MrGareth’s Missives

A good friend of mine in London pointed out something that had already been rattling around my head: "the BA strikes are the fourth part of our return to the 70s....anything else we could copy from then? 3 day week???"

It seems there’s a couple of unique political scenarios in play right now that mirror the mid-1970s in remarkable clarity, and who knows how these retro-scenes will conclude.

So it seems today that what has amusingly become known as the “ConDem” alliance between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats has unravelled.  I think its wise for Mr Clegg to open discussions with Labour – afterall, if he and David Cameron can’t reach agreement with the lure of the keys to Number 10 Downing Street as the elephant in the room and with the media spotlight fuelled by an expectant nation as bright as it is; what chance do they have holding a government together in the melee of the day to day?

It turns out that parallel negotiations  between The Liberal Party and The Conservatives in 1974 to solve another hung parliament collapsed on exactly the same issue – electoral reform.  Its staggering that in 35 years this impasse is still not solved.  That break down in talks let the Labour party back into government as I hope it will today.

Of course, that situation is a slight reverse of what is happening now though – that scenario prevented the incumbent party from retaining government and allowed the opposition in the door.  Today of course, the reverse is – hopefully – happening: the challenging Conservatives might be denied power and the sitting government saved by Liberal collusion, bitter at their denial of electoral reform from the Tories.

Another major factor of course in this is Gordon Brown’s resignation (poor chap: "gifted man, ground down") – obviously a key condition of Clegg’s for negotiations to open.  Talks have already begun and David Miliband’s absence a clue as to who might be Gordon’s successor.  Of course Ted heath didn’t resign and was ultimately thrust out by his arch nemesis, Margaret Thatcher.  I often think that the relationship between Heath and Thatcher is a mirror of Brown’s and Blair’s.  I suspect Brown will now impersonate Heath’s grumpy back-bench grand-father demeanor for the remainder of his career.

But down under there’s another kooky mirror in play with those times.  Articles have started emerging drawing attention to the similarities between Kevin Rudd and 70s PM Gough Whitlam  – essentially boiling down to ‘lots of big ideas and good intentions; but executional incompetance’.  In fact, so much so that in a recent interview with Julia Gillard,  echoes of the great 1975 constitutional crisis of 1975 were heard.  The Labor party will – potentiall - nail the controversial Resources Tax to the Budget which Wayne Swan hands down today, thereby daring Tony Abbott to block it as Menzies did back then – triggering political crisis (known as “blocking supply”).

In fact, a half-way-house for Clegg is a mere “confidence and supply” agreement with one party or the other – agreeing only to support the government in confidence votes and in passing the budget. 

It struck me as odd though that while the Queen was able to solve the 1975  back then by empowering the Governor General to sack the Whitlam Government; she is not empowered right now – thankfully – to ask Mr Cameron to just get on and form a government according to what is clearly a popular mandate, if not a technical majority.

So while the famous line from Whitlam then: “God save the Queen, for no one can save the Governor General” one wonders who will save Nick Clegg from his very uncomfortable rock/hard place, Devil/deep-blue-sea dilemma.

(Fortunately, one parallel with the mid-1970s completely reversed is that England have qualified for the 2010 world cup which is more than they could manage in 1974.  Not only that but they are seeded for once!)

I’ve been to a lot of gigs recently but I’ve not seen good old fashioned Rock and Roll histrionics like I was treated to at The Luna Park, Big Top – appropriately a Circus venue.  The Cult were half an hour late on stage.  When you pay more than $100 on a school night, that doesn’t go down very well.  If he was at his creative cutting edge I think people would have been more patient – but lets face it, he’s not.

The first track of the gig was testy.  They started dramatically with the opening chords of “Nirvana” but within only as few minutes Astbury had kicked over a speaker and marched off the stage in a strop – flicking back his locks of thick black hair.  The band – no doubt used to this kind of behaviour, stoically played on, Titanic-esque.  This situation got more surreal as the track hit another verse, and the obvious vocals the crowd were singing went without vocals on stage, because there was no vocalist!  He returned soon before the track was out, and seemed to apologise to his team- but not to the crowd.

