Rape and Pillage

G'day Possums,

Mrs Wombat and I went on a little amble t'other day.  

After staying with friends near Benalla we meandered up to Chiltern and on to Goulburn, perusing The Big Merino "Rambo", a magnificently haughty specimen and then diverted to the Illawarra Highway, travelling through a very colonial Englishness of Exeter with its delightfully understated 1895 Art Nouveau St Aidens Anglican church, to Sutton Forest and then on to Kiama.

The Big Merino "Rambo"

We  returned via the M1, taking in the beautiful Pacific coast with its multiple secluded inlets and dramatic landscapes south of Narooma, the beautiful country of Tilba Tilba conversing there with some of the delightful and self proclaimed notorious, "Tilba Tappers" to an excellent lunch at the Tathra  wharf.

Back into Victoria, Cape Conran and the Snowy River estuary at Orbost were highlights and after a stay in Bairnsdale, returned to the home burrow.

 Snowy River estuary at Orbost

So why the title, Rape and Pillage following such a visually stunning trip?

Well, the pillage could in some fashion be explained by the road-kill carnage seen in this 1400 km trip: 22 Wombat, 2 Echidna and dozens of Wallaby and Kangaroo carcasses littering the road side, particularly in the NSW region. The rape? There was a small cove/beach near Kiama that had once been full of shell middens until the arrival of the colonists who denuded the area of its flora, built a wharf to transport stone quarried further inland to Sydney and generally laid waste to an Indigenous culture of a beautifully balanced environment, food sources and shelter material. This experience was sadly, seen repeated a number of times in other places.

Turingal Point, near Tathra

Reflecting on this, it seems that our "national culture" was "set" back in the 1790's.

We have a lamentable world record for the extinction of mammals, we are still (in Deep North, Queensland) clear felling/stripping bush for cattle farms, over-logging marginal forest with endangered species (in The Tardis State of Victoria) and polluting bays and rivers nation-wide with run-off from roads, farm fertilizers, and coal mines and sewage.

Tathra Wharf

Water theft by large irrigation companies is aided and abetted by our apology of a deputy prime minister / water minister the New Zealander, Barnyard Joyce and today I listened to the faux environment minister, Fictions Frydenberg, prevaricating on re-newable energy in order to kow-tow to fossil fuel companies and abnegate responsibility for the nation's gas supply and allow "fracking" to destroy more farmland and pollute the water table in the worlds driest continent instead of developing a viable and sustainable energy policy.

Unfortunately I didn't vote for Santos, AGL, Alinta or Ergon et al, to run this country, so I don't know why this present Ruling Rabble thinks that sucking from the taxpayer teat qualifies them to not lead the nation but blithely follow multi-national business' profit plans to the country's environmental, economic detriment and eventual demise.

Kiama

Interestingly, during the trip, similar attitudes popped up in conversation with other travellers or locals... none of them happy with the manner in which this place is being allegedly governed. I would have expected in rural towns more conservative attitudes to be expressed but the opposite was the case. It was the same with shop-keepers as it was with the person on the street. Once, during a picnic lunch at Holbrook in a conversation with a Adelaide couple, a person nearby joined in to agree politically, with what we were saying, so it seems that our famed reticence not to publicly and openly discuss politics is being eroded by the sheer continuing incompetence of the Ruling Rabble and its ad hoc administration. Even a middle class couple from Victoria's Blue Ribbon bay-side opined that we're no longer in a good place and were thoughtfully amused at my fantasy suggestion of the woman converting the tip of her walking pole into an elimination device of the corrupt Reboxetine Robb who has "Quislinged" the nation to the Chinese.

Murulan

Great Uncle Otto's boy, Eric, Vichy Abetz has again provided ample evidence not only of the Ruling Rabble's abject hypocrisy but also their legislative confusion: a front-runner of the push to have section 18C wiped from the statute books as he thought it limited free speech, Vichy has called for the banning of some Septic-Tank Rapper singing an "equal love" rap song at the NRL Grand Final entertainment. It seems that personal religious kant and the divisiveness of deeply ingrained homophobia trumps policy.... and community!

No wonder people will publicly query the proficiency, stability and veracity of this rabble or for that matter given the constant ranting of failed Ruling Rabble prime miniature, Rabid-the-Hun, its sanity, too.
Hoo-roo, Petals,

Shane.

St Aidens, Exeter, NSW