What you can't see on the cover is the inscription at the bottom of the statue:
coito ergo sum
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Tom Kruse [the Australian one] has passed away, aged 96.
Kruse was the outback mailman featured in the 1954 doco The Back of Beyond.
From 1936 he delivered mail and supplies along the track from Marree to Birdsville.
The doco is a bit contrived, but is the closest thing to a time capsule we have. [Though his shorts look very much like the ones my uncle used to wear.]
The third clip on the ASO website shows the story of two lost kids, a recurring them in literature of the time. We had a story in our school reader about two kids lost in the bush. Both a cautionary tale, and the sort of story humans need to tell in order to voice or confront their fears.
I'm sure the current fad for vampire stories is a continuation of the fear-facing trend, but I guess I mustn't fear vampires 'cos the whole genre holds no appeal for me at all.
I'm beginning to wonder if the reason we don't like growing old is not because we fear our own death so much as we fear the passing of things we regret losing?
Things like the freedom to clamber up onto a pile of stuff on the back of a truck without being arrested for not wearing seatbelts.
Or cooking sausages over an open fire down by the river without getting a fine for not having a Country Fire Authority permit, or for not having a Council permit to gather firewood.
Or being allowed to do stuff without adult supervision; being trusted to have some common sense.
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Happy Birthday Dorothea McKellar.
Remember when you had to memorise stuff for school? Or translate a whole passage from a french textbook? And you knew the teacher always started in one corner and you would be the fourth or sixth person or whatever who had to do the next line or sentence, so you would find the sixth line in the french translation and just do that, then number 3 would chuck a sickie. Gee I hated that.
Anyway, love the poem My Country, but only ever memorised lines 9 to 12.
What about Henry Lawson's Clancy of the Overflow, eh?
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving 'down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;
That's Tom Kruse country, that is.
Our kitchen pantry is quite small. All the extra stuff like unopened bottles of dead horse [tomato sauce] goes in 'Clancy', which is what we call the storage cupboard in the laundry 'cos it holds the overflow.
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