#rafting Wales

[areteoutdoorcentre]

https://bipjacksonville.com/rafting-in-snowdonia-an-unforgettable-adventure-with-arete-outdoor-centre

Experience the thrill of white-water rafting in Snowdonia with Arete Outdoor Centre. Navigate exciting rapids, enjoy expert guidance, and create unforgettable memories in Wales’ adventure hub. Book your rafting adventure today!

[aretecentre]

Dive into Adventure at Arete: Top Residential Activities in Wales

Step into a world of excitement and discovery at Arete Outdoor Centre, located in the heart of North Wales. Our residential activities are crafted to deliver thrilling, memorable experiences for school groups, families, and corporate teams alike, all set against the stunning Welsh landscape.

At Arete, adventure comes alive with a diverse selection of activities. From rock climbing to caving, kayaking, and scenic mountain hikes, each activity is designed to bring you closer to nature and push your limits. Paddle along peaceful lakes, explore underground caves, or hike to breathtaking viewpoints—no matter the activity, every experience at Arete is unforgettable.

Our expert instructors are committed to ensuring safety and creating a supportive environment that empowers participants of all skill levels. They’re there to guide, challenge, and inspire, helping you develop new skills and confidence along the way. With comfortable lodgings and nutritious meals, you’ll be well-prepared to make the most of every adventure-packed day.

Arete Outdoor Centre is more than just an outdoor destination; it’s a place where friendships are forged, and memories are made. Embrace the thrill, explore the beauty, and discover something new about yourself.

Don’t just visit—experience! Book your stay at Arete Outdoor Centre and let the adventures in Wales begin!

[invisibleicewands]

Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon’: how Michael Sheen got sucked into a forever chemicals exposé

An opera-loving member of high society turned eco-activist who was forced into police protection with a panic button round his neck. A Hollywood actor who recorded said activist’s life story as he was dying from exposure to the very chemicals he was investigating. Throw in two investigative journalists who realise not everything is as it seems, then uncover some startling truths, and you have “podcasting’s strangest team” on Buried: The Last Witness.

On their award-winning 2023 podcast Buried, the husband and wife duo Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor dug into illegal toxic waste dumping in the UK and its links to organised crime. This time, they focus on “forever chemicals”, specifically polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and set out to discover whether one whistleblower may have been decades ahead of his time in reporting on their harmful impact.

“It’s amazing how big the scale of this story is,” says Ashby, as we sit backstage at the Crucible theatre, where they are doing a live discussion as part of Sheffield DocFest. “With this series, we don’t just want it to make your blood turn cold, we want it to make you question your own blood itself.”

It all started when Taylor and Ashby were sent a lead about the work of former farmer’s representative Douglas Gowan. In 1967, he discovered a deformed calf in a field and began to investigate strange goings on with animals close to the Brofiscin and Maendy quarries in south Wales. He linked them to the dumping of waste by companies including the nearby Monsanto chemical plant, which was producing PCBs.

PCBs were used in products such as paint and paper to act as a fire retardant, but they were discovered to be harmful and have been banned since 1981 in the UK. However, due to their inability to break down – hence the term forever chemical – Gowan predicted their legacy would be a troubling one. “I expect there to be a raft of chronic illness,” he said. He even claimed that his own exposure to PCBs (a result of years of testing polluted grounds) led his pancreas and immune system to stop working. “I’m a mess and I think it can all be attributed to PCBs,” he said.

However, Gowan wasn’t a typical environmentalist. “A blue-blood high-society Tory and a trained lawyer who could out-Mozart anyone,” is how Taylor describes him in the series. He would even borrow helicopters from friends in high places to travel to investigate farmers’ fields. Gowan died in 2018 but the pair managed to get hold of his life’s work – confidential reports, testing and years of evidence. “I’m interested in environmental heroes that aren’t cliche,” says Ashby. “So I was fascinated by him. But then we started to see his flaws and really had to weigh them up. My goodness it’s a murky world we went into.”

The reason they were able to delve even deeper into this murky world is because of the award-winning actor Michael Sheen who, in 2017, came across Gowan’s work in a story he read. He was so blown away by it, and the lack of broader coverage, that he tracked him down. “I got a message back from him saying: ‘Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon,’” says Sheen. “I took a camera with me and spent a couple of days with him and just heard this extraordinary story.”

What Gowan had been trying to prove for years gained some traction in 2007, with pieces in the Ecologist and a Guardian article exploring how “Monsanto helped to create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain”. One was described as smelling ��of sick when it rains and the small brook that flows from it gushes a vivid orange.” But then momentum stalled.

