One reason to be glad that Australia is so bloody big is that for those of us on the eastern seaboard, at least, we are far, far away from Troy Buswell, Liberal opposition leader in Western Australia, currently neither resigning nor being removed from his position after admitting to sniffing a female colleague’s chair after she stood up. He has previously admitted to snapping a woman’s bra strap (when he was over the age of 15, which I am setting here as a random cutoff point for the overlookability of such antics).

” Mr Buswell’s deputy, Kim Hames, stood by him, describing him as a rough diamond with a robust sense of humour.

“To me, Troy’s a rough diamond and you don’t fix a rough diamond by smashing it to pieces,” said Dr Hames.”

Of course not, when you could fix it with a carefully applied disc sander, or perhaps some hedge clippers.

I think we must ask ourselves what sort of grown man sniffs women’s chairs in public. Would Clint Eastwood? Gregory Peck? Yul Brynner? (I am trying to think of manly men here, not your effete metrosexuals who only sniff perfume tester strips and maybe a little cocaine.) Churchill? Vladimir Putin? Colonel Gadaffi? Even Nicholas Sarkozy probably wouldn’t. (And Chuck Norris wouldn’t, of course, in case the mighty force of his inhale caused the chair to lodge in his nose.)
We are told the party is keeping Buswell as leader because they can’t find anyone better. Oh dear, oh dear.

I’m writing this with eyes smarting. They’re doing controlled burning of bush across the state, nowhere near us, but the wind’s blowing the smoke down and it’s all through the air.

Anyway, last night I dreamed of gorgeous diva Szilveszter Szabo. He was ice skating, wearing his white damask Death costume from Elisabeth, and everything was going just fine, until he turned into a two-headed creature, like fetus baby, with a woman at his other end. Somehow he/they were still skating, despite not having any feet. I can’t remember how my mind represented that visually. I really had better not let myself develop a crush on this guy, since everything about him is in Hungarian. With an online dictionary I did manage to discover that he writes stories — or used to write them in school, anyway; I don’t know if he still does. Someone has put quite a few on a fansite. Well, I now know the Hungarian words for “the”, “a”, “how”, “where”, “great”, “willies”, and “radiator”. I have a dangerous urge to learn more. Last time this happened, I eneded up learning Japanese. But Hungarian looks quite a bit harder than Japanese, and I really should be learning Thai. I must find a Thai person to have a crush on. Maybe that kid from the gay bar would do?

But wait, the title of this post isn’t “fangirling”, it’s “The Chocolate Mill” — which is where we went yesterday, after persuading my mother that there is no sin in visiting a boutique chocolate factory then going to a pub rather than putting on a Sunday roast. Located just out of Daylesford, in a large straw bale building — impressive in itself, and which owners Jennifer Gregory and Chris Weippert built with their own hands — The Chocolate Mill uses high grade Belgian chocolate with all-natural fillings, containing fresh ingredients with no preservatives. The resulting short shelf life means that chocolates have to be sold on the premises, which hasn’t stopped the business doing extremely well. It was busy when we were there, both in the chocolate shop and the cafe. Naturally we had to buy a few chocolates, and I can say that yes, you really can taste the quality of both the chocolate and the fillings, especially those with fresh cream in them. The liqueur raisin was a particular delight, with a quite complex flavour, and just enough sweetness, but no more than enough — and good liqueur, so none of that sense of consuming cheap hooch tarted up with sugar that you get too often with alcochocs.

The main machines in their factory, which we watched through a window in the shop, all have names, like Black Betty the dark chocolate mixer and Mr T (the something or other). This is Fat Albert, the milk chocolate mixer:

Dad with his hot chocolate and the leftover part of mine:

Mum enjoying hers:

We ate lunch at the Farmer’s Arms pub in Daylesford. Pub food has come a long way, baby. Dad and I had cheese, leek and herb soufflees with fresh dill on top and Mum had tuna sashimi with assorted side bits including wasabi flying fish roe, which was a beautiful shade of green. All very good. Then we toddled off to a bookshop in an old house on the main street, in which there were two rooms full of vintage sheet music — at very reasonable prices, especially considering some of the lovely art nouveau covers. I bought a few playable pieces, and one that I probably won’t be able to play without cutting notes out of the thick chords, but had to have — a book of tone poems inspired by Omar Khayyam, by Frederick Hall. On the back is an easier “Call to Prayer” by the same composer, from a suite of Egyptian tone poems — which I found digitally archived by the National Library of Australia. I had no idea this archive of music existed. The guy at the shop said people don’t buy sheet music much anymore. Certainly, not as many places sell it. Maybe digital archiving has killed the business.

