Admittedly this is not what you'd normally bring to mind when asked to imagine "bread money", but it's redolent with associations. Food prices are set to rise by 45 percent over the next decade, we're told. It should not surprise us. The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, a federal government body, says that food prices have risen by 75 percent since 2000. The Courier-Mail story tells us that it's not just people living in developing economies who will face hunger in the coming years, but "even more Australians will be unable to afford a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, turning instead to processed meals and junk food".

It should be no surprise to governments in Australia, though. In a 2007 study undertaken by the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC), in collaboration with NSWHealth and other health bodies, "Some socio-economically disadvantaged suburbs in [Greater Western Sydney] are effective 'food deserts' with no local food outlets such as supermarkets, food co-operatives or fruit and vegetable shops." Overweight results from restricted access to affordable, healthy food, which the study says is a "basic human right".

But Sydney's peri-urban regions, which could supply a lot of the fresh food its residents require, is a contested area. 50 percent of the farms by number - and 30 percent by volume of produce - producing vegetables in the Sydney basin, are located in the two growth centres on the city fringe. These agricultural precincts are slated for development according to the NSW Department of Planning. When I asked the department for comment, they told me that they "had my details".

The 2007 study notes that a rural lands review to document agricultural land in growth centres was a "current NSW government commitment" but one of the study's authors tells me that it "went nowhere". A "ground truthing" study conducted by a researcher at the Department of Primary Industries documents the state of agriculture in the Sydney basin in 2008. It says that only 12 percent of Sydney's fresh vegetables are grown in the basin. For some produce, such as mushrooms, the local content of what is consumed in Sydney is high. For others, such as celery, about 98 percent of what is consumed in Sydney is produced elsewhere. It seems that people living in areas underprovided with fresh-food outlets will continue to be forced to rely on unhealthy options such as fast food in order to satisfy their nutritional requirements.

I slept from 9pm last night until 8am this morning. Exhausted physically and emotionally drained. Editing my father's memoir has not been easy, neither in the routine and practical sense that encompasses endless tiny corrections made in the MS-Word file containing the memoir nor in the less-tangible but equally real sense of confronting a number of demons that I had conveniently stashed away, out of sight and out of mind, to secure my own peace. The task of editing the file and then converting the text into HTML format, as well as splitting up the text into (it turned out) 35 separate chapters so as to enhance the document's readbility and make it suitable for web publishing, took the better part of three days.

Yesterday, I finished adding the final touches to the web pages and writing two additional pages in order to complete the task in a definitive manner. One of these new pages is a note from the editor explaining the provenance of the memoir and how grammatical and punctuation changes had been made to the text. Providing an explanation of this nature is, I thought, important for two reasons. First, it helps those family members who take the time to have a look at the memoir understand the quality of the text. This is relevant because dad basically finished his English schooling at age 14. Secondly, the note gives readers a bit of background about how the memoir came to be written, even going so far as to tell them where it was written. The note also tells readers about my mother's involvement in one of my father's final major projects.

The other major project he undertook after retirement and before he succumbed to the debilitating consequences of contracting Alzheimer's Disease was an extensive family tree. I have not decided to publish these files and, in fact, doubt that I will. This is because they contain a fair whack of personal information including the dates of birth of thousands of individuals still living in a number of global communities.

My mother agrees with publishing my father's memoir and we have discussed the reasons why it is a good idea. Of primary importance is that the number of people who are unrelated to the family and who visit the relevant pages on my website is very small, indeed negligible. But the benefits are numerous. Not least of them is the fact that family members we are unacquainted with will be in a better position to find me by searching on the internet. This has already happened a number of times, and the additional links to extended family enriches our lives.

I am not able to unequivocally say that the intimate knowledge of my father's life afforded to me by means of reading, in minute detail, his memoir has enriched my life. In the short term, it has troubled me. A man who writes a memoir automatically engages in a process of editing. Memory is unstable from the point of view of the person writing, for a start. The other thing that qualifies the reader's understanding of the memoir is the way in which the author has chosen to frame events. What purpose did he have in writing it?

In his preface, my father explains that he wrote the memoir for several reasons. One is because he felt regret, himself when, in the process of compiling the family tree, he came across holes in the narrative. For a man as meticulous and curious as my father these hiatuses must have been frustrating. My father also says he "felt a need" to write about those parts of his life that his children and grandchildren did not already know about. The third reason is more troubling.

He says that he was troubled by comments from my brother and I during our lives together. And this makes me look askance at the title he chose for the memoir: 'Growing'. In the light of his complaint about things my brother and I said, at various times in our early lives, this title appears to presage a wash-job. From things that happened in the recent past it is clear that, in terms of family, my father never actually "grew" much at all. In fact, I'd say that his behaviour indicates that from the earliest times to the most recent his attitude toward family was all of a piece.

Anger can motivate people to do extraordinary things. I hope that the anger I feel at things that my father, who is 80 years old this year, did at various times in my life can be converted into something useful and beneficial to me and those close to me. At least in the long term. In the short term, the best I can do is to communicate the link to the finished pages to family members and await their feedback. My mother says she has taken steps to organise my father's funeral in case she is unable to function properly when he dies. We will see how many people manage to find time to attend the service, when that event finally comes to pass in this world of sorrows.

This is a picture of my paternal grandfather, Joao Luis da Silva, a key participant in my father's memoir, which he completed in 2002 and chose to title Growing. A wilful child, my father was in the habit of "wandering off" (his term for those rambles, undertaken from a very early age) and part of the reason he had so much freedom to do so was that his parents both worked at jobs that kept them out of the house for most of the daylight hours.

Joao Luis was often unemployed. But he was a good gardner. The memoir isn't too specific with dates that far back (the 1930s, during the Depression, were a challenging time for many), but it's certain that Joao Luis worked hard at what work he could find, which frequently was in the nature of looking after the gardens of the well-to-do residents of Brighton, the suburb of Melbourne the family lived in.

He also spoke with a strong accent and was sometimes moody and depressed - hardly surprising when you consider the circumstances of his life after arriving in Australia in 1924. My father's older sister was born in 1926 and dad in 1930. Until the war, when Joao Luis got a job at a munitions factory in Melbourne, the family's income was frankly unstable. His strangeness, his marked accent and his Portuguese bosom buddies, and his occasional rages, made my father dislike him.

I know this because I have just spent more than a day editing dad's memoir and converting it into HTML, and publishing it on my website.

Dad wanted, more than anything else, to be a part of the establishment. He wanted to be like his maternal grandfather, William Caldicott. Will was a sturdy pillar of society, ran his own fruit-wholesale business, and was the kind of man who listened to your problems (I think Joao Luis could have done a bit more of this type of thing with his kids). He was also the kind of man who could stand around in the local fruit shop and chat with the proprietor in an easy, confident way.

