

Please read it.

It’s important.

And then, please, take courage, and do the right thing.

The right thing, not the politically expedient thing, the best thing for the future of lawn, but the right thing by the forests, the rivers, and the dairy, fruit and vegetable bowl, that are and is the Lower South West.

Thanks.

Best

Jon Doust

My brother writes:

Our property was recently featured on the front page of the West Australian.
The article was about the Hester Brook which had stopped flowing. We grew up in Bridgetown and have lived on this property for 17 years. To our knowledge, Hester Brook has always been a permanent water course. We are well aware of how precious a resource water is and for years now have imposed our own very tight water restrictions, including buckets in the kitchen and laundry sinks and also the grey water, pumped from the washing machine, goes out for the garden. As with most rural properties, we do not have water piped to our property and must use the available water very wisely. We do rely on the water though for the stock, up to 100 head of cattle that we run on the property. Apart from two small dams, Hester Brook is the only source of water for these animals. It was to our dismay that we read the headlines in the West Australian today stating that the Government is going ahead with pumping water from Yarragadee so that the city would not have to have sprinkler bans. The “Suck it and See” approach that has been proposed, at a cost of $650 million, is flawed, especially when one looks at how the Gnangara mound has been managed. The water situation in the South West is already critical and lowering the water table further by the pumping of Yarragadee each year will have far reaching effects throughout the region, social, environmental economical.

Sue and Jamie Doust

PO Box 147

Bridgetown WA 6255

97 611985

17 March 2007

The West, Saturday: the beard

17/3/2007

I recently grew a beard. It wasn’t the first time.

The first beard I grew appeared in 1972, the year I left the family’s south west retailing business to pursue a career as an aimless hippy.

That was a successful beard and kept me well hidden from those who knew me as a clean shaven, clean cut, ex-private school boy from Bridgetown.

It lasted 20 years. It was a handsome, ginger-fired, manly, extravaganza of hair.

Once I’d done with the hippy thing and found myself aimless on a university campus, the beard became a symbol of redness, of revolution, of alternateness, of intellectual intensity.

I did my best to live up to it.

This latest crop of face-hair, however, suggested none of the above and was an entirely unsuccessful growth.

It itched, it annoyed, it hid me from people I wanted to greet without having to explain that, yes, I was indeed Jon Doust, not some weird, goog-eyed perve who confronted people in the street with strange tales laced with personal knowledge and who frightened small children.

Ok, I can hear the question: Why was a bloke at your age letting his face go anyway?

Thing is, I’m not in the middle of a middle-aged crisis. There are no signs: no motor bike, no running off with a younger woman, younger man, canoeing trips down the Amazon, or late nights on ABC2 watching footy finals from the 1960s with a bag of twisties.

No middle crisis for me, no need, my entire life has been a crisis.

What happened was, my wife left me.

Not forever, but for a long time.

Not because she didn’t love me anymore, because she does, she can’t help herself, but because whenever I have married I have always married outsiders, foreigners, people from other countries, and, when there is a family crisis in their homeland, they have to go home. And rightly so.

I have always considered it important to marry people from out of town. Many people do, but, for the most part, they go to Manjimup, Donnybrook, Gosnells, or even Hyden.

Let us pause for a paragraph or two and allow me to tell you that my wife is now an Australian.

It took a long time, almost 30 years, but she made it, and made it with an obvious keenness.

What was it that changed her? A change, I might add, that forced a realisation: I am now more like these people I live with than those people I used to live with.

It was Roy Slaven and HG Nelson.

Yes, remarkable, isn’t it?

Hildegard watched Roy and HG during both the Sydney and Athens Olympics, laughed herself stupid, visited her grumpy homeland, and thought: Bugger, I’m an Aussie.

That was all it took, just two looks.

She realised then and there that there was something wonderful about an Aussie sense of humour, a real one, the one she now shared with my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, siblings and our Noongar mates.

It’s the one that helps you laugh in the face of all odds, of the thing that’s intimidating you, working against you: the drought, the budget, the idiots on the roads, the system, the lack of hot water, milk for the coffee and the inadequate public transport system.

All right, back to the beard.

When she left me, I decided I was not going to shave until she returned.

But Hildegard, a large and powerfully built woman, would not even allow me that pleasure. She issued instructions, through her solicitor, that I was to remove the offending hair well in advance of her return, or there would be no return.

Sorry, I was thinking of someone else.

But Hildegard, a slender, elegant and attractive woman, who looks ten years younger than her actual age, said that although she respected the symbol of her absence as a manifestation of my continuing affections, she would prefer I had it removed before her return.

Either that or go look for another foreigner.

Saturday's West Australian: Sydney Greenstreet

10/3/2007

Before I start, I must make it quite clear, Sydney Greenstreet had nothing to do with the writing of this column.

He did not dictate it over the phone, in person, or slap me on the side of the head with it. He did not email it, send it around by courier, or arrange for it to be delivered by Peter Lorre.

Because of current controversies surrounding various issues, recipes and table settings, it is also important that I reveal all previous meetings, meals and toilet breaks I have had with both Greenstreet and Lorre.

Let me start with Greenstreet: I have never had relations with that man.

From time to time there have been vicious and uncalled for rumours regarded the disparity in our respective sizes: I am a weaselly man; Greenstreet is a fat man.

This has not affected our relationship in any way. We don’t have one.

I have never met him, heard of him, know what he does for a living and I most certainly did not buy a used car from him or anyone associated with him.

I don’t go to parties with him. I don’t know what he looks like close up, or from a decent distance, say five metres, or why he wears that stupid hat when he is inside a house, building, or place of investigation.

All right, there was that one time, when I thought I was going to a pyjama party at Humphrey Bogart’s.

When Humphrey rang he said all the “gang” would be there, but I thought he meant Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Gobinson George Raft, Ingrid Bergman and Jason Akermanis.

I assumed we would be discussing up-coming projects, including a remake of The Big Sleep. It was to be called The Big Wake Up.