Years later, in 2023, Ashby and Taylor stumbled on a recording of Sheen giving the 2017 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, which referenced Gowan and his work. Before they knew it, they were in the actor’s kitchen drinking tea and learning he had conducted a life-spanning seven-hour interview with Gowan before his death. So they joined forces. Sheen isn’t just a token celebrity name added for clout on this podcast; he is invested. For him, it’s personal as well as political. “Once you dig into it, you realise there’s a pattern,” he says. “All the places where this seems to have happened are poor working-class areas. There’s a sense that areas like the one I come from are being exploited.”

Sheen even goes to visit some contaminated sites in the series, coming away from one feeling sick. “That made it very real,” he says. “To be looking into a field and going: ‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s toxic waste.’” Sheen was living a double life of sorts. “I went to rehearsals for a play on Monday and people were like, ‘What did you do this weekend?’” he says. “‘Oh, I went to the most contaminated area in the UK and I think I may be poisoned.’ People thought I was joking.” Sheen ended up being OK, but did have some temporary headaches and nausea, which was a worry. “We literally had to work out if we had poisoned Michael Sheen,” says Ashby, who also ponders in the series: “Have I just killed a national treasure?”

The story gets even knottier. Gowan’s findings turn out to be accurate and prescient, but the narrative around his journey gets muddy. As a character with a flair for drama, he turned his investigation into a juicy, riveting story filled with action, which could not always be corroborated. “If he hadn’t done that, and if he’d been a nerdy, analytical, detail-oriented person who just presented the scientific reports and kept them neatly filed, would we have made this podcast?” asks Taylor, which is a fascinating question that runs through this excellent and gripping series.

Ashby feels that Gowan understood how vital storytelling is when it comes to cutting through the noise. “We have so much science proving the scale of these problems we face and yet we don’t seem to have the stories,” he says. “I think Douglas got that. Fundamentally, he understood that stories motivate human beings to act. But then he went too far.”

However, this is not purely about Gowan’s story – it’s about evidence. The Last Witness doubles up as a groundbreaking investigation into the long-lasting impact of PCBs. “We threw the kitchen sink at this,” says Ashby. “The breakthrough for us is that the Royal Society of Chemistry came on board and funded incredibly expensive testing. So we have this commitment to go after the truth in a way that is hardly ever done.”

From shop-bought fish so toxic that it breaches official health advice to off-the-scale levels of banned chemicals found in British soil, the results are staggering. “The scientist almost fell off his chair,” says Ashby. “That reading is the highest he has ever recorded in soil – in the world. That was the moment we knew Douglas was right and we are now realising the scale of this problem. The public doesn’t realise that even a chemical that has been banned for 40 years is still really present in our environment.”

To go even deeper into just how far PCBs have got into our environment and food chain, Ashby and Taylor had their own blood tested. When Taylor found 80 different types of toxic PCB chemicals in her blood it was a sobering moment. “I was genuinely emotional because it’s so personal,” she says. “It was the thought of this thing being in me that was banned before I was even born and the thought of passing that on to my children.” Ashby adds: “We’ve managed physical risk in our life as journalists in Tanzania and with organised crime, but more scary than a gangster is this invisible threat to our health.”

In order to gauge the magnitude of what overexposure to PCBs can do, they headed to Anniston, Alabama, once home to a Monsanto factory. “As a journalist, you have an inbuilt scepticism and think it can’t be that bad,” says Ashby. “But when I got there I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I hate to use words like dystopian, but it was. There is a whole massive school that can’t be used. There’s illnesses in children and cancers. It truly was the most powerful vignette of the worst-case example of these chemicals.”

It’s bleak stuff but instilling fear and panic is not the intention. “Obviously, we’re really concerned about it,” says Ashby. “And although the environmental crises we face do feel overwhelming, it is incredible how a movement has formed and how individuals are taking action in communities. The lesson to take from Douglas is that the response doesn’t have to be resignation. It can be agency.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Cathy had voted Labour all her life. Then she heard an LBC interview with Keir Starmer. In it, he was asked if it was “appropriate” that Israel should besiege Gaza, cutting off power and water. “I think Israel does have that right,” Starmer replied. Cathy immediately resigned from the party, which she joined three years ago when Starmer was elected leader. “This has been the last straw,” she tells me. Previous straws, she says, include a raft of policies that Labour had watered down, and Tory policies that Labour would not repeal. But Labour’s position on the siege of Gaza has killed off the little faith she had left.