When dad broke his neck during a visit to Sydney, where Will lived in a house bordering the Parramatta River, Will would visit him in hospital every day. More talking no doubt took place on these occasions. It's certain that Joao Luis was a distant father. But as a migrant he faced unique and possibly sometimes seemingly-insurmountable problems. Dad didn't empathise with Joao Luis and this lack of a shared bond is evident in the memoir that I have just finished reading in minute detail.

Poverty was grinding, but the family always had food to eat even if treats were sometimes missed on a Sunday evening after the dishes had been cleared away. The plates would have been heaped with fesh vegetables grown in the garden behind the house. And there would probably have been plenty of fresh fish that Joao Luis had caught that afternoon on Port Philip Bay, using fishing rods that me made, himself, at home.

After dad recovered from the almost-fatal injury sustained during that trip north, he reentered society with a vengeance, and took a job as a clerk. He switched to draughting, which was a profession more in line with his interest in mechanical things. Dad went back to school, having left one day aged 14 because he didn't enjoy it, and studied engineering. He would go on to attain a master's in mechanical engienering from the University of Melbourne - something his mother never would have anticipated when he left school to become a carpenter's apprentice.

But dad was driven, in a way that Joao Luis was not. Trained for nothing, Joao Luis floundered from wage to wage, finally setting up in a milk bar (but that venture floundered when TV began to eat away at cinema business; the customers leaving the movie houses no longer needed a meal at 1am because now they were at home watching the box on the couch). Dad couldn't let Joao Luis and this lifestyle of want stymie an aspiration to belong to the establishment: the world of cars, property and a rewarding professional life.

The memoir is disappointing in some ways but it makes you think. It's actually a good read, despite the many grammatical and structural flaws. For example, dad always struggled with the concept of a sentence. A fully-crafted sentence was a bit too much trouble. Serial commas without fussy conjunctions more suited his thrusting temperament. But the prose and the language are compelling and interesting. There's a bit of self-pity in among the chronicles of victories won against the odds, but the unfailing will abides above all. Dad never gave up, even though he often lacked fellow-feeling. He wanted to be understood but often failed to understand others, even those closest to him.

This makes him seem, at times, rapacious and cold. He wasn't either, but having lacked so much for so long he didn't think he could afford all of the finer characteristics of the well-rounded persona. Tolerance fell by the wayside because he was busy looking for ways to attain the goal he coveted so hard and so long. Compassion, too, was often absent. And consideration, and empathy, and a lot of other things we like to see in ourselves and, when we don't, prefer that the slip goes unnoticed by others apart from ourselves. In dad's case, it was easy to slip because the slope stretching out in front of him was steep and he needed to remain agile and focused, and not fail.

In the end, though, his sins caught up with him. Mum and I still visit him in the nursing home, but I don't go along as often as I perhaps should. I'm pretty busy making a career out of writing.

This image of an exhausted hyena IS NOT a picture of a blogger retiring wounded from the epic Grog's Gamut slang-fest that has finally it seems transitioned from the full-scale, no-holds-barred battle it resembled a couple of days ago (it started last Monday, 27 September you'll be interested to know; the blog post linked above contains a comprehensive list of pieces from members of both the chronically-understaffed Grand Lodge of the Virtuous Quill and the fatally-splintered Grog's Unrepentant Rabble of W00ts, which are, for the record, the twin forces that locked keyboards with such splendid abandon during that exhausting five-day festival of loathing and mutual distrust we must now bring down the curtain upon, and before the shrine of which deposit, with mingled feelings of pride and happy self-regard, a memorial asterisk) to a barely-simmering cauldron of repressed grievances and hatreds that shall probably lie dormant, like a fabled volcano in a brick-sized fantasy novel picked up for a buck at the second-hand store next to the porn shop, until a future chance event causes the swirling magma of irrepressible agency that forever seethes just below the quiet surface of the Internetz to pop out once more and scare the living crap out of the GLVQ's haughty editors and GURW's sartorially-diverse tweeps, alike.

A new debate on whether Australia should remain involved in the War in Afghanistan is long overdue. I agree with Scott MacInnes, a retired lawyer and lecturer, who writes today on The Drum, "It is good that there will be a debate on the war in Afghanistan."

The war started in 2001 as Operation Enduring Freedom. Sounds a bit odd and extreme, doesn't it? The Bush-era rhetoric jars, now, on the civilian ear. The robust label harks back to a time when everything was suddenly turned upside down by 19 detemined, well-organised and -trained men operating outside their comfort zone, on foreign soil, according to an impeccable plan worked out, we were told, somewhere in Afghanistan. As a result, the United States marshalled its immense military power and crossed the seas. Australia followed.

In the last year the number of evening news stories featuring flag-draped coffins, weeping children, stirring speeches delivered from the pulpit, and images of big, unbranded aircraft flying in to land has increased as the Australian Defense Force delivers more dead bodies back to the civil society that apparently sent them out, alive, to represent our interests on the international stage.

But the marketplace for ideas has altered dramatically since 2001 or even 7 July 2005, when four Muslim men attacked the London transport system with lethal effect. Freedom has endured despite, not because of, the military actions taking place in Afhanistan. Of course, some say that freedom has been the main casualty. Michael Moore calls Barack Obama a dupe to the defense lobby and the "military-industrial complex" (yes, even he cringes when using this well-worn trope).

The outlandish rhetoric of martial leaders has surrendered its place in our living rooms to the sight of small children saying their final farewells to dead fathers. Even Australia has registered 150 woundings as well as 21 deaths, in the conflict.

Another change has been on the security front. More staff engaged in counter-terrorism has meant that there have been no successful attacks in the West since 7 July 2005. The enemy has been harrassed at home and is in disarray abroad. But as Peter Black said, on behalf I think of many, on The Drum on TV the other night, it's "an unwinnable war". Institute of Public Affairs representative Tim Wilson quickly demurred when Black came out with this broadly-held viewpoint, but we know that that organisation is conservative to the core and would be unlikely to join ranks with the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" lined up with their white flags aflutter on the ideological Left of the political divide.

When it became clear that Bush, Blair and Howard had outright-lied to their constituents about the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the argument morphed into a bitter denunciation of a Bad Man. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is certainly Bad from the point of view of most White People, but continued fighting with troops, guns and helicopter-launched missiles is also cringeworthy, no? The occasional story exiting Afghanistan with the blessing of immensely paranoid military managers safely stationed in rural Canberra just seems to bounce off our collective epiderm like an errant blow-fly on crystal meth. It's too bizarre. What on earth has this stuff got to do with us? Hasn't all that stuff finished yet?

So it's good that the Greens have demanded a debate it looks like we'll finally get. In Parliament. Among people we recognise and who represent us politically. At length and to the point, no doubt, of physical exhaustion. Bravo for the Greens and Andrew Wilkie, the Tasmanian independent MP who was so brutally handled by the Liberal Party earlier in the decade. Lest we forget.