We all make mistakes. I made a mistake which, in hindsight, I probably would have made anyway, but I would have made it in the knowledge that I was making it, rather than the other way around.

All right, okay, then there was the fund-raising for my election campaign. As it happened, my nomination was withdrawn at the last minute due to something to do with my nationality, which I am sure will be cleared up when the papers are found, or my parents turn up.

As for the money, I understand it was absorbed by various bank accounts related to the organising body, or donated to a double-bass player with curly hair.

And now I think I should deal with Peter Lorre.

To be honest, it is very difficult to know if you are talking to him. I once spent 45 minutes on the phone before I realised it was him. His soft, sneaky tones make him hard to discern and hanging up didn’t help because when I went into the next room there he was on the carpet.

Six months and $4076 later, we thought we had him removed but the very next day my youngest discovered a small stain at the back of the house near the old septic tank.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to my neighbours, the people over the road, those who live down our side of the street, a couple of those on the other side towards the north east, not the others, on the south west, because of their failure to stand up and be counted over the curbing issue, which I won’t go into here.

I think that’s all.

As far as I can recall.

Now, let’s return to Sydney.

In fact, we tried returning to Sydney, to get away from Sydney, but it made no difference. The man has tentacles.

He said he had something that sounded somewhat similar and anyone who wasn’t with him didn’t have them.

Sorry. Just a second. The phone.

“Hello. Yes. Oh, Sydney. No, I didn’t know you still had a phone. What? No, mate, no, maaaaate, yeah, sure. What? The column? I’m writing it now. You serious? Editor? Of the whole paper? You could? Mate, Sydney, of course I can. We go back, mate. No, it didn’t come from you. Bye.”

Look, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start this again.

Before I start, I would like to make it quite clear, Sydney Greenstreet is an honourable man, an old family friend, a man I have looked up to ever since I have known him as a taller man than me and I think what is happening to him is a travesty.

This time it’s personal!

The West Australian, Thursday, February 22, 2007

The West: Peter Foster

3/3/2007

It is important that I get this off my chest, my relationship with Peter Foster, you know, the bloke who is awaiting trial on trumped-up charges in Queensland and recently escaped from the KGB in Columbia, or a country with a similar shape.

When I first saw him, form a distance, he certainly seemed accident prone, financially prone, people prone, mainly prone.

Later, I thought he was a good bloke with a funny looking head full of hilarity and some other stuff I couldn’t get a handle on, or there wasn’t a handle, I wasn’t sure which.

It was my father who brought us together. He was a butcher, well, he said he was a butcher, but he wasn’t, he was a small-arms dealer plying the volatile islands between a whole lot of other islands in the South Pacific.

At least, that’s what he said.

If he was alive today, he’d be so close to dead he might as well stay where he is, but if he was, I’d ask: “What did you really do, when you went away for months at a time?”

Mum used to say: “He’s on business for your Uncle Ted.”

Years later, when I told her about dad running guns, she denied it: “No, he meant gum, he was a gum-runner, a travelling salesman for Wrigley’s.”

When I was 12 he left for good and we never saw him again. Over the years I saw a lot of men around his age who looked like him, talked like him and I asked each and every one of them: “Are you my father?”

Not one replied in the affirmative, some of them ran, three cuffed me on the back of the head, two said, as far as they could remember, they were skiing in the Alps at the time and one swore it wasn’t him but he knew someone who looked just like a man who could be my father..

This is where Peter Foster comes in.

Recently, in another attempt to find the man behind the father I never knew, I sought out Foster, who was well known in Fiji as a medium sized, plump, flatulent man who had a habit of bringing people together, then turning them against each other.

I liked him because he spoke English with an Australian accent and ate peanut butter and jam sandwiches with a slice of banana on top.

Peter said he was a research officer for the British Secret Service Agency MI5, the RSPCA, or BHP, or he sold cheap jewellery to rich American tourists with big stomachs, skinny ankles and swollen necks. It was hard to tell.

He was exciting to be around because every day was a new day. He said he knew this for a fact because he made a point of watching the sun go down, then come up again.

I paid Foster hundreds to help me find my father. And then I paid him thousands.

Everything went well until he claimed he had uncovered a plot by the President of the United States to net all fish in the Pacific Ocean and transport them to Florida, where they would be trained to invade Cuba.

It ran in all the papers and then it ran us out of town.

Everyone was after us, the Americans, the Fijians, the vegetarians and we had to swim from Fiji to Vanuatu, which we did, with considerable help from a passing steamer.

The captain of the streamer was a man who looked a lot like a lot of men I had spoken to over the years, or someone who looked like them and as I dived overboard for the last 200metres, I could have sworn he said: “Your real father is the new Secretary General of the United Nations.”

When we arrived on shore, I asked Foster if he had ever worked for the United Nations. He said: “Of course I have. I was once a roving ambassador for UNESCO, with special responsibilities for nubility, proximity and gold bullion.”

Despite hundreds of emails, mobile phone calls and letters to MI5, I never heard from Peter Foster again.

Until this week. He rang and asked if I would get my father to arrange diplomatic immunity for him.

I said: “Don’t be silly. My father’s a butcher in Dalwallinu.”

The West: sport, more sport

24/2/2007

It’s that time of year again, when the big sports merge into one great paroxysm of sport and more sport.

It’s disgusting, the amount of sport on free-to-air television and from all seasons.

The only way to discover what season you’re in is to go outside and see for yourself.

Trouble is, I do love a good sport and not just the big two, cricket and Aussie Rules.

No, it gets worse.

I love all-gender swimming, running, jumping, hockey, rugby union, table tennis, lacrosse, surfing, handball, netball, basketball, volleyball and if they are on the telly then I have to watch a little just to see how good the game is and if it is in a state of intense competition with all players fit and firing then I can’t get to bed until 3am or even later if it is the World Cup.

Yes, the World Cup added soccer to my list and I couldn’t get into a delightfully made bed in a small motel in Dunedin, New Zealand, because of the Socceroos game against Italy.

