Category: Australiana

I’m with the French, for once

Advancing against the Haka - £2,500 fine from the IRB

Who are these boofheads running the IRB?

As all you Rugby types will already know, Les Bleus have been fined for linking arms and walking towards the Kiwis while they were doing their nuts – sorry, doing the Haka.   Makes a change from the French running for cover and eating cheese.   I wouldn’t have known about this, had not the Brisbane Times article caught my eye (click on the piccie to read it).   You’ll find that 98% of the Aussies reading it – some 8,300 – think that they shouldn’t have been fined, and the comments indicate that it’s time New Zealand grew up and stopped enforcing unfair rules on other teams.

Ban the Haka!

The Monarchy and Rangers – a Surf through two Nations

I am a regular reader of the ABC’s Drum – a fact that probably leaves most of you cold unless you happen to recall the occasional article that I have linked here for your amusement.

Most of the time the articles are too specifically Australian to be worthy of exposure on The Chariot, but today there is a beaut inspired by the imminent arrival of Betty and Phil in Canberra this evening for a short visit which will, at last, include Brisbane, and will culminate in the opening of CHOGM in Perth in ten days time.

Strangely, the piece – entitled “Long to reign over us – God save the Republicans” – was not written by an Aussie, but by an antipodean-savvy Brit; it’s a lament for the failure of republicanism in both countries, and a damning, but amusing, indictment of the movement’s shortcomings.

Having chuckled, I decided that I needed to learn more about this bilingual Brendan O’Neill, so I did a little armchair  surfing.   It turns out that the gentleman is the editor of Spiked, a UK web-site vaguely similar to the Australian Punch, a source that has also been linked here to the dismay of our more restrained members.

Now, this is where the story really takes off.

Now peruse the unexpected dénoument . . .

Have you seen my cows?

Last night Boadicea and I cooked a roast for our Aussie grandson and his current girlfriend.

She’s every inch a modern Brisbane girl; she’s tall, elegant, intelligent, poised, and has that sort of healthy physique that tells you she would be equally at home on the high-fashion catwalk as she would be as a beach-bunny surfing a 5 metre wave or outback wrestling a croc – and winning.

At present she’s teaching in Charters Towers, a small rural town in far north Queensland, one of the places where cyclone Yasi stormed through earlier this year.   She entertained us with stories of the storm and chatted about the effect on the local children of the recent Gillard knee-jerk halt on live cattle exports.

But the tale she told us to illustrate some of the differences she’s found between life in the capital city and in her bush town, bears repeating. Continue reading “Have you seen my cows?”