With the words 'Toxic Bank Anglo' written on its enormous drum, a cement mixer was rammed into the gates outside the Irish Parliament yesterday, reported the Irish Independent. The news disappeared rapidly from Australian websites and failed to make an appearance on the websites of The Guardian - the UK's leading liberal broadsheet - or The New York Times. Which is slightly odd when you think about it for a short time. It's just local Irish news? Well, maybe it is. But it's also a sign from the street that Ireland is balanced finely on the brink of financial collapse, and that's not a good sign so soon after Greek financial vulnerability appeared in the wake of recession-busting measures taken after the Global Financial Crisis. Those measures were supposed to protect the global financial system from falling more. They have mostly, but in some countries problems persist.

Street demonstrations staged in Athens a few months ago caught the attention of the world's media, giving us the opportunity to see second-hand the challenges facing Greece as it starts to come to grips with austerity measures imposed to combat a serious economic crisis.

The Dublin cement truck's neatly-painted slogan, in less dramatic guise, points to ongoing problems with confidence in Ireland's ability to repay sovereign debt, and austerity measures taken by the government to buttress the state's liquidity, which are impacting on society generally (as they have in Greece). This time the public has focused its attention on the Anglo Irish Bank, an entity the government in Ireland nationalised, according to the short Sydney Morning Herald story, in order to save it from total collapse. According to the Independent:

The incident was sparked by controversial plans by the Government to plough more than €20m into State-owned Anglo Irish Bank.

In the same newspaper, there's a story about the cost of securing sovereign finance in Ireland, which has risen to 6.78 percent. There are fears that a situation similar to the one faced by the Greek administration will develop in Ireland. It's a matter of global interest whether a second country needs to be bailed out by Europe's major economies, as Greece was when Germany, France and others stepped in to pump funds into its financial system. Another recessionary dive in Europe would have serious repercussions everywhere, including in Australia. Here, it is common for global financial jitters to result in the stock market falling sharply, and if it happened again it would become a feared 'double dip'. A strong currency will not protect us from large falls in confidence elsewhere in the world.

And it's not the first time that a graffitoed cement truck has been deployed by protesters in Dublin.

In April, a cement mixer truck, with similar wording on it, was abandoned outside a branch of the bank on Forster Street, Galway. The cabin was locked and the engine left running.

The absence of related stories from major world media outlets is puzzling, as though this simple but insistent message were of no consequence at all. Civil action in Greece, certainly, is more imposing - rioting this year led to a death, for instance - but we can now see with our own eyes that the Irish people appear to be getting fed up with a government that seems to be unable to tidy up a mess created by the same financiers who are benefiting from public largesse.

Fascinating results have come out of a new study on religion in the United States by the country's renowned Pew Research Centre, a non-profit subsidiary of Philadelphia-based The Pew Charitable Trusts, which was established between 1948 and 1979 by four children of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph Newton Pew and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Despite being the most religious Western country, America seems to be suffering from an abundance of ignorance. Atheists and agnostics do better than anyone else in the tests, underscoring how familiarity with a doctrine breeds scepticism and, possibly, a greater ability to form independent opinions about it.

Older Catholic Southern women who only graduated from high school are the least-informed when it comes to religion and young, educated, sceptical Nothernern men are the best-informed.

Not suprisingly, one of the worst results was on being asked about whether Indonesia is a majority-Muslim country. Only about a quarter of Americans got that one right. In the history section, less than half know that Martin Luther sparked the Reformation. Just over half of Protestants, whose religion is founded on teachings promulgated at the time, got the question right.

Unsuprisingly, education level is the major determinant of knowledge, with college graduates scoring better than, say, high school graduates. Along with atheists and agnostics, Mormons and Jews did better than other groups sampled in the survey. And those who have an active commitment to their faith (who attend church at least once a week and talk about religion with others) do better than those who are more casual about observance. Participation in a youth group or religious study class helped to up the result. And while private school respondents did better than public school ones:

those who attended a private religious school score no better than those who attended a private nonreligious school.

The Pew survey also found that, as in other surveys conducted by the research centre, atheists and agnostics and Jews are better-educated than other groups polled. Nevertheless:

even after controlling for levels of education and other key demographic traits (race, age, gender and region), significant differences in religious knowledge persist among adherents of various faith traditions. Atheists/agnostics, Jews and Mormons still have the highest levels of religious knowledge, followed by evangelical Protestants, then those whose religion is nothing in particular, mainline Protestants and Catholics.

And while evangelical Protestants did pretty good on questions about the Bible, they "fare less well compared with other groups on questions about world religions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism".

There's a scene in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) which is memorable because truly realised, unlike much of the book (a book that has come in for a lot of flak in recent times for not being as "true" as its dust jacket and title page promised). It features a posse of street-wise cats that prowls the pavement in downtown Holcomb, sashaying up to still-warm automobiles parked at the curb, and picking pieces of dead fauna out of the front grilles. It's a convenient snack for hungry felines.

I thought of this scene in the wake of the Grogs Gamut scandal that is currently animating the twitterverse and, going by the belated exposure the case got last night on the ABC's always-excellent Q and A, the commentariat and society generally. The decision by The Australian's James Massola to 'out' Grogs Gamut as Canberra arts bureaucrat Greg Jericho has been picked at like one of Capote's dead birds. First it was Jericho's turn to be splattered across the front-end of The Australian's roaring news vehicle. Then, in retaliation, tweeps from across the country bore down on Massola en masse. Now we're busy picking the pieces off the fender in an effort to understand just why a journalist from the mainstream media took the fatal step that he decided - or his senior editors decided - to take.

In any case, Massola has decided to "wear" the flak. It's the only honest thing to do. It's also typical of News Ltd to dig in and weather the storm, as it is for most people operating routinely in the public sphere.

The arguments for and against the outing are multiple. For me, the most compelling reason for it was Jericho's apparent partisanship. In a lengthy apologia (it's also been put up in PDF) published at midnight yesterday (today?), Massola admits that the fact that Grogs Gamut's tweets seemed to place his true persona firmly on the Left of Australia's ideological divide, contributed to a decision to take him out. Massola also admitted that The Australian took exception to this perception of bias. It's long been the opinion of numerous people on Twitter that the newspaper leans to the Right, and this most recent piece of evidence simply reinforces the contention.

The forces on that side of the divide have been busy, too. Herald Sun political journalist Ben Packham grumbled yesterday about a fact most tweeps understand: their own inherent bias in the opposite direction. And because I thought it glib for News Ltd to complain about Jericho's anonymity I told Packham (yesterday at 8.45am, to do myself justice) in a tweet:

So SA govt was right to ask blog commenters to reveal their identity? Seem to recall AdelaideNow was against that premise.

