My friend of 40 years has now departed this earth. Dr Phil Harker my long-time associate and mentor has left his body and gone to a better place. The world is diminished with his passing. I first met Phil sometime around 1986 when he was part of a selection panel assessing applicants to be […]
My long suffering readers will be aware of my fascination with time. It seems indisputable that, no matter how you construe time, the only reality is “now”. No sentient being is able to access any time other than the present. In essence we reconstruct the past and we imagine the future. Mind you some of […]
It’s not hard to make the argument that on many fronts Australia has regressed in recent years. Our standard of living in real terms has diminished over the term of the Albanese government. Whilst our GDP, masked by record migration might have increased, our percapita GDP has fallen. We have endured high levels of inflation […]
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist. In his 1979 book Distinction, Bourdieu introduced the concept of symbolic capital. In contrast with more conventional notions of resources, such as wealth and material assets, Bourdieu argued that symbolic capital is the resource available to an individual on the basis of prestige, celebrity status and public recognition. A […]
On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists emerged from Gaza to commit an horrendous atrocity against Israeli civilians. This deadly incursion has been well documented so I won’t elaborate on the gruesome details. Inevitably Israel responded with deadly force in order to deter further aggression and to rescue the civilian hostages that Hamas had kidnapped during […]
At the age of eighteen, I left my family home in Charters Towers to start an engineering degree at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville. In those days it was quite an extraordinary thing to do! In my high school years I can only remember two students in the cohort that I knew ahead of […]
Well, after this essay my soul is likely to be sentenced to eternal damnation in Hell, but I can’t but help share with you some of my reservations about conventional religious beliefs. Traditional monotheistic religions have been largely constructed by those who have claimed to have had particular, personal access to God. In ancient times […]
Some years ago I wrote an essay which I titled The Most Famous Man who never Lived which critiqued the mythology that had been created to support the notion that an extraordinary man, who purported to be the Son of God lived on this earth some two millennia ago who held the keys to eternal […]
I have written in previous essays of how wokeness has permeated the fabric of Western democracies. In many ways it has impacted on our sense of self with its promotion of identity politics and its denigration of our history and traditional culture. Consequently we are encouraged by the left to view ourselves very differently to […]
Whilst in my younger years I was much more progressive in my political point of view, as often seems to be the trend (we can only hope for the same with Greta Thunberg!), But as I’ve grown older I must confess I have become more conservative in my thinking (in case you haven’t noticed). My […]