What I Cooked Last Night

The intensity map radiates out from the population centres and fades and dies in the far reaches of the States where it meets the borders. Trouble here. The idiot-class State politicians that were elected to enact politically correct legislation are hopelessly out of their depth. Closing borders bang-shut is cutting the meagre populations and many families in two. Or even three. Bickering amongst themselves, the State fishwives (of both sexes, if you like) have managed to destroy communities. In reply to one case (and there are thousands) in which a family was twenty kilometres from a hospital - which was on the wrong side of the border - was told to fly to Sydney, quarantine for a fortnight and take it from there. 1600 kilometre round trip. The Queensland premier blithely added Queensland has its hospitals and so does New South Wales. A farmer received a kind suggestion from a bureaucrat to fly 45 tonnes of hay to Sydney and then truck it back to his paddock 45 kilometres over the b...

I got it out of an old cookbook but the children said I'd already made it; just in a slightly different version. In any case you don't need a recipe for a dish containing potato, cheese and onion. The three ingredients are fellow travellers and kind of just collide. In the presence of heat, they know what to do, and turn alchemy-like into that clichéd term, comfort food, which means something you don't quite make it to a chair to start eating. The title was 'pan haggerty', but Wikipedia shows several different names for it. That proves the point: the recipe was never written down because it was so intuitively obvious. Pan Haggerty. Peel and cut two large potatoes into very thin slices. Do the same with two onions. Cook the onions in some oil in a pan until just softened. Lay some of the sliced potatoes into the bottom of an oiled baking dish and caress them with melted butter. I use a paint brush (that has never been used to paint - I bought one for the p...

Grade Three: she was only nineteen and just out of teachers' college. She introduced classic music and travel. Her name was Miss Burns. That year, Petula Clark started a massive run of smash hits and she and Miss Burns kind of merged. Later, there were others. Lulu smashed with To Sir With Love in 1967 but her apogee - if singers can have one of those - was the minor hit Oh Me Oh My, a soul-infused love song that never rose into the year's top 100 in '69. 1967 also saw Brit Sandie Shaw impossibly catchy with Puppet on a String - once heard never forgotten. Meanwhile, Morgana King's soul-fired coloratura went in a totally different gospel/soul direction and the Fifth Dimension were on fire. I was at a parish fete one warm October day in 1967. They used to play a radio station over the loudspeaker in between prize draws on the spinning wheel. A southern accent came out of the speaker and the story was some kind of personal disaster and the guitar in front had a weird ...

8 p.m. A midwinter full moon rises over my poplar-ended street as the city falls silent.

I got through the checkpoint without being challenged, and proceeded into the territories that were my ancestral lands, and made my way through distantly familiar streets to the house in which I grew up in bucolic 1960s then-outer-suburban Melbourne, high on the hill overlooking the Maribyrnong valley. I found her snoozing in front of the television, which was shouting at full volume about some political issue. I turned it down slightly and went through to the kitchen where a small mountain of plates and pots and plastic meals-on-wheels containers rose up next to the sink. I made a start on the mountain but didn't get far because the sink wasn't draining. I put the brush down and wandered through the vastness of the house into an old dusty abandoned bedroom full of memories and linoleum. I opened a wardrobe and shoved several hundred 1960s ladies coats along the railing until I found an unused wire coat hanger. Returning to the kitchen, I unwound the coat hanger at the part w...

30 January 1919: The (Essendon) Health Officer, Dr. Flanagan, was informed of an outbreak of the deadly Pneumonic Influenza and immediate action was taken to prevent its spread. An inoculation program was commenced with 150 citizens presenting themselves for inoculation. Theatres were closed locally, and restrictions on Defence Department drills and church gatherings were being considered. Householders were advised to throw open their windows. The Mayor, Cr. Arthur Fenton, amid accusations of over-reaction, took full responsibility for actions taken as 11 mild cases were reported. 10 February 1919: The Essendon Gazette reported that local doctors were inoculating as many as 800 people a day against the disease; that many citizens were wearing masks; that large public gatherings were prohibited and church services were being cancelled, or attended in small numbers. The Public Library was closed, and schools would not open until further notice. Essendon High School was being converte...

The cooking instructions started with Step One: Take the meatloaf out of the fridge. We can safely presume I have already taken this step because, in order to read the cooking instructions which are attached to the package, I am not standing in the fridge doing so.

It was 2010, late July. Mid-afternoon on a crisp but very cold day. Pale sunshine tiptoed across the carpet and onto the bed on which I lay, ill with a severe flu. I subconsciously felt the sun's friendliness on my feet as I finished the third volume of The Lord of the Rings. That night she lay next to me, heavily pregnant. The baby, a girl, was born a few days later, overdue a week. The funny thing is, a few months ago in late summer, and now all grown up at nine, she had finished all of the Famous Five, some 1960s horsey girls books by upper class British writers (Pullein-Thompson sisters etc) and a million of those children’s large-print faux-novels in which the author varies the text point size for emphasis, or prints them in capitals of a different font, or puts words like 'fart' or 'bum' in the title.  And she was looking for something else to read. Browsing my shelves, she pulled down a copy of The Hobbit. Will I like it? she asked me. I don't know,  ...

