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The Buttons: Speechless but never at a loss for words
It’s taken me a while to read Speechless, a lovely book about speechwriting by James Button, Walkley Award-winning journalist and author and son of John, a senator and a former minister in the Labor...
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Comic duo Laurel and Hardy’s moments to remember: Tales of Hollywood stranger...
Laurel and Hardy were two of my favourite comedians. Every year on Thanksgiving, a US TV network played one of their old films. We laughed at their jokes and slapstick, with perfect timing and the...
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Dear Diary: Why hast thou forsaken me?
Sorry about the headline, but I wanted to get your attention. It comes from Psalm 22.1: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The psalm Christ recited on the cross. My cross is much less of a...
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Sam the Man: A tenacious titan of television generous to a fault
Sam Chisholm, sales director and former head of Channel Nine, Managing Director of BSkyB, and television executive extraordinaire, was also known as a legend in his own lunchtime. But lunches were...
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Strewth! A magnificent memoir of home truths
“What do you call a fart in the bathtub?” It was a question I asked award-winning columnist of The Australian, author, snake lover and bagpipes player, James Jeffrey (Photo above The Australian), a...
View ArticleLeslie Seymour: The Everywhere Man — Have Camera Will Travel
“Who the hell is Leslie Seymour?” That’s what journalist and broadcaster Ray Martin asks facetiously in his foreword to the autobiography of Les Seymour, his long-time mate, and it’s a fair question....
View ArticleI’m dreaming of a fallen Trump
Like all lapsed Catholics, I still have a guilt complex: guilt drilled into me from priests and nuns and Christian Brothers, guilt from committing a mortal sin, ranging from thinking impure thoughts to...
View ArticleA tale of two septuagenarians: A Queen reigns over the ABC while a Cardinal...
This is a tale of two septuagenarians: one a journalist, the other a Cardinal. You know which one should come first. It was 1981, and Ita Buttrose was the Murdoch recruit, the new editor-in-chief of...
View ArticleIs ScoMo the new People’s PM? Not by a long shot
What would Bob Hawke have said? That’s the first thought that came to mind when I read the Daily Mail piece about the Prime Minister of Miracles, Scott Morrison, being compared to Labor’s best PM, the...
View ArticleTiananmen Square: Don’t mention the massacre
“We meet here to mourn this tragedy and to share the grief of those who have lost members of their families, their loved ones and their friends, and to express our profound sympathy to the...
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