Legacy’s..... and How the Cat got Belled.

G’day Possums,

It’s been a week of legacy’s, from those acknowledging Dame Margaret Scott’s enormous contribution to Australian dance at her funeral service, the ballet school’s memorial and yesterday’s state government’s memorial. All celebrating a woman who had such a positive impact on so many lives and ultimately for the nation and which has given me much pause for thought.

The pictures on this weeks blog are some of my photographs recently done for Heather Anthony’s delightful children’s book, “Mouse Sprouts” (link at bottom of blog)

A less positive legacy and one that the Ruling Rabble and their fellow travellers, propagandists, trolls, spruikers and other ne'er-do-wells are now running miles from are the consequences of their racist hate: the murderous shootings at the Christchurch mosques.

Promulgated over the last 20 years, initially by war criminal, Little Johnny Howard and in large part by the IPA and The Ugly American, Murdoch’s low-rent journals: is their so-called libertarian efforts to repeal section 18C so that racial vilification was to be seen as “free speech” but  was in reality for partisan political gain and the politics of divisiveness.

Suddenly race-baiting, “dog-whistling”, Rabid-the-Hun’s catch-cry, “Islamophobia never killed anyone...” The Deep North’s Red Terror’s, ”Islam is an infection, a contagion that needs elimination..” the porcine faux Attorney General, Bookshelves Brandis’ “Everyone has the right to be a bigot” and Arsehole Anning’s “….final solution...” speech (widely applauded by ruling rabble parliamentarians btw) was suddenly seen for what it really is, not “free-speech” but hate speech, fear mongering, cruelty and outright overt racism.

The NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Adern has shown us what leadership looks like and although we already knew that our emperor had no clothes, Scummo, now totally naked, is nationally, extremely unedifying.

Trying to salvage something from the hole his Ruling Rabble had dug, Scummo ventured onto “The Project” and an interview with Waleed Aly who a couple of nights before had, with controlled emotion in discussing the mosque shootings, “belled the cat” and implicated Scummo directly as a racist.

What transpired was what was expected, spin, bluster, smug arrogance, disdain, obfuscation, dissembling and, naturally, little content.

After 35 minutes, the hole was a lot bigger.

Counterattacking from the foetid swamps of The Oz, Janus Albrechtson irrationally opined that the “Left” are as bad as race-haters like Arsehole Anning who literally blamed the shootings on the Muslims for being at the mosque and like Potato-Head Dutton, calling the left out for seeking political advantage….only indicating that this Murdoch shill has nowhere to hide either and by trying on an argument of false equivalency and ignoring reality, further damns herself.

Also doing “her bit” for the Ruling Rabble cause was the hapless Linda Reynolds who on National TV said when the bill was passed to allow very sick refugees in our concentration camps to be transferred to Australia for medical treatment she was, “….almost physically ill.” Such humanitarian sentiment had her mind then wander off on a frolic of its own to do a bit of Mussie-bashing about the Bali bombings… but she "...wasn’t going to politicise the issues….".

I’m not making this up, Petals.

Some are saying that these events are now a turning point but I’m more Cassandra-like: in that the effort to turn this nation around is almost impossible as long as our media is in the hands of so few and those who control so much of it and are so right wing........ or just plain fascist.

Hoo-roo Petals,

Shane

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mouse-Sprouts-Heather-Anthony/dp/1916027601/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Mouse+Sprouts&qid=1553299547&s=book

Notes on the Tribute.

G'day all,

On Friday March 15 there was a memorial at The State Theatre to celebrate the life of Dame Margaret Scott AC, DBA, OBE, better known as Maggie or Miss Scott.

Hundreds arrived at the Arts Centre: teachers, past and present, ex students, Board members, choreographers, television performers and others, whose lives had been affected in varying degrees by this formidable woman.

Guard of Honour

On slowly filing into the theatre we were greeted in the aisles by a “Guard of Honour“ by what seemed zillions of students from “the School,” causing me to reflect that 52 years ago “the School” in Brunswick St, Fitzroy consisted of only some 30 boys and girls of the First and Second years.

I watched the audience shuffling past as the students stoically maintained graceful posture, particularly the girls, having to hold their arms out so their hands were at tutu’s edge and further reflected on the audience / performer relationship with a misappropriation of Milton’s, “They also serve who only stand and wait."

Angus Denton

10 minutes later Steven Heathcote introduced proceedings with heartfelt tributes from himself, Maggies son Angus, Colin Peasley, and David McAllister AM, Director of The Australian Ballet. Heathcote, Peasley and McAllister were generally all young contemporaries and noted how, through their association with Maggie their lives had irrevocably altered, something they would never change

Interspersed with these tributes was a poignant work, by Paulina Quinteros, ”Embrace” dedicated to Maggie’s husband Dick and sons Matthew and Angus, and beautifully danced by Chloe Reynolds ( NCD, Newcastle) and Daniel Savetta (formerly Washington Ballet.)