Ian Astbury is not the man he was.  He’s now a fairly portly chap – a reality that hits us all in middle age of course.  At 47, he actually made a point to address media mention of his wider-than-normal girth, blaming it on a recent hip operation.  Not sure why he felt the need to bring this up,  I expect someone who was recording in the eighties to be slightly shabbier version of his former self today.  Nonetheless, his personality dominated the event from start to finish.  He even at one point hinted at his well-known Jim Morrison delusions by breaking into lines from The End: “the killer awoke before dawn and put his boots on...”  Then he remembered who he was and returned to his own material.  Later on he asked the crowd how many of them were Christians before playing The Hollow Man.  “This one’s NOT for you” he said. Despite a good number of hands going up, everyone still rocked, without exception, as Devil-worship imagery played behind him.

The crowd were clearly split between Love people and Electric people.  I am a died-in-the-wool Love person and know it back to front, but I don’t think much more than half the crowd were.  This clearly frustrated Astbury at one point and he even castigated the audience when he left the vocals out for a chorus for the crowd to fill in – without much success: “You don’t even know the words” he shouted grumpily.  The tempo rose considerably however for Ethe Electric material – the joint jumped!

So all the histrionics aside, it was a terrific gig.  The Mosh pit was livelier than any I’ve seen in Sydney this year.  There was more violence as Astbury threw several tambourines into the crowd.  One guy behind me successfully caught one but was beaten off it insistently by a very large gentleman with no neck.  From then on the latter continued to wind up the former by shaking it in his face.  I imagine that took the edge off his night.

Listen!

One thought did blow my mind as I listened to these old tracks I’d enjoyed throughout my adolescence:  we were able to broadcast instantaneously to thousands of people at the click of a button video, audio, text and images from this gig using a location-intelligent wallet-sized device affordably available to most.  We can do this using GPS Satellite technology, 3G mobile networks and of course the internet – all technologies I couldn’t even dream of when these songs were first cut. More has changed than the circumference of Mr Astbury's girth.

UPDATE: some great video of the night from as close as I was, a bit more central perhaps.  A good sense of the mosh pit from here:

I just had to share this - the loudest I've laughed out loud for a long time.  But I guess in typical fashion, you might have had to be there - i.e. watch the film.  So I'll try and set the scene.

Grow Your Own is...well, I actually think its best described by a reviewer on the IMDB site:

"Wow! A genuinely funny and moving film that lingered in my head for days. Probably the most unsexy list of ingredients to make a movie from - gardening, immigration, telephone masts - but it links all these plots with an amazing cast of characters who it is impossible not to care for." 

I really don't think I could do a better job of summing it up than that.  Delightful film and all along I thought its a perfect example of that genre of English Indie movie like Full Monty, Brassed Off, Happy Go Lucky and in fact any number of Mike Leigh movies.  Jolly black comedies with deep characters, tremendous dialogue, tight plotlines and those kind of bittersweet moments that can move you quite profoundly.

As the reviewer said, who could imagine a more unlikely combination than immigration and allotments to make for a successful yarn.

However, to share the gag I have to ruin a little bit of a one of the sub-plots - so please forgive me.  But it involves an African woman who's husband appears to be missing, feared dead, and she's waiting for word.  Anyway, there's a very moving scene where the lost husband - who obviously got seperated from her in refugee mayhem - reappears and comes to find her with flowers.  After a brief reunion cuddle, she stares teary-eyed into his eyes and says in her exotic French-Saharan accent:

"I thought you were dead."

And he replied, with a huge grin, "I am not dead.  I was in Leicester".

If you've ever been to Leicester, you will understand how the two could be confused!

Elections are often entertaining blood sport (Bigot-gate a fine example!), and sometimes actually significant or important to your life.  Very rarely are they of generational and historical significance.  The 2010 UK Election could be.  

There’s a famous book most students of British Political History would be familiar with: The Strange Death of Liberal England.  

The Liberal Party of Gladstone and Lloyd George (even Churchill very briefly) died a sudden and mysterious death at the 1922 election.  Certainly it became for the most part politically irrelevant as the Union-backed Labour party surged into ascendancy on the back of Universal Suffrage in 1918 and the changing make up of industrial, urbanised, post-WW1 Britain.

