Sime says

What a load of cobblers. For the past three weeks I was told NSW would win Game 2 of the State of Origin. And we did, well they did. “The boys done good”. Nothing else mattered. Sticky Stuart and Smell Mafinga bled blue and maroon blood for the media during the build up, and there were endless one-on-one interviews with various players or bricks with eyes. It was saturation coverage, the clouds rolled into Sydney and it pissed down with footy talk. The streets flooded with superlatives and the game was of national significance, the result bigger than the Mabo decision or Lindy and Michael’s exoneration. I should win The Voice , for I’ve had enough of this banal agenda which is not just confined to the footy field. Increasingly, our national broadcaster is guilty of running facile material close to the top of its nightly TV news bulletins. On radio, two giggly girls host its morning program and I can go no further to escape their shrill and nasally babble than Radio ...

On the long weekend, eager to switch off news from the political pig pen that is Canberra, I made tracks to a friend’s farm in outback NSW to shoot the breeze and some vermin. In the morning sunlight, the jet black back of the sow gleamed. She stood proud within the sorghum stubble and treated her hairy boar of a husband and four obese piglets to breakfast. With the .222 rifle locked and loaded, we thumped across the rich black land determined to stop these hoofed hitchhikers in their tracks. With nostrils twitching and their heads pointing skywards, it wasn’t long before our quarry detected a scent of human in the air and started trotting towards the nearest exit from the paddock. The killing of these grunters was not intended as an act to satisfy one’s lust for blood. For we were not a pair of sporting shooters trigger happy at the prospect of creating carnage in national parks or straddling our kill and posting ph...