December 2024

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

31 December 2024 / 1 Comment

I kicked off the year with Play Outside Day—simple enough, right? But by the 9th, I struggled with the No Pants Subway Ride. Living in a regional community, I could only imagine those feeling the sting of a chilly New York breeze.

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 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.