Poverty Under Our Noses

Yesterday was one of those glittering Sydney days we all want to bottle and sell to anyone who glances our way – and which we delight to remind anyone living further south (or to anyone living in the UK) is a Spring treat you don’t really find anywhere else. I had reason to be down at the harbour at one point in the afternoon and found myself enjoying the day and figuring there had to be better things than having to go back to the office at the end of it. The previous evening I was reminded there are certainly worse things. A few hundred metres back from the Finger Wharf, one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the country and home to Russel Crowe, a cluster of homeless men camped under the rail overpass linking the city with Kings Cross and Bondi.  They bicker like birds settling on the wire for the evening, huddled against the cool evening under old blankets, some of them ducking away from the camera but all watching carefully, alert to we strangers wandering through their turf. As I watch these guys hunker down for the night behind the expensive BMW sports car it is not this contrast that is foremost in my mind but the former Navy Commander who found himself in these circumstances a few years ago and was killed by someone deranged who thought  a man living on the street had no right to live at all. How does a Commander find himself in these circumstances? A man on top of his game, with a family in the suburbs and a career stretched out forever in front of him

National Thong Day

Where I grew up thongs were known as jandals. Who knows where that word ever came from – short for Japanese sandal apparently! Australians call them thongs while in the US they are flip flops. American thongs of course are much more attractive – though that always depends on who is wearing them. Same rule can apply to footwear I guess.