Its a very exciting thought that Nick Clegg in 2010 – more than 80 years later – could be bringing the party back from the dead like one of those scenes in Sci-Fi movies where cryogenically frozen astronauts are resurrected (Cleggmania spreads across Britain).  It could mark another tide-mark in the fascinating story of British politics – hopefully.

Labour’s relationship with the Unions that blessed its founding almost became the death of it in 1978.  "The Winter of Discontent" was where that relationship had finally become abusive and a dysfunctional state of near-revolution existed as uncollected rubbish and unburied dead mounted up.  1979: Enter the Thatcher years which dragged Britain so far to the right that when Labour did win back power 18 years later, Labour were forced to have become a softer, more socially acceptable version of the same thing when “Tory Sleeze” brought an end to Major’s government in 1997.  But even those two truly historic elections might not be as important as the one about to happen in this narrative of the changing make-up of one of the oldest democracies in the world.  

And what of the Liberals?   Answer – an ever intensifying flirtation with the Labour Party:  the Lib-Lab pact in the 1970s that didn’t work; the “Gang of Four” Labour MPs that left Labour in the 1980s and formed the Social Democrats (that ultimately merged with the Liberals to form what we have today  - The Liberal Democrats); and Paddy Ashdown’s dalliance with Tony Blair in the 1990s that almost saw him in the cabinet.

The final chapter of that story could happen on Thursday when hordes of disgruntled Labour voters – betrayed by Iraq but still offended by Tory sleeze – can’t bring themselves to vote for either and flock to Mr Clegg as a last resort, giving him anointing-power in a hung Parliament.  The 1920s leftward-shift - over corrected in the 1980s by Thatcher’s angry lunge to the right - might finally be coming back to the centre ground.  (Check out Scenario B here.)

Whether Clegg is able to anchor it there is another matter.  But it makes a refreshing bloody change whatever happens!
(I would like to see: Brown back in, beholden to Clegg, until he is quickly sacked by the Milliband Borthers – Camelot-esque – who achieve Labour renewal after new election within the year.)

UPDATE: Now the results are in and what has amusingly become known as the ConDem coalition brought to life, this new era in Liberal England has fully dawned.  Despite losing seats rather than winning them, the Lib Dems are a renewed force on the British political scene.  With a referendum on electoral reform on the agenda, the 70-year effort to regain political relevance in England for the Liberal party has almost been achieved.  Nick Clegg has secured five Lib Dem cabinet seats including the nebulous role of Deputy Prime Minister for himself (portfolios to be announced), not to mention 15 ministerial posts across Whitehall. The Tories are apparently furious that Cameron gave so much away, and many observers are quietly admiring Labour's tactic of negative bidding to force Cameron into negotiating himself an even more powerless position than he already had.  How the coalition will operate - how right it will be and how centre - will be fascinating, particularly as they get down to the business of brutal spending cuts to reduce the Greek-sized deficit.  The youth and inexperience of the combined, not to mention their philisophical incombatability - will hamper them greatly.  It will be fascinating blood sport thats for sure!

WARNING: POLITICAL RANT - I have to vent spleen about this.  But Rudd's back-flip on climate change is one of the worst examples of political cowardice I've ever seen.  Not only cowardice, but betrayal as well.

So he has postponed an Emmissions Trading Scheme until 2013 - a waste of three years.  The price of carbon will not change for three years.  Therefore, our habits and behaviours will not change for three years.  Climate change will march on unabated.  When Lateline last night asked all three ministers with environment in their portfolios - Penny Wong, Peter Garrett and Greg Combet - to come and explain this outrageious back flip - they all declined.  Ducking a fight is one act of cowardice.  Hiding from explaining why makes it so much worse.

Rudd may have forgotten that one of the top three reasons he was elected to replace the Howard Government was to do something about climate change - but I haven't. Now he's just utterly failed.  God's teeth, even Howard would have done something about the environment by 2013!  

We've listened to him harp on in his traditional high-horse, self-righteous tone about how it is the "moral challenge of our generation"; contrasting his position with Abbott's <yawn> "absolute crap".  But at least Abbott has taken action and has a policy.  I don't agree with any of it, but at least he's assertive, decisive and committed.