The argument was backed up during Q and A last night when Senator Conroy brought it up on air. The defense of transparency is simply a ruse to deflect attention away from where the real impetus arose: in News Ltd's ferocious and implacable partisanship. The last straw was the ABC's CEO Mark Scott listening to Jericho seriously, and moving to adjust the public broadcaster's coverage of the recent election to better serve its viewers, readers and listeners. But that discussion will have to take place somewhere else, preferably among people with the skills needed to accurately 'unpack' the kind of writings that make so many people on Twitter cringe.

For me, at the moment, I need to find my nail file. There are pieces of rotting flesh sticking out from under my fingernails.

Woody Allen did for failed romance what a news story does for a failed election attempt. In Annie Hall (1977) Allen humourously displays the dilineations of love-gone-cold from the point of view of a sophisticated loner with romantic sensibilities and a warm heart. But the sense of pure pity that Lasse Hallstrom generates in his Dear John (2010) is entirely missing. Allen spends a lot of effort trying to describe the social relations between his characters. Hallstrom spends the same effort looking at the enduring mystery of love and how it functions as a common element in our lives.

The social diorama Hallstrom leverages in his quest is not unimportant, but it is secondary to his main artistic aim. John Tyree (Channing Tatum) is an All-American boy and a Special Forces combat veteran home visiting his father on leave. He's muscular, quiet, and manly. He appears within a milieu we recognise from many movies out of the US. There's a beach, a beach house, a party assembled around a fire on the cooling sand. There's volleyball and old friends who are quick to offer you a drink to make you feel welcome.

Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) is the girl-next-door from an affluent Southern family. They own the beach house. But Amanda has unusual ambitions beyond those tied to economic success. She wants to help people, and this compulsion which sees her volunteer her time to help build a new house to replace one destroyed in a severe storm, will also lead to the sickening split that leads to so much drama in the film. Hallstrom has set his aim high, and forges a path directly into the centre of the American psyche in an effort to uncover something unique and universal about love.

The film is set mainly on the coast of South Carolina with its powerful horizontal features. There are the sand dunes and the endless, lapping waves coming in off the Atlantic. There is John's father's low-slung bungalow sitting comfortably amid nestling trees. There are the long, open roads of the coastal region which split the landscape between the beach and the lush hinterland with its rich herbaceous variety. Within this flat visual spectrum John and Savannah create powerful verticals, and the strength of this juxtaposition underscores their centrality in the story. It is their story in a compelling fashion that cannot be denied.

After two weeks' leave Stateside, John must return to his unit in the combat zone, but the two lovers promise to write to each other and tell each other everything that happens to them. The letters zing their way via numerous routes between two continents until, one day, Savannah's letters suddenly stop. John's dismay is palpable but the feeling worsens when, a couple of months later, he receives the letter he has been dreading most of all. His footlocker, where he stores the envelopes and their treasured contents, is emptied into a fire.

Then John is shot in the shoulder and is sent to Germany to recuperate. From there he is sent back to the US due to his father's failing health. While home, John visits Savannah, who now lives in her parent's home with her new husband, who is not at home. In fact, he's in hospital as a result of severe lymphatic cancer. They visit the hospital and John confronts his rival for Savannah's affections. It turns out it's not the guy John had suspected -- the irritating Randy -- but the separated father, of an autistic boy, who had been John's friend, Tim (Henry Thomas). After the two lovers return to Savannah's place they argue. Tim has told John that Savannah still loves him as much as she did when they were together for those unforgettable two weeks so many years ago. They seem irreconcilable now. "See you later," says Savannah as John is about to exit the house. "Say the same back to me," she pleads with quiet desperation. "Goodbye sweetheart," he says as he pushes open the screen door leading into the darkness. He goes back to Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever else it is he's serving. But before he leaves he sells his father's coin collection and donates the money toward purchasing the expensive, experimental drugs Tim needs to fight his illness.

More years pass and all the while Savannah and John are still in love with one another. Then, one day on the streets of downtown Charleston, John rides up on his pushbike, which he starts to attach by a security chain to a parking meter on the pavement. Glancing sideways into the front window of a cafe he sees Savannah seated alone in front of a cup of coffee. She gets out from behind the table, leaves the cafe, and stretches up her arms to embrace John on the sidewalk.

The credits run.

The celebration of Aussie boganism begins hours from when the start whistle rings out across the verdant sward in the middle of the Melbourne Cricket Ground and while there's only so much interest that can be extracted from shots of change-rooms, the camera gets plenty of help from secondary actors. The camera does more than track its way down the passages constructed in the bowels of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It also sits, transfixed, staring at groups of suited men lined up behind a desk and holding branded microphones into which they pour endless streams of verbiage - all in honour of the Australian Football League grand final that is about to start today.

Warm-up band INXS looks tame rather than iconic and sounds inadequate without the splendour of lead singer Michael Hutchence, who died 13 years ago in November. The support vocalist's breasts jiggle enthusiastically as the new lead singer - who knows his name? not me - struts across the stage constructed above one of the main entrances to the stadium's underbelly. Perhaps it's the entrance the players will use to, soon, stampede onto the playing field.

Not yet, though. A well-drilled procession of Toyota utes drags itself out of the stadium's voluminous guts and starts to drive around the field but stays in the out-of-bounds zone. On the back of each ute sits a pair of past worthies, players celebrated for something-or-other. They sit, suited and grinning, on folding teak deck chairs of the kind normally found set outside the back door of a suburban house and used for barbeques and other summertime activities where plenty of beer is drunk and lots of meat is eaten. Some of the men have children on their laps as they make their well-deserved victory lap around the stadium where 100,000 fans cram their scarves and jackets into plastic seats that cannot be removed.

Talking of deck chairs ... Advertising screened during the grand final appeals to the same, identical demographic as that of the audience. You can get your bathroom tiles grouted seamlessly. You can buy an iconic, award-winning lifestyle home that is architecturally designed. You can use a top-of-the-range welding machine in your chosen profession of tradie. If you are cashed-up and willing, the opportunities available in this modern, football-loving society are quite simply endless.

Absolute nightmare experience yesterday due to my downstair's neighbour turning up the volume on his television set to booming levels, making the sound travel up the airshaft into my little world. Some ridiculous game-show complete with a hungry-for-laughter compere and regular, explosive applause from the mouth-breathing bogans in the studio audience.

I pottered down to his landing and knocked on the door but there was no answer. So I went down to the front door and buzzed him with the intercom. "Hello?" he said when he picked up. "Look, sorry to disturb you. It's Matthew from upstairs." Silence. Then a loud 'click' was heard as he hung up the handset in his unit. I repeated the exercise. The second time I buzzed him he didn't even answer, he just hung up straight away.

Back in my apartment, I called the police and explained to them the situation. It was about 5.30pm at this time and the operator asked me if the noise was excessive. Not unbearable, I said, but it was as loud as a voice inside my room. "That's excessive," she said. She promised to send a car around soon, and hung up. I waited.