[...]

The consistency in the position of several Labour voters I spoke to over the past few days is striking. The main assertion: they will not be voting for this Labour party. The reason: the party crossed a line by effectively endorsing Israel’s killing and besieging of civilians. The language of a final reckoning came up a lot: “a red line”, “a line in the sand”, “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, a “mask has slipped”. And the anger is by no means sectarian. “It’s easier to frame it as a Muslim issue,” says Calum, a member who has left the party. “It’s not a Muslim issue. It’s a human one.” Labour’s damage limitation response did little but entrench this view of an untrustworthy, cynical leadership. It took Starmer days to address his LBC comments, and then, bizarrely, he claimed that he never said them at all. Then there was his visit to a mosque and Islamic centre in south Wales, a sanitation exercise that backfired epically. On social media, Starmer posted images of smiling congregants, saying he had “repeated our calls for hostages to be released, more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, for water and power to be switched back on, and a renewed focus on the two-state solution”. A statement issued by South Wales Islamic Centre via the Muslim Council of Wales rejected Starmer’s version of how the meeting went, stressing that his “social media post and images gravely misrepresented our congregants and the nature of the visit”.

[mightyflamethrower]

Riots have broken out in multiple cities and towns across Great Britain, particularly over the past week. There were already protests taking place, but some of them have now turned violent. The topic driving all of this unrest is the immigration situation, particularly the illegal migrants that have been crossing the English Channel on rubber rafts and boats. Much as we've seen a backlash in the United States to violent crimes committed by illegal migrants, many Brits are clearly fed up as well. Everything seemed to come to a head last week when a series of stabbing attacks took the lives of three young children and left eight other children and two adults seriously injured. This took place in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool. Rumors quickly spread that the attacker was an illegal migrant, and that's when the protests turned violent. Hundreds have been arrested as a result. (AP)

Britain has been convulsed by violence for the past week as crowds spouting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slogans clashed with police. The disturbances have been fueled by right-wing activists using social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls during a Taylor Swift-themed dance event. The violence, some of Britain’s worst in years, has led to hundreds of arrests as the government pledges that the rioters will feel “the full force of the law” after hurling bricks and other projectiles at police, looting shops and attacking hotels used to house asylum-seekers. As Britain’s new government struggles to quell the unrest and announces a “standing army” of specialist police to deal with rioting, here’s a look at what’s happening and why.

The liberal media has a marked tendency to try to blame nearly everything on online misinformation or disinformation, but in this case, they do seem to have a point. The attacker was described in several outlets as someone "believed to be an asylum-seeker or a Muslim immigrant." That report spread across the media quickly, inflaming tensions. But it turns out that the killer's name is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana and he was actually born in Wales in 2006, moving to Southport in 2013. His parents are reportedly legal immigrants from Rwanda. He also reportedly suffers from autism, so the stabbing attack may have been more of a mental health issue than any sort of hate crime.

Even if the deadly attack in Southport turns out to have been mischaracterized, that doesn't mean that the UK doesn't still have a serious problem with its illegal immigration situation and resultant unrest. This situation has been simmering for more than a decade and it now appears to be reaching the boiling point. There is a group over there named the English Defence League that has been operating for more than a decade, running a campaign against massive Muslim migration into the country, and they've been attracting more followers recently.

As far as the response to this situation goes, what we're seeing is a jarring juxtaposition between two different British leaders. The UK recently elected its new Labor Party Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to replace the outgoing Conservative Party PM, Rishi Sunak. Sunak had previously vowed to stop the flow of illegals into the country by turning back the boats in the channel and deporting illegals already in the country to Rwanda. Immediately upon taking office, Starmer canceled the plan and instead vowed to take care of the problem by "working with other European nations and speeding up the removal of failed asylum-seekers."

Starmer has also vastly increased the rate of arrests... not of the migrants, of course, but of the protesters. Some of the protesters have engaged in vandalism and caused damage, with some even attacking the police, so they will need to be held accountable, but many of them are simply carrying signs and decrying both the current administration and the flood of migrants. They don't have the type of First Amendment protections we enjoy in the United States, so many of them have been sent to jail. Starmer has promised that the protesters will "feel the full force of the law" and established a "standing army" of specialist police to deal with the rioting. The entire situation is a mess, to be sure, but it's yet one more sign that massive migration and lax immigration enforcement are causing unrest far beyond America's borders. And the problem is spreading.

