Rage Quit

I grew up thinking of Malcolm Fraser and Australia’s Liberal Party as the bad guys, a view which only became stronger when I immersed myself in 1975 lore as a political science student in the late 1980s. When Gough Whitlam died last year, I lost a hero. Once I would as happily have danced on Fraser’s grave as on Margaret Thatcher’s.

But while Thatcher’s legacy in Britain becomes more toxic by the year, Fraser’s is more benign. His government presided over some positive changes—welcoming Vietnamese refugees, establishing SBS, opposing apartheid and white minority rule in Rhodesia, and the Northern Territory Land Rights Act—and saw through some of what Gough started. I’ll never approve of what he did in 1975, although I attach most of the blame to Governor-General Sir John Kerr for cravenly going along with it. Dismantling Medibank was a blot on his copybook as well, as was making a minister of John Howard. But after his time as prime minister he did and said a lot worth admiring.

David Pope’s cartoon in the Canberra Times captured it best. I love his reference to the old jokes about how Fraser looked like an Easter Island statue, too.

Time to relinquish the rage.

20 March 2015

Memories of Pterry

A sad day for fans of comic fantasy, a genre Terry Pratchett pretty much came to define.

My copy of The Colour of Magic dates from 1985, the first Corgi paperback edition, which described the story on the front cover as “Jerome K. Jerome meets LORD OF THE RINGS (with a touch of Peter Pan)” and on the back as THE WACKIEST AND MOST ORIGINAL FANTASY SINCE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (who knew Death started out as a blurb writer?). The comparisons had a whiff of desperation, but did the trick: as a teenage fan of Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Three Men in a Boat, I paid my A$4.95 and started reading.