For me, I agree with the Liberal analysis of Rudd position on the ETS.  His impressive sense of urgency in October/November to get it passed was so he could walk tall on the world stage and laud it over his peers.  Now, post-Copenhagen, its fallen off the agenda for him - particularly since its turned into a fight.  Rudd's principle concern: not Australia, not even Labor.  Its Kevin Rudd.

Rudd has a double-dissolution trigger.  The reason I imagine these things exist is that if a government is being stonewalled by an intransigent opposition from passing something for which it has an undisputable poltical mandate to achieve - then it can re-draw the parliament along lines that will get the job done.  Rudd says he won't pull the trigger because he has committed to serve a full term.  I say that is a cop-out.  I say thats because he's frightened of fighting Abbott on a subject he can't articulate.

Whats more, instead of believing in the threat of climate change and argueing against the scepticism that has emerged in recent months, he has watched it fall off the political agenda and as a result neglected it as an issue.  He responded to the problem when he perceived it was a vote winner, whelched on it now it isn't.  That isn;t leadership, thats just cyncial.

Through his behaviour on this issue, Rudd has lost me.  I'll always support Labor - probably - but not Rudd.  Bring on Gillard or someone else (not sure who!) But I'm over Rudd as of today.  I find it difficult to accommodate his patronising, aloofness and his arrogance.  But when this is combined with spineless cowardice and cynical opportunism, he becomes the worst of all monsters.

As usual, all the focus around ANZAC day  is always on ANZAC Cove in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 .  Admittedly its of obvious importance as the first time Australian forces were committed,  not as a division of the British Army, but as an Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.  The campaign itself was a complete disaster and the Allies abandoned the Turkish Penninsular beachhead within the year.  

The controversy around the British leadership of the campaign is the sharper end of an otherwise fond relationship between Britain and its former colony, but its always struck me as appropriate Australia’s military heritage is founded on a battle for a beach!

While the emphasis on Gallipoli is burgeoning, no doubt increasingly close to the hearts of those who have visited ANZAC Cove as part of their backpacker travels.  But its occurred to me that there is a somewhat blinkered obsession with the action there.

On St George’s Day my father was just appointed Chaplain of the St George's Church in Ypres, Belgium (congratulations Dad!).  Not many Australians seem to have even heard of any of the battles of Ypres, but they play a powerful and significant role in the British, French and German narrative of the First World War.  In fact, British Prime Minister Lloyd George of the Third Battle of Ypres – Paschendale (June to November 1917), ““the battle which, with the Somme and Verdun, will always rank as the most gigantic, tenacious, grim, futile and bloody fight ever waged in the history of war.” (In fact more Australians - 20,000 - died in 1917 than in the whole of World War Two.)  But Ypres or "wipers" as it was colloquially known - is fairly overlooked in the ANZAC Day legends.

Nevertheless it is staggering if you compare the realities of the ANZAC campaign at Gallipoli and those at Ypres.  For a start – and this is quite arresting – there were 2,700 NZ dead in the whole of the nine-month Gallipoli campaign but the New Zealand Army Core in Ypres sustained 2,700 casualties (800 dead) on the 12th October 1917 alone – just one day.  

Similarly, the comparison is even starker when you compare the Australian sacrifice at Ypres with that of the supposedly Legendary exploits at Gallipoli.  Overall, Australia sustained 28,000 casualties (8,700 dead) on the Gallipoli peninsular in a nine month campaign (important to remember Britain took 73, 485 casualties with 21,155 ded).  On the 26th September 1917 there were 5,500 Australian casualties – in one day!  That day – The Battle of Polygon Wood  - was actually considered one of Australia’s most successful engagements in the First World War!  

Overall, the Australian monument at Ypres today commemorates  48,000 Australian dead in the Ypres Salient!  But that might sheer guesswork.  So many soldiers just disappeared in the mud at Paschendale, there is no way of knowing who died where.  (Many Australian sappers died in the mine battles underground prior to the huge explosion at Messines Ridge   – a reality chillingly described in the bestseller Birdsong .)