Side note to the twat in the 4WD who tooted me as I turned off to the Chocolate Mill, when turning from a 100kph highway onto a gravel road, you gots to slow down. Quite a bit. I had my indicator on for well over 100m, just for you. As I slowed down, rather than maintaining a safe distance, you kept your big bullbarred nose up my little car’s bum. Who taught you to drive — a dog? Or you — the other you — who tailed me half the way home, then tailed a caravan the rest of the way? If a roo had run out in front of that caravan, his accident would have been your accident too, mate. Anyway, bumsniffers aside, it was a lovely drive home down country roads lined with elms and poplars in their autumn best. 70km round trip; Ren’s fuel gauge didn’t budge from half a tank.

One more soapbox: in the bookshop, I saw a new volume, The Dangerous Book for Boys. This book is a hit. It’s full of egregiously undangerous stuff like “how to make the perfect water bomb, how to read codes, what are the rules of cricket, who were the Kings and Queens of Europe, what are the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World – and just how do you deal with girls?” Yes, I realise it’s a homage to all the Books for Boys of yesteryore, and that there’s going to be one for girls later on. (But not Dangerous; it’s going to be Gallant, or something.) But. BUT. While we at chez Bishop are not fans of politically correct embuggerations of the English language (we are not well disposed towards, for instance, “Person of La Mancha” or “Devil Got My Person”, though we confess a sneaking partiality for “Governess General”, just for the kink value, you understand), we are ardent supporters, we like to think, of social progress, and from our episcopal seat cannot see any merit in designating a book for one sex or the other, when the book is for children, who are already have more than enough pernicious gender-divisive material shouting at them — or worse, stealthily insinuating. What were you thinking, Harper Collins? Yes, yes, we know; you were thinking about money. Maybe that’s why the book is green.

Of coure, girls probably don’t need a book like this. I, for one, make pretty good paper planes (the secret is in an extra fold, a set of labia minora, if you like, to stabilise the glide). Perhaps girls can read the instructions on packets of water balloons, and look up Google if they wish to learn about the kings and queens of Europe (young ladies, don’t miss Charles II, who “love(d) fucking much”). Still, one can hope the future might provide us with a St. Trinian’s Book for Girls, containing instruction on such essential female skills as how to build a nuclear device, abort a late term pregnancy (yours or someone else’s), seduce your teacher of either gender, smuggle plastic explosive onto an aeroplane, biologically engineer a plague, and summon the devil. Until then, the only dangerous books I shall be giving to children of my acquaintance will be the medieval kind that scream when you open them and have to be chained up at night.

Finally, so that I don’t finish this on a whinging note, from the other day, a classic corner building in Maldon (purveyors of covetable Japanese tea ceremony cabinets, lamps, carp kites et al.) :

I spent last week visiting friends and relations. Had breakfast with Tessa in one of the nooks on Degraves St. (a tiny alley in town). The victuals were delicious, though too much for two smallish people, even hungry ones. I checked out the exhibition of top VCE (end of high school) art at the Ian Potter gallery and was blown away by the maturity of the work and the thought behind it. How on earth do these kids get to be so sophisticated (or was I just backward? Hmm…)
I’ve been lazy about posting while I’m away. I’m now up at my parents’ place in Castlemaine. With the lack of rain and the strict water restrictions, it’s amazing how their garden’s hanging in there. Where the biocycle (domestic sewage treatment thingo) drains into the garden they’ve got quite a little woodland, with some impressive trees grown from seed, including exotics like oak, hawthorn and gingko, and even a paulownia, which they practically wrapped in blankets when it was little to keep Jack Frost’s fingers off it. The exotics don’t get any extra water, but some of them are doing very well, especially the oaks. I remember when they were tiny little twiggy things, and now they have acorns. The apple and cherry trees, which haven’t been watered all year, produced bumper crops. There’s no lawn, of course, but now that the trees are bigger the dirt between them doesn’t look so bad. Meanwhile, Mum and Dad have been laying gravel paths all over the place in their little Japanese garden.