A lot of people look at me, which is fine, it’s when they raise their hands that they worry me.

And when they look, those who know me, or think they know me, or know someone who looks like me, they sometimes say: “What is this with you and sport? You are a cultured man, with fine artistic sensibilities, yet you seem to have a perverse fascination with the brutal arts.”

Oh, I forgot to mention boxing.

This is the big one. This is the one that really gets folk fired up: “You love boxing? Are you mad?”

Some don’t wait for the answer, assuming they know it already and as they leave the room I don’t call them back because there’s not much I can say in my defence.

I have no defence.

And we all know, those of use who watch boxing, that defence is crucial.

But this is not a column about boxing, that’s another column, because I have a defence, of sorts, not really a defence, more an analysis of a psychologically disturbed aging baby boomer whose parents gave him boxing gloves one Christmas and watched in admiration as he beat the living daylights out of anything that moved.

Now, let me say, please, that I do not think that a love of sport in any way negates a love of art and culture.

Think Ernst Hemingway.

Ok, forget Ernest, what about Damon Runyon, Mick Jagger, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Elton John, or Gideon Haigh?

Don’t recognise any of them?

How about Reg Cribb? Now there’s a cultured man, writer of plays, films and small scraps of paper.

Last Train to Freo was a work of Mr Cribb’s and he has been called a “chronicler of our times”, which means he has observed stuff most of us walk past with our heads facing north while shoving icecream in our faces.

Mr Cribb loves football.

He and I have stood together in the front bar of a dilapidated pub engaging in a conversation about some long-dead Greek philosopher while marvelling at the ability of Chris Judd to slip through a marauding pack of behemoths.

Given the propensity of humans to batter the hell out of each other over anything from an imaginary line in the sand, to a few barrels of oil, an insult, or even who has the largest collection of weapons of mass destruction, then thank the gods for sport.

At the very least, while we are engaged in sport we are not beating the hell out of reach other, unless, of course, that is allowed under the rules of the particular sport, or your team loses

Which brings me back to my dilemma, which particular sport?

I’ve got to get out more, get away, turn off the telly, leave the building, use my legs, a car, a bike, anything that will take me away from the torment, the inability to decide which one to watch.

I’ve got to have some down-time, some time to smell the roses, prune the roses, or remove the roses because they drink too much water.

Either that or play a sport.

The West: love and Katanning

17/2/2007

I was in Katanning last week.

It has nothing to do with this week’s offering. Just thought I’d mention it.

But now I have, I may as well go on a bit, since, it seems, going on a bit has become one of the characteristics of this column.

It is not the place it once was, Katanning, no way, a long way from it.

Well, it’s still on the same town site, with many of the same buildings and thank you, Katanning, for hanging on to those fine structures.

If you want to see a handsome looking town, with a sense of heritage, of the past, of from whence it has come, there are a number of them, but make sure Katanning in on the list.

I can remember back in 32, or 47, or more likely one of those years after the year I was born, walking upright, eating, probably talking, not necessarily making sense, but certainly able to remember what I did yesterday, when Katanning was not the place it is now.

If you said to someone: I was in Katanning last week.

They would respond: Why? Is there someone wrong with you?

Not anymore.

It has, they say, the most culturally diverse community in this vast and handsome state of ours.

Not only that, in the local library is a young dude with enough energy to sell her excess to Western Power, sorry, Synergy, create a separate power grid and supply the entire Great Southern.

Not only that, you can buy a cup of coffee in town to better the one I bought the week before in Rokeby Road.

This week’s column, by the way, is about love.

But I’m not ready yet.

If you do drive down the Great Southern Highway and turn left at the sign for a fine example of the ancient craft of public building, don’t forget to drop into Mungart Boodja, an art gallery displaying the modern art of Noongar painting in the Carrolup style.

Inside you might find a man who could paint the world a vision of itself as it should be.

Ok, I’m ready now.

Love. That’s what this column is about.

Apparently there was a day this week when I should have remembered flowers.

I didn’t. I was busy in Katanning, or thinking about Katanning, or writing about Katanning, or missing Katanning.

This year is the 30^th anniversary of my marriage to Hildegard, which is not, by the way, her real name.

Someone once told me, after I had taken Hildy’s name in vain in a public setting, that loud mouths such as me should leave their partners out of it.

So I do. In a manner.

Hildy knows I talk about her and write about her, but she, also, would rather I referred to her as Hildy.

Anyway, Hildy has been to Katanning. Just the once. A sad story. The marriage nearly ended there and then.

Sorry, I thought I’d moved on from Katanning.

Hildy and I are still in love. Isn’t that amazing, after 30 years of hell?

No, not hell, a long way from hell. We’ve had it good. We’ve been blessed. And Hansl, our son, also not his real name, but correctly spelt, is proof of our successful union.

He is, of course, a genius, a university graduate, high-income earner, tall, handsome, unattended, built like a Katanning farm-house, but does he visit, does he call? Yes, he does.

Hildy and I met in Katan, sorry, in Israel, on a kibbutz, in 1976 and we got married late the next year, in Perth, because the immigration department had her on a list of illegal immigrants.

And just to spite those bureaucratic bastards, we’ve been together ever since.

One of the first towns we visited during what I called our honeymoon, more a trip down south to see an old mate who promised a good weekend with plenty of beer and a side of lamb, was Katanning.

Hildy was bit suspicious, given I was vegetarian and drank spirits, but she was new to Australia and thought it best to go along for the ride.

She hasn’t been since.

Don’t say anything, she doesn’t know yet, but next week I’m taking her back.

I can’t wait to see the look on her face, because now, after all these years, you can feel the love in Katanning.

The West Australian, Saturday, Weekend: climate change

10/2/2007

I don’t know if you’ve caught up with the latest news, but the planet is heating up.

Yes, this one, the one we’re on.

Some of us, I know, occasionally, live on other planets, but even those of us who do have to drop back into this one if we want a glass of water.

