The Kalgoolie Liberation Front

Succession plans are in the air this week. Will Tibet manage to sneak away from China while everyone is concentrating on the Olympics? Will
Burma succeed from the Alice in Wonderland existence it currently lives in and join the civilised world? And most importantly of all, will
Carlton's plans to dominate AFL over the next 10 years come to fruition.

Some plans have to be spoken of in more careful tones. The world is listening you know. Some computer buried deep inside a mountain in
Colorado is about to be triggered because I've used the words military takeover in a blog. You ask me why I'd do this if I know it's been monitored. I'd like to say that I'm pushing the boundaries of liberty. But the truth is, I'm
just desperate for more readers and the CIA will do. How's it going
guys? Have you found Osama yet?

Actually, if the CIA are reading this, I'd like to ask them a question.
When did conspiracy become a crime? When did two people just thinking
about something, become worthy of ten years in Federal Prison? A friend
of mine and myself use to plan the overthrow of the Irish Government and
the establishment of a 32 County Marxist Republic whenever we got drunk.
Little did we know that we were breaking several laws in countries that make
up the coalition of righteousness in the global war on terror.

But risk be damned, I'm going to launch a conspiracy anyway. There is
one great separation movement yet to be born. I call out to all free men
(and free women if they can take a break from running the world) to join
me in this great struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit of material
gain. Together we can strike at the imperial heart of colonialism and
raise the flag of freedom above this parched and tortured land.

I present to you the Kalgoolie Liberation Front (Maoist wing). Join this
week and you get a free beret.

Let me try to explain the indignity and injustice that the good people
of Kalgoolie have had to ensure. There are 150 seats in the Australian
lower house. 149 of these are split between two thirds of the country.
The other one third of the land mass only gets one MP. You might think
this a little unfair until you realise that Kalgoolie only has 80,000
residents, despite covering 2.3m square kms.

It's basically Western Australia minus Perth. Stretching from the
Southern Ocean to the Indonesian straits with the Indian Ocean nestling
to the West. A land of desert and baking all year round sun. You'd
wonder how it can attract even 80,000 souls until you realise that what
lies below the desert is what counts.

Kalgoolie sits on a treasure chest of natural resources that are
the envy of the Industrial World. There is more gold than you could fit
on a rappers chest. More Iron Ore than you'd need to fill Shane
McGowan's teeth, more diamonds than would fit in Victoria Beckham's
belly button and more Uranium than Iran would ever need if was doing
what the yanks claim it is doing.

But the Kalgoolie Liberation Front won't mention any of this. We won't
mention the fact that succession will result in us becoming the third
richest country in the world by capita, or that cleaners can earn the
salaries of Wall Street Accountants in the mines of our fair land. Like
all good liberation movements, we'll play on the softer, more altruistic
reasons for our struggle. We don't want the world to turn against us when
we're fighting against the tyrants in Canberra (although the offer of
cheap Uranium should keep most of the world happy). We'll play on our
concerns for the local indigenous people whose lands we will continue
raping after we take over. We'll play on the lack of democracy and that
our one representative in Canberra is finding it difficult to arrange
parish hall clinics each weekend, given that his constituency is about
the size of Europe.

We do of course have the problem of Perth. This leeching excuse for a
City will become even more isolated once we obtain our independence. It
is already pretty isolated to be honest, perched as it is on the West
Coast of Australia. Once you leave the City boundaries, you'll drive
2,000 miles before you come to the next Krispy Kreme donut shop and
that's just not civilised.

The City appears to exist purely to profit from the resource boom of our
fair land of Kalgoolie. Which is why it is the favorite destination for
English and White South African settlers. They have a long history of
profiting from the labour of others. They will of course want to join us
in our independence struggle but we must fight this at all cost. That would
reduce our share of the pie substantially and would risk them wanting
to run things in the future. Democracy has failed Kalgoolie up till now.
Why would want to risk it in the future?

So our first task must be to build a strong border around the perimeter
of Perth and guard it with our lives. Or at least the lives of the
Kalgoolians we will conscript into our army. With a bit of luck, most of
them will be killed and we'll be left with just enough people to run the
mines and ourselves. We'll run the country from our embassy in
Melbourne, because it gets a bit hot in the homeland to be honest.

So come join the fight. As George Bush would say, you're either with us or
against us. Although it's fair to say that in this context there is also
the chance that you've never heard of us. We plan to strike during the
Olympics when the eyes of the world are on separatism in Tibet. And if
the CIA are listening, can we buy all our guns from you like Al Qaeda
did?

