Fatticus Faces The Wolf, a Slumber-Time Adventure: A 1930′s-era romance author finds herself caught up in a web of intrigue involving government conspiracies and the extraordinary abilities of her obese cat, Fatticus.

Adelaide’s Pinnygig: Adelaide, a Canadian teenage girl, flees across a wintery landscape to evade an assassin sent to steal her guinea pig.

A Friend In Need and Other Furry Slumber-Time Tales: Short stories surrounding the varied exciting adventures of several cats and one dog (taken from the novel ‘Fatticus Faces The Wolf’) with illustrations.

The Ladybug’s Dance: Featuring eleven pieces suitable for early-intermediate pianists, The Ladybug’s Dance is a jazz-piano folio designed to foster the student’s own expression and interpretation of what they play, to encourage the first steps towards unleashing their own composition and arrangement skills.

Enjoy! And, remember kids: sharing is caring!

After all, the right-wing of the political spectrum, which the Coalition traditionally occupies, does not consist entirely of social conservatives and Christian fundamentalism. Indeed, many inside of Abbott’s own party — and many of his MP’s — fit the definition of a ‘fiscally-conservative social-liberal’ — also known as a libertarian. These libertarians — some of whom are very powerful inside the Liberal party — may force Tony Abbott to allow his MP’s to hold a conscience vote of their own.

Libertarianism has at its core a fundamental belief that the rights of the individual are paramount above the rights of religion, government or any other organisation — that people are at liberty to do and say as they wish in so long as this liberty does not impact negatively on the liberty of others. It is straightforward to acknowledge that marriage equality is in fact then a very libertarian notion.

Now, in the past, social conservatives (and homophobic pseudo-’libertarians’) have attempted to use a ‘loophole’ by arguing that children raised by homosexuals are at some sort of disadvantage and thus gay people do not have the right to a liberty that harms others; however, modern studies have shown quite plainly that this ‘danger’ to the child simply does not exist in any widespread fashion.

In Australia, it is already against the law to discriminate, bully or harass homosexuals — and by extension their children — and this has led to a steady decline of homophobia in schools and greater acceptance of same-sex relationships amongst young people. Rather, it is arguable that teenage same-sex attracted children are more likely to fall victim to self-harm because their relationships will always be invalidated by their inability to marry.

So, with the once vaguely-rational ‘issue’ of the ‘rights of the child’ removed, it has since become very difficult for social conservatives to mount any convincing argument with which to sway their libertarian colleagues. Feeble attempts at ‘slippery-slope’ arguments — typically involving pedophilia and zoophilia — fall in a heap in the face of the simple common sense that children and animals cannot give legal consent. Polygamy is similarly negated by the fact that by definition only one individual can possess the ability to exercise the absolute will of another, as granted by marriage.

And, as an individual already holds certain legal and moral rights and responsibilities with respect to immediate family members, the risk of the legalisation of incestuous relationships is non-existent.

It is due to the inability to mount a realistic argument against marriage equality that, after the Liberal Party of Canada legalised same-sex marriage and then lost the subsequent election, the Conservative Party of Canada upon forming government was forced to hold a conscience vote regarding the repeal of the prior government’s amendments to the Marriage Act — a vote that failed, causing the Conservatives to break a ‘crucial’ election promise. (By the way: that same party is still in power today, and has just become the ninth longest-serving government in Canadian history.)

It is important to remember that, unlike Labor, although Coalition MP’s can be directed to vote as a bloc, an individual MP does not risk expulsion from Caucus if they do not do as they are told by the Leader of the Opposition. This means that despite Tony Abbott’s conservative rhetoric, those more libertarian-minded MP’s can still stand for marriage equality at the time the numbers are counted even if the public face of the Coalition is strictly against the notion up to the last second before the vote is called, as happened in the Canadian Conservative-led parliament.

It is also important to realise that it is unlikely that Tony Abbott will risk fracturing the Liberal party by attempting to mandate any special privilege toward his own position by threatening his libertarian colleagues — one of whom is his chief rival, Malcolm Turnbull. He is almost certainly not going to put his leadership on the line, nor risk disunity within his own party, over his conviction that marriage is strictly meant to be between man and woman. A conscience vote will permit him the luxury of being able to absolve himself of criticism both from his libertarian members and his conservative-Christian ones.

But it could be a nail-biter. If Tony Abbott is smart, he will wait until the last possible moment before making any announcement regarding a conscience vote — even as late as the morning of the day the vote is held. If those who support marriage equality are equally intelligent, they will mount pressure upon those more socially-liberal Liberals and keep it there up until that very same moment. The battle is still quite winnable — it happened in Canada and it could just as easily happen here in Australia.

—
Melody Ayres-Griffiths is a Canadian Australian permanent-resident married to her Australian wife under Canadian law.

Over there, in the province of British Columbia, where I’m from, the
regulation of slot machines is substantially different than how it is
here in Oz. Firstly, alcohol cannot be served on the gaming floor –
it has to be in a completely separate venue, and you cannot exit from
the venue back to the gaming floor if you have ordered or consumed any
alcohol. No bars just ‘over there’, no ‘having a few’ and then
visiting an ATM before heading for the $10 slots. No gaming machines
in pubs, either.

Of course, all gaming venues would prefer their clientele inebriated.
This is why the pubs here almost universally have poker machines –
they have a built-in advantage. Drunk people gamble more. They gamble
more often, they spend more money. Banning visibly drunk people from
gambling (which, by definition, would include identifying and ejecting
those who make unusually flamboyant or risky bets) is a wonderful
Canadian policy Australia would do well to implement — although the
pubs and casinos certainly won’t like it. But a strong argument can be
made that someone who is drunk is incapable of making decisions in
their own best interests, and as such do not have the legal right to
divest themselves of their money in an rash fashion, and sooner or
later someone who loses big will take one of the big casinos to court
arguing that exact same defence. It is in the casinos best interests
to support legislation that will absolve themselves of any such
liability before that happens, even though the hoteliers won’t like it
– although it should be noted they’re not supposed to serve alcohol
to drunk people, either.

Secondly, individuals in British Columbia have the right to ban
themselves from gaming venues. This is an obvious no-brainer: if
someone feels they have a gambling problem, they can simply direct
their haunt of choice not to admit them at any point in the future.
This should be the right of anyone fighting any addiction — but it’s
far more effective for gamblers than for anyone else, since the venue
tends to be an important component of the addiction. The casinos will
like this policy even less than the no-alcohol one — because it’s
they who would be hurt most by this, and not the pubs, RSL’s and
clubs.

