Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

. Below is my review of Les Murray's novel in verse, Fredy Neptune . I finally finished it last night and have been captured by its spell of poetic mastery. I reckon its a candidate for "the" Australian novel. There might be some resistance to that because it is not written in prose. But who said a novel could not be a poem? . “ Fredy Neptune: A novel in verse ” By Les Murray. This novel was first released in 1999. It is arguably a candidate for “the” Australian novel. It is in verse. That is, it is written in eight line stanzas with a semi-rigorous metrical beat. Do not be daunted. You quickly forget that you are reading verse, and it is more than worth any little initial effort. The compression and lyricism that the poetic form allows, provides a loadstone in which Murray lavishly embeds polished gemstones of insight and he creates a word music that mere prose would labour too hard to emulate. It makes for a spectacularly rich and multi-faceted yarn, filled with action

. I was going to post on the delightful news, via Garth Godsman , after a lengthy and curious embargo by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, that another dead specimen of the "extinct" Australian N ight Parrot, has been found in Queensland . This is great news for ornithologists and Monty Python fans. It is also a refreshing change to have some developing news from the natural history world that is not yet another tale of environmental woe or human devastation (excepting that this night parrot was found decapitated by fencing wire). There's been another piece of apparently good news that recently almost broke. It seems that based on satellite data this summer's Antarctic summer ice melt was at an all time recorded low. Presumably this means that waterfront property will continue to hold its value and Governments will now not have to spend taxpayer funds on the engineering works necessary to hold back the tides. This good news for mankind seems further enhanced

. Amidst the current surge of disasters in our region with tsunami in Samoa , quakes in Sumatra and floods in the Philippines , which provide more incontrovertible signs of the impending and inevitable Anthropogenic Continental Drift catastrophe, there is some good news for the Federal Labor Government. This disaster deluge has provided the cover necessary to release the long awaited results of the NT Police investigation into the deaths of five asylum seekers in April 2009. You remember this don't you? The media was playing out its carefully crafted narrative that these desperate boat people were all tragic victims of turmoil in far away places who required our sympathy and support not hostility and rejection. The increase in their numbers arriving here was not due to a perceived softening in the Government's stance, but to heightened troubles in the world. And then there was an explosion on a Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel. It burnt to the waterline killing five refugees and