"Embrace"

Graeme Murphy’s tribute followed and for perhaps the next 10-15 minutes (?) he took us on an enthusiastically spontaneous, note-less journey: part history, part anecdote, part aesthetic and manifesto but all highlighting his joyous relationship with a like mind; and who, as a protege and later in his own mature creative works paved a continuum of Maggie’s legacy and that of a ballet tradition in Australia.

I thought, too of the tenets of Noverre, Blasis, Diaghilev, the works of Martha Graham , Pina Bausch and others and that “...many are called but few are chosen.”

 A delightful pas-de-deux, from Murphy’s Nutcracker was movingly and fluidly performed by the AB’s Benedicte Bemet and Jarryd Madden...a testament to his amalgam of historical acuity and contemporary elegance.

Nutcracker, Pas-de-Deux.

Tributes from Marylin Rowe AM, OBE and Lisa Pavanne, respectively, former and current Dir: ABS followed and Stephen Baynes,”Ballo Barrocco” was then well danced by the Level 8 students from the School with the memorial finishing with a video presentation of a fruitful life with past staff and students filing onto the stage to lay a rose in honour of Maggie.

"Ballo Barrocco"

It was quietly, emotional.

Rose laying tribute.

To Dick, Angus and Matt and families, condolences, hopefully the extensive sympathy publicly expressed for your wife and mother’s death will in some way assuage your private grief.

Lawrence Winder

Pell-Pot... Beckett, you are not!

G'day Possums,

well, it seems that one of the last edifices of Australian civil society, the Catholic Church has been shown to be rotten from the top down, too. Joining the finance and banking sectors, treatment of the elderly in nursing homes,  endemic violence against women, the appalling conditions for incarcerated indigenous youth, the anti-environmental stupidities in the Murray-Darling. 

The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has claimed Cardinal George Pell, who has been convicted on 5 counts over two boys, as a paedophile and is awaiting sentencing.

"It's a sad story and it wasn't of much interest to me" said Pell-Pot (*2) when asked how much he knew of his priests paedophile activities, betraying his dismissive clerical arrogance and also, as parents of his victims have told "....his sociopathic lack of empathy" as he didn't seem fazed by the fact that 7% of his clergy were serial perpetrators.

 Le Thoronet

Shades of... “You do not, have the power to command bishops.”* railed Beckett to Henry 2 in 1162 as the king attempted to pull the clergy into judicial line on similar matters.

The enraged howls emanating from The Ugly American Murdoch's shills over his Pell's conviction had ex prime miniature, Little Johnny Howard in the lead, and Miranda The Mad, Devine followed by Blot-on-the-Landscape, Bolt both frothing at the mouth over this alleged miscarriage of justice..."...he's a good bloke", "...a witty conversationalist".. "...he couldn't have done it" claimed all three, not in possession of the facts of the case, but seeing perhaps truly for the first time, in this "...disgraceful decision.." (by 12 jurors) that one of their apparently unassailable conservative, nay, fascist pillars, had suddenly fallen, disgraced and more importantly, was forever impotent.

Silvacane

Did it occur to them that their political commentary and lying might now come under closer scrutiny and that Little Johnny who was so keen to kill Iraqi's on a hunch about WMD's and send troops into indigenous camps on falsified information, be racist to the very refugees whose plight he had helped cause were now exposed and didn't have the moral cover they once assumed through association?That they were justly being clearly seen as craven paedophile apologists and protectors?

Le Thoronet

Fractured is the glass of benign paternalism and the isolation of "truth" troublemakers that had worked for centuries as had, "You do not have the power to command bishops"... as when Bernard of Clairvaux did a family take-over of the Cistercian monasteries set up by a rather gentle Englishman, Stephen Harding (which was probably the last time the French saw anything gentle in the English), which became in the so-called, "Middle -Ages" a prototype multi-national organization, calls up the Crusades, castigates Richard the Lionheart's mum, Eleanor for being a little fiesty (and too fun loving) and then he helped set up the Templars who were a multi-national business (before Phillip IV tried a terminal take-over of his own a few years down the track)...and shooed the peasants off their land and out of their villages in the godly pursuit of larger profits and more land for their "Lay-brothers" (serfs) to work whilst they discussed how many angels could dance on the head of a pin!

The Forge, Fontenay

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" said Denis Diderot, who is one man who would have heartily applauded Julia Gillard's setting up of this RC into child sex abuse. Who, as Prime Minister was so consistently and foully abused by those now singing the praises of a convicted paedophile cleric and who hypocritically think the law is what they say it is but doesn't apply to them.

End times? What a mess has been made of this country.

Hoo-roo petals,

Shane

Silvacane

* Ackroyd, History of England… Foundation. Macmillan 2011

*2Pell-Pot: the nickname given Pell by staff at the Catholic Education Office when he became Archbishop of Melbourne (when the convicted offences occurred) and halted all new appointments that had been made, particularly those of women.