People who gamble recklessly tend to be attracted to the glitz, the
glamour and the feeling of being a ‘somebody’, and a smaller venue
just doesn’t provide that allure. Big casinos do. Big casinos also
offer anonymity if you get drunk, go broke and make a scene. Smaller
clubs don’t. Luckily for the big casinos, most have facial recognition
software in place already to detect cheaters and fraud-artists, and
could easily implement self-imposed bans, as well as impose arbitrary
bans on easily-identifiable problem gamblers, so there’s very little
argument they can provide not to that wouldn’t display a complete lack
of social responsibility. Perhaps this is something they can take on
themselves, without forced legislation — but maybe pigs will also fly
then, and Hell will open an ice-skating rink too.

Thirdly, if you’re on NewStart or other unemployment benefits you
shouldn’t be able to use your dole money for gambling. People who are
already financially vulnerable and subject to depression shouldn’t be
in a position to make both situations worse. Yes, this is the stuff of
a nanny-state, but it’s also the realm of basic social responsibility,
like not letting someone freeze to death in the street. I’m not
suggesting Grannie can’t spend her pension at the pokies — that’s
Grannie’s business — but Grannie’s not likely supporting small
children and/or at risk of not getting another cheque because they
were unable to look for work because they had no bus fare. If the
government gives you money out of the social safety-net, it should
have the right to dictate how you can and cannot spend it, if by
spending it a certain way you place yourself at risk.

In British Columbia, gaming venues are only required to take your ID
and report you to the government if you win over $1000, and so people
who spend their dole money aren’t caught out very often. However, that
system could easily be adapted here to apply to all payments of
perhaps over $100. In the last few years, BC casinos have transitioned
to a paper-ticket system for credits and payouts, making an
individuals wagers and winnings easier to track — another way to
monitor for problem gamblers — and I strongly suspect they’ll be
matching the pictures they take at the cash counters with betting data
soon if they aren’t doing it already. After all, facial recognition is
Vegas’s best friend for a reason.

(It also appears that moving to a paper-ticket system did not send the
gaming venues broke, either — but when a machine takes in over a
thousand dollars a day, that thousand dollar cost to refit it is a
very, very small price indeed.)

Fourth, in British Columbia the machines are apparently required to
display just how much money has been poured into them since they last
paid out, and just how much that last payment was. These tend to be
quite sobering figures, but it should be made quite clear that they do
not discourage the casual gambler who can afford to take the risk in
hopes of hitting a jackpot, in fact quite the opposite, it encourages
them, because they have no expectation of winning. This is the
supposed target audience for this kind of ‘entertainment’, not those
who see the numbers and realise they might inadvertently spend their
rent money before they get any real payout — at least in theory. But
once again, casinos are not in the business of being concerned with
the ability of their patrons to make smart choices.

But, I hear you cry, the poor little clubs and RSL’s won’t survive
with these sorts of rules!

That’s not true at all. Gaming venues in British Columbia still make a
great deal of money even though alcohol is tightly regulated, people
can self-ban themselves from venues, people risk trouble if they
gamble while on the dole, and the machines show how unlikely you are
to keep eating if you spend your grocery money. These are all much
more valuable tools in the fight against problem gambling than
mandatory pre-commitment, a per-bet limit (although the most popular
and likely profitable slot machines in British Columbia tend to have 5
to 25 cent individual bets, not $5) or the elimination of random
jackpots (or ‘features’).

Further, the patronage of clubs and RSL’s tends to be that of the
members of these organisations themselves. Even hotels tend to have a
common, regular clientele they can choose to self-regulate should
someone obviously be in trouble. But to the casinos, people are just
sources of revenue, and there’s no close-knit community (in the case
of the clubs), or unspoken obligation to their suburb (in the case of
hotels), and measures such as these are required to force these larger
organisations to mind their responsibility to the broader community.
It’s reasonable to argue that casinos breed far more problem gamblers,
but that it is the responsibility of the gaming community as a whole
to ensure that the damage caused by addiction is minimised, even if
that means a bit of pain for everyone involved.

To conclude, I strongly suggest that people take a good look at these
strategies and see how they might work to the benefit of the social
fabric in Australia. Sometimes there’s just simply no need to
re-invent the wheel, you just need to glance over your neighbour’s
back fence.

In Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), a roaming samurai arrives in a small town where competing gangsters make money from gambling (Richie; p147; 1998). He convinces each crime head to hire him for protection from their rival, and then plays them off against each other leading to their mutual destruction.

Yojimbo was both inspired by, and created several western archetypes – the man with no name; the helpless, terrorised town. Kurosawa has conceded that Yojimbo was born out of a love for Westerns such as Shane (1953) (McVeigh; p172; 2007). These elements were taken further by Sergio Leone’s remake A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), of which Kurosawa wrote to Leone, ‘It is a very fine film, but it is my film’ (Verevis; p89; 2006).

In Fistful, ‘The Man With No Name’ (Clint Eastwood) is an American gunfighter who wanders into a Mexican town only to find it split into two warring factions, each supplying guns and alcohol to whiskey traders (Walle; p168; 2000). He is aided by a local barkeep and the local undertaker in his efforts to both profit off of, and destroy the two sides. He has an odd sympathy for Marisol (Marianne Koch), a woman kept from her family who, along with her kin, “serve both functions of the ‘terrorised victims’ motif, first as a setting, and then as a motive when (he) decides to liberate her – though his reasons are left enigmatic’ (Fridlund; p28; 2006).

Fistful provided the template for Leone’s style in later films (Fairbanks; p125; 2005), utilising sharp contrasts and recurring visual and audible motifs. It moves Yojimbo forward, taking the elements of a film that was inspired by the Western genre, and returning them back into the genre itself, as Roger Ebert notes: “Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one.” (Ebert; 2005)

In this sense, Last Man Standing (Hill, 1996) is a remake of Fistful and not Yojimbo in that Walter Hill, a Peckinpah protégé, borrows heavily from Leone’s refinement of the Western archetypes, and not Ford’s as Yojimbo does (Giannetti et. al; p207; 2009). Standing is to Fistful what Fistful is to Yojimbo – the story is the same, but the way in which it is told follows a natural progression from one film to the next.

Is this enough to classify Last Man Standing as a western? Certainly, A Fistful Of Dollars typifies the postmodern Western (Ewell; p327; 2004), but can Standing, with its revised time period (the 1930s) and gangsters (instead of cowboys) be called a Western by extension? McCarty (1993; p12) describes the gangster film as ‘the modern continuation of the Western – a story the Western had grown too old to tell,’ but Standing is more of a fusion, somewhere in the middle, whose protagonist is ‘more akin to Western or noir heroes than gangsters’ (Larke-Wash; p191; 2010).

Like Yojimbo, Standing is set in a dusty, semi-abandoned 19^th-century town – ‘Jericho was a jerkwater town … dirt streets, ramshackle buildings. One thing for sure, you couldn’t find it anywhere on the map’ (Hill; 2006).  There is an old ruin of a Spanish church, obvious Western iconography, in which the ‘Man With No Name’, in this case John Smith (Bruce Willis), recovers following the beating the common Yojimbo plot demands, and where the ‘damsel in distress’, here named Felina (Karina Lombard) prays so that she can spend time away from her gangster captor.

