December 2024

A Year of Woke Observance: One Man’s Struggle with the Liturgical Calendar of the Politically Correct

31 December 2024 / 1 Comment

It all started innocently enough. On New Year’s Eve last year, I made the fatal decision to embrace the “woke” New Year’s resolution to observe as many single commemorative days this year. The idea was simple: celebrate diversity, inclusivity, and all the other buzzwords that have been hammered into us. Little did I know, I was about to enter a whirlwind of special days, weeks, and months that seemed designed to test the limits of human tolerance — and sanity.

The year Santa never made it to Darwin

20 December 2024 / 1 Comment

It began as a deep distant rumbling, like the stirring of some gargantuan subterranean beast.

It was unsettling at first, ominous, something you felt in your guts more than you heard with your ears, an eerie subsonic vibration that seemed to rise from the bowels of Hades.

As the she-devil crept closer, the wailing began.

A wooden pipeline that carries more than water – it carries a lot of history

6 December 2024 / 9 Comments

It all started in November 1883. Payable gold was found on a high ridge separating the magical Linda Valley from the Queen River valley, some 18 kilometres inland from the isolated west coast Tasmanian town of Strahan. This discovery led to mining leases that supported rich copper mines. These mines eventually merged in 1903 to form Mount Lyell’s, and indeed the world’s, largest copper mining operations.