Wow, can it really be three months since my last post? I did say I needed a break. We’ve been immersed in music for the last few weeks – a road trip to Canberra for the National Folk Festival. We were invited to participate in a special concert to celebrate the Alistair Hulett award. Alistair was a well-known leftie songwriter who died in 2010. His family set up a trust to administer an award to…
Yes folks, it’s a list, and not just any old list. This one selects (just some) of the things that gave the writer an urge to pen ‘outraged father of one’ letters to newspapers in 2023. All are ongoing issues in 2024. Cash is King Kudos to our local Credit Union teller who happily counted bags of coins and deposited them in our respective bank accounts. Some banks are no longer providing such service options,…
So goes the simple counter melody to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1971 song, Happy Christmas/War Is Over. The Vietnam war was still raging when Lennon penned this universal message for the album, Imagine. Fifty-two years later, the 30 children from the Harlem Community Choir who sang on the recording would be in their 50s and 60s now, if still alive. I wonder if any enterprising journalists have tried to find and interview these people….
Nothing sums up the brutal futility of the Israel/Gaza war more succinctly than Two Brothers, a folk song by UK songwriter Pete Morton. The lyric imagines a mother, fed up with the squabbling siblings, Israel and Palestine: “I don’t care who started it, just try and get along.” Morton’s song has been criticised as ‘condescending,’ that it trivialises a complex Middle East conflict. But the central message – a call for peace – can’t be…