The iconography and archetypes are what is of the highest importance here – Gene Autry’s films are classified as Westerns although they tend to be set in the 1930s (Stanfield; p78; 2001), and involve villains who are often not cowboys, but they have a certain mise-en-scene which Last Man Standing appears to share in equal measure, a ‘Western-in-disguise’ (Fhlainn; p107; 2010). Indeed, Chris Holmlund in his ‘Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies’ classifies Standing as a ‘nouveaux western for the 1990s’ (Holmlund; p59; 2002).

Further, Director Walter Hill made two post-modernist Westerns directly preceding Standing, Wild Bill (1995) and Geronimo (1993) in which he challenged Hollywood’s traditional representation of Western heroism (Allon et. al; p243; 2002) similar to Leone. Thus we conclude that he wrote and directed Standing as a remake of not only Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but of Leone’s Fistful (Santas; p49; 2002) and therefore the author will for the purposes of this comparative essay accept Last Man Standing into the Western genre with the grace of the reader, and compare it with A Fistful of Dollars in terms of gender, audiences, history and authorship.

Tough but not too tough: Portrayals of Gender in the post-modernist Western.

Unlike Gene Autry, who had a sidekick perform in drag to offset his femininity and make him seem more ‘manly’ (Stanfield; p120; 2002), Leone’s ‘Man With No Name’ unravelled the masculinity of the traditional Western, making the postmodern form of the genre feminine (Smith; p87; 2000). Eastwood’s body is as objectified as women in traditional Westerns, with its exaggerated masculinity, and is subject to brutal physical punishment during which ‘Eastwood revels in pain’ (ibid), as does Willis in Standing.

However, although subject to extreme abuse, the powers of the Fistful/Standing protagonist are almost godlike (Merk; p280; 1992) and are unexplained painting a cinematic personification of machismo. To extend this, both Willis and Eastwood’s roles are largely silent, re-enforcing what Laura Mulvey calls their characters’ ‘ideal ego’ (Mulvey, 1975).

Regarding Fistful, it was typical for Italian movies of the time to parody gender stereotypes (Beyer; p36; 2008). Further, the Italian tradition of neo-realism after World War II challenged cliché’s of genre cinema such as gender (ibid.) which in the Spaghetti Westerns led to the replacement of the traditional male-female relationship with all-male bonds (ibid. p42.)

Fistful paints a portrait of the decomposing masculinity of the postmodern man (Smith; p88; 2000), where in contrast Standing’s Willis is more like a James Cagney who ‘has a weakness for any and all dames’ (Holmlund, p59, 2002). However, the all-male bonds are still present in Standing – Smith’s relationship with the hotelier is as equally strong as Eastwood’s “Joe” in Fistful, even though Smith is portrayed in a more masculine fashion, since these bonds are now common in modern American cinema, having itself become neo-realistic.

There is also a sexual component. In “Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush”, David Greven argues that these masochistic portrayals of the male protagonist prey on a repressed homosexual voyeurism on the part of the ‘male’ spectator in what he calls the ‘masochistic gaze’ (Greven, p31, 2009). I would argue that the strong male bonds, and almost paternal female relationships in both films take this concept a step further, rationalising it on-screen.

Women in Westerns usually exist as signs of civilisation, or as a reward men fight over (Beyer; p45; 2008). It is true that in both films, this symbolic character exists as a motivation for the protagonist, although this motivation is non-sexual in nature, and instead more paternal (or maternal) and thus more typical of the ‘masochistic gaze’ in that the object of the audience’s infatuation is never the woman, but the protagonist who cares for her situation. Hill was so struck by this device that in Standing he actually employs it twice – having Smith give one female character money to leave her abusive boyfriend, and another the freedom to return to her family out of an odd, unexplained compassion (Fridlund; p28; 2006).

Indeed, the scene early on in Standing where Smith has sex with a prostitute focuses far more on him than her (Holmlund; p59; 2002) – she is basically faceless and he is undeniably the object of the audience’s gaze in that scene, one which moves from sex to violence in short order, fetishising Willis for the remainder of the film. The gaze is undeniably male, but yet Willis is the one eroticised by it.

Cowboys and Gangsters: The fall of the PCA and the rise of the ultra-violent Hollywood.

The Glass Key (1942), an adaption of a novel by Dashiell Hammett, is a notable influence on the Yojimbo legacy – Kurosawa is said to have been much inspired by the film, in particular the controversial scene where the protagonist is ruthlessly beaten by his enemies (Britannica.com; 2010). During the Second World War, the Production Code Administration (PCA) had temporarily relaxed rules regarding the on-screen depictions of screen violence, allowing striking visual instances such as Alan Ladd’s beaten face in Key (Prince; p151; 2003) to make it through on-screen, and contemporary filmmakers took as much advantage of this as they could.

In the post-war period, American filmmakers found inspiration in Italian films, advocating a more honest, less cautious cinema that would give the audience pause to think (Leff et. al; p146; 2001), although PCA chief Joseph Breen dismissed these aspirations, saying, “When these people talk about realism, they usually talk about filth” (ibid, p149). To his dismay, Breen would be challenged with widespread American releases of controversial but popular films such as The Bicycle Thief (1948), and the PCA’s authority was slowly chipped away.

By the mid-1960’s, directors were aggressively testing the boundaries of the PCA (Doherty; p276; 2007). As with The Bicycle Thief, Leone was able to push the violence in A Fistful Of Dollars farther than he would have been able to had he made the film inside of the United States – and hence subject to direct scrutiny by the PCA. Indeed, as a ‘foreign film’, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was able to release Fistful to a wide audience while sidestepping the micro-management of the censor. However, Eastwood has since claimed that Leone was unaware of the subtleties of the unspoken rules of the PCA, and never meant to cause such controversy. “You never shot a tie-up shot of a man shooting a gun and another person getting hit. It’s a Hays office rule from years ago, a censorship deal,” (Prince; p105; 2003) he later noted as an example of Leone’s ignorance, even though he himself commented on the protests launched against Leone’s films at the time, defending them, “Freedom of expression is the American way” (Miller; p235; 1994).

Well after the subsequent abandonment of the PCA and the introduction of the modern-day MPAA ratings system, Last Man Standing was produced in the mid-1990s, a time when the boundaries of the contemporary censorship regime were being tested by the likes of Quentin Tarantino in films such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), the ‘hippest of the hip new violent Hollywood directors’ (Phillips; p74; 2008). To be commercially viable with a younger audience, Hill would have needed to produce a similarly violent offering, and a modern interpretation of the Yojimbo plotline in the vein of Fistful would have been deemed quite attractive for such a production.

When and when: History of the Yojimbo legacy from within and without.

