Category: Fiction

In January I was notified I had a bunch of Frequent Flyer points and I needed to use them by end of March or lose them. I had been wanting to fly to Sydney to see the Tina Turner musical as I love anything to do with Tina Turner. Event though she does not play herself in the play I think the actor who won the part will be very good. So I booked it all and leave Monday.

I’ll be there for five days. Two days will be spent with a good friend doing photography. Hopefully some street and urban photography one day and animals another. Then I’ll come home.

I’m taking my lovely copy of Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises to read on the plane. That is the June book club read. It is one of the books of his I have not read due to the bull fighting in it but I’ll just have to skim over that part if it gets too busy.

When I return I am going to do a little photography project and a book project. Both are alphabet projects. Tasmania is cold and dark for the winter and it is important to get out for some sun. Photo project will have me visiting different places alphabetically with my camera. Saturday I am visiting a local spot that starts with A. I’ll include it in a future blog. I’m hoping to find some interesting spots in southern Tasmania that I have not been to before.

Alphabetical TBR project. I have my book club reads that are often more substantial but I have a lot of books on my shelf that are slimmer and need to be read and removed. So I will start with an author that begins with A and go from there. We’ll see how far I get until the first day of spring, equinox spring, but of September spring.

So stay tuned for my thoughts on that and some photos hopefully in a couple of weeks. Stay well everyone.

…but I wanted to tell you about the rally I went to here in Hobart on Saturday. In Australia we have Aussie Rules football that is quite popular in several states, though not all as others prefer rugby. Each state has one stadium to accommodate football, cricket or rugby. However Tasmania has two stadiums. One in the north that is currently under renovation and one in the south of the state. Several states have one or more football teams. Tasmania does not have a team. Tasmanians have wanted a team for years but usually support a favourite team in another state. We would like one.

Now the head of the AFL, Aus Football League got together with our state premiere and said we will give you a team. All you have to do is build a covered stadium for 750 million dollars. We will chip in 15 million and your taxpayers can pay the rest. Our premiere and this head guy from Melbourne went into a room and signed a secret deal approving this. No one else in parliament was allowed to learn the terms of this contract and still don’t. Then our prime minister weighed in and said, “We’ll give you 240 million dollars if you follow these redevelopment rules in this area of old warehouses, etc on your waterfront” . However all predictions indicate costs will blow out to a billion dollars and where are the engineers and builders coming from who will build it? Where will the traffic go? There is one main road that flows by the site. Not to mention it will be 10 stories high and overshadow the Cenotaph, the ground the war and veterans memorials are on. The mayor and city council don’t know the details either. It was a done deal and then announced in the media that this stadium will be built on the waterfront of Hobart. Right in town. Again, Ten stories high-highest building in Hobart. And it is on Indigenous historic land.

Well, the proverbial shit hit the fan throughout the state. Everyone wants a team but this is blackmail. We have homeless on our winter streets. We have people dying in ambulances. We have a mental health hospital closing its doors as the building is too old. We have environmental issues. We also have 70% of people in our state not wanting a third stadium in a state with 500,000 people. We are a small state.

On Saturday a protest as called for on Parliament House lawns after 7 days of organisation. 6,000 people from all over the state arrived at noon. Every branch of government was there. Two of the party our premiere belongs two resigned and became independents as they are against the whole thing. Tasmania’s liberal government is now in minority. They did have majority. For my North American friends the liberal party here is the conservative party unlike liberals in the USA being more to the left.

So now, no one knows what will happen but the protest was great and I went to it with my camera and took photos. The only book related bit of this post is that Richard Flanagan, a Booker prize winning author and homegrown here who loves this state, introduced the speakers.

I don’t get political in my blog but I want to share my photos and if this goes ahead Tasmania will have 3 large stadiums and maybe no team.

When you visit here be careful not to step over a cut down tree in the rainforest, step over a homeless person or get in the way of a ramped ambulance who cannot unload their patient for another few hours.

Members of the other political parties all sent messages that were read against the stadium by Australian actor Essie Davis.

Now a new week is underway and time will tell what the future holds. Until next time.

I will leave you with the proposed image. Not my photo🙄🙄

MONDAY: Weather here still chilly but have had sun. So good for the mood. Good session with the weights. Felt good to toss them around. Stayed in and got stuck into the book Lost and Found in Paris. A light but enjoyable read. Joan, married to film photographer Casey, works for a lovely art gallery and museum in Pasadena, California. The first few pages has Casey arriving at her work place, announcing he had twin boys with his assistant five yrs ago and would like them to all be a family. Of course he would be a proper father and live with his assistant but Joan could integrate the boys into her life. Well you can imagine how that goes over.

TUESDAY: Yesterday I streamed the film The Whale from Amazon while Mr Penguin was at the gym. I saw trailers here at our State Cinema, that has really interesting films. My sister enjoyed it. I, not as much. Online English teacher who is secondary teacher is morbidly obese. He left his family, wife and 8 yr old daughter for another man years previously. The love of his life. When the love of his life died, he compensated by developing an eating disorder of binging. He becomes completely incapacitated by his weight. He can barely move and is cared for by his boyfriend’s sister who is a nurse that drops in regularly. His angry daughter comes back into his life , now in grade 12. Failing at everything she needs help from her father to help her graduate. A young man also enters the picture claiming he is door knocking from a religious sect but he has his issues too as we later discover. The three of them develop a tenuous relationship. I thought the acting was very good especially from the main protagonist. However the entire movie until the end takes place in a living room with all curtains drawn. Lots of yelling, darkness, etc as the themes of homosexuality, religion and relationships are all thrown together. I found it melodramatic and filled with a good deal of Hollywood moralising. The movie is very dark due to the setting and with my eye sight I struggled at times to see. It did win 2 oscars at the Academy awards I’m told but don’t recall what categories. However, I take the Oscars with a grain of salt. Some will love it, others not so much.

Tuesday evening had me enjoying a meeting of Photo Club 2. Photo club 2 is the club I joined recently that I am enjoying mainly for the great socialisation and excursions they go on. Photo club 1 has more members and challenges, more instruction. I have been a member of no. 1 for 6 yrs. So I am meeting lots of new people and enjoying photography on many fronts.

WEDNESDAY: Today was a quiet gym day and lunch with a friend. So I’m going to move through Wednesday and Thursday…straight onto:

FRIDAY: We attended an interesting Fullers event this evening at the RACV hotel across the street from Fullers. We meet here for events that have more attendance. Women and Whitlam-Revisiting the Revolution edited by Michelle Arrow. We had a panel consisting of Michelle, Margaret Reynolds, former Senator 1983-1999 Qld., and former Tasmanian premiere Lara Giddings. Michelle discussed how she put the book together and Margaret is a minefield of stories of how women were treated in politics and especially in Townsville in the 1980s. It was an evening filled with lots of head shaking and laughs and “I don’t believe its” and “Weren’t they just awfuls”. The room was packed and our hour flew by with interesting questions at the end.

SATURDAY: was purely political but I will do a separate post on that as I have some photos I took to share of that day.

I hope you have all had a good week and as Arnie Schwarzenegger would say, I’ll be back!