A lot of people poo-hoo and I quite enjoy that, because it takes me back to a time when poo-hooing was popular and an art form.

In this case I refer, of course, to a poo-hoo of climate change.

Well, I have only one thing to say to those folk, the poo-hooers: Take a look around you, buddy!

First thing you’ll notice is that there are more people than there were this time yesterday.

They are increasing by the minute and there is no better example than the inability to find a parking space on Rokeby Road outside your favourite shoe shop.

It can get worse.

My partner, Hildegard, said that when she went shopping in Holland recently there were so many people in the street that when she went to blow her nose, someone had beaten her to it.

Hildy was in the Land of Dykes for Christmas and it was the hottest winter on record.

Oh yes, minimums of -2 degrees Celsius and balmy days with maximums around 10 degrees.

It was disgraceful, Dutch folk throwing off their doonas in the middle of winter and walking in the streets.

Not only is global warming destroying climates, it’s causing the disintegration of cultures.

This brings me back to ours.

Everyday, I am reliably informed by a government department, thousands of Victorians and others lost and confused charge into this great state of ours looking for a place to stay, 24-hour shopping and oversized bananas.

It wasn’t enough for them to send us their kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets and tinned jam, now they have to send themselves?

A lot of them arrive in an exhausted state, in an exhausted state.

And I meant to say that twice, because, let’s face it, we are pretty tuckered.

It takes a lot of energy and resources to dig up what we have to dig up and ship it to where we have to ship it in order to keep this great nation off its knees.

And the arrivals are exhausted because of the walk from the border, where they had expected everything to be handed over, including a four-wheel drive with trailer and boat attached.

I don’t know about you but I don’t have a science degree, in fact, I failed chemistry, physics and geology, all on the same day, so don’t go asking me for the scientific facts.

But, I do know stuff.

And so do you.

Here’s a thing you can try tonight when you get home.

First, climb into bed on your own and notice the under-cover temperature. Then ask the rest of the family to join you, or even a few near neighbours.

To warm it up even more, engage in strenuous activities, eat fatty foods to encourage the production of certain gases, run a lawnmower over your carpet and build a small coal-burning power-station.

Yes, you’re right, in no time at all you can dump the doona. Why? Too hot. Now imagine millions of bodies just like your mob, all under a massive doona.

It’s no wonder we’re losing our cool.

If everybody on the planet did nothing, just stood still, or lay down on a quiet patch of soft grass and took shorter breaths, that might help, but it isn’t going to happen, even if the fat lady sings.

We’re not made like that. We’re more like lemmings than lemmings.

And so what is needed is some kind of action and I am calling on everyone to join me tomorrow in a march on climate change.

We’ll meet in St Georges Terrace, march due west up the hill to Kings Park, down Thomas Street, along Stirling Highway, turn right into Eric Street and cluster at North Cottesloe.

By then the planet should be warm enough for a swim followed by a long-black at a beach-side café, if we can find one above sea-level. (Better arrange for someone to drive your car there, so you can get home.)

The West Australian, Saturday, Weekend: holidays & hair

3/2/2007

I love this time of the year: I don’t work, I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, I simply lie about reading and then, every so often, mainly early or late, I get up and walk along Middleton Beach, Albany, until I find a good sized wave.

Then I plunge in the surf like I am a man who is not yet a man, more a boy who wants to be a man.

This is where I am, Albany, for my summer break from everything but the life I really want, which involves all of the above and a few flat whites with any old friend I meet or even complete strangers.

It wasn’t always like this. In order to get here I worked hard, long and hard and before breakfast dad would drag us from bed, whip the flesh off our backs and then, only then, would he kick us in backside until flesh grew back.

All right, dad was a good man and he only made us work until our flesh bled and then he let us play cards.

But that’s not the point. The point is that when a man was much younger this time of the year was full of work, the holiday work, in the bins, down the mine, on the farm, in the shop, on the back of the truck, wherever and whenever in order to make the money you needed to fund the activities your parents would have nothing to do with.

Once I worked in a post office. Well, not in, but out of. My job was to deliver the parcels that arrived from all over the planet, usually badly wrapped and spilling.

I delivered them on an old motor bike that should not have been allowed to use the name. It was a malicious beast and as soon as the relief bike arrived on the back of the manager’s ute it would splutter and start and make me look a liar, a cheat and a student who knew nothing about motor bikes.

Which I was.

I was also once a student who knew nothing about hairdressing, still am, which is why I have never taken a job in a salon, for men or women, or dogs.

My mother, however, is a woman, for which we are eternally grateful.

Sorry, I digress.

My mother is a woman who has always presented herself as knowing everything there is to know about hair.

When I achieved that age when boys are handed a book by their fathers and told to go away, read it and come back with any questions, my father was nowhere to be seen. It was mum with the book and it was called: Hair Today, Success Tomorrow.

As far as mum was concerned, hair made the man, the girl, the person.

“Without groomed hair,” she would say, “you might as well be Wally or Crispin.”

Wally and Crispin, I should explain, were two men invented by Findlay Campbell. Findlay, by the way, was the man who stopped World War II, but I haven’t got time to go into that here, suffice to say that Fin was a story teller and Wal and Crispy were his two down-and-out night-cart men, the blokes who emptied the pans at the back of every house in 1950s Bridgetown.

Apparently they existed and mum said their hair was the work of the devil.

And so was mine. It needed to be trained, subdued, controlled.

And so was my father’s.

Not once did I see my father leave a room without my mother grabbing a comb and digging it into his scalp.

“Don’t you dare leave this room without doing your hair,” she would say.

Dad would stand, dutifully, and allow mum to comb it one way, then another, until she found the perfect set.

Which brings me back to Albany, because while I’m down here, while students state-wide are working jobs to raise funds to buy stuff they don’t need, or want, I never comb my hair, not once, not for anyone.

I get out of bed, hit the beach, surf until my body shakes with the cold, change out of wet into dry, eat something, not much, read a book, nod off, wake up, hit the beach again, never once running anything through my hair, just the wind that takes it when I stick my head out the car window.