Yojimbo is set in feudal Japan, where wandering gangs often set upon and terrorised remote villages. A Fistful Of Dollars identified a historical similarity, and moved this setting to Mexico circa the American Civil War/frontier days of the 1860s when rumrunners traded guns and alcohol to the Native Americans, which they brought up from Mexico through towns that they controlled. Last Man Standing is set in Texas of the 1930s, during prohibition when gangsters similarly imported illegal whiskey from Mexico for illicit distribution to consumers inside the United States (Behr; p 85; 1996), in a town similarly under criminal rule.

Direct narrative translations from one genre to another are not unknown in cinema (Langford; p134; 2005). Indeed, Hill’s choice of shifting a story to a similar, but different time period is not uncommon amongst directors – Baz Luhrmann’s La bohème (1994) for example, sets the opera in the Paris of the 1950’s.  Of this change, Luhrmann said, “We found the social and economic realities of 1957 were a very good match for the 1840’s” (Shiels; 2002), and the three settings of the Yojimbo legacy share favourably similar historical conditions.

One could not remake Fistful set in the same time period, and with Leone in mind, without fabricating a complete duplication, which is likely why Hill chose to proceed in the direction he did, choosing a setting where the Western and Gangster genres met at a crossroads. In fact, Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is said to have been strongly influenced by the 1929 novel Red Harvest, which ‘linked the detective story to the flourishing popular tradition of the western adventure’ (Cawelti; p116; 2004), and so perhaps Hill was going full circle, fusing the Western and the Gangster once again.

However, he is not the first to set a Western during this time period. Gene Autry set his films in the then-contemporary 1930s (Stanfield; p78; 2001) as well, but he did so as a distraction from the hardships of the Great Depression in an almost anachronistic construct. He brought the cowboy to a modern audience during a period where the wild-west outlaw had become the Chicago gangster – but in Autry’s universe, his enemies were typically criminals who were far less dramatic, typically confidence men or common thieves, not gangsters since the Hays Office had a particular idea of their portrayal in which they generally died in the last reel (Smith; p49; 2005), such as in The Public Enemy (1931).

That is not to say that the cowboy and the gangster did not co-exist in the 1930’s – Hill’s portrayal of the small town beset by bootleggers in Standing has some historical legitimacy, even though the film’s outcome is a bit unrealistic if taken in such a context. However, the updated setting did permit a greater level of violence, and more grandiose weaponry than is seen in Leone’s Fistful, a ‘happy consequence’ of this temporal change in setting that permitted Hill to film scenic Texan vistas whilst racking up a commercially desirable high body count.

Authorship: Leone’s style meets Hill’s substance.

It was not Leone’s intention to make carbon copy Westerns. Instead, he used his cultural background to renew a stagnant genre (Frayling, p181, 2006), making it distinctively his own. Traditionally American Western traits are employed by Leone in fashions that include typically Italian themes and concepts (ibid. p182), such as the link between family life and church iconography.

Hollywood’s annual Western production fell from 54 in 1958 to 11 in 1962-3 (Bondanella; p253; 2001) and would rise to 37 by 1967 due to the success of Leone’s pictures. Leone’s impact stemmed from his departure from the traditional Western formula – a plot typically generated by three forces: the townspeople, outlaws and heroes. Leone instead ‘plunges us into a violent and cynical world’ (ibid; p255) far different than those of Hawks or Ford. The hero acts for personal gain. The town is full of villainy. Women are largely absent.

Although influenced by Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, this is a world in which Leone’s Italian roots plays a heavy part in its existence, and is what makes his ‘Man With No Name’ trilogy so engaging, far more than the mere presence of Eastwood. A review of the film by James Barardinelli states, “The strengths of A Fistful Of Dollars relate to style, not storyline,” and “The element that differentiates [Fistful] from the majority of its predecessors is its gritty, unromanticised view of the Old West.” (Barardinelli; 1999)

TV Guide states, “Leone revitalizes the Western through a unique and complex visual style. The film is full of brilliant spatial relationships (extreme close-ups in the foreground, with detailed compositions visible in the background) … Aural and visual elements together give a wholly original perspective on the West and its myths.” (movies.tvguide.com)

In Adrian Mackinder’s review, he states, “Fistful has all the elements that define Leone’s style of filmmaking; full of unremitting violence, gritty realism and tongue-in-cheek humour. Leone’s direction is taut and stylish…” (futuremovies.co.uk)

Like Leone’s Fistful, Last Man Standing is ‘economic in plot and lavishly shot (with majestic images of the expansive desert landscape)’ (Allon et. al; 242; 2002). Heroism for Hill’s protagonists is about ‘simply being able to survive’ (ibid.) which he also shares with Leone, whose ‘Man With No Name’ must never find true heroism (Smith; p83; 2000). Although Hill has been called an ‘auteur of action’ due to his mastery of chase and confrontation (Huda; p 38; 2004) one finds him channelling Leone more often than not in Standing, placing his own authorship aside to concentrate upon directing a film that is more dramatic and subdued than his usual fare.

Of Last Man Standing, David Statton writes, “Even Hill’s references to classic Hollywood Westerns only serve as reminders that this sort of thing used to be done with a lot more imagination and depth,” (variety.com) and Rob Gonsalves states, “Hill has directed Willis to submerge his personality in tribute to the laconic icons Mifune and Eastwood.” (efilmcritic.com)

Time Out Film Guide states, “Hill’s Tex-Mex version suggests he hasn’t got the Western out of his system yet, and this highly stylised film looks like an uncomfortable exercise in cross-breeding, as if a handful of mobsters had wandered on to the wrong studio backlot.” (timeout.com)

Clearly, the general consensus is that Hill, although at times considered an auteur in his own right, is making no attempt to bring anything new to the Yojimbo franchise in terms of authorship, and here is a simple director, making a movie for the sake of making a movie.