So on this my ninth ANZAC Day in Austrlaia, I’m not going to obsess over Gallipoli this year, I’m instead going to think about William and Fanny Seabrook.  The Australian couple lost all three of their sons in the days following the beginning of the Menin Road offensive on the Ypres Salient on 20th September 1917.  While the younger brother Willam (20) was buried in the area around Ypres, the remains of his elder brothers Theo (25) and George (24) were never found.  It was their first, last and only action of the war.  

As my father wrote to me in an email: “ANZAC Day is commemorated in Ypres.  There is a Service of Remembrance at Buttes Road Cemetery at 06.00 (local time) and Last Post at the Menin Gate at 11.00.  We will remember them.”  Glad someone will.

UPDATE: In a recent visit to Ypres i was able to find William's name on the Menin Gate among those listed as disapeared - i.e. whose body was never found.  Here it is:

I just felt the need to put pen to paper as I tried to wrestle with the various conflicting emotions that arise from the news of the murder of Carl Williams this week.

For those who are not familiar with the story of the Gangland War in Melbourne last decade, this little video dossier by the murders’ chief reporter – John Silverter of the Melbourne Age -  is very informative.    It apparently began and ended with Carl Williams – his attempted murder in 1999 by the Moran brothers, and his actual murder on Monday in prison, where he was serving a 35-year sentence for some of the 25-odd murders sparked by that original attempt.  Most will know the yarn first became a book  by Silvester "Leadbelly", and that became the hit Channel 9 TV series, "Underbelly".  The latter does a sensational – and very commercially successful – job at glamourising some very grubby and nasty people and acts.  Herein lies the moral struggle.

For the most part, Williams’ death is life-imitating-art and would make for the perfect denouement to the TV series.  A co-ordinated attack.  An assault by a supposed friend and ally.  The security guard “off-duty” and no one watching the CCTV.  Beaten to death in 10 seconds with a metal bar taken from a nearby excercise bike.  Left in his cell to bleed to death for 20 minutes before anyone came to his aid.  His ex-wife famous reaction – two hours in the hair-dresser’s.  

He was killed while reading the paper.  The lead story in the Melbourne papers that day?  How his daughter’s school education was being paid for by the police – public confirmation for some that he’d gone “snitch”.

So while the glamour is compelling, then my mind wanders to what he did.  Two crimes spring to mind that give the lie to the comical, endearing larrikin that Channel 9 portray him as.

1.    The murder of Jason Moran which Williams Commissioned and was convicted for collusion in.  I vividly remember news of this breaking on the radio while I was shaving one morning; and despite how de-sensitised I was by news of gangland murders in Melbourne by then, I was still completely shocked by the brutal slaying of a man in front of his children at a footy match.

(This soundless video from Underbelly demonstrates the glamour with which Channel 9 portrayed the violence).

2.    The murder of Graham Kinniburgh , known as “The Munster”; a non-violent safe-breaker in his 60’s killed outside his home – unarmed.

So while the glamour of the gangland thing is well-established now, with the Underbelly franchise now in its third series and once again in the business of glamourising a living, breathing, thieving criminal http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/underbelly-is-disgraceful... your mind must return to what and who these people are. I found this article most useful in assembling these thoughts, written by Silverster after the murder of Jason Moran:

So then, having digested this through, I found myself thinking “yeah, he had it coming to him, its a good thing that he’s been violently and brutally murdered.”  But thats an equally ugly place to find yourself and this article in the Australian helped me work those thoughts through also.  His main point being: murder is bad. Whomever is the victim and whoever is the perpetrator and whatever the circumstances.  The impact on the family and friends is permanent and painful and the stain on society is indelible.  

I guess, though, as a footnote, what does sit uncomfortably is that because of the manner of Williams’ murder – in prison where authorities have a duty-of-care - his family certainly have a right to compensation, and could sue.  After all the horror and expense that man has visited on Australian society, and all the illgotten gain Roberta Williams in particular would have accrued – you would have to question any judgement to that effect.

Its hard to know why The Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 is such an enduring and compelling story, but recently I got a new angle on the old yarn that nicely demonstrates how history is ever-evolving as new threads of a story can be spun and re-spun again and again.

