Glenn Rose says:

A thought occurred to me as I wandered around the Library Museum the other day.
Actually as I perused the permanent collection of Uiver memorabilia.

It seemed to me that there was plenty to demonstrate the form and appearance of the plane, but nothing to actually make the link to its actual size.

Surely the inclusion of an iconic piece (such as a propeller) installed tastefully might be a useful thing in being able to imagine the plane’s true size.

Possibly the front part of the fuselage could be cut and the whole cockpit installed.
I’d say the cockpit is the part most people wold be most interested in seeing anyway.

Thoughts?

Currently there are four temporary art installations around Albury, all are free, all are worth a look and I’d urge anyone in a position to take advantage of the opportunity to check themselves out for themselves.

For what it’s worth, here are my observations.

Hats Off is a tiny exhibition located in the foyer of the Library Museum. It seems to be a collection of women’s hats mainly from the forties and fifties, if you’re an aficionado of vintage fashion, millinery or even just design in general you might find it worth a look, otherwise, it might be a bit, well, old hat.

SHED located downstairs in the Albury Art Gallery, certainly gets points for cleverly using more than one meaning of the term in an exhibition, beyond that I found it pretty slim pickings, I should divulge that I have never been a great fan of the notion of found objects as art I think there is more to the notion than picking up an object in one context, moving it to another and having it somehow magically transformed by the transition.
I believe there is more to an object than the value someone places on it and one person’s value of a particular thing, doesn’t necessarily change its value.
That’s just me mind.

With this in mind, it should come as no shock to learn I didn’t particularly enjoy Drifting in my own land  by Nalda Searles, while it certainly held more in terms of creative content than the previous exhibition, it lacked, for mine, direction and dare I say, a little in terms of originality.
If you haven’t seen the whole “indigenous artist bridges cultural divides” routine a few hundred times yet I’d argue you haven’t really been paying attention.

The Collective is an absolute refreshment even to a jaded old cynic like me, anyone still entrenched in the belief that furniture and everyday objects can’t be elevated to the lofty realms of high art really needs to go see this exhibition. I was absolutely reassured that Australian craftspeople are on a par with any other in the world in terms of ability, innovation and creativity. This stuff is solid gold and as good as anything I’ve seen in the Albury gallery in YEARS, YEARS I tells YA!!

There’s also no shortage of children’s exhibitions on at the moment, story readings, interactive goings on and various other things to ensure the entire school holidays needn’t be spent at timezone, lazer-tag or the Lan Mine.

The absolute best of them for mine is the foyer of the Lavington Library, a collection of disparate war memorabilia from various campaigns, Australian service from campaigns often overlooked in the glamour stakes.
The opportunity to come face to face with intimate relics of such a significant and timely nature of generations of Australian servicemen is not one to miss and one worth taking the time to reflect on the nature of these men’s contribution to the way of life we enjoy today.

The problems with drunken anti-social behaviour in Dean street at night are well documented and decades old.

Seems they haven’t escaped the attention of Prime newsreader Daniel Gibson who posted a brief tweet on the subject over the weekend.

Not so claims Daryl Bettridge, public drunkenness, antisocial behaviour in Dean Street? All in your head.

Bettridge’s financial and agenda driven motives for downplaying the seriousness of anti-social behaviour in Dean Street are obvious given his involvement with the liquor accord, his position on council and the fact that he is in a position whereby he makes a lot of money from the Dean Street drunks., Gibson has no such conflict of interests. In fact he’s a respected source of information “who you turn to for local news” I think is the marketing term.

To quote Bob Dylan, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.

Do the town a favour Daryl, resign your position on council, close your dive of a pizza shop at a sensible hour and stop providing a venue for anti-social lout behaviour and stop preventing a solution to the drunken idiocy of Dean Street you corrupt, corrupt man.

If you’re a Liberal voter in Indi and you oppose a carbon tax you have every reason to be utterly  incensed today.

Not because there’s any particular merit to your view, my observation is that the majority of people (although I concede not all) opposed to a carbon tax are opposed on the basis of climate change scepticism.

Of course people are entitled to this view, just as they are entitled to believe the moon is made of green cheese, but when you have outspoken lay people deciding they know better than 90% plus of a scientific community who have made it their life’s work to understand the complexities of our atmosphere and it’s impact on the environment. They’re not really entitled to have their view listened to by anyone that wants to be taken seriously, in my opinion.

No the people of Indi are entitled to a degree of righteous indignation because quite simply they’ve been screwed. They were screwed at the Liberal party branch meeting when the rank and file members were rolled to run a ring in barrister from Melbourne (presumably one who knew where a few bodies were buried) in a safe seat, THEIR safe seat.

They’ve been screwed because the hierarchy of the Liberal party hasn’t seen fit to install a candidate of better calibre despite the fact that Ms. Mirabella has seemingly done her level best since taking office to turn the gilt edged, iron clad safe seat of Indi into a marginal one.