In conclusion, I would suggest that A Fistful Of Dollars and Last Man Standing show a progression in screen violence and homo-eroticism between 1964 and 1996, demonstrate how the same plot can be recycled by setting the same story in different time periods and locales, and provide a fine example of a filmmaker leading, and a director following in Sergio Leone and Walter Hill.
References:

The Glass Key (1942) in imdb.com – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034798/

A Fistful of Dollars (1964) in imdb.com – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058461/

A Fistful of Dollars in tvguide.com – http://movies.tvguide.com/fisful-dollars/review/126235

A Fistful of Dollars in futuremovies.co.uk – http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/review.asp?ID=316

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema; Laura Mulvey; (1975)

The Sexual subject: a Screen reader in sexuality; Mandy Merck; (1992)

Bullets over Hollywood: The American Gangster Picture; John McCarty; (1993)

Censored Hollywood: sex sin & violence on screen; Frank Miller; (1994)

Prohibition: thirteen years that changed America; Edward Behr; (1996)

Last Man Standing (1996/I) in imdb.com – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116830/

Last Man Standing in timeout.com – http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/80131/last_man_standing.html

Last Man Standing in variety.com – http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117905570.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

Last Man Standing in efilmcritic.com – http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=636&reviewer=416 and http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=636&reviewer=258

The Films of Akira Kurosawa; Donald Richie; (1998)

Review: A Fistful of Dollars; James Berardinelli; http://www.reelviews.net/movies/f/fistful.html

Coyote kills John Wayne: postmodernism and contemporary fictions of the transcultural frontier; Carlton Smith; (2000)

The cowboy hero and its audience: popular culture as market derived art; Alf H. Walle; (2000)

Italian cinema: from neorealism to the present; Peter E. Bondanella; (2001)

The dame in the kimono: Hollywood, censorship and the production code; Leonard J Leff, Jerold Simmons; (2001)

Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail; Peter Stanfield; (2001)

Contemporary North American film directors: a Wallflower critical guide; Yoram Allon, Del Cullen, Hannah Patterson; (2002)

Impossible bodies: femininity and masculinity at the movies; Chris Holmlund; (2002)

Responding to Film: A Text Guide for Students of Cinema Art; Constantine Santas; (2002)

Baz’s Broadway opera; Maggie Shiels; (2002) in bbc.co.uk – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts/2305609.stm

Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930’s Singing Cowboy; Peter Stanfield; (2002)

Classical Film Violence: designing and regulating brutality in Hollywood; Stephen Prince; (2003)

Mystery, violence, and poplar culture: essays; John G. Cawelti; (2004)

Voyages of Discovery: A Manly Adventure in the Lands Down Under; Ken Ewell; (2004)

Yojimbo; Roger Ebert; (2005); in rogerebert.suntimes.com – http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050410/REVIEWS08/504100301/1023

Brian W. Fairbanks – Writings; Brian W. Fairbanks; (2005)

Film Genre: Hollywood and beyond; Barry Langford; (2005)

Children cinema and censorship: from Dracula to the Dead End Kids; Sarah Smith; (2005)

Spaghetti westerns: cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone; Christopher Frayling; (2006)

The spaghetti Western: a thematic analysis; Bert Fridlund; (2006)

Film remakes; Constantine Verevis; (2006)

Hollywood’s censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration; Thomas Doherty; (2007)

Controversial cinema: the films that outraged America; Kendall R. Phillips; (2008)

Flashback: A Brief Film History; Louis D. Giannetti, Scott Eyman; (2009)

The American Western; Stephen McVeigh; (2007)

Shooting (a) Woman – Comparative Study of Gender Roles in American Cinema; MA Manuela Beyer; (2008)

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush; David Greven; (2009)

The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films; Sorcha Ni Fhlainn; (2010)

Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters; George S. Larke-Walsh; (2010)

Yojimbo (2010) in Encyclopaedia Britannica – http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/653480/Yojimbo

News is news. Facts are facts. Just the facts, ma’am; report the facts properly and the story tells itself. PBS news-anchor Jim Lehrer’s commandments regarding journalism might seem a bit naive in a modern context, but let us not forget that it was not Woodward and Bernstein who fathered the present news industry in America, rather Australia’s own Rupert Murdoch, who realised that exporting this country’s ‘bread-and-circuses’ culture to the US would likely prove a commercially successful venture.

We report. You decide. We might repeat Barack Obama’s middle name three-hundred times an evening during an election year, and insist upon giving air-time to some of the nuttiest right-wingers the world has ever seen, but we’re just telling you what your fellow Americans think. You can make up your own mind. Can’t you?

Americans love sensationalism — but that sensationalism previously only extended to celebrity, or ridiculous notions peddled by check-out stand tabloids such as the National Enquirer. They sell the Enquirer in Canada, but everyone there takes it as-it-is: a humour publication. Frighteningly, many Americans take it seriously — as seriously as they take tabloid-television programs such as TMZ (which admittedly does get it right on the rare occasion, but I digress.) It took Australian ingenuity to extend that sensationalism to what used to be the boring, drab 6-o’clock news. Flashy graphics, dramatic music, flamboyant commentators — all of these things combined give you the macabre circus of the mundane that is Fox News.

Back to Australia. When I first emigrated, one of the first things I noticed was how ingrained into Australian culture betting and barracking is. It’s everywhere — not just in sport, but it extends to religion, political persuasion, fashion, music… You name it, there’s always a side. Everybody seems to have an opinion (which is healthy) but mostly a steadfast one (which is not!) Governments hold power based on the tiniest ‘swings’ in voter preference regarding issues specially chosen by political pundits to polarise the populace as much as possible, because the opinions within that populace hardly ever change at all. Red or blue? Which is your colour? Red or blue? Red? Can I change your mind? I didn’t think so. Red ’til your dead, right? That’s what I thought.

The media here has recognised this too, and exploits it with zeal. ‘You work and pay taxes, so why should you pay for those lousy dole-bludgers?’ ‘You poor battlers on disability have a hard time; shouldn’t the government give you more?’ Of course both of these arguments have their merits, but you never see them on the same page, because that would be a balanced argument that would leave the reader neither happy to be validated, nor angry to be invalidated for their position.

As a Canadian, I’ve grown up with, and demand balance. If I read an article in one newspaper which shows an obvious bias, even if it’s a bias I agree with I will still seek out a counter-argument in another publication (or, if it’s a good Canadian publication, I’ll just need to turn the page.) Thankfully, it is rare, even in modern times, for a Canadian newspaper to advocate that people vote for a particular politician or party — typically, they will give space to the various political persuasions to make their cases in the editorial pages, and themselves talk only about the electoral process, or about the election campaign as a whole.

Curiously, I’ve just realised they also typically don’t use quotes from politicians editorialisations for headlines. Fancy that.

Of course, we all know that’s not the way things are done here in Australia. Fairfax has identified a market demographic, and caters to it. Murdoch’s papers have their demographic, and cater to those readers. Even the ABC has a demographic it bends over backwards to please to ensure they come back and visit Aunty a bit more often — hopefully every 24 hours. However, it’s one thing to appeal to a demographic in style, but a whole other kettle of fish to appeal to it in substance — in Canada, the first is practiced; in Australia, seemingly the second.

Five years on in my residence here, unabbreviated ‘WTF’s still frequently escape my lips when I read the ‘news’, or watch ‘current affairs’ programming. As Holmes’ anonymous journalist said, the news is just not entertaining if you don’t provoke emotion in your audience, and the depths that reporters will plumb, and the heights of bias that they will scale in order to achieve that appear to be endless in either direction. Nobody appears to be immune to it — journalists seem to have realised that, rather than simply be easily-forgettable ‘reporters’, they can supply ‘analysis’ and ‘commentary’ and get their own fifteen minutes of micro-celebrity. Why not? Their opinion is as good as any — better, because they know the story. Why bother going through all the detail of explaining why something is bad when they can just tell you it’s bad? You trust them, right?