I’ve been here two weeks now.

My hair is matted and spiked.

When people ask what I do for a living I say: I’m a hairdresser.

The West Australian, Saturday, Weekend: ironing

27/1/2006

I’m not alone. There are other men like me. Men who love ironing.

We meet, surreptitiously, suspiciously and sometimes out in the open. We talk in quiet, subdued tones, not because we are embarrassed, or afraid of a community backlash, no, because that’s one of the side effects of a man ironing, a kind of peace.

I can’t remember the first time I ironed, it certainly wasn’t at home. My country town home was a place of men, real men, men with guns and axes, men who wore footy shorts to barbecues.

The only person at home who wasn’t a man, was mum, and it was obvious. She shone out like Sharon Stone umpiring a state of origin rugby league game and, boy, could she iron.

Mum seemed born to iron. She ironed everything: sheets, pillow case, underpants, handkerchiefs, table napkins, placemats, socks, towels, wash clothes, hair, carpet, curtains, lawn, skin.

All right, maybe the list is longer than I remember it, but she certainly ironed hair. Dad’s hair. Dad had the curliest hair this side of the Blackwood River and it was a never ending source of embarrassment for Mum.

Mum was a neat person and she believed that when one went out into the world, one should be neat, tidy, well ironed and curly hair was an abomination organised by Our Maker to try us, test us and to see if we could fix it because Mum believed that the Maker himself had the same problem.

Poor old dad would come home for lunch, eat it, then long for a long, flat, lie down before he hit the shop-floor for the afternoon of retail madness. And he could, as long as his hair was straight. If it wasn’t, he was looking at 30 minutes with his head on the ironing board.

As a consequence, all my brothers grew to hate ironing and not one of them has curly hair. Neither do I, in fact, I long for curly hair. No one has done more for curly hair than yours truly.

Someone told me that if you ate bread crusts your hair would curl. I saved bread crusts, roamed the city seeking restaurant tables laden with uneaten bread crusts, stole them, stored them and ate them until my teeth ached.

Not a single hair on my head has ever curled. Some days they look curled, but that is because I love sticking my head out the car window while driving at a reasonable speed from Kalamunda to Scarborough for an early morning swim.

You’ve probably herd of the Extreme Ironers, those mad people who iron naked while skydiving, who take their irons on roof tops, up rock faces, on marathons, deep sea diving and into lifts in busy city buildings.

These people give ironing a bad name and their behaviour defeats the sole purpose of running hot smooth-metal over vulnerable, passive, clothe. The main purpose of the task is to seek the attainment of a kind of peace, a oneness with the flatness, a Zen of ironing.

The other purpose is, of course, a practical exercise related to the look of the garment and it is only through practise that one can begin to explore the mythic beauty of the ebb and flow, the back and forth, the neat corner entry and the often difficult shoulder thrust.

I’m a two handed ironer myself, none of that one hand moving this way and then having to turn back the other, shift the board, or stand the other side, no, not for me, when I’m ironing I use two hands in a seamless flow: first the left along the left sleeve from behind, then the left along the right from front on, then a change of hands and a change of sleeves.

As a boy I loved the harp and the highlight of a Marx Brothers’ movie was not Groucho tossing insults at the toffs, but Harpo playing his sharp.

I’ll never play the harp but when I’m ironing, I’m thinking harp, I’m playing harp, I’m harping.

There’s another meeting tonight, of Men Who Iron. I’m excited. There are only two items on the agenda.

1. Will Kevin Rudd come out and admit to the Australian people that he is one of us?

2. If he doesn’t, should we out him?

The West Australian, Saturday, Weekend: trees & heat

20/1/2006

It’s getting hot. You can feel it. And, as usual, I’ve left the heavy gardening until the last minute.

When I say the last minute, I mean that minute before the local ranger drops by and says: “You got a house under there, or you living up that tree?”

I love trees, always have, right from the very beginning when my father brought me down for the first time.

One thing I hate doing, is bringing them down, but sometimes a man has to do what another man didn’t, or won’t.

I live in the hills around Kalamunda and a man before me planted a lot of wild and outrageous tress that belong on other continents.

Then I turned up and planted a lot of trees that belong on this continent but on the other side and, I don’t know about you, but I am a patriotic Western Half of Australia and anything from the other side is fine with me as long as it stays there, or is visiting.

Trees don’t visit. If they drop by they tend to stay forever and before you know it, they have take over your garden, your suburb, your city, your psyche.

That’s why I blame most of our current problems on the wattle, not our wattle, the Golden Wattle, the one eastern folk refer to as our national emblem.

It’s isn’t, because to be truly national it must belong to all states, all environments. It doesn’t and is symbolic of a typical eastern-centric view of the world.

We have our very own wattles and if I could remember their names I would record them here and now.

I have three of them in my garden. They are tall, handsome and proud, as you would expect from a native Westerner and when they blossom they do so with decorum and aplomb.

Not a plum, aplomb.

A plum is a small fruit which, when dried, is known as a prune. When you get to my age you’ll know all about prunes and their therapeutic value.

The bloke before me planted a prune tree at the back of the house. I say prune because I never saw a plumb. By the time I got to the tree, right after the 28 parrots, all that was left was a dried bit of plum, so I took it out.

Not to the movies or anything like that, far from it, I took it out to the road where another bloke came along with a machine that mulches garden debris and then you throw it all back where it came from.

He calls himself The Mulcher Man and when working he sings “Mulcher Mulcher Mulcher man” to the tune made famous by the Village People, or ABBA, I forget which, but certainly a group of people wearing clothes not normally seen in my street.

Now this brings me to the point, or something that might resemble a point if a point is what you are looking for.

Cutting down trees is a thing that men and women have done ever since they learnt to cook meat and sleep out in the open on a cold night without a blanket.

The trouble is there has been too much of it ever since the Romans built forts and the Dutch made clogs and if we don’t watch ourselves soon there will be no wood to touch.