I’m sorry I didn’t have my camera when we walked the dog the other day. As we were coming home, via a grassy lane behind a paddock, we met three of the local kangaroos — mum, dad and a little one, standing in the lane, upright, looking very human, and not especially pleased to see us, especially the dad, the dominant male of the local mob, I guess, who was a strapping, square-jawed, thick-shouldered paterfamilias. We tried to sneak off down a side lane, but we had to go a little closer to them before the turnoff, and the mother decided on discretion being the better part of valour and bounded. The kid sprang away after her. The father stood rearguard for a few moments, looking like he just might go all Chuck Norris on us, but after giving us a good look at his sizeable person he turned with every appearance of cool disdain for our puny simian selves and headed off up the lane after his concubine and offspring. No person in their right mind would have tangled with him, of course — in fact, any threatening movement on his part would have had the three of us backing off the way we came, or if it was a threatening movement of the “I bound towards you and kick you to kingdome come, or maybe eviscerate you with my gnarly claws” kind, bravely diving into the nearby ditch. Mum said it was funny in the summer when the family in the house up the hill were on holiday and the roos took to lolling on their front veranda.

My parents also told a story about an open range zoo they went to in Dubbo. The zoo has a Bengal tiger, which my father says “has attitude” (as tigers do, I guess). Anyway, kangaroos being perhaps not entirely cognizant of what a tiger is, now and then one of the zoo’s roos jumps the tiger’s fence, and the tiger gets bush tucker that day. Sadly, one of these violent dinner dates happened while a group of Japanese tourists were viewing the tiger. Over the fence jumped the kangaroo, and soon the zoo resounded to shrieks of “Hidoi! Hidoi!* No, Skippy, nooooo!” Ah, Nature, thou cruel old biddy.

*hidoi = horrible, awful

I’m back in Melbourne, staying with Stu’s parents. Days are warm and sunny but mornings are nippy; I’m rediscovering the sensation of feeling cold when I undress for a shower. I’m also rediscovering asthma. The air is as dry and dusty as the proverbial nun’s twat, and my lungs are telling me they much prefer Bangkok’s humid miasma. Luckily (for me) Stu’s family are an asthmatic lot, so I was able to buy a puffer from their stash, at their $5 pensioner price rather than the regular $25. It’s named after some Gondorian aviator called Airomir. I’ve also got hay fever. I’m going to blame it on the plane tree seedpods, since it’s the wrong time of year for any other possible culprits.

The city shops are, as usual, full of beautiful clothes that I can’t afford and which most other people can’t either, judging by those I see as I wend my way down the corridorial, dungeonesque streets, alleys and arcades of the city centre. The question of who does buy them hangs in the air, redolent of mystery. Aliens? I couldn’t resist trying on a coat in figured silver-grey velvet that reminded me a bit of our old sitting room wallpaper, only without the rising damp, and one in the same style in silver and teal, which was just pimpin’.

My priority mission was to find some perfume for my great aunt, who turns 100 in June. I was going to go for Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet, but the only shop that stocks Penhaligon’s didn’t have that one, and the others that they had didn’t seem right for what I know of her tastes. In the end it came down to Joy or the new Chloe. Joy has a lot of tuberose, which doesn’t work on everybody, but Chloe was lovely, didn’t seem to contain any potential offenders, and came in a pretty bottle to boot. Mission accomplished, I wandered around looking in windows. I discovered a new Japanese goth shop called Shibuya in Elizabeth Street and noted that Spellbox in Royal Arcade is now selling gorgeous metal-tipped quill pens and goodies pour le bain with names like “Bath of the Dark Goddess” and “Beautiful Witch Aura Bath”. The slightly more serious occultist might prefer The Golden Lamp in the side arcade, where you can choose from The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Gems from the Equinox, and Wet: Erotic Adventures in Water. Koko Black is still there, serving up calories to libertines of chocolate for whom hot chocolate means nothing less than a cup of Belgium’s finest melted and mixed with a little cream, and found another, new joint for the advanced chocolate consumer, called Chocolait, downstairs where something humbler had been before.