Obviously, I don’t agree with this idea in the least. Remember, I’m a Canadian, and I like my news boring as mud. Facts are facts, and commentary is commentary, meant for sites such as this — not on the 6 o’clock news, and not on the front page. Give me the facts as concisely as you can compile them in a way that I can understand and process them adequately enough to sufficiently formulate my own understanding and opinion of the situation — THAT is the essence of good journalism. If you can give me the ability to grasp the complexities of the most complex topics of the day, then you’ve done your job and are to be commended — but only then.

If the choice, metaphorically speaking, in how I learn about current events is either boring old bread, or flashy circuses, I’ll take the bread. You can keep your death-defying high-wire acts to yourself.

And, if I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.

Do we need the monarchy? Sparked by the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, this debate has been recently renewed, and is once again a topic of public conversation. Do we, the general ‘peacetime’ public (there are not bombs raining down upon our heads, after all), really need the monarchy? On the face of it, perhaps not. But, I think that this question doesn’t necessarily concern those of us not in uniform. In fact, I don’t believe it concerns we civilians at all. Let me explain.

Where the issue of monarchy or republic really comes into play, and almost perhaps explicitly so, really is in the theatres of war. When the question of precisely why one is entertaining charging that machine-gun nest comes up, or exactly why one is blinded and deaf in a trench, praying to whatever God you believe in while mortars rain down around you (“there are no atheists in a foxhole”), it’s important to consider just why one is not just enduring, but actively engaging in such an horrific experience.

In these cases a monarchy becomes a living symbol, like a flame or a torch, that one is defending, out of a sense of loyalty or honour, or out of a feeling of indentured servitude, if one has been drafted into the situation unwillingly. A country, or republic, on the other hand is a bit more of a nebulous entity, especially when the country to whom the soldier belongs is not itself directly under threat — but even when it is. I would argue that historically, armies seem to fight more fiercely, and defend more vigorously,  when led by a leader ‘by divine right’ rather than one appointed or elected by the population at large.

Witness World War II, and in particular the axis countries of Germany and Japan. Hitler was indeed a dictator, but the Germans themselves placed him in that position — he had no birthright to rule. Conversely, Japan was governed by an emperor who had an accepted divine right, by the Japanese, to do so. From historical evidence, the Japanese appear to have been far more eager to throw themselves at the enemy in defence of their Emperor than the Germans were in defence of Hitler. Eventually, the Germans fell over from both battle fatigue and in-rank infighting — a collapse from within — while the Japanese suffered less from such frailties, and complete victory required the deployment of a couple of atomic bombs — destruction from without. This crucial difference in stature translated into subsequent post-war proceedings against the leadership of those vanquished — while the German hierarchy was vigorously prosecuted for war crimes — and. had Hitler lived, presumably he would have been taken to task doubly so — Emperor Hirohito not only avoided prosecution, but continued, at least ceremonially, in his role as Japan’s head of state until his death in 1989.

Had they laid their hands on him, Hitler would have given absolutely no quarter by the Allied forces fighting in Europe, but yet Hirohito escaped his atrocities untouched. This is a curiosity of history that leads us to another question quite relevant the debate at hand: are a people stronger in wartime led by an elected official, or by a head of state elevated by divine right, or right of succession? The bombing of Britain during WWII was a terrible event, but the recollections of Britons who survived it tend to touch on the strength given to them by then-Princess Elizabeth’s radio broadcasts, or her ceremonial service in the military. The American soldiers were arguably driven far more by their generals than their commander-in-chief, elevating those such as MacArthur to almost legendary status — but, it would be difficult I think to say that the Americans fought out of a fondness for these military icons, and perhaps more out of fear of them. To the American people, WWII was about preventing the spread of the evils of Nazi Germany, and obtaining satisfaction against the Japanese for the attack on Pearl Harbour — more about fighting against something rather than fighting for something. I think this is a distinction that requires a great deal more exploration and thought.

In peacetime it is easy to dismiss these arguments as silly and sentimental. It would appear to the average member of the Australian public that one ought to feel more motivated to defend the ‘land of gold and green’ rather than some monarch of another country who resides thousands and thousands of kilometres away. But, I would myself hesitate to jump too quickly to the conclusion that we do not need them at all, and they should be done away with without a second thought. In times of war — especially war at home — a populace needs absolutes, and the monarchy provides that, at least in the matter of ‘supreme leadership’. There is no ambiguity; if the existing occupant of the throne is killed, we know who is next in line, and next after that. There are no worries of elections, of disputes of who will be in charge — we know that already, and so there is no need to trouble oneself with such details in a time of extreme strife.

When it comes to who and what you’re fighting for, you simply need to pull a coin out of your pocket, and flip it over a few times. You’ll find a symbol of your home, and a symbol of the one who personifies God’s dominion over it, whichever God that might be, if any at all (you might still have reverence for a Queen or King regardless.)  Can you do that with an American coin? Symbols of an overwhelming bureaucratic establishment united by one of the world’s bloodiest wars combined with a strikingly impersonal, bold-serif “In God We Trust”? Personally, I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. (In fact, I’ve always found the American penny to be quite the scary thing. But that’s an entirely different discussion.)

It’s fair to say the cultural identities of the former British Royal Dominions, and the personal identities of their subjects, have been forever shaped by these differences in iconography. Could Australia become a republic? Perhaps. Could Canada? Perhaps, but very, very unlikely. The Queen is like Hockey in Canada; they’re both spelt with an honorary initial capital letter out of a fondness held by the Canadian spirit. Admittedly, I don’t see that royal reverence quite as much in Australian civilians — but as to the question of who leads either country, I think that matter ought best be left to those who are willing to fight and die for us, rather than those who will ultimately be defended by their blood.

To those Australians in uniform — when you’re turning over that coin in a filthy trench somewhere, waiting for your chance to die in defence of your nation, who, or what on its faces would give you the most comfort, the most strength?

Being an advocate for an underprivileged and/or unrepresented group does not mean one provides blanket, unquestioning support for every single thing a member of that group says or does. Advocates are not defence attorneys; they do not seek to relieve a group completely of responsibility for their actions, and nor do they hope to unduly benefit their group simply because the opportunity exists. Advocates are not politicians.

Advocates work to ensure that a fair and just outcome occurs in issues where unfairness is perceived by a member, or the whole of a the group they represent. Sometimes, the perception of a member is deemed to be unfounded by the group. Sometimes, the perceived unfairness is unintended by the perpetrator, and the group recognises there was a lack of malice. Sometimes, the individual alleging unfairness is shown to have done so for personal purposes. Advocates are not meant to blindly work for individuals in these circumstances, and nor should they, for by doing so they disadvantage the position of their group by colouring the perception of it by the community-at-large.