Touching wood is something we need to do when we are hoping the thing we just mentioned won’t ever happen and the thing that will ensure it will never happen is the touching of wood.

Ok, you still waiting for the point?

The point is, these days, the taking out of the tree is made too easy.

For a start, there is the chain saw.

Then there is the D9 bulldozer.

Not lot of people in my street us a D9, but they do resort to the motorised spinning chain and once fired up it takes about a minute to bring down a standard wattle and, even if it is a weed I planted myself, I think it is deserving of some respect.

As a consequence, whenever I take a tree out or down I use an axe.

An axe makes you work hard, sweat hard and use the rhythm method.

There are only a couple of things that excite more than finding the rhythm of the swinging axe. I’d like to mention them but given this is Saturday morning and the kids are looking over your shoulder, it is probably not the time or place and, besides, I’m getting hot.

The West Australian, Saturday, Weekend: Christmass

13/1/2007
Now that there’s a good distance between me and Christmas I am able to reflect on its past glories. The thing is, it is nothing like it used to be.

In the old days, Christmas for my family was always a fight: a bun fight, sometimes a pudding fight and often a watermelon fight.

In the later years, it has become more a fight for the most comfortable chair in front of the big screen playing the DVD that Uncle Paul brought in from his electrical shop.

The Christmas I miss most of all was the water-fight. It lasted a long time, probably five fun and dangerous years.

Here’s what would happen.

Everyone arrived at my brother’s Bridgetown farm, greeted their cousins, siblings, visiting friends, parents and in-laws, then sat peacefully while the four Doust brothers and their father barbecued a seafood lunch.

This was not the time for fighting, this required a team approach. We didn’t argue, we cooked, each one taking his turn at the hot plate and working up his own, personal recipe.

My favourite was a lavish mix of garlic, chilli, ginger, prawn and home-made tomato sauce.

The wives and mothers, meanwhile, sat back under the old willow tree beside Hester Brook and basked in the glory of their men working together.

You never knew when it would happen, there was no plan, but at some point, without warning, someone would bring out their brand new super-soaker and blast the nearest, but not dearest.

This, inevitably, led to a complete soaking of the immediate area until everyone present was dripping wet and wishing they had stuck to their original plan: Christmas lunch with another family totally unrelated to the Dousts.

None of us can forget Christmas 2000, it was huge, water burst from a vast range of receptacles and was finally topped by the farmer-brother arriving with his fire truck.

He didn’t hold back with the nozzle, aiming indiscriminately, knocking parents from chairs, grandparents from wheelchairs and hurtling one unsuspecting visitor into the Brook, from which he emerged with three marron attached to his thigh.

e He He wasHHHHHe was promptly arrested for out-of –season fishing and, as far as we know, is still serving time in the Pemberton Trout Hatchery on a community service order.

This year also saw the first water-slide, a long sloping stretch of black plastic, bounded by hay bales and ending on the edge of the brook. We lost three visitors that year.

We’re still not sure but we think they picked up too much speed, plummeted into a hay bale, couldn’t find their way out and accidentally became Boxing Day fodder for the cattle on the hill.

We knew it couldn’t last and the final year resulted in serious injury to yours truly and peels of laughter from anyone not feeling the pain.

Here’s how the day started.

I woke into the traditional early morning Bridgetown cold and got stuck into the preparations, putting out chairs, erecting umbrellas, and putting down animals required for human consumption.

All of a sudden, all hell broke loose: teenagers were running amuck with water bombs, adults were toting high powered hoses, the farmer ran for his fire-truck and Stan, our father, was seen filling a balloon with helium and water at the same time.

Responding quickly, I grabbed a bucket and washed an unused youth down a drain.

This seemed to excite my son, the ungrateful lump and he decided he wanted to show his father he was fitter and could run faster and further.

He chased me for seventeen kilometres with a helium filled water bomb and just when I thought I had him beat he started closing in.

It’s probably useful to make it clear to those of you wondering about the combination of water and helium that water is heavier than the gas and the only discernable objective in combining the two seemed to be the fun of accidentally filling your lungs and screaming: “I’m in love with a pineapple.”

When my fruit loving son was within one metre I dropped to my knees.

And that’s when it happened. Instead of falling over me and tumbling head first into the nearest hay bale, as was my plan, he bent both knees and slid, right into my rib cage.

It was all over in seconds because, as any one who has ever parented a teenage man will know, when they stick the knees in, they hurt and at our age, they break, not the knees, but whatever it is they have stuck them in.

On the way home a couple of days later, I stopped off in Donnybrook to visit the local pharmacy.

Loaded up with painkillers and anti-inflammatories, I drove with a steely resolve that next year would be my year and that no-one the southern side of Donnybrook would be ready for the water from the fire-fighting helicopter I had hired.

It didn’t happen. The next Christmas we played volley-ball.

The West Australian, Saturday, Weekend, page 2

6/1/2007
On this day, the first column written by Jon Doust appeared in the This Life section of the Weekend insert in The West.
You can read it in full here and now:

Good morning.

This is the first time I have been in this position.

Normally at this time on a Saturday morning I’m lying flat out in my own house minding my own business, but, suddenly, I’m scattered right around this vast state.

If you don’t believe me, go next door, you’ll find I’m there too. And down the street. And at your mum’s place in Mandurah.

Scary for you, sure, but how do you think it is for me: doesn’t matter where I go, there I am.

It’s not easy, writing a column.

For a start, you have to find all these words, then put them in an order so they make sense, or approach sense, or look like they might make sense if only you had finished high school.

Which I did, but only just and not successfully, because I don’t think an average final score of 24% could be considered a pass.

To be fair, I did notch up 50% for history, my favourite subject, and 45% for English, my next favourite.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking, that’s an average of 47.5, so how come he averaged 24?

Well, when you add 3, 7, and 15 to the 45 and 50, then divide by 5, you get 24.

Not bad, hey?

