Category: Life

To Count or Not to Count

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I am in a paperwork week and nearly wrote you an analysis of the Australian Census. Not the use of the census material, but how the form is structured. In vast detail and terrifying depth. By this, you know I am in the middle of a great deal of paperwork. When the end of the paperwork is in sight, then I’ll feel less tendency to analyse data and explain archival methods. I say this very firmly, because I was once that person and haven’t been for a while and while I totally enjoyed that work, everyone around me missed the Middle Ages and bad jokes and passing comments about historical foodstuffs.

Our census is, technically, tomorrow week. This is our first mostly-online one and a vast number of people are not waiting for census night. We’ve been told we don’t have to wait so we race and fill everything in and then walk around with an air of conscious virtue. I sometimes suspect that Australians like filling in forms and being counted. We certainly like our compulsory vote, which is another way of filling in forms and being counted. Politics is so different in countries where voting is optional.

We won’t have decent answers to census questions until June next year. Questions people are asking in my vicinity include how many people will write their religion down as “Jedi” and their second language as “Klingon.” Other folks want to know what answers will be given to the question of gender, which is not a simply binary this time around. We will find out how people describe themselves in gender terms and have a better understanding of how much of Australia sees themselves.

One of the most concerning questions the census folk are asking is how many Jews will feel safe enough this year to write our religion down. The Jewish community was given a special briefing on Sunday evening where we could ask some very senior bods how the data is handled. This is how I know it’s a burning question.

In ten months’ time (if I remember) I will share some answers. Until then, I myself will live in unsatiated curiosity. Australia has changed significantly since the last census. Watch this space?

Jewish in Australia – a brief update

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

This week the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is a mixed bag, but it’s all very close to home. The Royal Commission is talking about learning and educational resources today, for example, so I have to watch. I need to know how what I do (or did when I had lots of teaching and do on the rare instance I’m back teaching) fits into good practice. I also need to be critical of what everyone else is doing. Not bad-critical, but aware-critical. Today then, is an in-service for education outside the tertiary sector.

Then there are three days of things I know but need to understand better. Learning and education require this, and just because I’ve been excluded from much of the education I used to give, doesn’t absolve me from learning and updating. It’s ironic that I’m updating my understanding of why I’ve been excluded, but that’s only a small slice of a vast pie about education in Australia and how it fits with being Jewish in Australian.

Friday, as I told everyone on Facebook, is my personal hellscape, because it’s about antisemitism in the Arts and Creative sector. It’s not my once-life and hope-to-be life: it’s my current everyday. I say “hope-to-be” but the silencing and how Jewish creatives now live in a different world to most others hasn’t yet been tackled and may not be tackled. The focus here is on the hate, not the side effects of hate. The introduction for this week (by counsel assisting) has already noted how many of us are isolated and drifting thanks to the antisemitism, which is a big advance.

Outside the Royal Commission, people are blaming Jews for all kinds of things still. The new thing they (those who hate) have is an assessment of the Royal Commission while not paying any attention to what everyone says in it. The investigation into antisemitism itself becomes an excuse for antisemitism. I read something that suggests that people who do this enjoy hating. I wish they were wrong.

I asked my Facebook followers to consider. “Anyone who has political opinions on these subjects, listen to the evidence at the RC first and maybe think on how things affect me and other Australian Jews in your vicinity. Is your opinion on my page more important than my safety or emotional stability? Your choice, of course, but I’d rather you made it an educated choice.”

None of this was going to be today’s post. I had completely different ideas. But in the background, I’m hearing a rabbi talking about healing the staff at Bankstown Hospital, which is known to be antisemitic. So many people are taking their religion off their hospital record, for their own safety. There was discussion in Sydney about even finding alternates to hospitals because of safety. The State government is now talking about what to do. Healing is going to take a long time. Safety is still an issue. At least, however, more people are now talking about this.

If you want to learn more about our Royal Commission, you can find it here: Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

Ranting

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.

My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.

 

There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”

An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?

[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologist

Ali Jasemi, Wilfrid Laurier University

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

What’s the solution to news fatigue? Well, it’s not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.

Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We’re wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.

The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.

Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.

There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.

Finally, be wary of “rage bait” — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.

The news will not become less “heavy.” But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.The Conversation

Ali Jasemi, Lecturer, Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix”…

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

Australia – again

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I am late! I am late and want to talk about Jewish matters.

The Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has just released the total number of submissions and it’s a lot higher than anyone expected. I predicted 10,000 submissions and everyone around me said that 5,000 would be a lot and would reflect what was happening in our country a lot more. Even 10,000 was considered an overprediction because of the way most people saw antisemitism in Australia, in other words. So what does 20,000 mean? That things matter. That people have things to say.

What the submissions give us is something amazing, especially given that this is a census year and that we can fit those submissions into a snapshot of Australia in 2026 (the last census was in 2021, and you can see what it shows about jewish Australia here: The-Jewish-Population-of-Australia-Report_2021-Census-1.pdf . There are issues with the way data was collected and how unsafe the collection made Jews, and that Judaism was not listed as a religious or cultural option ie people had to write it in manually, but it still gives some indication of who we are in Jewish Australia. We have a surprising number of old people, for instance, and an unsurprisingly high average level of education.

Put these 20,000 submissions into analysis the way that Mass Obersvation Project has done for the UK, and it becomes an enormous data base for research into one aspect of Australian life: how people see Jewish Australia and how Jewish Australia sees itself. What we are. Who we are. How we deal with hate. This will lead to insights into how Australia sees other cultural and religious groups in the country. It has the capacity to change Australia’s self-knowledge.