Recently, I have noticed a number of so-called ‘advocates’ in this country appear to have forgotten these simple guidelines — individuals who claim to advocate for indigenous peoples that flatly dismiss the Northern Territory intervention; people who claim to advocate for refugees that place their support behind applicants found to have no legitimate claim, or who fail character checks. These examples stab at the heart of advocacy — advocacy is not about ambulance chasing, or the number of times an ‘advocate’ can get their name in print, or their face on television.

There is no benefit to the whole of the group of refugees, for example, if the general public feels that there is an all-or-nothing position held by those who purport to advocate for them. Generally, the public will go with ‘nothing’, since they assume that they will continue to be the target of derision and abuse by said ‘advocates’ irregardless of what, if any, concessions they choose to offer. This is obviously not productive; unfortunately, in Australia these tactics seems to be quite common.

In many cases, such a position erodes the credibility of those who ‘advocate’ for a group. For those who claim to advocate for the welfare of indigenous Australians, in particular those who live in the Northern Territory, to say that there has been absolutely no benefit to the quarantining of assistance payments only causes a large portion of the general population to scratch their heads whilst attempting to fathom the lack of logic in such a statement. Obviously, those who engage in casual substance abuse, or those who have difficulties managing money will benefit from quarantining of payments, regardless of what race they are. To say then, further, that said policy is racist because it targets a community where most, but not all of its members are of indigenous descent leads to further incomprehension, as the substantially higher rate of substance abuse in that community as a whole has been adequately measured, and such actions should be easily justified.

I am by no means saying that there are no merits to the multitude of finer points in any of the arguments I describe; but, it makes it far more difficult to engage in public discussion of those more ‘minor’, but far more important points when self-described self-promoting ‘advocates’ stand there with megaphones making blanket inflammatory generalisations about issues about which they appear to either have little or no understanding, or make cyclical, unreasonable arguments seemingly with no desire or intention of ever reaching any form of resolution in their regard.

These ‘professional advocates’ cause me great concern. In my experience, a true advocate would never consider advocacy to be their profession, instead feeling that they are providing a service to their community out of a desire to make that community equal in standing to others. If there is no unfairness towards their community, then there is no need for advocacy, and a true advocate will be satisfied and move on to other matters until unfairness returns — if it ever does.

An advocate should not seek to unfairly advantage their group. To do so would fly in the face of the principles of advocacy. Cynical arguments to justify “getting what we deserve” have no purpose in advocacy, and these should be shunned and rebuked by others who practice the art.

Advocates must remember that they are there to ensure that balance and fairness exists not only for the group they represent, but for the various interests in society as a whole. The purpose of the pursuit is to strive for a world wherein no person will be disadvantaged due to unfounded, arbitrary thought regardless of to what group, or groups, that person belongs; the purpose of the pursuit is not to encourage inappropriate advantage for individuals or groups, nor abuse or interfere with established processes simply to provide inappropriate opportunities for an individual or a group.

If you follow these principles, and strive to ensure fair and balanced treatment both for members of your group, and by members of your group toward society at large, then in my opinion you are entitled to call yourself an advocate. If you seek to advantage members of the group you represent unfairly and without consideration, you are not. After all, fairness is about fairness, and equity about equity — for everyone.

That’s a good question.

Life gets in the way. If you haven’t learned that yet, you soon will. The body you’re born into doesn’t always play nice with you. Sometimes it’s defective right out of the box — but you can’t send it back or exchange it. You’re stuck with it. The physiology associated with it may not be ideal — you may be non-muscular, you may be obese, you may be too small, you may grow too large — it really is a roll of the dice, a flip of the coin. The same goes for your mind. You could be brilliant, or you could be dull. You could be very sociable, or very withdrawn. You could be good at math, or very poor at it, but instead excellent at language and the arts. That you will excel in any of these is unlikely, and the likelihood you will excel at more than one of these is virtually none.

The percentage of people who go on to any prominence whatsoever is tiny — perhaps measured in tenths of a percentile. I’m not in that category. I’m no great artist, no world-renown author; no captain of industry; no popular politician; no brilliant scientist. I’m not an olympic athlete; an heroic soldier; an astronaut; a mountaineer. Like virtually all of you, I’m nobody, and what I have to say has little meaning or substance to the collective worth of humanity.

So, then, if this is so, why say it?

Perhaps I may have a good idea, or two. I have had some extraordinary experiences and successes that may be considered mundane in the grand scheme, but they were extraordinary to me, and could have been extraordinary to others. A hurdle doesn’t need to be very high if you have no legs. Most artists, novelists and poets aren’t truly ‘discovered’ until after they die — Agatha Christie was a pulp-fiction author who wrote time-fillers for train passengers, and Conan Doyle wrote short stories to fill empty columns in 19th-century newspapers. Poe was a drunk, who recited poetry merely to obtain another drink. Similar with van Gough. But, they are all held in quite high regard now. Whose to say that although what I write may not be recognised for any merit today, a hundred years from now popular opinion might not be similarly different?

Trapped in my feeble body with my ailing mind, the only thing that keeps me sane is that what I do may mean something, might effect the slightest change on another that eventuates in making the world a better place, or at least prevents it from becoming any worse. Further still, I might actually do something for which I will be remembered — not in infamy, but as someone who contributed, gave back for the oxygen I’ve consumed, the resources I’ve burned, the sum-total of what it cost the world and its creatures to foster my existence. Perhaps one day I will — or perhaps I won’t.

I was meant to be a genius. At age 6 I was programming computers and reading Heinlein and Asimov. My IQ at age 7 was off the scale. At age 8 I was studying chemistry and archeology, statistics and the stock market. My family life was not the best. My parents fought a fair amount, and my brother was a rather… let’s say ‘rambunctious’ child. These were distractions my semi-autistic mind could ill afford, and made it very difficult for my studies to progress beyond the average achieved with almost no effort. My parents declined an offer to send me to a private college out of pride, I suspect — my family was poor, and felt alienated from the community of well-off people who would comprise the parents of my potential classmates. I was addicted to tobacco at age 12, and took to frequent truancy to hide in bushes and smoke clandestine cigarettes with friends who were afflicted with the same filthy habit. Obviously this did little for my physical development, and it didn’t do much for my mental development either.

When I was 16 I broke my leg. They put me to sleep in order to reconstruct my ankle, and then I never woke up — at least, not fully. My mother has the nebulous conditions known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Crohn’s Disease; and I do too, ever since that point, anyhow. I then spent fifteen years doing very little. I existed with someone who only aspired to exist. I used my talents to perform trivial technical tasks only to obtain enough money to feed my nicotine addiction and semi-alcoholism. I was going absolutely nowhere. I wrote a short story or two, but nobody was interested. I composed some music for which another tried to take credit, and a big corporation stole. Any attempt at an artistic endeavour ended in naught. Even worse, there was virtually no encouragement from anyone in my life to take any of these paths further.

