Country town

Original photograph by Rob Taggert

"Once we were all clouds"

Sumo stencil, acid tree

John Howard's boss

It's not every day you meet the Governor General, not on half-returned Aboriginal land anyway. I'm pleased to say that I recently had this honour. I shook His Excellency's hand and called him mate at a place called Iga Warta* in the Northern Flinders Ranges. He was on a ten-day jam-packed promotional tour of the outback which would pass through Birdsville, Charleville and Longreach, having already paused at Port Augusta and Wilpena. Among an entourage of 11 persons (according to the Herald Sun, and not including media reps) was a vice regal physiotherapist, whose job, I can only assume, was to keep the former SAS commander's body limber so that he could move from admiring subject to deferential subject secure in the knowledge that if he should slip a disc or pull a hamstring, a deep tissue massage would be only a yelp away. No one would know better than the distinguished Military Cross awardee and former resident of Wiluna just how physically demanding it can be to shake the hands of unwashed well-wishers while offering them tedious anodyne platitudes about values, prosperity and cultural understanding.

Of course, the size of the entourage was entirely fitting for the Queen's antipodean milk monitor. There was a small (but muscular) posse of police and army personnel, a clutch of pointy-faced minions, Ted Egan, Ted Egan's wife and some born-to-rule-looking kids wearing moleskins and expensive riding boots.

Fair enough I don't hear tax-paying republicans say. But a physiotherapist?

That said, he was quite a nice bloke.

* A settlement within Nantawarrina, the first (SA) Indigenous Protected Area, declared in August 1998.

More than can be imagined

Richard Dawkins explains that for beavers, dam-building is hard wired in the brain.

I have seen a remarkable film of captive beavers imprisoned in a bare, unfurnished cage, with no water and no wood. The beavers enacted, 'in a vacuum', all the stereotyped movements normally seen in natural building behaviour when there is real wood and real water. They seem to be placing virtual wood into a virtual dam wall, pathetically trying to build a ghost wall with ghost sticks, all on the hard, dry, flat floor of their prison. One feels sorry for them: it is as if they are desperate to exercise their frustrated dam-building clockwork.

It is also true that if you leave a politician in a cage, he will eventually start to build a constituency out of thin air. He may even go as far as to manipulate the phantom relationships he has conjured to become a sort of pathetic dictator, a father of thin air.