Despite the expanded choice of chocky dens, from the Royal I headed through the Block Arcade and stopped off at Haigh’s, the venerable chocolate heart of the city, not to mention storehouse of memories of childhood treats, where a young man carrying a tray piled with enough confectionery to supply a Roman feast met me just like St Peter at the gates of heaven and gave me a big piece of dark chocolate rocky road (though I imagine St Peter would have to have a pile of Jewish cakes, perhaps he might also have rocky road as a symbol of the difficult path of righteousness). Or perhaps I’m entirely confused and the young man was just like Beelzebub, demon president of gluttony, at the gates of hell; in any case, there was something just a little supernatural about him and his groaning silver salver of adulterated marshmallow. Haigh’s rocky road is the best I’ve ever had, anywhere. It’s priced in accordance with its excellence, however, so I contented myself with a little baggie of mixed chocs to take to my sister-in-law’s place tomorrow. Feeling virtuous for having exercised financial restraint, I felt that some instant karma was due, so I went no further than the belle epoque Hopetoun Tea Rooms at the end of the arcade and splurged on their salmon and cucumber sandwiches — de-crusted, of course.

I have made such bad guesses about the likely weather, having packed for a cold climate, that I really needed to buy some light clothing. I went up to the Queen Victoria Market, where I found that the clothing was as wearable and the prices as cheap as ever. I bought some Nepalese happy pants in light pastel blue, pink, white and beige patterned silk — I think of them as the happy pants Marie Antoinette would wear — and a cotton dress/tunic decorated like blue and white china (not Willow Pattern; it might be Dutch floral with a Batavian influence, or, of course, I might know nothing about china). Anyway — I’m a teapot, I’m a teapot!

I went home on a tram of which the interior was decorated with signs in faux Indian script proclaiming “Plentiful is the spam in the fare evader’s inbox” and “Sadistic is the dentist of the fare evader”, and urging passengers to avoid fare evasion karma. The driver had a beautiful English accent. He was probably Indian, too.

I’ve realised I’m starting to feel just a bit like a tourist here. I’m not sure how much this is still my town — or how much it ever was. It’s an enjoyable place and I like being here. But perhaps it has never really felt like a home. Why that should be, I don’t know. Perhaps the problem is in the distances. It’s a very spread-out city, so that going anywhere at all — unless you live in one of the very, very expensive locations that are actually near the places you might want to go to — involves a sort of expedition that perhaps drains away the sense of the city as a totality to which you belong. My friend Inger has lent me a book called Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne (Bearbrass was its original name), by Robyn Annear, who describes herself as a typist who lives in country Victoria with somebody else’s husband. Best author bio ever! I’m gobbling it up — and also wondering if I’ll wind up feeling more anchored in the place after learning its history. I do wonder if some of the old ghosts of Bearbrass got into my head while I was writing The Etched City, since the first random page I opened to contained this description of the Bearbrass gentleman of the 1840s, who

“wore a figured or embroidered waistcoat beneath a short-waisted coat with broad lapels, a high collar, and swallow tails swooping and dangling behind. The trousers were tight-fitting and strapped down under the soles of square-toed boots. At the other end of the ensemble soared an impressive belltopper hat, wrought of black beaverskin. Mr Jephson Quarry, an Irish gentleman who arrived at Bearbrass in 1841, was a specimen of the breed. With his black hair and high cheekbones, he was described as: ‘a lady chaser who stalked his feminine game in a a tall ‘Caroline’ hat, a Willy-Wagtail coat with brass buttons, and white trousers strapped under Wellington boots.’ ” This at a time when the city, built on a swamp, was mostly unpaved, often a quagmire of mud — and in the case of Elizabeth Street after rain, a “brawling torrent”, the streets having deep, crooked gutters that had to be leapt across, huge stump holes, and no lighting except for that required outside hotels and theatres, and the one that a Moses Lazarus kindly left on in his jewellery store, which was near “a perpendicular fall of some six feet”. It seems safe to guess that Mr Quarry’s trousers were more often brown than white.

So the Opposition–or parts of it–thinks the Australian Government’s planned apology to Aborigines will reinforce a victim mentality. I doubt it. Can anyone think of a time when receiving a sincere apology made them feel more like a victim?