[petula-xx]

The new normal?

Have just been watching footage of the world's latest flooding disaster - this time it was storm Bert in Wales. A month's worth of rain in 24hrs.

The new essential life skills for humanity now seem to be the following:

Sand bagging, bucket bailing, carrying possessions above your head through chest deep water, paddling an inflatable raft down your street, dragging sodden house contents to the nature strip, shoveling mud, learning how to live without insurance cover ever again.

[ieian]

Falmouth, Cornwall, 1955: a legend is born along Customs House Quay. A smartly dressed young man with wild, curly hair has launched a 23ft catamaran, built in just a few months for the modest sum of £200 (the equivalent of around £6,500 today).

Rigged as a ketch with battened junk sails, the aptly named Tangaroa (meaning 'God of the Sea' in Polynesian) began the epic James Wharram story.

At the time, catamarans were considered dangerous and eccentric, while yachting was a pastime reserved mainly for high society. But sailing already has other visionaries. On the deck of Tangaroa, beside James, are two young women: Jutta Schulze-Rhonhof and Ruth Merseburger.

In puritanical post-war England, setting off to cross the Atlantic with two young women – and German ones–was shocking. But these three young people care; they dream of adventure, and their enterprise is an act of defiance.

The three adventurers left Falmouth on 27 September 1955 on a boat loaded with books, essential foods, and little else. Despite a fraught passage, encountering storms in the Bay of Biscay and being suspected of being spies by Franco's Guardia Civil, the trio crossed the Atlantic and reached the island of Trinidad on 2 February 1957.

Without a penny to their name, they adopted a simple island life, and Jutta gave birth to her and James' first child, Hannes. The unconventional polyamorous family lived aboard a raft inspired by the floating dwellings of the Pacific, nicknamed 'the paradise island of the South Seas'. Tangaroa, now tired, was abandoned as Wharram decided to build a new catamaran.

By chance, two solo sailors came to anchor in the bay where the Wharram tribe lived afloat, and the legendary Bernard Moitessier and Henry Wakelam helped Wharram build his new design, Rongo.

The crew left La Martinique for New York on 16 April 1959, one year after Rongo's construction began. The return voyage to Conwy in Wales took 50 days. Still, Wharram's new design achieved what many thought impossible. Soon, Wharram-designed catamarans were worldwide, connected by a robust community spirit.

Images credit: Julien Girardot and Benjamin Flao

Read more at the link in the comments below.

#catamaran #yachtdesign #sailingadventure

[fisheadz]

I found some funny voicelines from Rainbow by wandering the 1st floor for a while, and wanted to share some!

“You know what the funny thing is?! You’re going to work so hard to survive this stupid escapade only to die by my hands! Hilarious.”

“The flood is coming and your arc is more like a janky raft. But you’re doing great.”

“Yes, hello? Mr. Wales? This is, uh, Chase… Mannafort from the Milton Haven sheriff’s department, I’m calling in regards to some questions I have for you regarding an ongoing investigation… where were you last Tuesday? Oh that’s right you were home, alone, like a loser.”

Bro thinks he’s the sh¡t, when he’s just silly goofy. I have more, but they’re all somewhere else in my notes and I don’t wanna go through those right now. Also, idk if ima make my fic Desmond x Lucas or not. Although no matter what I pick, it’s gonna be at least partially gay so, eh.

Oh! And I found a little handheld gaming console in Max’s tape that’s plays a little tune, that’s actually Max’s song "Is It Me". I thought it was rly cool.

[themuseumwithoutwalls]

MWW Artwork of the Day (10/24/24) Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775–1851) A Disaster at Sea (c. 1835) Oil on canvas, 171.4 x 220.3 cm. The Tate Gallery, London

This canvas was never exhibited and is probably unfinished, but remains one of Turner's most powerful statements on the Romantic theme of maritime disaster. Its pyramidal composition leaves little doubt that Turner had seen Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (now in the Louvre, Paris) described by one critic as ‘this tremendous picture of human sufferings’, when it was exhibited in London in 1822. Turner's own subject is the wreck of the Amphitrite off Boulogne in 1833. The ship's captain abandoned his cargo of female convicts, claiming that he was only authorised to land them in New South Wales.

[areteoutdoorcentre]

Discover the thrill of white-water rafting in Snowdonia, Wales. From the exciting rapids of the River Tryweryn to family-friendly adventures, enjoy expert-guided trips, stunning mountain views, and unforgettable outdoor fun for all ages in the heart of Snowdonia National Park.

