Blue Remembered Hills

Early morning papers and coffee for John at Clouds' End, near Dorrigo, this weekend.

A Man, His Bike…and His Mum

If the Tour de France revelations below left you feeling cheated, as they did me, then Luke Bream and his mum, Carolyn, should restore your faith in human nature. If it doesn’t restore your faith in the race itself, it will remind you of the Tour’s ability to inspire.

Local Lad Rising

It’s been a shocking morning. Went to bed at 1.30am after watching the live coverage of what seemed to be a marvellous stage of the Tour de France in the Pyrenees, displaying all that was good about the sport.

Turned on the radio at 7am to hear that the Cofidis team had withdrawn after a positive drug test. Then got to work to hear that the race leader, and winner of last night’s stage, Michael Rasmussen, had been sacked by his team for lying about which country he was in when he was supposed to have been undergoing a random, pre-race test.

As a friend pointed out, it’s easy to mistake Mexico for Italy when you’re on drugs.

If there’s a silver lining to this grubby cloud, it’s that Australian rider Cadell Evans is now lying second. He grew up near here and worked in a local cycle shop, Woodsey’s Wheels, in Woolgoolga.

Presidential Opening

Carl, as president, opens the first Coffs Harbour Short Sharp Film Festival on Saturday night. We had an audience of 250 and it all went swimmingly. Phew.

....And Further Up

We're getting in even deeper with this interview with Andrew Keen, failed net entrepeneur and now, apparently, full-time baiter of anyone who publishes on the web. I think it means we're eating ourselves and the traditional media.

Disappearing up etc etc

For a piece of post-modernism (I think), try this and the comments. It’s all about the language used in blogs but the comments take it off in a totally different direction. Required reading for anyone who blogs or reads blogs. And I couldn’t find any reference to it on at
OUP either.

Festival Update

With only ten days to go, I think you’re due an update on the Short Sharp Film Festival.

Not much has been happening, frankly, because when we reviewed the entries the day before the closing date, we were confronted with a bunch of sausages talking about road safety and a guy with a hangover vomiting over a priest. While the latter was heavy with symbolism (possibly the former too, but it escaped me), and we did have a couple of potential winners, we didn’t feel we had enough to justify making a night of it.

In true media tradition, though, there was a flood on the last day and we seem to be in business. After viewing all the entries, two things occur.

Technology, in the form of relatively cheap cameras and editing packages, is a great enabler for people of all ages. It’s hard to see how you could have mounted a festival like this ten years ago. However, to return to an old theme, just because you can use the technology, doesn’t mean you should, unless you’ve got something to say or show. The fact that you clearly need traditional elements like inspiration and an ability to tell a story is reassuring, I think.

The exercise has afforded a fascinating and sometimes chilling insight into people’s minds, which is exactly what a creative endeavour is supposed to do. If you want to know any more, you’ll have to turn up at the screening the weekend after next.

Still Black and White

The debate about the Federal Government’s take-over
of Aboriginal land in the Northern Territories to address the problem of child abuse continues. The gulf between the Government’s “something must be done” position and those who say that what is proposed is paternalistic, opportunistic and purely political is caused by the conflict between those who still feel guilt at what happened when the European settlers arrived, and what has happened since, and those who believe that feeling guilty will not turn back the clock or improve the lot of a single abused child; and between those who believe that a traditional way of life can be resurrected or preserved and those who believe that integration is the only way forward.

These articles by Noel Pearson and Germaine Greer
(I don’t think the latter has appeared in the Australian press) sum up the debate.

Filling Time

There can’t be many dentist’s chairs from which you can sit and watch migrating humpback whales.

John Nevell’s surgery in Coffs Harbour overlooks the jetty, the marina and many acres of the Pacific Ocean so you can scan the ocean for a few minutes before he reclines the chair and gets down to business and powers up the drill. I didn’t see any today but Debbie, his assistant told me that she saw three pods go past yesterday.

A few days ago, Sara and I sat on the headland to the south of Sandy Beach and saw a fine display of breaching, blowing and tail-waving.