Cats and Feral Animals

The Cat Plague

 

Back in the seventies I used to watch Harry Butler’s TV program, ‘In the Wild’.  Unless time has scrambled my memory, I remember one program in particular in which he said that if you want to tell the world that you have absolutely no regard for Australian fauna….. “Get yourself a cat”.  My family had a cat when we first came to Kalgoorlie, but when it died I had no intention of replacing it.  Let me not beat about the bush.  I think that in Australia the only good cat is a dead cat or, better still, no cat at all.

Sure, they can be adorable to some, and I suppose ‘Kelly’ (we also had a dog named Ned) was cute too, but my hobby is finches and parrots and so when I began to find wattle birds, doves and magpie larks ripped to shreds in my garden I was not impressed and when Kelly karked-it, well I can promise you, the grieving period was for me, remarkably brief.

Cats were in plague proportions two or three years ago and one could watch a nightly procession of cat families exiting the old swimming pool buildings at Kingsbury Park as they headed out on their forays in search of an evening meal.  What form that meal took didn’t matter.  Cats are the ultimate scavenger and-or hunter.  I have heard stories from people not given to fantasies that in the bush there are cats two and three times bigger than the average moggie.

I thought that the cat population was under control for the last couple of years and assumed that the City Council had taken action, but the murderous monsters are out in numbers again.  Conservatively I would guess that I have lost $500 to $750 worth of birds that somebody’s little darling moggie has terrorised until in panic they fly against the wire mesh and are seized by the razor sharp claws of these vermin felines.

I am not a property holder in Kalgoorlie, but if I were I would cheerfully pay a levy on my rates if it was specifically used to seize and ultimately destroy all animals that are not in the care of their owners and not: micro-chipped, or tagged with the City Council tag, or carry a phone number tag.  And in the case of animals that are identifiable and are roaming the streets, if they and are trapped and-or captured there ought to be (and there may be already) heavy fines and finally seizure and appropriate disposal of the stray animal.

I would ask this.  “Leaving aside Kangaroos and the birds whose size and breeding even outstrips the efforts of murderous cats, who has actually seen, other than in zoos etc., wild Australian fauna?”  Not me…. And I have looked.  If it is not too late and I suspect that it is, a nationally funded campaign to win back the land from ‘all non-native animals’ should be implemented without further ado.  When I read books or articles or watch television programs about Australian wildlife there is one word that I hear and see ad-nauseam.  That word is ENDANGERED and we have at least two things to thank for that: feral animals and our own inaction.

Action through all layers of Government should begin now before all hope is extinguished.

 

Bill Sullivan

Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech

Freedom of the Press

 

I stopped reading Sunday Times about ten years, or was it twenty, er…. Sorry…… I can’t remember, but it was a long time ago.  I stopped spending my hard earned on it because it was unadulterated drivel and not worth loss of trees or the fifty cents or whatever it was at the time.  Sure, I haven’t been back so I don’t know what it is like now.   My question is.  Should it be regarded as worthy of Professional status? Should it be regarded as a bastion of free speech?  Would I throw myself under galloping hooves to demonstrate that I support the freedom they enjoy?  Not on your blood life and I promise you, certainly not on mine.

The press get blood precious don’t they?  Just like bloody Lawyers.  So damned ‘up themselves’ that they think that they are ‘well above the law’.  Not in my book and I treasure freedom, but it has to be earned and it has to be respected.

My own blood boils when I hear unmitigated garbage such as this…. And I quote.  “PerthNow quotes the WA secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Michael Sinclair-Jones, saying the raid was a GESTAPO-style attack on free speech and civil liberties.”  This, ladies and gentlemen’ is crap and they, the media, then entreat me to protect their (not hard won) liberties and those of Michael Sinclair, bloody hyphenated, Jones and the people who presumably elected him, who has the temerity to refer to our Police officers acting like GESTAPO.

If this cretin represents THE MEDIA….  Get rid of him and quick.  I’ve seen the footage and I see no jackboots.  I see no swastikas.  I see no brutality?  No….  No I don’t.  Do I see a Professional measured response from the guardians (the media) of freedom?  No, I don’t see that either.  I just see a fragile and PRECIOUS MEDIA who crave total freedom and a media that does precious little to deserve it.  Don’t give it to them…. LET THEM EARN IT.

Most of the rags (newspapers) are in the hands of the mega-rich and to suggest that the media ‘IS FREE’ is a total lie and to talk of journalistic freedom is a lie, but the question is….”Who most takes away their freedom????”  Not me, or you or Political leaders.  Journo’s…  Don’t look sideways.  Look upwards.  Old men and young brides.  Old men and their prostitutes and their casinos and their gambling excesses.  These should concern you and not young officers doing their duty.