[aretecentre]

Embrace Adventure at Arete: Unforgettable Residential Activities in Wales

Situated amidst the picturesque landscapes of North Wales, Arete Outdoor Centre is your gateway to adventure and discovery. Our comprehensive outdoor residential activities centre offers the perfect blend of excitement and learning for schools, families, and corporate groups looking to experience the great outdoors.

At Arete, adventure comes in many forms. From thrilling rock climbing and abseiling on natural cliffs to serene yet challenging kayaking and canoeing on beautiful Welsh waters, there's something for everyone. Our mountain hikes, walking and navigation exercises allow you to explore the stunning terrain, uncovering the natural beauty of Wales while building resilience and confidence.

At Arete Outdoor Centre, we believe that the best adventures are the ones that inspire growth, teamwork, and lasting memories. Whether you’re scaling heights or paddling through calm waters, your time with us will be filled with moments of triumph and discovery.

Join us at Arete and embrace the adventure that awaits. Book your residential stay today and embark on an unforgettable journey through the stunning landscapes of Wales.

[esotericconsultingdetective]

my forever fixations (changes will be added.)

sitcoms (b99, modern family, bbt, himym, the office, friends, HOUSE MD)

benedict cucumberpatch and martin freeman (sherlock bbc, lord of the rings, the hobbit etc.)

Sherlock and watson variants (House MD, Sherlock)

Patrick Bateman

ghosts&vampires&blood&sadists&gore&darkacademia&haunted places (frankenstein, jekyll and hyde)

english schoolgirls in the not creepy way (wild child, enid blyton boarding school books)

Harry Potter

Dead poet’s society

neil gaiman (coraline)

true crime

granada holmes

LOCKWOOD AND CO. MY BABIES

star trek and star wars in no particular order

spock

taylor swift and old washed up rock bands

pheobe effing bridgers

GRACIE ABRAMS est. 2020 (and the 2021 london show which i attended- my first concert 🥹)

kill her, freak out - samia

therese dreaming and maya hawke

art

raft of medusa

travelling

nerdinators

nerf guns

spy kids

peppa pig and ben and holly and gaston and nanny plum

emma chamberlain's fashion choices

the grisly origins of fairy tales

101 dalmations' original cruella deville.

horrid henry, captain underpants and phineas and ferb

LEGOOOO

evermore and folklore

lore by aaron manke

neurosurgery

fashun

crime podcasts

the history of mad hatters

interesting things to research about

indian royalty history

transylvania

Elizabeth Báthory (the blood countess)

agatha christie and miss marple

puzzle solving but i'm terrible at it (i’m awesome, i’m trying to be humble)

a deepening disgust at mortal fascination with each other.

aliens

d&d

mathematics

Lockwood and Co.

The sisters grimm

Land of stories

middle grade horror and fantasy books

my instagram threads account

tumblr shitposts

tumblr in general

pjo (ex induced)

scarlet and ivy

THE WELLS AND WONG DETECTIVE SOCIETY (robin stevens ily)

young adult dark fantasy without romance (check point 46)

my goodreads account

ada lovelace

franz kafka, virginia woolf.

my spotify playlists (ethel cain i love u)

joan of arc

rosalind franklin

ted ed videos

witch hunts in scotland and salem.

zoroastrian burials

sherlock and watson

my pinterest

amrita shergill

CRISPR

old disney shows

cricket and india's victory in WC in '83

jhansi ki rani

my childhood tv shows

my yt history

video essays

shane and ryan (watcher or buzzfeed unsolved)

chronically online

jude bellingham

Carlos sainz

a dreaded feeling of separation.

Elsa Schiaparelli

the kelly

monaco

f1

aux en provence

ireland

my artemis fowl phase

harry potter

wales

ryan reynolds and john krasinski

adam sandler movies and similar genres of shitty comedy

cobra kai and the karate kid

superheroes

spiderman variants

bucky and the falcon

charlize theron

vintage watches

conde nast traveller

delhi

benedict cucumberpatch

kristy thompson from the bsc

anne with an e

mr brightside

mitski

podcasts

the sixties, thirties and twentys

maggie smith (downtown abbey and loewe campaigns)

jane birkin

youtube fan edits

stranger things

the irregulars and haunting of hill house

gossip girl (fallacies and legacies)

meryl streep (mammia mia and the devil wears prada)

julie andrews (the sound of music, the princess diaries)