What’s really interesting is how silent the far left is about the number of submissions. We don’t yet know if those submissions reflect their views as leading or typical. I strongly suspect that their views are bigoted and hateful, but I’m willing to wait and see how the data presents itself. And I want to know what Australia does with all this information about how we think and feel.

Given that the trigger was the Bondi murders and there is a very strong likelihood that those murders were caused by links to certain terrorist groups, we can’t exclude the outside world. But we can take a close look at ourselves and find out who we are and what we want to be.

Australia is in a strange place politically. Everything’s changing. I suspect those 20,000 submissions are part of that change. Who we are and how safe we are and the paths we take are all up for grabs in this very interesting year.

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

Staying Safe

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

cover of Don't Fight Back, a book by Meg StoneI walk a lot for exercise, and on those days when I don’t get around to it in the daytime – not to mention those days when it’s hot – I often go for a neighborhood walk around 10 pm. I live just off Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, California.

I also either walk or take public transit when I go out at night to see a movie or meet someone for dinner or go to an event in San Francisco. I don’t like to drive to social events because I hate traffic, really hate to park, and also  might want to have a drink. I do this regardless of whether I’m going with someone or by myself.

I am a little nervous about one thing when I’m out at night, though.

Cars.

Not to sound all old and “get off my lawnish,” but I swear drivers have stopped paying attention to stop signs and even traffic lights. And some of them speed down residential streets. They completely ignore crosswalks, despite the fact that if you take the California written drivers exam at least three of the 20 questions will be about when you’re supposed to yield to pedestrians (all the time).

I’m scared of getting hit by cars. In the winter, when it gets dark early and lots of cars are still on the street, I try to remember my flashlight. And not only do drivers seem more careless than they used to be, but the cars are so damned big.

What I’m not scared of are other human beings on foot.

Unfortunately, other women are. And there are a lot of articles and social media posts and even purported self-defense classes that are aimed at making sure women stay scared.

I always try to debunk the post I see regularly on social media – the one about carrying your keys so that they’re between your fingers (which is only useful if you actually know how to throw a punch) and not going places alone and carrying pepper spray. I work at doing it gently, because people share it in good faith.

They’re scared. The trouble is, they’re mostly scared of the wrong things.

I look up the latest stats, remind people that the biggest risk of sexual assault against women is by people they know – acquaintances, exes, current partners, even family – not strangers. (Murder even more so.) I point out how to pay attention, suggest good self defense classes.

Now, though, I’m just going to tell everyone to read Meg Stone’s new book: Don’t Fight Back and 10 Other Myths About Crime, Personal Safety, and Gender-Based Violence. She’s covered everything I want to say and provided the reader with detailed facts, studies, and statistics to back it up. Continue reading “Staying Safe”…

Australian and Jewish… again

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I’m sorry I missed last week. Jewish Australia is a bit… different. There’s a Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. I’ve submitted 22 pages to it and keep thinking I missed critical things. Last week was the first of the public hearings, and by Monday morning 9,400 submissions had been made. There are so very many that the open period for submissions was extended by two weeks. This is a vast number, for the whole population of Australia and all its territories is significantly less than the population of California. We fit somewhere between the population of Florida and Texas. If you printed the submissions and handed them out to random Jewish Australians (using the Monday morning numbers, weeks before submissions close), one in eleven would receive an interesting document to read.

Antisemitism is pretty bad here, and whatever the Royal Commission decides will determine our future in many ways. In equally many ways, our future rests on how the rest of Australia feels on hearing just how difficult life has been for Australian Jews.

Even checking up on what is said in the first lot of public hearings was exhausting. So many reports had me nodding alongside, think, “Yep, that’s happened, and oh yes, that too.” I am still annoyed by the people who accuse Jews of complaining too much or of clutching pearls or of being perpetual victims, or of being guilty by dint of being Jewish. In a perfect world, they would stop and listen. They would also not tell me, when I quietly let them know some of the worst incidents, “But what about Gaza?” So many are saying, “If every Australian Jew disassociated themselves from Israel, then there would be no antisemitism.” This is oddly funny, because other times and other places when there have been hate we’ve been told the same thing. Convert to Catholicism was the argument in 15th century Spain. And then came the definitions of impure blood and Judaicising. Some of those who had done the denial as asked were burned alive as Christians because their denials weren’t believed.

It’s a very strange month.

Time and cold and other vagaries

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I’m taking a break from reality.

Canberra has almost winter weather, and we’ve not even reached the traditional time to change to autumnal linen and to turn on the heaters. That traditional day is a public holiday, which this year falls on a long weekend … and happens to be my birthday. I will turn 65. I have dinner with a friend the day before my birthday, and lunch with another friend the long weekend Monday, but that’s it. Most Canberrans will, I suspect, be down the coast, trying desperately to avoid below zero temperatures. The coast has a very mild winter and, by Australian standards, Canberra does not. (We don’t get down to zero Fahrenheit, just to reassure you, but we’ve already been below zero Celsius in April.)

Let me ask you all a question, then.

Since it’s a mug’s game to work on one’s 65th, and since the Dawn Service* (which I would’ve liked to go to) requires me leaving my flat before 3 am when the temperature will be below zero, I’ve decided to stay home and watch a sequence of streamed films on Saturday. Which films should I watch? The Lord of the Rings comes to mind, but… I’m not certain.

I was going to watch When Things were Rotten and Robin Hood, Men in Tights, but they require note-taking, since I’m writing an article about them in a few weeks.

Suggest something. All suggestions will be taken seriously.

* The public holiday is ANZAC Day, which is our equivalent of Memorial Day and is the sole day of the year when it is legal to play Two-Up. Two-Up is one of the most boring forms of gambling possible, but it is very, very Australian.