Australia   : loves and hates

 Friday, 1 February 2002

Unmarried Father of the Year. When tennis star Pat Rafter was named Australian of the Year, the fact that his girlfriend is pregnant was seen as a bonus, and the Australian media shied away from mentioning the M word. Bettina Arndt comments:

But the question remains as to why the media decided it was now inappropriate to ask an unmarried father whether he intended to marry. In just about 30 years we have shifted from a culture where a man who found himself in these circumstances would have been soundly condemned, let alone named Australian of the Year, to a climate where it's seen as wrong to do anything but celebrate his good fortune. To ask about marriage is to suggest that unmarried paternity is less than ideal - a moral stance which has become distinctly unfashionable.

Over the years Bettina Arndt has managed to offend almost every special interest group in Australia -- from right-wing fundamentalist Christians to the left feminist sisterhood. She's magic.

7:59:25 AM    comments ()  

Come in Victor. This morning we welcome a new member to the Australian blogging contingent, Victor Zalakos. A couple of weeks ago I persuaded Victor to download and install Radio. He posted once then lapsed into silence but this morning he's bounced back: "I woke up this morning from what must have been a bad dream, with the completed revolution in my mind - that I had something to write about and the only forum in which to do so was a blog." I think it's more likely that seeing my name in Australia's national newspaper spurred him into action. Whatever the reason, let's give a warm round of applause for Victor Echo Zulu.

7:08:43 AM    comments ()  

Back with a vengeance. Seems like the enforced hiatus did wonders for Burningbird:

The second reason was irony. I soundlessly pull a posting whose content was about Dave soundlessly pulling a posting. Try putting that on your scales and see if you don't get jello. Call it weblogging's first performance art and title it "Silence of the Postings".

Not only do we get some handy metablogging on the art of Doing a Dave, there's also the throwaway reference to performance art, which I thought no-one cared about anymore. One of my more dubious claims to fame is that in a previous incarnation I shot a performance art movie -- Rules and Displacement Activities, Part II -- for Australia's most highly-regarded conceptual artist, Mike Parr.

Mike's most recent performance work, after years of concentrating on self-portraits in a range of more conventional media, was Water From The Mouth. Last year, he lived "in a contained environment at Artspace for ten days, completely deprived of food and contact with the outside world," a work described as "the pinnacle of his performance career" as well as "possessed of the gritty reality that is missing from the current crop of ratings driven Reality-TV survivor shows."

Something to shoot for, Shelley.

6:39:45 AM    comments ()