In the meantime the explosive television from downstairs continued to infringe on my privacy, making it impossible to work or even read stuff on the internet. I suffered in silence for a while, then resorted to my own television, which I switched on at low volume and settled down on the couch to watch a chat show on the ABC.

Finally, at about 6.20pm the police buzzed me on the intercom but by this time the guy downstairs had had enough of his own sonic effluvium and had turned off the television. I informed the officer of this and he said that it was better not to go up because it might "aggravate" my neighbour. What about my aggravation, I thought. But I said merely, "OK, thanks", and let the police go about their other business.

It would have been useless to bring them up as the way it works is that the officer must judge on the merits of the case whether there is a reasonable cause for complaint. It is an individual, on-the-spot decision. If there is no sound there are no grounds on which to interrupt a person's evening by knocking on their door.

I felt drained after this, and found it impossible to concentrate even on a book, so I switched off the light and spent the next hour listening to my racing heartbeat as the episode of aggravation started to morph into a full-scale panic attack. I fell asleep, at length. This morning, I feel tired but calm; a long way from the way things felt yesterday. There are still three stories to finish and another bout of noise pollution could make the whole enterprise jump the tracks.

Pic credit: Computer Arts

The local bananabirds are visiting the flowering aloe on my balcony again. It's the second time this year. The first was back in May when this photo was taken.

For a large bird, the bananabird or blue-faced honeyeater is agile and swift. Measuring about 25cm to 30cm from beak to tail-end, they zoom onto my balcony from outside and perch precariously on the flower stems -- each flowering results in two or three bunches of blossoms at the top of a long stalk that removes the flowers away from the plant's sharp-edged leaves.

The aloe didn't start flowering until just before I moved to Queensland. That was in winter, too. I had rescued the plant from neglect when my downstairs neighbour moved house, leaving the pot sitting on their balcony between the building and the one next door. I bought a new, larger, pot at a nursery-supply business near my old flat. When the removalists came to pack my stuff, they placed the pot in a box and the plant is hardy so it survived the three-day shift which included several nights of darkness inside a container. Not all my plants survived.

The bananabirds come singly, most of the time, although today the adult arrived with an immature fellow who saluted me on departure by squirting a stream of goo onto the balcony tiles. They are the largest honeyeaters in Australia and are coloured delicately in an olive green plumage. Their faces are black-striped and bright blue and their chests are white. They are very timid and will quickly disappear if they see my head move as I turn to look at them out of the sliding glass.

I really wanted to share this brilliant little video that shows why severely-troubled gay teenagers shouldn't take ultimate measures to end personal suffering. The trauma to family due to youth suicide apart, these two guys say that things will get better: so don't do it. Absent the bullies and other sources of personal pain, life advances to places, they say, that you could not ever have imagined. These two guys have been together for 16 years and have a 13-year-old child to care for and love. Their lives are, in their own words, great.

Northern Ireland just seems to endure as a sore in the body politic of Britain. Events such as the shooting of a policeman (10 March 2009) or the shooting of a pair of soldiers by men posing as pizza delivery men (8 March 2009) continue to bother people living otherwise peaceful lives in the Isles. We thought it was all finished, done, forgotten. But it's not. And Five Minutes of Heaven (dir Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) shows why that is the case.

It's a fairly short feature at just under 90 minutes but it stars two of the best in English acting circles: James Nesbitt as Joe Griffin and Liam Neeson as Alistair Little. Neeson's sonorous voice dominates the opening credits. "For me to talk about the man I have become, you need to know about the man I was," he says. The story begins in the mid-70s amid a group of young Unionist sympathisers preparing for a retaliatory hit on a Catholic worker.

Mark David plays the young Alistair, a plucky buck with a revolver hidden under his bed inside a box of children's toys and a gang of apt friends who are expert in the darker arts, such as an ability to hot-wire a brown, late-model Ford so that they can drive into the Catholic parts of the city of Ulster where their target lives. The hit goes off flawlessly but Alistair is taken by the police and jailed.

Fifteen years later, and he's out on the streets again. But the authorities want their pound of flesh, which takes the form of subjecting him to a televised 'truth and reconciliation' session at an imposing castle-like pile set among green fields outside the city. Like an executive retreat or the place governments choose to stage peace talks, it's cold, impersonal and forbidding.

The drive to the place by chauffeurs ferrying Little and Griffin in high-end automobiles allows the two actors to show off some of their more intimate appeal. Nesbitt, especially, shines here. Griffin is gripped by doubt and racked by insistent flashbacks where he is compelled to hold conversations with his dead mother: who blamed the small boy who had been playing with a soccer ball outside the house when the young Alistair came calling armed with his six-shooter. Griffin's father died soon after the assassination. His mother endured for a while, but she also died of a broken heart. In his maturity, Griffin now has a wife and two young daughters. Faced with the task of confronting Little again, he almost falls to pieces.

The drama continues at the castle, where Griffin is shown a room by the seemingly-solicitous maitre-d'affaires and his posse of assistants. One of them, the gofer Vika (Anamaria Marinca), shares a cigarette with Griffin on the stone balcony. Griffin is dimayed to learn that Little's flat is austere and unwelcoming. What he wants is revenge, and the weakness of his nemesis is like a betrayal of a cherished ideal.

In the suite's bathroom, Griffin adjusts the position of a sheath-knife he has brought along with him. It is to be used to kill Little: his 'five minutes of heaven'. But his will buckles under the strain of maintaining both his malice and his essential humanity: he flees the scene. The elaborate and expensive shoot is cancelled. Making peace is not as easy as setting up a whole flank of expensive cameras and engaging a special sound technician. It's a lot messier than that, the movie tells us.

But Little still wants to meet. He takes a note containing the number of his mobile phone to a private club with instructions that it is to be delivered to Griffin. The message is received, an event which turns Griffin into a monster once again, this time in his own home. His terrified wife cries out to him from the floor, where he has pushed her down. His children are in tears with fear and confusion.

At the old house where he has arranged to meet Griffin, Little enters the front doorway gingerly and slowly makes his way upstairs (pic) where his old foe awaits. In the ensuing struggle, both men fall out of the first-floor window into the street. They creakingly pick themselves up, dust off, and retire.

A few days later, Little receives a message on his mobile. It's Griffin contacting him again. "We're finished," the message reads.

Imagine you were transported away from a tiresome job as a fact-checker with The New Yorker (um, chick-flic anyone?) and an unresponsive, ambitious boyfriend who doesn't really care whether he is with you or with a slab of smoked ham. Imagine then that you end up in Verona - home of fabled lovers Romeo and Juliet - where you embark on the trail of the most viscerally-compelling feature story that, you are convinced, will propel your career as a journalist to a dizzying pinnacle of success.