We won't make a crisis out of a drama

I studied "The Merchant of Venice" for me Intercourse. That was what we called the exams that you did at 15 in Ireland. It was the only intercourse I was getting at the time but that’s another story. I used to know that play off from beginning to end. I knew that Antonia fancied the arse off Bassanio (literally) and Portia was an early Kd Lang fan. At 15, the gay references in literature were very important to us for reasons that only Freud could decipher. However, I don't think I ever really analysed it the way I have "The Memory of Water". I've now seen MOW so many times, I'm having dreams about it and unfortunately they all involve coffins rather than the snogging scene.

I directed this play in Ireland in 2006 as a tribute to my dear old mum. I was very jealous of the cast back then as they get to burn brightly under the stage lights while the poor director bites his nails in the darkness of the auditorium.

It’s been my dream therefore to act in this play even though the male parts are the equivalent of the reproduction process. We’re there at the start, full of enthusiasm and energy and we turn up at the end for support. But we don’t really contribute much in between.

We've now finished our marathon 14 night run and I'm more exhausted than Warren Beatty's index finger. I really don't know how people act and hold down full time jobs here.

Drama has been a large part of my life since I first played a love hungry young farmer in 1993. I’ve performed with four different groups in three different countries but the most interesting thing I’ve found is the ability to compare this latest production to our humble production back in 2006.

Rehearsals were much more intense. I kind of wonder how my old group in Dublin can pull off such wonderful productions based on two nights a week for 9 weeks. They start at 8.15pm when everyone stops talking about the Hermes Bag they picked up in the Brown Thomas sale. Break at 9pm for tea and Jaffa cakes and a chat about Charles' dogs or the latest gay cowboy movie showing in the Multiplex. Start again at 9.30pm and finish at 10pm when Paul locks the doors.

In Melbourne, we did 7.30pm to 10.30pm twice a week with no break and then 2pm to 7pm every Sunday. In Dublin, the idea of warm ups was to lift four chairs and make a phony set. In Melbourne, vocal and physical warm up was obligatory. I can now say "I want a proper cup of coffee in a proper cup of coffee cup" while standing on one leg and turning my knee clockwise.

The lighting was fantastic and benefited from a fixed gantry and the lighting manager from the Melbourne Opera house doing some freelance work. There were 97 light and sound effects during the play which is about 95 more than we had. The overall effect was to have a floating bedroom slide into the sea. We had side curtains and a back screen that could take light changes and projection. I hate to say it but flats are very 1980's. My recommendation to Dublin would be to invest in some side curtains and a back canvas. Takes away all that painting fun but means that future Me’s don't have to climb ladders.

The acting was excellent as was the direction. It was a bit over the top though. The director came in at the interval and end of each production to give us notes. I also struggled with some of the voice direction. She wanted me to project from the stomach but with an inflection from the top of my head, as though I was smiling behind my eyes! I took this to mean shouting which came in handy when the air conditioning machines were turned on and the cockatoos started dancing on the tin roof. Not a problem we had to face in Dublin, it should be noted.

As with all groups, there are nice people that I would like to work with again and not so ni nice people. You meet a lot of pre-Madonnas in amateur drama. I was in a play in Dublin years ago, where I had to walk on at the end and execute the lead character. That’s all I did. I used to joke that "Lonely Hearts" was a tale about an executioner with some flash backs, but one of the girls in this play took “Me, me, me” to new levels. She told me the other night that I should take two steps back because she couldn't see Frank when he was speaking and she needed to see him to reply. I said "Have you tried acting?" and she hasn't spoken to me since.

The party was a damp squib, but then I am cursed to remember the Northbrook Hotel in the early years of the 21st Century and compare everything to it. John "Darcey" Glynn reciting "The Planters Daughter" to a trembling female audience, Charles and myself re-enacting act 2 of "Round and Round the Garden" while helping ourselves to beer from behind the bar. And stumbling out at 8.30am into a Dublin Sunday morning having drank ourselves sober. We’ll never see those days again.

We had the cast and crew party in the foyer. There were some nice presents, particularly for me. Nobody told me, but the tradition is for the cast to buy each other a present. So I got 5 presents and didn’t have to buy anything! Bonus. I was driving as we were out in the sticks. So I had one glass of wine and made my way home. No murdering of Leonard Cohen songs, no Waltzing Matilda with footnotes. No mad hooves galloping in the sky. But the weak, washy way of true tragedy.

At least I didn’t have to help with taking the stage down. I think I was supposed to, but I didn’t anyway. That’s one tradition I am taking from Dublin.

The audience loved the play. Said it’s the best piece of theatre they’ve seen etc. And it is. I hope the DVD will be out in time for Christmas!