Liberal leader Brendan Nelson is no doubt right that there are bigger issues for the Government than an apology to Aborigines. However, looking at the international news today, I notice that the German Government has approved two new Holocaust memorials in Berlin, for gypsies and homosexuals, near the Reischstag and the Brandenburg Gate. No doubt Germany has more immediately pressing issues too; but a government should find time to attend to the symbolic–to the monuments and moments that will become part of the public history.

The point of symbolism is to make an impact on the heart and memory, to involve the emotions, to make a current flow in a certain direction–in this case, the direction of goodwill and reconciliation. Symbolism encourages the will to attend to the practical. In the case of an apology, it is hard to imagine that not doing would be better than doing.

And then, get on with the practical–in which the previous government had some success with its policy of intervention in dysfunctional Aboriginal communities. One thing the Rudd Government might want to keep as a lesson from its predecessor is that the politically correct thing to do is not always the actually correct thing. But an apology to the indigenous people is more than just a bit of PC fluff–or it should be.

Australian law states that no child under 12 can give consent to sexual activity. Legal precedent has established that child rapists must expect imprisonment unless there are exceptional circumstances. Apparently one of those circumstances is that victim and rapist–the victim especially, perhaps–be Aboriginal.

A 10 year old Aboriginal girl in a remote Queensland community is raped by nine males, six of them under 16, and three of 17, 18 and 26, one of them a repeat sex offender. Judge Sarah Bradley (white) lets the nine off with suspended sentences and probation orders, saying the girl “probably agreed” to have sex with them.

The girl had already been removed from the community after being raped there at the age of 7 and was living in foster care, but was returned. She is now back in foster care.

The mind boggles. Was the judge worried about the high suicide rate among Aboriginal prisoners, afraid that the young men, if sent to jail, would never be rehabilitated? Her remarks suggest that she views underage sexual promiscuity as normal for Aborigines. Judges have made similar statements before, supporting tolerance of child abuse in Aboriginal towns. This tolerance comes from either of two extreme positions, both arrived at sans a functioning moral compass - one being that since some Aboriginal tribes had a history of marrying young girls off to old men, Aboriginal girls in the modern age are fair game for sex in the name of respect for tradition, and that whites have no right to interfere in indigenous affairs, however sordid and vicious; the other being that Aborigines are savages who can’t be expected to control themselves and are, in any case, doomed and not worth helping. A confused mixture of both notions probably circulates in some heads; both place Aborigines outside the human mainstream.

Perhaps the judge feared being branded an interfering racist if she upheld the letter and spirit of the law. Yes, Aborigines are disproportionately represented in the prison population, and Aborigines serving custodial sentences are known to suffer to an uncommon degree. But, sorry, that doesn’t grant them a license to commit crimes or to turn their own communities into hellholes where women and children are persistently abused. Nor should a judge, for any reason, set a precedent for treating child rapists gently. My heartless view is that if such creatures hang themselves in jail, or sniff petrol till they die, well, that’s some nasty matter cleaned out of the gene pool and society, whatever their cultural background or the colour of their skin.

Aboriginal activist Boni Robertson said “There is nothing culturally, there is nothing morally, there is nothing socially and there is definitely nothing legally that would ever allow this sort of decision to be made.”

The Queensland Attorney General has lodged appeals against the sentences and the state Premier, Anna Bligh, has ordered a review of all sexual assault cases on the Cape York Peninsula in the last two years.

The new Labor government will inherit a wealthy Australia. That isn’t to say the people are wealthy, but the country is. This is thanks in no small part to huge demand from China for our coal and iron ore - a demand which is unlikely to slow anytime soon.

The Labor party is committed to maintaining a strong economy and, far more - at least in rhetoric - than the outgoing Coalition was, to fighting climate change.