Although Grace Metalious's novel Peyton Place was a best seller from the day it was published, thanks to its provocative content, it never gained critical acclaim. A 2014 New York Times retrospective marking a half century since the author's death sniffed, 'Metalious's writing is mostly undemanding, but it's also, often ... not bad.' Damned by faint praise fifty-seven years down the track. Metalious can rest in her grave.  By the flower-powered free-loving 1960s Peyton Place 's themes were old hat. Anyway, by this time the fiction prurience index had been turbocharged by any copycat writer who could type. In later decades the book was forgotten almost completely and if mentioned was mistaken for the movie or the TV series or the meme or the lyrics – Tom T. Hall: 'Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you're all Harper Valley hypocrites'.  Writers 'who could type' proliferated in the computer era, when they mightn't have bot...

It was a winter Tuesday afternoon with no sun, and the air was ice-cold under a steel sky. I stood on cold concrete staring up at the whirling, swooping amusement park rides. Shrieks and yelps rose and fell, like the ride operator was twirling a volume button. The place seemed smaller inside than it had looked from the street, but that might have been because the entire block was penned by a giant lattice, rising and falling like a suburban picket fence built on a castle-scale. That, of course, was the white-painted timber scaffolding for the roller-coaster, a live relic from the early twentieth century. I stood and gazed as the boys went around again and thought about once when I had stood on the same spot on a sunny spring afternoon, queueing to sail through the river caves with a girl in my arms and her younger brother in the back seat, a kind of idiot chaperone whose presence had been ordered by their mother. The memory I kept was like a postcard, a static picture full of yello...

That pulsating lightning rod of noise I heard in the early 1970s burned itself into my sonic brainbank along with several million other short bits of music that would activate when heard again a year or ten years or forty years later. It was just a guitar. I heard it again a few weeks ago during a radio tribute after its player passed. The player was someone called Lynford Brown and the lightning bolt was the start of a Paul Simon song of that era, something about a reunion. I never particularly liked Paul Simon's work: my favourite Simon or Garfunkel song was the sorrowfully evocative Tim Moore minor hit Second Avenue that Garfunkel covered the same year. By comparison I found, for example, Simon's Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover to be the diametric opposite in sentiment; a lightweight collection of hardboiled rhymes. As for El Condor Pasa, I'd rather be a chimney than a sweep. But that guitar on Mother and Child Reunion. So they had a Hux Brown tribute on the serio...

Last weekend, Alan Kohler flagged an alternate universe to the panic-stricken one run by the timorous politicians and their health officer bureaucrats who see no problem in sending the engine room of the country over the cliff (see previous post). In the same paper, Adam Creighton reviewed the priorities of the left, of which he says 'a common theme is now sanctimony, and vast reservoirs of it', quoting the UN: David Beasley, executive director of the UN's World Food Program, warned in April that millions could starve as a result of the economic slump induced by the hysterical response to the coronavirus by advanced countries. Creighton pointed the finger at bureaucrats and politicians: ... the university-educated bureaucrats, teachers, public health advocates, consultants and executives dependent on government contracts, et cetera, whose incomes are more stable (than the poor, itinerant workers, small business owners and independent professionals). More stable? ...

Alan Kohler (Weekend Australian Business Review, 20/6/20) has been talking to the hospitality industry. Right now, 3.3 million people and their employers are being supported by JobKeeper at a cost of $10bn per month. ... JobKeeper (ends) September 27 ... there's a very large and very specific problem with the deadline: the four square metres rule. Kohler suggests the only way this can be lifted is if a vaccine exists, and if the rule is still in place after 27 September hospitality businesses go into receivership en masse and hundreds and possibly millions of people will be thrown out of work. An economic catastrophe would ensue - an industry that represents 7.2 per cent of GDP and more than 10 per cent of the workforce would close. ... each restaurant that keeps to four square metres per patron would need each diner to spend at least $2500 per sitting in Sydney and $1500 in Melbourne. ... It's not possible. ... For another month the waiters, chefs and dishwashers thus un...

Where else would I be? (Apart from walking through that piece of scenery in the previous post.*) There's a million things to which you just would not get around in the normal course of events. One of them is reading pieces of paper found inside the sleeve of an LP record purchased on December 12, 1972 (correct: I used to write in very small script the date of every record I purchased, inside the sleeve in order not to mark the artwork). One of these pieces of paper was an advertising flyer from Festival Records. Here's some of the text: Festival Records proudly presents this comprehensive catalogue of over 700 top selling albums from world renowned artists. These include the greatest overseas and Australian talent such as, Joe Cocker, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cat Stevens, Elton John, Shirley Bassey, Wendy Saddington, Blackfeather, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 77, Bee Gees, Freda Payne, Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Chain, Sandy Sco...