If you can imagine these things, then you are already inside the world created by Letters to Juliet (dir Gary Winick, 2010), where Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) gets the cold shoulder from fiance Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) after they arrive in Verona from New York where, unfortunately, her job as a fact-checker is doing just fine. Victor has plans for Verona but they don't really include Sophie. A chef about to start his own restaurant, he wants to talk with Italian suppliers about cheese and wine. The last thing he wants is to accompany his betrothed on a tour of the city's sights. So Sophie sets out alone. Walking the streets, she comes upon a strange sight. Dozens of women with pens and sheets of paper are writing notes and afixing them to a rustic wall. Intrigued, Sophie waits until they are gone with the daylight.

A woman arrives carrying a basket. She places each note into it and walks away, with Sophie hot on her trail down an alley, through a cafe and up a flight of stairs at its back entrance. Undaunted by the strange surroundings, Sophie follows the woman into a cosy chamber where three women sit around a large table. The notes are handed out so that the women can answer them, as 'Juliet', and have their replies sent to the hundreds of petitioners they respond to on a daily basis.

Naturally, Sophie wants to join them. She takes out her discovery from a hidden recess in the wall: a letter so ancient the paper has turned brown and dried out almost completely. It's from a young English girl who last visited the city, where she fell in love with a boy named Lorenzo, in 1958. With the women's approval, Sophie writes a response. After it is mailed, things return to normal, except that Sophie has been included by the Italian women as one of their number.

Until one day a tense young man named Charlie (Christopher Egan) walks into the chamber asking who wrote the letter he holds in his hand. Sophie owns up immediately and the two face off angrily before Charlie storms out of the room back to meet his grandmother, who has returned to Verona because of Sophie's missive. Sophie naturally follows Charlie, and they come across Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) in a courtyard. She's on a mission: to find Lorenzo and see what has happened to him in the 50 intervening years. Charlie objects strongly when Sophie offers to accompany them, but Claire approves.

They set off the next morning in Charlie's expensive black car with the stereo on loud and high hopes in their hearts. What they find suprises them but doesn't put a stop to the quixotic adventure. There are dozens of Lorenzo Bartonlinis in the city's vicinity. Sophie's experience as a fact-checker proves invaluable.

There is one man who flips them the bird. There is one with dementia. There is a playboy, a hen-pecked husband, a priest, and a letch. After each disappointment they return to their hotel, where they talk and the more they talk the closer they become. Their hearts are becoming intertwined and Claire takes on the role of go-between, finding opportunities to facilitate the feelings that develop between two young people who, at first, had hated the sight of one another. It's a very Shakespearean comedy. There's plenty of brittle word-play between the sexes, and lots of misunderstandings that the viewer watches play out from a position of complete knowledge. Frail humanity stumbles blindly onward, trying to make the best of things.

They eventually find the right Lorenzo riding a horse (of course!) near a vineyard. Of course he remembers Claire. Of course he still loves her. Sad that the romantic holiday Odyssey is over, Sophie returns to the city, and heartless Victor. She then returns to New York where, in the office of the editor-in-chief, she has her story accepted.

Thrilled to her very bones by this personal triumph, Sophie visits Victor in his kitchen. Has he read the story? No, he can read it later. The snub becomes the straw that breaks the back of Sophie's regard for her long-time boyfriend. After the split, which is bloodless and mercifully quick, she quits the scene. In the office next morning she is keen to hunt out new opportunities to shine. She is handed a letter that turns out to be an invitation to the wedding of Claire and Lorenzo. She packs and makes arrangements and soon finds herself back in Italy. It would be too heartbreaking to say that the boy had already chosen another woman, so I won't. Enough to say that there's another misunderstanding, a balcony to be entered, and a crowd of onlookers to attract who will get to watch a passionate kiss seal an everlasting pact.

Despite the sparkle and pep displayed by Tea Party candidates like Christine O'Donnell, who has just won her party's nomination to run for the Senate at the November mid-term elections in the United States, there's a lot that is dark and uncomfortably murky about the recent poll, especially for a foreigner. Shots of a jubilant O'Donnell, shots of processions of flag-carrying Republicans, shots of traditionally-dressed ersatz-Revolutionary pipers - these colourful elements of interest, it seems, to the mainstream media do little to enable the perplexed to grasp just what has happened in Delaware, a small state on the Atlantic coast that was one of the original 13 states of the Union.

And posters like this one (pic) just make matters worse. What, after all, does a retro aesthetic that owes as much to 1930s Soviet propaganda as Palin's recognisable rep as a hands-on soccer mum, mean? She's tough, outspoken and blatantly conservative - no, not conservative (that's the Democrats). She's Right-wing Radical and make no mistake about it. And she's white and handsome in a conventional sort of way. Think of her as a cross between Norman Rockwell and the Politburo. Now that's frightening!

Delaware's election was attended by who? It's a mid-term primary. But in the States primaries - which are elimination races among candidates who vie for the privilege of representing a single party - often involve a popular poll. I'm still not sure who voted in this case. It might have been a poll of registered Republicans. It might have been a state-wide popular poll.

UPDATE at 00.18am, Friday: Qualified response from a person I know who has studied American politics: "just registered Republicans voted for O'Donnell to be the party's nominee."

It matters. The result of the election was clear: 53 percent for O'Donnell against 47 percent for Mike Castle. Castle had the support of the Republican Party's mainstream. I assumed that the poll was taken among voters who identify themselves as Republican to such an extent that they register themselves with the Party for this purpose. So it's not a popular vote, but a type of caucus vote among true-believers.

Because of this, the likelihood of a loss for the Republicans in November, when the mid-term elections are held (and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are decided as well as full terms for 33 or 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate), is great. The Tea Party seems to be splitting the Republican vote, so a lot of nominally Republican voters might feel disaffected if a Tea Party candidate is their only Senate or Reps option, and go with the Democrat candidate instead.

The alternative is that Tea party-flavoured Republicans will dominate in either or both houses after November. If this happens, President Obama will have more difficulty getting his laws passed since there will be more strident and steely opposition on Capitol Hill.

It's not every day that you receive a momentary cerebral pang that transports you back in time some 250 years. But the other day that's what happened to me when I heard on the nightly news the speech delivered by federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott as he addressed his battle-weary and hungry-for-revenge partyroom troops gathered, once again, to hear the bad news. "We're a band of brothers and sisters," Abbott intoned with gruff and manly sententiousness as he reached (in my mind's drifting eye; it has a habit of doing this when I listen to Abbott talk; when I listen to Gillard talk I tend to concentrate more acutely despite her very weird accent) for the waiting cup of hearty sack (or claret; it's difficult if not impossible to buy sack, a type of fortified white wine, these days) which he would then raise aloft in the direction of the portrait of the Queen that (of course; you have to ask?) hangs in pride of place within the confines of the crowded room.

"Three cheers!" "Hip, hip, hurray!"

