He didn’t need to die, but his passion for bringing the world’s attention to the loss of habitat eventually contributed to his death. He was sincere, committed, decent, inspired and worthy of our highest regard. Vale, Steve Irwin. While you were alive it was easy to see you as a larikin. We took for granted […]

The truly tragic resignation of Geoff Gallop as Premier of Western Australia – announced yesterday with great courage – has prompted me to write about another tragedy likely to have been due to a form of depression you won’t read about in the newspapers. One morning last week a young man, dressed in a business […]

The good news is he’s been arrested again. The better news is this cycle hasn’t sent me into quite the same spiral as before. This time, I didn’t get sick. There were a few weeks of chasing around after him, meeting him to get him food, buy him groceries, encourage him and join him in […]

I was just playing and trying to provoke with my recent post asking whether obesity was a product of “mummy culture”. I thought it was probably the truth, but not the whole truth. And I thought it was more to do with Mum being seduced into supersizing our lunch boxes and dinner plates and driving […]

When I defended fast food against the charge that it was to blame for our increasing obesity, most comments said that obesity was the result of lack of exercise. I think that is a superficial explanation too, so I wanted to throw some more straws in the wind which suggest to me that culture in […]

I’ve been described as a food fascist, and while I don’t sit down at the dinner table singing “Tomorrow belongs to me” I do watch what I eat. And sometimes what I am watching is a Macca’s Quarter Pounder. They have never done me any harm (photos on request, “commercial in confidence”), and at least […]

There is a thesis in why some deaths are more newsworthy than others. 50 people die in London and it is high news, more than that number die every week in Iraq, and we barely notice, while our need for mobility led to an average 31 deaths each week on the road last year, and […]

A few posts ago I threatened to start a database which would check on experts’ predictions after the event to see how many of them are correct. Now I’d like to make a nomination, even though I don’t yet have a database going – Tim Flannery. Tim’s famous for a number of predictions, one of […]

Moruya is a pretty but unremarkable town on the New South Wales south coast. It sits on the Moruya River, where a concrete bridge marks the entry to a small town centre. Slowly it is changing in ways typical of much of the Australian east coast. While inland regional areas are losing population, a slow […]