Jetty Road Weekly Update 27/4/25

Image: Pajarmez Newsweek

‘God works in mysterious ways’

So they say. The religious right fascinate me.  Did God deflect the bullet? Or did God decide to reward their wilful blindness with the even greater curse of incumbency?

The Trump Ten Commandments

1.     You shall have no other gods before me. I am God

2.     You shall not make unto you any graven image. The portrait in the Colorado Capital was not a good enough graven image

3.     You shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. I have always been vain. What do you mean I cannot take my own name?

4.     Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. You want me to give up golf on a Sunday?

5.     Honor thy father and thy mother. Especially if it means I get a stupendous inheritance

6.     You shall not murder. Charlottesville? There were very fine people on both sides

7.     You shall not commit adultery. You mean not even more than once?

8.     You shall not steal. I can. I can go bankrupt and attempt to steal an election and still be President.

9.     You shall not bear false witness. The fact that I lie all the time is just fake news

10. You shall not covet your neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour's.

Not into oxen or donkey’s and other blokes but you know if those women are a nine or a ten! As for Greenland, Canada, Gaza – that’s prime real estate man. Anyway the Supreme Court are my servants.

Image: SEN

AFL – A leader but not always a listener.

Willie Riolo’s outburst at Gather Round did not come out of thin air. Far too often the AFL’s approach to a conflict be it the treatment of Adam Goodes or the Essendon supplements saga is either head in the sand or Ready Fire Aim.

The Hawthorn racism saga just will not go away. It was a mess from the start. You cannot interrogate one side and publish the allegations in a metropolitan daily and expect to control the process let alone the outcome.  Those accused are going to lawyer up and defend their reputation and you have the lost the chance for any collaborative negotiation where any wrong doing or genuine misunderstandings can be acknowledged and remedies can be jointly explored and put into place. Ultimately the conflict will be resolved one way or another but misgivings will linger and resurface just as they did at Gather Round with Willie Rioli publicly venting his disgust with the Hawthorn Football Club. Acknowledgment of wrong doing or misunderstandings in a discreet and well managed mediation process can go a long way to creating a forum in which parties listen, apologise and commit to restitution and better processes to mitigate similar outcomes occurring in the future. In many ways I think it is possible to compare the AFL and Hawthorn’s approach to this conflict to the failed referendum on the Voice. We were being invited to listen and work together into the future with our indigenous brothers and sisters - we capitulated into accusation, denialism and defensiveness. Sometimes justice is far better served by withholding judgment and just listening with both our head and our heart. Willie Rioli is not making this up.

Image: Kirsty hall

Thirteen Level Circa 1975

A brief glimpse into a culture and a special breed of men that have passed us by.

I knew blokes who would not go to work on Friday the 13th. So superstitious were some miners that it is a wonder they even dared name a level 13 Level. There were nonetheless a number of fatal accidents on 13 Level at the Rosebery mine. The sad truth being that it would not have mattered what number it was called. This part of the mine certainly had its characters Danny Griffiths being one. He was a trucker with a beautiful baritone voice and you could him hear singing above the noise of the rake coming down the level. Dan was a bachelor who shared a house with his bachelor brother Roy in Zeehan. He was also a little absent-minded. On one occasion Dan had walked the sixty metres or so from the 13 level plat to the crib room to inform me I had a phone call. I wandered down to see the receiver back on the hook. Dan had obviously taken the message and then hung up! The older miners of that era are mostly gone. They were a no nonsense mixture of stoicism and dry humour and they always had your back. If ever I had to name a tribe to which I felt I belonged they are one of a very few. I was a raw and very young Australian Workers Union secretary back then. Little did we know these days were to be the pinnacle of a proud and influential union tradition that would soon spiral into a long and slow decline.

Song: Thirteen level Blues