Boys, you might get away with this kind of behaviour at an eighteenth-century themed fancy-dress party ('Band of Brothers' was the self-stylisation used by Admiral Horatio Nelson's victorious team of ship captains, heroes of numerous sea-battles leading up to the victory offshore at Trafalgar where the great man was shot and died a-weltering in his own blood aboard his flagship) but it's really not advisable under normal circumstances lest unwary (and often armed) people think you're as demented as a flying fox that has just feasted on a wheelie bin full of rotting passionfruit.

As to the image used so recklessly with this post, it was a compromise (as so many, many things are in these New-Paradigmatic days we live in) and I settled on a detail from a painting called Washington as a Statesman by Junius Brutus Stearns (1810 - 1885) that depicts the first US president addressing the Constitutional Convention back in the days when sack was, after all, still widely available on the streets of Boston if not on the shores of Port Jackson.

So I'm going to coin a new label for attitudes such as the one struck by Abbott just a few short days ago: claret and beefsteak. As in "Bring out the Claret and Beefsteak and let us pass the jolly Wassail 'round, Boys!" It's a certain type of masculine celebratory stance vis-a-vis some event of moment or contradiction, in this case a political setback of great moment and significance. For politics, as we know, truly came of age in the eighteenth century along with coffee houses, tobacco smoking and gazetteers. Sure, we had to wait another 150 years before HARD NEWS was born along with the professional journalists who would produce the stuff, but the male-oriented glamour of the era is unmatched in its splendour, strength and poise.

Passing the wassail by men in stockings also involved a fair amount of singing, which reminded me of The Australian's attempt to counter the attack on their virtue by that execrable Paul Barry of the ABC's Media Watch program on Monday night, which had at its centre stories published in the newspaper about the Australian Greens. Geoff Elliot went to substantial lengths to get good, juicy quotes from a number of highly-professional and (therefore) unimpeachable sources for the story. But it was the use of the epithet "robust" in the headline that mostly caught my eye.

Hence: 'Robust' = 'Claret and beefsteak'. QED.

I expect to see more efforts from the Murdoch-owned broadsheet in a similar context. Its Right-wing bias seems to be a point of no significance if you go by the response I received from one person on Twitter. When I had, a few days ago, brought to general notice a couple of instances from my past when the independence of Murdoch editors had been questionable, he snorted derisorily in a biting tweet and called me a puling girl for being so laughably innocent. As if it was news.

Appointed on Saturday to the climate change portfolio which he assisted with during the government's previous incarnation, Member for Charlton Greg Combet has already begun the precarious process of backing the multiply-articulated political truck into the policy slot being built to accommodate a piece of carbon-price legislation that will please everybody, from the government's Green partners to the vociferous and aggressive coal industry. In a piece published on The Australian's website today, you can distinctly hear, above the formal drone of Combet's broad Oz palaver, the shrill beeps of the rig's reverse-gear warning signal. Because there are so many elements in the train, be prepared to hear that sound for a while and, underneath it all, the angry growl of the policy engine as it strains against the resistance inherent in the debate's glaring contradictions.

"The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future," he says, and quickly resorts to that tired defense, carbon capture and storage (CCS), to redeem his credibility and signal to the coal industry that he's "serious" about wanting to protect it from the incipient ravages threatened by the Green element of government, which will include (from 1 July) the balance of power in the senate. "You don't take the back of the axe to the fundamentals of the Australian economy." Remember their reaction to the mining "super-profilts" tax?

Environmental campaigner Guy Pearse told me it will cost "around 300 billion" dollars to replace all of Australia's coal-fired capacity (around 100 gigawatts or energy annually) with renewable alternatives (wind, solar, tidal), when I spoke with him for a story I wrote recently. Pearse, who has expressed interest in running for parliament on the Green ticket, is highly critical of the Rudd-Gillard government's commitment to renewables.

If you actually look at the amounts of money involved you’re talking about a tiny increase in capacity that is so far out of whack with what’s required that it’s very hard to get excited about it. 

How much money has the government earmarked for renewables? An example of how it works is the Silex Systems 100MW solar plant slated for construction in Mildura. Federal and state promises of $125 million in assistance have come to little, with around $2,620,000 dispensed so far from state coffers and the rest of both tranches of money dependent on the company reaching agreed milestones. What those milestones are is unknown, as they are protected by 'commercial-in-confidence' provisions in the relevant contracts.

Down in Victoria's La Trobe Valley, where some of the country's worst-polluting power plants operate, a group of enterprising blue-collar workers is taking measures to insulate themselves from unemployment stemming from power-industry layoffs expected to result from plant closures.

The union has established a social enterprise which is about to begin manufacturing solar hot-water systems and installing them among neighbouring residents as well as union-affiliated consumers throughout the state. They have secured a state government grant to tool up a factory and have technical support from two commercial solar hot-water suppliers in Melbourne. It is a very interesting business model that is fashioned along cooperative lines: a social enterprise where profits are rolled back into the business rather than siphoned off by shareholders. The union-based founders are savvy about the likelihood of a carbon tax reducing the workforce in their local area. They’re also ambitious, with tentative plans to manufacture utility-scale power generation plants in Victoria.

Not everyone in the coal sector is backpedalling with the same ferocious concentration as the lobby groups and the major corporations they represent that have so much at stake.

Pic credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

At one point in the film The Blind Side (dir John Lee Hancock, 2009) Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), a hard-nosed, well-coiffed and right-brainy Southern mother-of-two is having lunch with her regular girlfriends at their customary table in their usual white-china-and-clean-tablecloth restaurant in some privileged corner of Memphis, Tennessee. "You've done so much for him, he's so lucky," says one highly-primped, middle-aged matron from the far side of the flawless edge of her comfortable teacup. She's talking about how Leigh Anne has taken into her house a black youth who attends the same school as her son. Tuohy stares at her friend, offended as a proud mother by the implication of selfishness and as a Christian by the implication of self-interested charity.

"No," she intones frostily. "I'm so lucky because of what Michael has done for us." She means it and because she means it the audience is made witness to not only a perceptive mind but also a powerful but delicate realisation of life in the form of film. Just days after Leigh Anne, her husband Sean (Tim McGraw) and son Sean Junior (Jae Head) pick up a shivering Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) as he walks on the cold, tree-lined street and bring him to their home, we get to see just what someone from the wrong side of the tracks can add to the bounty enjoyed by a well-off family like the Tuohys'. It's Thanksgiving and they are settling down to enjoy a festive repast while watching the football on TV. Michael takes a plateful but, instead of heading for the sofas in the family room to join the others, he retires to the more-formal dining room. Leigh Anne espies his lonely figure slumped in its massive solitude over the meal - and rouses the rest of her brood. They come to table where the food is carefully laid out. Then Grace is said over their conjoined hands. They give thanks together in a way that a poor boy from a broken family - Michael's mother is a drug-addict who has made children with possibly a dozen different men over the years and now lives alone - is best-qualified to appreciate.

