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Never again
This is the full-length movie 'Never on Sunday'. Enjoy! Remember the American tourist Homer Thrace who, having gone to Greece in search of its ancient philosophers but becoming disillusioned,...
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Don't leave home without it
I show you mine ... Leave home without your iqama in Saudi Arabia and you are in serious shit. Not quite a beheading but you're getting closer. I'll never forget the day a friend and I drove out of...
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Why I am not rich!
The address says it all: PO Box 187, Rabaul, New Guinea : Remember the Poseidon boom in Australia in the late 1960s when some nickel stocks experienced spectacular increases in price? The...
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The Demon-Haunted World
Read the book online here I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing...
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Life was so simple then
My office on the top floor of the Al Bank Al Saudi Al Fransi building in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia I've previously reflected on my past stripped-down working life. I liked it that way and my employers...
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April Fool's Day
April Fool's Day is cancelled this year because no made-up prank could match the unbelievable shit-show going on in the world right now. Sorry about that. Having just renamed the Gulf of Mexico,...
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Walk into Paradise
<Also available on DVD from Papua New Guinea Association of AustraliaThe story in a nutshell: A small expedition led by Steve McAllister (Chips Rafferty)walks towards Paradise Valley, beyond the...
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The poem of my life
A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from...
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Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)
Uncertainty is a universal human predicament: 'the future’s not ours to see', as this song, popular in the 1950s, put it. In Germany, a whole generation grew up with the refrain in their ears - in...
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Hotel zum Letzten Kliff
Iwant to tell you about the failed attempt to introduce a German version of Fawlty Towers to the Germans. A pilot episode of the show, called 'Zum Letzten Kliff' ('To the Last Cliff'), was...
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Snorkelling off Loloho Beach
This is a recent clip of Loloho Beach but it's timeless and could've been taken back in the 70s when we all lived in Camp 6 and had all that glorious beach right on our doorstep. Did we...
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My "Cabooltier" Past
What makes Caboolture real fruit yoghurt so much tastier? Well out here the birds are chirpier, the air is cleanier The grass is greenier, the cows are happier They make it much creamier, with fruit...
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Watch your back, Frank!
Yours truly, although politically always on the far right, is here on the far left.Frank is the one with the target on his back; in the background to his right is a Canadian whom I met again at the...
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Commas are important people!
Did you know that Australian author Peter Carey won the 2001 Booker Prize for "True History of the Kelly Gang"– a work that contained not a single comma? Amazing, huh? Of course, one might wonder...
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The best of Clive James
Read it online at www.archive.org Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer and lyricist Clive James, who died in November 2019, aged 80, left a huge legacy with his writing of five...
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Bougainville calling!
It's now more than twenty years ago when I launched my Bougainville Copper Project website on an unsuspecting world. The response was overwhelming with emails, even phone calls, coming in from all...
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The magic of autumn is in the air
Perhaps it's because of my Teutonic past but I simply love dessidiousdecidious trees that shed their leaves in autumn. So, following the advice that "the best time to plant trees was thirty years...
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Tales from a Suitcase
Imagine this. You have just survived the war, in which you lost everything. Many members of your family were killed, some died in camps; others, you just don't know about. Many of your neighbours...
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Daylight Saving Time ends today!
Daylight Saving Time ends today! It has been a veritable Australian institution as far back as 1916, except for Queensland which only chose to join the rest of the country in 1971 and for a short...
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Only Trump could do it!
US$42.07 is the ADR-equivalent for two BHP shares which, converted at 0.60 and divided by two, equals AUS$35.05 a share. Sydney's closing price on Friday was AUS$36.82. Perhaps I should have invested...
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You'll never eat kalamari again!
My Octopus Teacher tells the moving story of how Craig Foster, after vowing to free-dive daily after burning out at work, came to know an octopus living in the kelp forests outside his home in Cape...
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Shaw's famous writing hut
More than seven decades after his death, George Bernard Shaw is remembered for his prodigious body of work as a playwright, but also for his personal eccentricities, such as his shed which he...
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Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee
After countless funerals attended over the last few years, I'd already told myself that I wouldn't attend another funeral except my own, but Padma insisted that I see off her friend Rosie's husband...
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Not your average accountant
Thank you, CERUM ACCOUNTANTS, for holding onto the slogan!(but not for not believing in the use of apostrophes) At around the time when the then Australian Society of Accountants (ASA) morphed into...
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