Who would have thought that a boy who got 7% for maths A and 15% for maths B, would finish up a man who could add all those numbers together and then divide them by the total number of numbers?

My mother did. She believed in me.

Mum always said: “You could do anything you wanted, my darling.”

And I did, but I don’t think that’s what she meant.

It was hard, back then, being a baby boomer in a family dominated by a generation of people with no name.

They had individual names, of course, but no generational name, no name to mark their culture, their attitude, their reason for being.

When I was a boy if your parents’ generation had anything important to say they asked you to leave the room and this, naturally enough, left a gap in our learning.

These days Generation Gap is a hip recycled-clothing shop in Hamilton Hill.

The first lot to get a name were the silent generation, the mob that got born just before the war and spent their childhood in a place so noisy with battle that they couldn’t hear themselves speak and so never got used to the sound of their own voices.

The strange thing is that most of the rabid revolutionaries who led the baby boomers in their mad charges on parliament houses, multi-national corporations and cheese cloth retail outlets, were silent generation folk.

And most of the musicians singing songs of protest, yes, you guessed it, silent gens.

My guess is, my mob, the baby boomers, excited them with our openness, our enthusiasm and our loose fitting cheese cloth and they could see we were just kids ripe for strong leadership.

They stepped in. We followed.

Eventually most of them took sensible jobs in marketing, real estate, stock brokering and cheese cloth manufacturing and we followed, again.

It all came to a head in the 1980s, when most of us moved to Denmark, which was then just a hamlet.

These days, of course, Denmark is a thriving metropolis full of four-wheel drives, vignerons and hemp cloth manufacturers and if you drive down there this morning you’ll find me there too.

Before you get carried away, I should point out that I don’t actually deliver this massive lump to your front door, no, that’s Tom, he has a license to operate the crane.

And when I say front door, I use that in the metaphoric sense, because one folk’s front door is another person’s back step.

But let none of us, this fresh January morning of a new year, see this new column as anything remotely resembling a back step.

Let us see it rather as a door opening into a bold new world, heralding a new era for this great State of Western Australia, an era when all generations will be named, appropriately and in keeping with their time, place and group culture.

Apart from that, just know one thing, this is my column and I’m here to stay. Baby boomers don’t give up easily.

Community!

The great thing about being a rapidly aging Baby Boomer is that according to the statistics I am loaded with more money than I know what to do with and I intend spending it all before I die, leaving absolutely nothing for the next generation.
Each morning I wake up I turn on my computer, logon to my bank, and eagerly peruse my account details looking to see if the money has turned up.
It hasn't.
It won't.
And the reason is, of course, that statistics are averages and averages are distorted by extremes.
This brings me to my life, which has had both, extremes and averages.
It all began way back in the late 1940s when Stan and Betty Doust of Bridgetown (Western Australia) decided to get married and produce children.
The first one arrived as the Second World War ended and the next, me, arrived in the same year as the birth of the state of Israel, 1948.
Who would have thought that the feisty, wiry little freckle would find himself in Israel, get married, divorced, and marry again, all to partners he met in that tiny state?
Certainly not his parents, who were both shocked and horrified at the turn of events.
They were hoping their second son would join a bank, learn as much as he could about the world of finance, then go home and help build the family retail empire.
Well, he did, but not quite like that.
He failed school, joined a bank, got the sack, arrived home very tired and emotional, made a good go of it, then left to grow long hair, a beard, and to follow a trail that crisscrossed the globe and involved speaking very slowly, giggling at random and dreaming of an impossible world.
And then, in an exhausted state, he arrived in Israel to experience the truth of socialism in a kibbutz setting, to work in the fields, to love and be loved and to find his soul.
For those of you not as old as those of us who are, a kibbutz was once a communal farm where people worked according to their abilities and took from the collective according to their requirements.
These days it still has a collective heart, but each community, from the outside, looks just like any other capitalist unit fighting for survival in a global economy.
This, surprisingly, brings me back to my local community, Kalamunda (in the humps, or hills, just east of Perth, West Australia) for if I learnt one thing during my three years on a kibbutz, it was that it had much in common with community life in Australia.
Healthy communities thrive on volunteer labour and their unhealthy cousins decline for the lack of it.
Without the enthusiasts who inhabit our shire, who regularly give according to their abilities, for no financial reward, there would be no Kalamunda Community Matters, no Zig Zag Festival and no Meals on Wheels.
And where would we be then?
Vive la communaute!

(The above was printed in a Kalamunda newspaper - Kalamunda Community Matters - a newspaper written and produced by young folk, folk much younger than the writer of this blog. They asked him to write something because they felt sorry for him as he sat alone on a park bench reminiscing about a life that wasn't his.)

Global warming? Not sure what to do?

The Stern Review, the report commissioned by the British, Blair, Labor Government, has forecast "global suffering greater than two world wars and one depression if nothing is done to cut emissions". [Weekend Inquirer, The Weekend Australian, November 4-5, 2006]
Unbelievable, that that the greatest threat to the planet is not war, but peace and prosperity!
The more peace we have, the more we produce; the longer the peace, the more we want; the more we want, the more we consume; the more we consume, the greater, the faster the madder the lemming-like spiralling growth; and the more we grow, the more we, well, you get the picture and so on and on until it all ends.

Ok, what to do: A Mind Map to remind us
The above mind map was created by Jane Genovese and her mother, Sharon.
Jane is a student and professional speaker.
And she lives what she speaks.
You can check out the map in all its glory, and other maps by the dedicated mappers, by heading for Jane' s website:
http://www.learningfundamentals.com.au/
And clicking on "resources".
For a full reading of the Stern Review, go ahead:
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm

Getting up!