It doesn’t take a brain the size of a planet to see a conflict of interests here. Realistically, if China doesn’t embrace non-polluting technologies, it won’t matter much what the rest of us do. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t do our utmost, because if we don’t, China sure won’t. But if we want to reduce global warming, China has to be on board. Obviously, coal-fired power plants are not what we’re after here. And the iron ore? Makes steel. On top of steel goes concrete. And concrete manufacturing (specifically, the cement that glues it together) is a major cause of greenhouse gas pollution, currently accounting for 5% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

It seems to me that we’re already too late, and things are going to get much worse on the environmental front before they get better. Australia does have one thing in the ground that might help: uranium, and lots of it. Nuclear reactor technology has come a long way in terms of safety and cleanness. It seems to me that nuclear power has to be part of at least the band-aid solution to the world’s energy demands, and possibly even the long-term solution. Meanwhile, as long as Australia cashes up thanks to Chinese coal plants and concrete construction projects, we’ll remain entrenched in being part of the problem rather than the solution.

In the world of reality, we’re going to sell whatever we can to whoever wants it. Given that, I believe a tax should be imposed on any company engaged in business that leads to greenhouse pollution, and all revenues from it put towards developing and implementing clean energy solutions and addressing the problems already caused by climate change, such as water shortages.

Because John Howard is no longer Prime Minister of Australia. He may not even be Member for Bennelong anymore, though that’s still too close to call.

Labor has won the election with a likely majority of 20-25 seats

Here in Thailand it’s the night of Loy Krathong, where people set little raft-lanterns afloat on waterways to thank the rivers for their water, apologise for throwing bad things in them (ironically, many modern krathong are made of styrofoam…) and carry away one’s anger, grudges and bad thoughts.

So I won’t vent spleen here. I wish the Labor Party and Kevin Rudd, who will be our new PM, good luck, because the best governments can come unstuck without it. I hope they will stick to their promised programs for education, the environment and workplace relations, that they will govern wisely and courageously, and that Mr Rudd will not give in to the temptations of the dark side, even when Australia stands to make a buck by buckling.

Melbourne artist Rick Amor, who is well known as a painter but considers himself an amateur sculptor has won the prestigious McClelland Sculpture Award for his work “Relic”, a bronze figure of a man with no arms and the head of a dog. (full view)

Amor said, “It’s a relic, it’s a distant memory. I don’t know where it came from, from the unconscious. It’s not meant to be an Anubis or any Egyptian deity, it’s just something that popped up.”

I like it very much. It also reminded me of the creatures in my sketches Casualty and A Little Thing (except that his is, you know, better!). It does make me wonder about these like-animal-headed figures–what they might represent in the collective unconscious, if there is such a thing as the collective unconscious. What gives us the urge to stick an animal head on a human body, in these times long past they heyday of anthropomorphic deities? I don’t think it’s as straightforward as wanting to attribute the qualities of that animal to a person.

The sun’s coming up. I’ve missed the colours of the Bangkok dawn, which are still alien to my eyes and might always be. At this hour, the Melbourne sky is most likely to be moving through shades of delphinium and lavender, colours that seem as deep as space; clouds will glow iridescent pink and tangerine, and the east-facing sides of the glass office towers will be golden, the hot colours sharp and distinct as trumpet blasts against the droning blues. As the sky lightens to impasto pale blue the sense of endless depth reverses, like a dimension turning inside out, until, as daylight stabilises, there comes a sense of no depth at all: the sky is a paradox, it never begins, it ends before it begins.

Today’s dawn in Bangkok begins with  smears of celadon green, juicy red and powdery cool brown, a brown waking from a dream of purple. Layers and layers of cloud come out of hiding, wisps and veils that flush soft rose and apricot against the pale green sky, slivers of grey and smoky coils of brown. The distance comes vaguely to light in a pale cinnamon fog, housing towers standing up like matchboxes. A broad tide of gold announces the sun, which makes its appearance in glaring molten orange, looking more like metal than gas; the pale gold seeps through all the layers of cloud and mist, turning everything to a print in yellow that lasts for about a minute before the show winds down and the eastern sky settles into a palette of creamy blue and shades of palomino that meets the edge of a great raft of gunmetal raincloud, the latter overhanging much of the city.

Our apartment in Melbourne has views to the east and west, which I miss here. It was a luxury to have the sky at both ends of the day. Watching the sky is one of the great pleasures of life for me, but I’m a daytime skygazer; stars are lovely, but it’s the variety and unpredictability of the sunlit sky with its shapes, colours, textures and depths, its effects of light and atmosphere, that appeals to me.