Michael arrives at Wingate Christian School unexpectedly because his father wants him to get a good education. The father makes a point of first approaching the coach, who then petitions the board. But Michael has terrible learning problems and no home to go to. He has been sleeping on the couch of a friend but they kick him out. He survives by spending his evenings at a laundromat and relying on his rep as a gentle giant among his fellow students, including SJ, who brings Michael's plight to the attention of his mother as they drive home one rainy night in their top-of-range, late-model beige BMW. Initially, they just stop at the intersection and ask him where he's going. "I'm going to the gym," he replies. The car drives off a way down the street but Leigh Anne has second thoughts. "Turn around," she orders Sean. Pulling up beside the T-shirt-clad, lumbering youth, Leigh winds down the window. "The gym is closed," she tells him. "Why are you going there?" "It's warm," he replies. "Do you have a place to sleep tonight?" she asks.

Leigh Anne cares about Michael and takes care of him with the same protective ferocity she lavishes on 10-year-old SJ and teenage daughter Collins (Lily Collins). She learns what makes him tick. She talks to the teachers, one of whom, Mrs Smith the English teacher (Catherine Dyer) tries hard to understand why a youth of Michael's age has such trouble coping in the classroom, and who confronts the uncharitable complaints of the other teachers as they sit around in the Common Room after class. Like Leigh Anne, Mrs Smith appreciates Michael's intelligence and takes the simple precaution against failure of asking him test questions verbally, rather than just making him take tests like the other children, who are predominantly white.

The two women are joined in their endeavour later, when it becomes obvious that Michael has extraordinary sporting abilities, by Miss Sue (Kathy Bates), the tutor Leigh Anne takes on in order to ensure that Michael's grade-point average is sufficient so that he is not excluded from gaining a college sports scholarship due to poor academic results.

By focusing their attentions on Michael the three women ensure that he makes the grade. By tolerating his wife's peculiar obsession with this child of misfortune, Sean - a successful businessman who operates a string of fast-food restaurants in the city - ensures that the whole enterprise succeeds. They are undaunted by the bigotry of redneck parents shouting idiocies from the bleachers, the callous violence of the homeboys from Michaels' precinct, the incapacity of vision of coach Burt Cotton (Ray McKinnon), and the lack of compassion demonstrated by most of the school staff.

There's plenty of scope for over-egging the cake in a film with such a story, but the screenwriters - the director, John Lee Hancock, and the author of the book the film is based on, Michael Lewis - take pains to tone down the messaging to a low rumble of righteous indignation. It could have been shrill. It's not. It's more than a competent screenplay, it's a genuine and morally well-centred piece of craft that eschews easy pathos and plumps for a more robust set of ethical cognates. Lewis' book, The Blind Side, actually has two strands, one of which is the story of Michael Oher. Wisely, the writers focus on only the one strand and they make a masterpiece out of the raw material. Of course, Lewis is a consumate writer whose reputation preceeds him.

When I was 16, I travelled with my family to the United States and we visited the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary operated by the Audubon Society in Massachusetts. It's on Cape Cod and we went there because my father had always had a soft spot for the beautiful, sensitive renderings by 19th century naturalist and painter James Audubon. The paintings are fabulous and depict their subjects in context, as you can see in the clip at right. They're also highly sought-after. Selling an Audubon book gets to be news, as happened in the last few days here. A complete copy of Audubon's Birds of America is to go on sale in London. It belonged to an aristocrat who died over half a century ago. The likely purchaser will pay millions of dollars for the privilege of owning one of the most coveted books in existence.

The sale struck me as significant because of the way that a thing made with care and consideration can accrue enormous value. Rarity attracts a high price. This is a mantra of the news industry, and is often used by online editors to beg off imposing a pay wall on news sites. Why would people pay for something they can easily get elsewhere? they ask. But carefully-crafted work is valued, because it's rare, and people would be willing to pay for it because they can't get it elsewhere.

Occasionally, good work is also free. This is almost the case on the web nowadays. I say "almost" because in order to perceive what is good you must invest time consuming a broad range of stories. In a narrow economic sense, progressive journalist Leigh Ewbank's recent post on The Punch, 'What we still need to know about a carbon price' is entirely free. To know that it's good, however, you may need to have spent time understanding the ecosystem in which it is placed.

One good location to start looking for pointers about quality is Jay Rosen's blog, Pressthink. Rosen is an academic at New York University in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where he teaches. But he also operates as a classical maven, and promulgates his ideas on the blog and on Twitter. His ideas have reach, and have started to appear in Australian media commentary since his visit here last month. He appeared on TV and wrote about his experiences in a number of places. His opinion of Australian journalism is low.

One of Rosen's ideas is to provide narrative for context that will enable readers to understand the significance of an otherwise isolated and confusing event.

Ewbank's post on The Punch does this, and it's a rare and pleasant experience to read it. He talks about the history of carbon policy up to the present time. Then he talks about the pitfalls to come for carbon policy under the newly-elected government - a government where a Green MP and three independent MPs with a preference for some sort of cap-and-trade scheme hold the balance of power in the Lower House, and where the Greens will have nine senators in the Upper House from July 2011. The game has changed, he says, but a mechanism aimed at reducing carbon emissions is by no means assured because popular support is still inadequate.

The coal lobby, for example, is a threat to the introduction of such a scheme. They lobbied successfully against a mining "super-profits" tax earlier this year, leading to the deposing of the prime minister. And the opposition Liberal-National coalition will also be campaigning hard against any such scheme despite not having control in either chamber. To counter this resistance, Ewbank says, the government needs to do something specific:

Those proposing a price on carbon should say where the money raised would be spent, and say how this would be in the national interest.

That's a start, he says. But there's even more that needs to be done, he says, before an uncertain electorate will accept a measure that is likely, at least in the short term, to result in higher prices for a range of goods and services.

The next attempt at pricing-based climate legislation can feature a national clean technology fund to invest in Australia’s low carbon future. The Commonwealth could use the fund to invest in new transmission lines, electric vehicle charging stations, and R&D grants to drive innovation in battery technology—helping to overcome non-market barriers to cleantech deployment. The government could also finance large-scale demonstration projects (e.g. concentrated solar thermal power) and clean tech procurement—the effect of which will spur industry development and drive economies of scale.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. My main purpose in starting this post was to highlight how a journalist who has taken the time to become an expert in a subject can synthesize complex sets of facts and trends into a convincing narrative. A danger, sceptics might point out at this point, is that the journo then becomes an advocate. Clearly, in this case, the journalist is an advocate. And this leads us face to face with the great slumbering giant of modern journalism: objectivity. This is something I'm still working out, but those who are interested in it could do worse than read more of Rosen's blog.

There's a cost to enlightenment, as always. In my case the family trip to Cape Cod ended up costing us a pair of binoculars, which I left on the rental car's roof when we drove way. But the memories remain, and continue to help me to understand a complex world.