I was watching a show – “The Bligh Conspiracy Revealed”  mainly charting attempts of a direct descendant of Captain William Bligh’s – Mark Arundel to better understand his ancestor’s life and why his reputation was so poor.  It was also an obvious attempt to tidy-up that legacy.  In this I felt it was very successful, climaxing with Arundel coming face-to-face with one of Fletcher Christian’s descendants in an electric charged meeting.

Since I arrived in Australia nearly ten years ago it had begun to become clear to me that the Bounty story was more complicated than Hollywood would have us believe – well there’s a shocker.  Bligh was obviously a man with poor communication and people skills, but what was less clear was whether he was quite the ogre Historical consensus would have us believe.

The upshot:  a man’s reputation, legacy - and much of the latter stages of his career - in tatters, quite possibly entirely unfairly.  What began with a clever PR campaign by the family and friends of Fletcher Christian was continued for mere story-telling convenience. This man has been persecuted to his grave and well beyond.

What was immediately interesting was the sub-plot of the Bounty itself.  Sent on a voyage to Tahiti to procure breadfruit plants that might be taken to the Windies for re-planting, several aspects of the trip almost guaranteed a mutiny:

• Very unusually, to make space for plants, there were no Marines on board to protect the cargo and maintain order among the crew.

• Also to make breadfruit space, crew and officers were required to co-exist in much more cramped quarters than usual

• Finally, the role of captain and bursar were rolled into one to cut down on headcount.  As the short-changer-in-chief, the bursar was always an unpopular character – doubly so when combined with the captain

So regardless of Bligh’s character, a stage was set by the Royal Navy that made mutiny almost inevitable.  Then – with the arrival on Tahiti – the rough, cramped and deprived conditions on board were contrasted sharply (and famously) with beautiful naked women, alcohol in great abundance and an idyllic climate.  The crew’s rampant sexual endeavours on Tahiti – none more prolific by all accounts than Christian himself – ultimately led to an outbreak of The Clap.  With an eventual return to deprivation on board the Bounty amid such – shall we say – discomfort, it is no wonder things got testy.  We all know what happened next.

Bligh did return to London a hero following his subsequent legendary feat of navigation.  But bad fortune once again impeded Bligh’s career: he was sent off on a second breadfruit voyage just when several of the now-captured Mutineers – Christian excepted – were put on trial.  It was essential to their defence, and increasingly convenient to the establishment (one mutineer – Peter Heywood - was even related to the judge!), that Bligh’s captaincy and even character were maligned and he himself scapegoated.  By the time he returned home, he was a pariah, a case fervently prosecuted by Christian’s Lawyer-brother who felt the ill-wind of guilt-by-association chilling his own reputation.

So Bligh was despatched to New South Wales as Governor, where his reputation preceded him and once again the misunderstood and admittedly intransigent disciplinarian was embroiled in yet another great episode of civil unrest – The Rum Rebellion in 1808 .

He died in obscurity in 1817 at 63. Yet his reputation continued to be further assaulted.  One of the Mutineers – James Morrison - whose death sentence was commuted drafted a journal of the Mutiny – albeit an exceptionally biased one.  Its confusion of the contemporary with the retrospective, however, ensured it was not published until the manuscript was adapted many years later by a novelist called Sir John Barrow who based on it his 1831 pseudo-history of the Mutiny  – all but popularly forgotten by this time.  It was this book that inspired the 1935 movie  with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton that made the story so famous.  The travesty of truth was taken so much further again by the subsequent Mel Gibson effort.

However, with all this blight on Bligh’s reputation – its interesting to stop today to think about how the battle of reputation that is the Mutiny on the Bounty has really panned out over the more than two centuries that have elapsed since.  Besides the episodes of Rum and Bounty, Bligh’s other main historical legacy is that of the delivery of the Breadfruit, which features in the epitaph on his grave:

“Sacred To The Memory Of William Bligh... The Celebrated navigator Who First Transplanted The Breadfruit Tree From Otahette To The West Indies”

More importantly, there is his epic journey to Papua New Guinea following his jettisoning by Fletcher and the rest of the crew – which this very day is being re-enacted in strict attention to detail as homage to his unsurpassed feat of survival and seamanship.