 

Journalistic standards are not yet at rock-bottom, but hell, give them time.

 

Open your mind…..  “Last week’s meeting of the apathy meeting has just been cancelled….”

 

Bill S.

Law and Order – or the lack thereof.

I love Australia.  I came here over thirty-years ago and I have never regretted it for a single moment.  It is a great country and it could be even greater, except that it has problems that it either can’t, or won’t, deal with.  I left behind a great country too, but I had seen the outside world and I wanted to see more.  There was no going back.

 

I arrived in Wantirna, Melbourne and I thought it was just about paradise.  One thing did disturb me though.  It was a quiet Eastern suburb then and maybe still is, but someone gunned down a man in his unit a few doors down only weeks before I arrived.  As time went on I began to think that the mobsters were a protected species and I was even more concerned at the big name Lawyers who achieved celebrity status for protecting them.

 

For the last twenty years I have been in WA and frankly, it seems worse here than it did back then in Victoria.  I don’t have the knowledge or education to fully understand the legal system, but then neither do most of us.  I don’t feel ashamed of that.  We should all play a role to the best of our ability and I try to do that.  I do though, in common with most of us, have a good sense of right and wrong and what should be happening.

 

Parliaments, State and Federal, the Police and the Judiciary are there for us all, but the separation of powers worries me.  The Legal profession seems to be a law unto itself: a boy’s club and no amount of horrifying decisions or stuff-ups seem to rattle them in the least.  In fact, so frequent are the blunders and travesties of justice that one begins to wonder if they do it to add spice to their lives.

 

Which of you has not seen on the daily news the parade of criminals exiting courtrooms swaggering and grinning and smoking, followed by devastated parents, families and friends?

 

The DPP in this state is an absolute joke albeit a very sick one, and the sooner that there is a major shake-up the better.  As I have said, I don’t fully understand the system, but I am a decent person and the Dix’s are decent people and the parents of Sofia Rodriguez Urrutia-Shu are decent people and five minutes on Google and I will give you heaps more of people who the so called ‘justice system’ has not only failed, but it has ripped them off.

 

Do I think that there will be change?  No I don’t.  I hate so say it because I do love this country, but the spectre of corruption seems a possible reason for the powerful betraying the battlers.

 

But we, the average everyday Aussies, do care for these betrayed families and I for one offer them my deepest sympathy and my most heartfelt regret that this country and its system has failed them and is failing all of us.

 

Bill Sullivan

Being Australian.

Being an Australian. What is that?

As I look back I can sub-divide my life in many ways: single and married, young and old, skint and having a few bob (and then skint again), happy and unhappy, confident and terrified, loving life and looking then looking for a way to end it so that the only one I wold hurt was me…….  Well, that is just a few, but you will get my drift.

Another subdivision is Australia, before  and after.  A Pom, I arrived in Melbourne, well actually Fremantle, but only for a few hours, in September 1974.  Apart from a stupid Customs official (another Pom actually) who thought that I was running an International smuggling ring focused on household effects, the day was a happy one.  My in-Laws picked me and their daughter up in a brand-new Leyland P76.  Okay! We all make mistakes, but they didn’t understand it and nor did I.  Many years later we argue about Ford or Holden…  That truly amazes and astounds me.  Ford, Holden and the Queen: Foreigners all of them.

 I knew that I had not made a mistake when Dan and Joyce drove toward the Dandenongs.  I suddenly knew that the Australia of my dreams was real and I fell in love with it and I still love it.  In my heart I became an instant Australian.  I arrived on Thursday and had a job starting Monday.

Not long passed before I went to the MCG and watched Australia and the Windies do battle: I copped a lot of good-humoured Pommie bashing only to find that the bloke that ‘gave me heaps’ was a Pom like me.

Australia has changed and I didn’t expect it not to, but I do worry.  I wonder how many younger people can’t spell ‘Banjo Paterson’ and have never heard of Henry Lawson and I wonder who cares…..  The Federal Govt set up this little test to see what applicants who want to come to Australia know or have bothered to find out.  Sure, maybe I don’t know all the answers, but I’m not applying to come here right now, but if I was I would take the trouble to find out.  When I went for my driving test I had to read up a bit.  Same thing isn’t it?  If you care……..,  you look into it, but no, the bleeding hearts say that 5% are failing, so they say “Make the test easier.”  Why have it at all then?  Make the test so easy that Osama Bin Laden would pass.  Come to think of it…. He probably could, because he would probably get out from under his rock and look up the probable questions and answers.

 So…. What is an Australian?  We still tug at the forelocks of the Queen.  We go to war based on American lies.  I am not at all sure we are anything like as good as we believe we are.  Even at Cricket we seem to be apologising for winning.

 Or am I just a Grumpy Old Man???

Bill S.

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