From The eXiled’s Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA — A reliable source tells me that Peter Greenaway’s pseudo-historical documentary, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, played recently at Berkeley’s snooty Pacific Film Archive. So — partly out of boredom, partly out of masochism, partly because no one’s kicked Greenaway in a while — I decided to watch it online. (more…)

PERTH, AUSTRALIA — Last August, I wrote an eXiled piece about an Australian protest group called the “Convoy of No Confidence,” calling it out – correctly – as a Koch-ite Astroturf scam, and shaming Rupert Murdoch’s national broadsheet, The Australian, for its misleading coverage of the event. My article got a wider audience when the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) put up a shorter, politer version of my eXiled article on their opinion site, The Drum. (more…)

PERTH, AUSTRALIA — A short update. Dr. Dolan’s old friend, Mark Steyn, the Canadian right-winger, has been touring Oz lately to promote his new book, After America, and Australia’s Tories are falling for him head over heels, declaring him the Great Right-Wing Humorist – almost makes you miss Hitchens, doesn’t it? (more…)

MT HAGEN, PAPUA NEW GUINEA — I’ve been spending this past month in the Papuan Highlands, in a paranoid little town called Mt. Hagen. My motel’s pretty typical for New Guinea: there’s a huge, corrugated-iron wall around the perimeter with a sheet-metal gate you have to bang loudly every time you want in. You knock on the gate, the doorman peeps through a little hole and lets you into the carpark. There are two more checkpoints: one to your immediate left, which leads to a hut full of pokie machines — you can see gamblers getting pat-downs on their way in — and a moat at the other end of the carpark, with yet another gate, another guard post, which takes you to the inner courtyard with the actual motel rooms. (more…)

From The eXiled’s Special Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA – After two years of preparation, Australian Teabaggers are finally out in force and they look positively gruesome over here, though they’ll look familiar to American readers. Climate-denying factory farmers? Check. Friends of convicted child-killers? Got em. A Pinochet-style fascist who wants to “inflict maximum pain” on the Australian economy by causing artificial famines? Yes, Sir! – ¡VIVA EL GENERALISSIMO! (more…)

The mining oligarch and his libertarian toadies

From The eXiled’s Special Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA–My blood’s boiling as I write this: Roebourne (the town where I grew up) is under attack by Australia’s richest man, a West Australian oligarch named Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, the country’s richest executive, said to be worth over $6 billion.

The reason why this vampire-billionaire wants my hometown: Roebourne’s resident Aborigines, the Yindjibarndi people, are sitting on $280 billion dollars worth of iron ore deposits. And Forrest’s mining company, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG), wants what the Yindjibarndi have. (more…)

From The eXiled’s Special Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA–Myanmar’s been making news lately, especially here in Australia. Most of it involves Kevin Rudd, our Foreign Minister, who’s gone there on a diplomatic mission, making weird pleas to the Burmese government not to kill Aung San Suu Kyi (as if they’d ever want to do that):

…it is absolutely critical that the Burmese government guarantee Aung San Suu Kyi’s security while such a tour of the country was undertaken. I believe all governments around the world would be looking very carefully at how the security is provided for by the government.

If you aren’t fluent in embassy-speak, this is what Rudd’s really implying: “They’re gonna kill that poor woman! They’re gonna kill that PAAAW woman!” (more…)