Eventually I grew tired of it. I quit smoking, and moved away from the person who preferred I go absolutely nowhere. Then, I was blessed to discover the person I truly loved. The only issue was that she was in Australia and I was in Canada. Even worse, I was (and still somewhat am) agoraphobic and prone to panic. Finally, at the time, I was the one with the financial wherewithal to travel. Did I get on the plane? Surprisingly, I did. I suppose I learned that you can surrender to fate if you feel the cost of not doing so could be far greater than simply that of your boring, worthless life — perhaps that’s the ultimate cure to that kind of anxiety. Go ahead, world, kill me — I don’t care.

It is better to never have lived, then to have lived for nothing. If that quote isn’t attributed to anyone, you can attribute it to me.

Being in my partner’s arms was the happiest moment, and still are the happiest moments, of my life. But I digress — this isn’t a love story beyond the simple explanation of my motivation to come here, to Australia. Being here was, in the broadest sense, strictly co-incidental. I had no idea of Australia’s economic position, or the opportunities Australian society held for even those whose capacity was diminished, for those who in Canada would be completely ignored by all and any media outlets. Canada is a very closed society, in the sense that an individuals ability to impact the whole is very carefully regulated by a rather complex system of gate-keeping. Canada doesn’t cut down her tall poppies, she simply doesn’t allow those who are not in favour to grow.

You would certainly never see the Prime Minister of Canada front up to an audience for questions if it were not a carefully orchestrated affair — if that audience had not been chosen and vetted by a litany of aides and political officials. Especially not today — it’s grown worse over the years, in spite of the theatrics of the so-called ‘town hall’-style events the Americans began and Canada has began to adopt. It’s complete farce, scripted by dozens of political “scientists”. In comparison, Australia seems like it could be one of the most politically open societies on the planet — not that there’s not room for improvement; this is merely an admission that there’s a great foundation to continue building on.

But enough of politics. All that matters is that I enjoy the freedom of discourse encouraged in that arena, and I wholeheartedly participate, because although my efforts likely amount to very little, in Canada they would have amounted to practically nothing. The same thing goes for the creative sphere. Canada is very much in the grip of the American ‘rock-star’ culture. Talent is ‘discovered’ (or, more often than not these days, manufactured) by large record companies who then bring that product to market, exploit it and then cast it away. A very few ‘artists’ persist, but that number is small indeed. The publishing industry is the same. Film and television is perhaps the last bastion where hard work can pay off, but it is very hard work indeed, and if you’re not prepared for 18-hour days you’ll likely not go very far.

One of the first things that impressed me here was the ABC, and the fact that unlike the CBC, it had not turned its back on community involvement, and was instead moving to increase that interaction. It seemed that the slow-march towards a very regimented media class system proceeding in Canada was here flipped in reverse — that in response to global media conglomeration, the ABC had opted to instead ‘circle the wagons’ and not go down without a fight. But the ABC is not alone in it. There are several community television stations in Australia, and numerous community radio stations — the closest thing to these that exists in Canada is student radio stations at university campuses, but these have minuscule broadcasting power and almost no listeners.

This is exciting to one who was so thoroughly disempowered in her home country. That all you need to do to have a voice is step up to the microphone and speak — that all you need to do to show yourself to your community is turn on a camera and submit a tape (I understand that it’s a wee bit more complicated than that, but I’m making a point here…) — that all you need is the initiative and the opportunities are not only available, but participation is actively encouraged. It boggles my mind, it truly does. Australia is so blessed to have such mechanisms — I would have emigrated to the most repressive country on the planet if that was where the love of my life had hailed from, but I am so glad she was from here, instead.

So, back to the original point of this diatribe: who am I? Well, I’ve certainly not squandered the opportunities I’ve been presented with here — I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be, but at least I’m moving in a forwardly direction and not standing still. I have a pretty varied body of work on the ABC Pool community media website that has photographs, novels, music, video — the occasional editorial — but I can’t help but feel that’s not the sum total of myself. What I create only describes me as much as what I can help others create, and I think that’s an important point that others should consider.

Taking advantage of these structures to empower myself is nowhere near as noble as aiding others to empower themselves. That’s why I’m working toward developing interfaces between community media groups and the general public, and between those groups and content-disseminators (such as broadcasters and websites) so that rather than hearing stories only told by those with the talent to tell them (which is still a dramatic improvement over other Western countries, I will repeat loudly) we will also hear the stories of those who do not think they will ever be able to tell theirs.

I envision free, albeit non-credited training in video and sound production. I envision ‘executive producers’ whose sole aim is to guide and encourage community productions (the ABC Open producer program is a healthy step in that direction). I envision promotional arrangements between community radio and television, and the various ABC properties to bring these voices not only to the small stages, but also the large ones. Forget 15 minutes. Why not showcase the diversity of the entire country all the time? The combination of the existing media foundations with the potential of the Internet can lead to places I don’t think we can even imagine yet.

Although, you can guarantee I am doing my best to try.

Australia is a very lucky country, and I am lucky to be here, and lucky to have the opportunity to shape and mould what could become the most truly democratic society on Earth — not just in politics, but in freedom of expression, and in the ability to be heard. Not only the ‘shining stars’ but also the ‘rough diamonds’ spread all over the brown-and-gold Austral landscape will have the ability to exhibit, and be exhibited. Who am I? I am someone who despite her crippling limitations has been given not only a voice, but once I’ve learned how to use it, the power to help give a voice to so many others. I have a purpose.

Hi there! I’m Melody, and I’m a producer — I have ideas, and I’m a somebody.

So are you.

But why merely tax carbon domestically? If Australia wants to have a real global impact on emissions then why doesn’t it also tax the export of coal to heavy-polluting countries, and tax the import of manufactured goods back from these same countries? Some of that money could be used to switch Australia to ‘clean’ energies, and the remainder allocated to research into renewable technologies, with the subsequent discoveries gifted back to those developing nations (in particular, China and India) thus making a real contribution to a reduction in global emissions instead of a token one.

Also, this would have no further impact on the cost of food, or domestic energy supply, requiring no additional complicated rebate mechanisms. Only goods from China and India (and perhaps the US) would go up in price, which would also encourage domestic manufacturing and a reduction of consumer waste. These are all good things, no?

However, implementing such a scheme would take some real strength on the part of Mister Rudd’s department. How about it, Kevin? Got the stones for it? Make other countries also pay the CSIRO et. al. to solve their problems– why shouldn’t they pull their weight too?

Forget the carbon tax. Tax coal exports to polluters. Tax manufactured imports from polluters. Tax electricity domestically if necessary to avoid charges of protectionism, but a small amount with no rebate scheme. This will make a much greater difference then a ‘price on carbon’.

How about it, Mister Rudd?