Breakfast Club Blog
Archive for May, 2008
Mummy, Can I Have a Gun for Christmas?
23 May 2008
That used to be the refrain of my childhood. We wanted plastic bazookas, machine guns and cowboy pistols, and often got them.
I don’t exactly know what our parents were thinking. Maybe they just wanted to shut us up. So instead of whinging about getting presents we didn’t want, we ran around pretending to shoot each other.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that I first heard a mother decry the concept of children being gvien toy guns as playthings. She was considered a crank where we lived, but now, nearly thirty years later, toy guns are not really the gift of choice in most countries. I suppose in this violent world it’s just a little too much to see a child pretend to kill his best friend. Bang bang you’re dead indeed.
In the end it was pretty harmless. I don’t go around killing people, but I’d imagine I’d be a little unsettled at seeing a child pretending to kill mine. Times have changed, and a good thing too.
Except where children get their hands on real weapons.
This is happening. Yesterday on the Breakfast Club we spoke with Mike Wessells, a world authority on child soldiers. He says that more children are being recruited into armies than ever before. The worst offender, he says, is the regime in Burma.
We’ve all seen photos of children in the Middle East, firing AK-47s. Mike Wessells says that the reasons for children getting their hands on these weapons are manifold. Sometimes, like in Burma, they are simply force recruited. Others, like in the Middle East are ideologically indoctrinated. Sometimes they do it because they are offered food and money, and in poor countries and with starving families, they have no choice but to take the arms and help their kin survive.
We live in a bubble of time where some children are not being allowed to be children.
The final point is that nothing says more about a government than the fact that it doesn’t care about its most vulnerable.
- Phil
Paul Kelly Rocks Us.
22 May 2008
It sort of jumbled our show a bit.
You see usually on Wednesdays we count down our Top Ten of new Australian music.
But yesterday we had to jettison the Top Ten because Paul Kelly came in to play for us.
Paul Kelly is a luminary of Australian music. He’s a little bit pop, a little bit Bob Dylan, a little bit rock, but one hundred percent himself and one hundred percent a gentleman.
We started him a little later than we expected because he had to tune up, and it took about six years for him to get his guitar sounding, like baby bear, just right. All we could hear for ten minutes wqhilke we did the weather and the finance, was the twangle of acoustic strings just outside our studio door. This man is a perfectionist indeed. When he started playing though, he was a ripper:
If Adelaine looks like she’s going to sleep, she wasn’t. She always looks like that.
The thing that struck us about Paul was his shyness and his humility. He has the aura of a man who is genuinely perplexed by the all the attention.
The highlight for me was when he said he wanted to play an oldie. The ‘oldie’ he chose was To Her Door, which I had just played with my band, not knowing it was a Paul Kelly song. To have him play it there in front of us was akin to having Bob Dylan (who Paul sounds like at times) playing Knocking on Heaven’s Door in your loungeroom.
If you want to hear what Paul Kelly sounded like, have a listen to our podcast of the chat. We have excerpts from his live performances as well as the entire interview. It’s on our homepage for the next couple of weeks. Enjoy.
- Phil
Mothers and wives.
21 May 2008
I’ve been away from the Breakfast Club for a few days. I’ve been in Sydney visiting the wife, who is in one of those Lloyd-Webber productions that seem to go on forever, and travels all over the region. So I did the conjugal visit thing to see the thespian.
Sydney is also the place where my mum lives, so travelling to Sydney means I get more of a chance to spent time with her too. My mum’s been a bit poorly lately. She had a few strokes which has had an extraordinary effect on her. She has gone from being a strong 80-something year old woman to being a helpless child.
You might think that this is very sad, and in a way it is. The mother that we knew will never be with us again, but the mother that we have now is a woman who has none of the adult urgencies and lifetime fears that we all accumulate with the years. My mother as she is, is a joy to be with. I hold her hand and walk her to the park, she taking the small steps of a child, and we banter about the things that we never usually see; that tree, the flowers, the bees, how cool the grass feels.
In a strange upending of life, the visits with mum are a real joy. I know they can’t last, and that the degenerative nature of mum’s illness means that she will be changed everytime I see her.
I am just glad that I have had these chances to stop and smell the flowers with my mum, like she did with me when I was little.
- Phil
Sure I Won But…
20 May 2008
If there’s a talented artist who wonders what all the fuss is about, it’s Anne Enright. Anne won the 2007 Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering. It was considered a dark work, dealing with topics of loss, yearning, terrible things that happen when you’re defenseless and how it haunts you for years.
Her new book Taking Pictures, which is a collection of short stories, has a similiar impact on readers. We’re going ooh, aah, haha and eeuuww! at the same time. Scary and bleak, everyone said. So Kim and I were sorta expecting a complicated person, even a scary person to turn up at the Breakfast Club.
But how far from the myth she turned out to be. She almost seemed to be wondering what the fuss is all about and frankly, that award’s been a pain more than anything, she says. But I think again, she’s telling tales. Secretly, she must be really pleased about winning the award. She gets to travel to exotic countries, chat with other authors at writers’ festivals and buy lots of new dresses. (Well, she’s only publicly admitted to buying one where the prize money certainly helped).
During the interview she smiles, she chuckles, she takes the mickey. Anne Enright. She’ll keep us guessing for years. Just look at her in this photo. She’s ready to play.
~Adelaine
Alcohol and Behaving Badly
15 May 2008
Alcohol isn’t a problem in Australia.
It’s the people who drink it who are the problem.
Spend any late night in the Melbourne CBD and you will not have to go far to see youth acting oddly after imbibing a little too much. We even had a Melbourne City councillor on the Breakfast Club who told us that he felt uncomfortable walking in his own city in the dracula hours.
It’s not that you’re likely to get mugged or bashed or anything (the drunks are more likely to bash each other in a “what you lookin’ at” kind of Shakespearean discussion). But it is sad, and not all that happy for other people trying to enjoy the evening peace.
Alcohol vendors haven’t made things much easier. They are producing items (that we call alcopops) that look like softdrinks, but are ready mixed concotions of cheap alcohol and flavoured sugar water. Yes, sugar, ethanol, preservatives and artificial flavourings: the health drink of a nation.
The new Rudd government has just announced that it’s increasing the tax on these concoctions, taking the cost of a small slab from $17 (Australian) to $25.
Of course, some people here are up in arms about this. There’s a story in one of the papers about how the increased cost is causing one Rudd supporter to change his vote.
The guy cries poor about having to pay more for his raspberry mush. What makes his story interesting is when he says that the cost of petrol and mortgage is excruciating. Now with this essential item, alcopop, being more expensive, he’s really hurting and he’s seriously thinking of voting conservative. The petrol and the house cost didn’t do it, but the alcohol did.
Some people just love their sugar, ethanol, preservatives and artificial flavourings. As I said: Health food of a nation, and an apparent essential item.