The Great Ocean Road

Surely there is no greater contrast between safety and danger than that represented by the border of land and sea. On one side you can sip cocktails and enjoy the magnificent vista. Two meters away the sea can rage in God made fury and yet offer no threat unless you cross the threshold from terra firma to water.

The Great Ocean Road provides this contrast better than anywhere else on earth. The might of the Southern Ocean has been battering the land for millions of years and has created cliffs and coves that pockmark the coast like a broken saw.

And yet you can stand at the many well maintained viewing points and review in comfort the raging torrents below. It’s like standing on the edge of the world, but the world has you safely tucked in its arms.

There are many places in the world that have had the arrogance to place the word “Great” before their title. I think you should only be allowed to call yourself “Great Something” if a smaller version of yourself is close at hand. Such as Great Snufflebottom and Little Snufflebottom. But throwing a “Great” in just because you feel a bit up yourself is a different matter. Who decided that Britain was great for example? Great at invading other countries perhaps. I suspect it derives from a state of national insecurity, brought on from trying to convince the Scots and the Welsh that they weren’t really being annexed by England.

Australia seems to revel in the “Great” prefix. You have the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Dividing Range and the aforementioned Ocean Road. Their titles no doubt derive from the Australian requirement to be the best in the world at everything but I prefer to think that the names arose because Australia’s large Irish community would have been the first to witness these places.

I can picture a freckly red head with a pig under his arm. He’s just cut through the uncleared bush land of Western Victoria to reach the wild and untamed shore. As he stood upon the cliff top and admired the twelve limestone stacks that stood imperiously against the on-coming tide his face broke into a toothy grin and he exclaimed “Ah, sure that’s just Great”.

My other theory is that Australians like adding Great before place names because of their shocking lack of imagination when it comes to naming things. The Snowy Mountains, Snowy River, Blue Mountains and Mount Beauty suggest that poets were not included in the naming process. It seems more likely that it was left up to sheep farmers to do the business. Bruce would have turned to Dougy and said, “What’ll we call them Dougy? To which Dougy replied “Well it’s got lots of snow on it. We could call them the Incandescent Peaks of Celestial Majesty, but I can’t spell that, so bugger it, why don’t we just call them The Snowy Mountains”.

The Ocean Road would sound a little weak without its prefix though. Great gives it an importance befitting its wonder. There are few comparable drives in the world where each corner turned elicits a gasp of astonishment from the viewer. There are bigger cliffs elsewhere, stronger waves, more beautiful hamlets tucked in sleepy bays. But none of these come together in such natural serendipity as on the Great Ocean Road.

The weather plays an important role in the magnificence of this and other Australian attractions. The sun shines most days here and this means that the tourist is almost guaranteed a view of the coastline at its finest. The light catches the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles and provides a brilliant contrast to the bluey green of the surrounding ocean.
The day we got there was overcast but the light still danced along the coastline like a proud shopkeeper displaying its wares. The wind was calm and yet the waves still crashed against the shore as though an angry ocean was screaming for attention. A few brave souls had taken to surfboards but the rest of us just stood and admired the fury of the open sea and the quiet resistance of the land to the ceaseless pounding. At night we camped by the beach and fell asleep to the comforting rhythm of the waves as they caressed the shore.

I compare this to Ireland which has comparable sights of natural wonder. But on the three occasions when I’ve visited the Cliffs of Moher you couldn’t see the ocean for all the mist and rain and the wind blew you back every time you went within 100 meters of the edge. They’ve built a large interpretive centre there now. This is to allow visitors the chance to enjoy the beauty of the cliffs without having to brave the elements. For those unwilling to pay the ridiculously high admission charge to see a computer generated cliff, there is always the well appointed car park in which to huddle from the Atlantic rains.

Rain is a problem in Victoria too. Except here it is the lack of it that causes people to worry. Drought reigns (if you’ll excuse the pun) and the occasional shower is enough to make people run into the street and stand with hands outstretched and face pointed skywards. The dry and parched earth of the countryside seems incongruous beside the expanse of the Southern Ocean. But that just adds to the colour and beauty of the drive.

I’m slowly ticking off the places I want to see in Victoria (the rest of Australia and New Zealand are a different matter). But as we drove back along the Great Ocean Road I wondered about those other things I wanted to see here. Wildlife. The search for the first Kangaroo goes on. It’s been 10 months guys, when are you going to say hello? I’m beginning to think it’s all a myth and that Kangaroos, Koalas and Emus are only a tourist ploy. I blame Skippy. He set an expectation that the Australia countryside is sadly failing to live up to. What will I do if I’m ever stuck down a well?