They’ve been screwed by having their sitting member reflect poorly on them by being embroiled in scandal after scandal after scandal.

They’ve been screwed because term after term after term they’ve been saddled with a national embarrassment of a member who has proven time and again that she has nothing to offer the national dialogue but bombast, empty rhetoric, anachronistic ideologies and providing both a laughing-stock and a free kick for the political left.

Now they’ve been screwed by being denied a voice and a vote in parliament on not one but potentially two significant issues for no other reason than that their sitting member apparently lacks either the maturity or self-restraint or both to prevent herself being evicted from the parliament to which she is appointed to represent her constituents, over what amounts to a stunt.

While Sophie cools her heels in the political sin-bin, the carbon tax gets up by a whisker and the possibility of the Gillard government pushing through immigration “reform” looms large.

Despite Ms. Mirabella’s predictable (and frankly quite pathetic)”it’s not my fault it’s theirs” protestations it is her actions, her poor judgement and her disregard for proper process that has denied her constituents a voice in parliament  today.

Of course there will no doubt be a significant number of Liberal voters in Indi who will trot out the standard “good on you Sophie” rhetoric. People like this deserve no-one’s sympathy, ultimately they would vote for a perma-pine post as long as it had a Liberal party badge on it. Rusted on idealogues like this are as much an anathema to the democratic process as appathetic “informal” voters and the ever fickle “swinging” voters.

Despite the fact that I don’t agree with them, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Indi residents with legitimate concerns about a carbon tax.

Can you spot the prawn?

For the life of me I don’t know what French chef Gabriel Gate is on about.

His claim that the practice of cooking is somehow imperiled seems to me, well spurious to say the very least.

A quick glance at the TV guide will reveal not just one, but a veritable plethora of cooking related shows, prime time, commercial stations, ratings juggernauts right through to obscure daytime programming.

If television is any kind of reflection of the tastes of the Australian public (and I’m not sure THAT many market research analysts can get it wrong ALL the time) Australians are obsessed with cooking. In fact, as much as any other, you could call it a national pass time.

In young males particularly, the number of men who can cook (and do so quite competently) now, compared with say fifty years ago, night and day comparison (to quote that other TV chef Gordon Ramsay).

Things like the ability to change a washer in a tap, the ability to install shelving, automotive maintenance, these are imperiled pursuits, cooking? it’s up there with texting as the growth industry for the new millennium.

There is of course one exception to this new-found-exhuberence for all things culinary.

While most kitchen posers would know exactly what a gespacho or miso soup is, they’d probably give you a blank stare if you asked for mulligatawny (is that anything like minestrone?) In fact our knowledge of, understanding of, familiarity with and general fondness for the recipes used in this country for the past couple of hundred years is in sharp decline.

I suspect the way a lot of Australians (and the rest of the world) views our traditional fare can be summarised by this brief stub of an article.

Allow me to paraphrase to save time. Few thousand years of aborigines eating half raw meat and dirt, along came convicts and spent a couple of hundred years picking peanuts out of poo, at long last after WWII along came a few squillion foreigners and ta da…finally there was something in Australia worth eating.

I’d say right off the bat that the content of the article I referenced and the sentiment of the preceeding paragraph are utter garbage.

There are several adjectives which spring to mind about our colonial culinary heritage, simple, rustic, honest, unpretentious, wholesome.

Given the world class standard of Australian ingredients, the unquestionable ingeniuety of our foodies, and our apparent obsession with food generally I see no reason whatsoever that traditional Australian colonial fare shouldn’t take it’s rightful place as a counter foil to the puffed up pretentious view of Australian food presented by shows like “masterchef”.

“just drizzle some extra virgin olive oil and cracked black pepper on that seasonal fruit compote would you?”

Wankers.

Some of you may recall recently Albury Council held something of an informal vote to decide the fate of the toy plane which has been busily rotting away at the airport for the duration of recent memory.

While I was surprised at how close the vote was, the results were still fairly conclusive, the people of Albury declined the “generous” offer of a local cashed up family to restore the wreck, on the proviso that Albury city dipped into public funds to the tune of a million or so dollars initial outlay, plus an annual upkeep of around a hundred grand to store the aging monstrosity.

While this would be in keeping with the great Australian tradition of “this piece of machinery is over fifty years old, let’s erect a shed over the top of it and charge people admission to see it”, it would hardly constitute a good deal for the people of Albury given that they would be considerably  out-of-pocket for what is essentially (in my opinion) an eyesore of dubious historical merit and of highly questionable benefit to the tourism industry (which is the main selling point of the pro uiver crowd).

Seems councillor Neville Hull undeterred by public opinion has decided to resurrect another local tradition, namely Albury council disregarding the input of the local citizenry and going ahead with whatever they felt they wanted to do in the first instance.

Patty Gould’s “internal-external-round-about-upside-down-back-to-front-inside-out-by-pass” (circa 2000) springs to mind.