Finally, there is the statue  opposite the Sydney Opera House at Circular Quay that even alludes to the misunderstood nature of his legacy and first asked me to change my view when I first saw it on my arrival in Sydney in 2000:

“Over the years, writers have built misleading legends about Bligh.  He was a severe disciplinarian, but never cruel. He was brave and honest but unfortunate in his subordinates.  This monument seeks to restore the image of a much maligned and gallant man.”

The full inscription

And what of Fletcher Christian?  His most memorable and most likely final legacy is that of his descendants’ conviction in 2004 for systemic child abuse on Pitcairn Island.  (It is interesting that the men's appeal to the Privy Council was based on an assumption that Fletcher Christian's Mutiny placed the men outside the Law.  The Privy Council saw it differently.)

I would say Bligh has won out in the end, wouldn’t you?

A good game of country cricket does banter, drama and comedy in a way no other sport can.

This weekend The Birchgrove Maddogs took on the Friendly Inn Pub team from Kangaroo Valley.  Well we played most of them.  It turns out that about half the side had double-booked themselves to play football the same afternoon (Football Association that is).  So unfortunately their captain began the match with only 4 players!  Additionally, what he didn’t know was that we had drafted a pair of local “ringers” for the match, one of whom (Cameron Belshaw) was a 1st Grader.  The same thing happened to  us once so we thought it was the go.  Two years ago we played a team in Goulburn and their first grader at one point entertained himself by smacking four balls in a  row high into the air and down the throat of one poor boundary fielder who dropped all of them  - understandably.   We were soundly thrashed.  So we did feel for their captain, Hugh – who fortunately enjoyed the funny side.

The setting was spectacular – amid one of only seven fully enclosed valleys in the world.  For anyone that has been, you will agree its a very special place.  For those that haven’t: do. And when you do, a beer and pie in The Friendly Inn is a must.

Obviously, after some furious telephone work, he was able to draft in replacements and their ranks swelled to nine.  But you have to assume it wasn’t his first choice team.  It wasn’t our’s either – numbering only ten...but we did bring a secret weapon. The first over saw the opener, Denver, get a direct hit off the second ball – right on the jawbone off Cam Belshaw's second ball.  The cheap ball our Captain bought was coming off the astro crease at a horrible speed.  It was changed.  The second over – from ringer #2, Paul Hodges – saw the ball regularly dance around the off stump, hitting it on two occasions.  The mis-match already looked stark.  We wondered how long we would be in the field – it didn’t look like more than a couple of overs.  We also wondered if we would get out of Kangaroo Valley alive if it carried on like this.

Thankfully it didn’t, and while it was a blatant and unfortunate mis-match, the Friendly Inn Team – by name and nature – made a stand and made a match of it.  The number three batsman made a half-century.  We had to drop our two opening bowlers for being embarrassingly accurate and fast – however we put them back on again towards the end when we realised we could even be in trouble!  Ringer #2 had to refrain from his usual action though and was forced to attempt spin bowling.  It took about two overs before he got the hang of that and the wickets fell again.  I managed three overs, one of which a maiden, and one of which saw the comedy of three dropped catches – one of them by me! Another comedy highpoint was Seamus Collins (taker of a very good catch) and his never-ending over which extended to about 10 balls after wides and no-balls. He got much better after that.

Our other bowlers put on a thorough effort and we felt like we were playing cricket.  The fielding was relatively tight, with the exception of the moment when almost every member of the Maddogs team ended up involved in a bizarre double over-throw incident that saw the batsmen almost unable to run for their laughing.  There were some impressive catches – two of which from Charlie our captain leading from the front - and not unusually none of them from me.  At tea (well, beer) 133 was the target after 30 overs. 

The run chase was brief and rapid and actually quite noisy with sixes and fours a common theme, and included one batsman hitting his mate's car for delightful comedy value.  The target was chased down in about 15 overs at the cost of only one wicket.  Naturally the secret weapon hid a rapid 50 and we retired him so our wicket keeper could have a go and we retired him after he made 42!  The final denouement was omething of an anticlimax and after some jolly hand-shaking,  everyone hit the well-named pub from which the local team derived their name where it was joyfully agreed that this would be an annual fixture!

On the way home we researched a new venue for next season: The (hallowed) Bradman Oval.