I don't know about you, but I get fired up about stuff.
Being a fifth generation Australian, with a strong connection to place, and an acute awareness of how much damage the DDT, dieldrin and other noxious crap we spilt around our home has impacted on the environment, I now feel the urge to correct and recover.
It's a tough assignment, but everyone has to do their best if we are to leave this place in a fit condition for the next gens and the poor creatures trying to eke a living in the fast declining bushland.
There's much to be done.
Some of it's personal.
Some of it's spiritual.
Some of it's political.
Some of it's communal.
The first two are very personal.
The second two are public.
If the third is of interest but you don't want to march in the street, then a petition might be the way to go.
Get Up, Action for Australia is a body I have some respect for.
Check it out.
There's a link on the right.
(I have marched in the street but find it disconcerting. All the yelling and the sloganeering unnerves me. Unless there are drums. If the march can be danced, I'm in.)
Have a look.
Take the time.
We all need all the help we can get.

Start laughing things are getting serious

Bugger!
Some days I wake up and I wonder where I've been, not because I have a heavy hangover, or I got so doped up the night before I have no idea who I am or the other details of my immediate life.
No, it's because I am an old baby booming bastard who came through the sixties and revolted and smoked dope and dreamt of changing the world and did my best to scream and rant at the established and controlling order and in some small way I believed that I had, along with Danny the Red, Richard Neville, Germane Greer, Carole King, Richard Pryor and who knows who else.
But it seems I haven't.
We all failed.
Ok, a few lucky women in the Western World have a better rate of pay.
And in some areas they get respect.
But....
A lot of men got confused and remain so and can't imagine what it is they are supposed to be doing in a world which now seems run by women on better rates of pay then their mothers.
It's crap, of course.
But it's not the only place of confusion.
What about North Korea?
And India?
And Pakistan?
And Israel?
All members of the club with the ability to blow the shit and all other bodily fluids out of the entire planet.
What's the point of that?
Why do we need the ability more than once?
And why is it that the most powerful nation the fully rounded planet has ever seen seems to think that it is the only one with the right to destroy us all and why is it that it continues to drive around in four-wheel drives past electronic signage pointing the way to vacuous, soulless, nothingness while so many of the rest of us can't find a decent glass of water, or a handful of fresh fruit?
So what about global warming?
What's the point of that?
Ok, it all looks pretty miserable.
Tell you what, if you didn't have a sense of humour, bugger, where would you be?

What a bloody waste!

Can you believe what we waste in the West?
And when I say West, I mean the entire western world, as well as the entire West of this vast continent we call Australia.
Rampant consumerism brings with it random debris. Enough to sink continents.
I'm a walker and when I go walking, on a beach, along a road, I spend an amount of time picking up rubbish left by others who went that way before me.
It's happened in Israel, in New Zealand, in Holland, in England, in, yes, even, in Switzerland.
The picture on the left is Anzac Cove, Turkey, the scene for a disgraceful dumping by Aussies in 2005 while there to celebrate a glorious defeat. This year those gathered were much better behaved, but I'll bet many of them managed to dump stuff elsewhere.
In Western Australia recently a major recycling plant closed down. Why? Because it was making money? No, economic rationalism.
And already this western third of Australia is a slack third when it comes to recycling, but a champion third when it comes to dumping.
It's not just that we're different to the other two thirds, or that we think we're Texan, we just don't think enough about the consequences of our obsessive consumerism, coupled with our rampant economic growth, it's debris and our responsibility to the folk we're leaving it all to.
My view is that if taxpayers, individually or collectively, are not prepared to take responsibility for their rubbish, then the government must, which means taxpayers will.
Either way, it's gotta be done.
I once stood for election to the Australian Federal Parliament on a deep sewerage platform: the dismantling of it.
Voters laughed at me and rightly so, I was a bloody idiot, but like all fools I had a point: society's problems multiplied when people were relieved of responsibility for their own shit!

Global Caring

It's time, I think, to take full responsibility.
If we don't, Kilimanjaro will melt, Iceland will melt, oceans will heat up (doing away with whatever whales Iceland and Japan have left behind in their madness), the Maldives will sink and Manjimup, West Australia, will be too warm to grow cherries.
This is a disaster.
You cannot have a Cherry Festival in a town that does not grow cherries.
Please, for the sake of the folk who have worked their guts to the bone to create a magnificent festival that already equals major cherry festivals around the world, please, sign a petition.
You can find it on this web site.
http://sunrisefamily.com.au/current/petition/index.php
Lot's of fabulous, gorgeous, darling, media type celebrity airheads have already signed, but don't let that put you off.
Go on, sign.
I dare you.

The Garlic Warrior

Let me make the point: Local Garlic is NOW available!
Well, for those of us in the southern hemisphere and particularly in West Australia.
And if you don't have any wherever you are then find yourself a supplier on Australia's fabulous west coast and place an order.
At Sal and Phil's, my local fruit and veg retailers, they have two boxes brimming with the delight.
That's Sal wearing a garlic necklace.
Not only has Sal got plenty of locally grown garlic, his entire shop is brimming with local fruit and veg.
Am I in the pay of the garlic munchers?
No.
Why then am I into garlic and cherries and other such fruit and veg?
Because, dear blog fancier, I am a fanatical, locally-grown fruit and veg person who grew up on a fruit and veg farm in the lower south west of this magnificent fast disappearing state called West Australia.
Indeed, I grow my own garlic and eat it every day.
Not mine, it's not ready yet, but right now I'm eating some I bought from Misters Fruit and Veg, Sal and Phil, two Australian-Italian dudes who not only know garlic when they sniff it, they stick it where folk can see it.
It's purple in colour, not white, and is full of all the necessaries you expect to find in a knob of the genre.
Just so you know I'm not alone, International Garlic Research recently held an international conference at The Free University of Berlin.
It was the 6th International Congress on Phytotherapy, in conjunction with the European Scientific Co-operative for Phytotherapy.
Phytotherapy, by the way, is all about the study of plants and herbs for medicinal purposes.
So there.
Go get it.
Eat it.
And keep it cool and dark.
You might want to take a look at this book.














Oh, you might be thinking: "Garlic stink not for me."
Well, check out his site for good info: http://www.garlic.mistral.co.uk/
Take a look at the above book.
Some ancients once prayed to garlic.
Must have been something in it.