Daryl Bettridge’s “what’s good for the grog peddlers is good for us all” approach further springs to mind.

It does beg the question, that if Albury council already knows what’s best for Albury (as they seem to think they do) why bother holding elections at all?

Surely the money saved by scrapping all those unneccessary local elections altogether could be put to more productive uses, like putting the Cumberoona on top of a dirty great pole strategically located for maximum visibility at the entrance to town.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past few years, it possibly won’t have escaped your attention that the sleepy city of Albury has become home to some (or rather a lot of) new arrivals of late. As featured nationally on the SBS propaganda series “go back where you came from”, Australian government policy has determined that moving significant numbers of non english speaking migrants out of the cities and into regional areas might be a good idea.

While this may assuage the middle class consciences of many, I would urge everyone to take a moment to consider just how democratic (or rather undemocratic) this process has been. As a fairly keen follower of Australian politics for a few decades now, and an avid reader of Australian history which gives me some insight into a considerable period of time before that, I would put it to readers, that the process of Australia adopting multiculturalism as a national policy has never actually been put up for debate. Instead, what we have endured in this country is a succession of governments of both sides of Australian politics, leap frogging through time, all the while with a constant agenda, namely that we won’t bother to ask the Australian public how they feel about a particular wave of immigration, we’ll just do it.

A “Father knows best” approach to immigration displayed by both sides of Australian politics.

Many decry the ”inhumane” treatment of illegal boat arrivals in Australia (notably the ineffectual UNHRC, as well as certain minority lobby groups represented politically by the Australian greens), many more applaud the Howard government’s “tough stance on immigration”, few realise (or are willing to admit) that the Howard era presided over the single largest influx of non english speaking migrants in Australia’s history. While public attention was focussed on rioting going on in places like Villawood, through the back door, the Howard government rolled out the red carpet to wave after wave of non english speaking migrants.

Let me leave you with this question. IF you, as a voter, were to look at the events in nations like the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Chechnya, India, China and the events in Cronulla back in 2005 and think “I would hate to see that in this country” what democratic course of action is available to you?

In other words if you see multiculturalism as a shortcut to national instability, increased ethnic tension in the community and an erosion of Australian culture, values and overall way of life, who do you vote for?

With every political would-be-if-they-could-be in lockstep on this issue, where’s the choice?

Anyone else struck by they utter hypocrisy of Albury Councilor Darryl Bettridge’s call for Albury police to rid “his shop” of illicit drugs and antisocial behaviour? (Border Mail, front page 17/9/11)

Let’s be utterly clear on one issue right from the start, Sweethearts pizza in Dean Street has been little more than a haven for crime, violence, obnoxious drunken behaviour and anti-social malingering for as long as I can remember.

As if this wasn’t enough on its own, it’ proprietor Daryl Betteridge (who was shoehorned into council on the support of the “Dean Street Trader’s Association” essentially a lobby group of powerful and well cashed up grog peddlers and poker machine merchants) has consistently and obstinately fought against and defied calls by Albury police to reduce his late night trading hours to assist them in their efforts to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour in the CBD at night.

Now, despite styming them at every conceivable opportunity “civic-minded” Daza, is calling for Albury police to use their time and resources to clean up his hovel of a pizzeria.

I can tell you right now the fastest way to clean the joint up. CLOSE IT DOWN.

If it’s absolutely IMPERATIVE for the good of the community to be able to get the worst pizza ever made at five am, RUN IT AS A DELIVERY ONLY PIZZARIA AFTER MIDNGHT.

In other words STOP PROVIDING A VENUE FOR CRIME AND ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR TO LINE YOUR OWN FILTHY POCKETS AND THEN PRETENDING IT’S SOMEONE ELSE’S RESPONSIBILITY TO KEEP IT UNDER CONTROL.

For once in your entire life Mr. Bettridge, just one time, put the overall good of the community ahead of your own profit motive.

Ever heard of a self-important insignificance who calls himself “P Max”?

No I have to admit I was blissfully ignorant too, his real name is Peter Maxwell Slattery, he’s an Albury “local” (local in this instance meaning redneck tool) who fancies himself as a “representin” hip hop “arteeste”.

Nothing wrong with that I hear you protest, “good luck to him”.

Well I would have thought so too, that is until I discovered this on none other than good old you tube.

How pleased I was to see “old glory” the good old Aussie Battler flag, hung proudly against the cross of Odin.

A well known right wing racist hate symbol made popular by those great great guys in the Ku Klux Klan.(insert sarcasm font here)

I can only wish P-nut,  P-nis P-Max the best of luck.

Let’s hope he makes it all the way to the mean streets of Los Angeles or Downtown New York.

I’m sure Dr. Dre, Notorious B.I.G. Fitty Cent and all those other hard hittin’ negroes will see the funny side of white supremacist rap music.

Alternately Mr. “P-Max” Slattery might just find himself with a proverbial cap-in-his-ass.

Can’t help but feel it’d be no great loss to humanity if he did.