vintage movies

youtube short films and billy joel

the prisoner of azkaban

fred and george weasley and kili and fili

gandalf > dumbledore

margaret - ldr and jack antanoff

alicia and janet (the enid blyton cinematic universe)

sharon tate

my halloween blog 'gore'

arch digest house tours

new york because i'm just a girl

BBC SHERLOCK

Star Trek

the matrix

kill bill, fight club, dr. evil, ocean’s 11

The KJO cinematic universe

Nepo babies

Tim Burton

The Addams Family

Science

Biology

Physics

Chemistry

Mathematics x 2

grigori perelman

Nerds

Conspiracy theories

Ethical research

female serial killers

elizabeth bathory

my spotify playlists

billy joel - piano man

youtube edits

saltburn

peppa pig & ben and holly

horrid henry

lost childhood animated tv shows

enid blyton boarding school books

british sitcoms (outnumbered)

house md

characters most like me list on charactour/ openpyschometrics.

the 2 IT zoya akhtar movies

special certain bollywood

teams in red - man united, Ferrari and RCB.

Formula 1, Tennis, Football & Cricket

Batman&Alfred (Christopher Nolan version duh!)

Dark Knight’s aesthetic

old marvel and DC movies

Superhero Comics

Richard Feynman

Haunted castles

Halloween and Halloween costumes (the only right answer is switching between batman and darth Vader or my Pinterest board)

LEGO (lotr, Harry Potter, marvel and DC lego)

Batman, iron man, and dr strange

ford v ferrari

shang chi

fight club and kill bill

Zack and Cody and phineas and ferb captain underpants

Karate kid and kung fu panda

karen from outnumbered

philomena cunk

Mercedes, Sebastian Vettel being a nerd and super awesome with pit overtakes, Brocedes + 2019 rookies and Maxiel

2012 grid

2023 george russel t pose

twitch quartet

Good food and masterchef australia

LUCA

black swan

Cool nepo babies (case in point romy mars (director of the tiktok vodka pasta video & Gracie frikking abrams ily)

F2 and f3

Horror movies

SHITTY COMEDYYY movie genre I.e. the hangover, grown ups, etc.

How to train your dragon (i had a dragon dinosaur phase so this is justified)

Lego ninjago

michelle mouton

derry girls

being an absolute effing genius

academia

saltburn aesthetic

letterboxd

Horror movies

Old marvel but deadpool revival

Minions

Breakfast at tiffany’s

Old movies (arsenic and old lace, wizard of oz)

Preminger and old Barbie movies

Old Disney movies (101 dalmations)

Merida and brave and Elsa and frozen

the one dance scene from the sleeping beauty

Movies with julie andrews and audrey hepburn and meryl streep

asha banks' and gracie abrams covering songs

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS + nosferatu

horror movies of all kinds (slashers, paranormal, psychological, all of them.)

Kickass (the movie)

IT (2017)

the teenage girl to anakin skywalker pipeline

masterchef australia

tzatziki and hot sauce

bbc merlin

coraline

dash and lily (the tv show)

letterboxd

BOOKS LITERATURE GOODREADS

Alexa Chung and Alex Turner

David Bowie

sixties music

the Beatles

[intheshadowofwar]

The Boundless Sea

Sydney

11 June 2023

We headed into Sydney at about 9am this morning with a fairly full raft of activities.

The first of these, which we arrived to at 10, was the Hyde Park Convict Barracks. This barracks was built by order of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1817, and today a statue of him stands across the road from the building, gesturing towards it. I can’t help but wonder if Macquarie would appreciate the somewhat dodgy statue of himself showing off the prison he built, but maybe that’s just me. Hyde Park Barracks is a thoroughly modern museum, in that it uses audio guides instead of placards. I generally can’t stand audio guides, but I soon worked out that I could just read the subtitles on the ipod thing they gave us, so it wasn’t a dealbreaker. The museum now includes a major focus on the effects of colonisation and the convict system on the indigenous peoples of New South Wales, which I quite appreciated. The one thing I might have liked more about was a little more information on the guards; but I appreciate that this is specifically a museum about the convicts, not the soldiers.

After the barracks, we walked through Hyde Park to the Anzac Memorial. This is Sydney and New South Wales’ primary war memorial, opened in the 1930s to commemorate the First World War. It’s not quite as grand as Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance - few things are - but it is still a magnificent structure and well worth a visit. The statue of the prostrate man in the Hall of Silence - positioned under the Hall of Memory, and visible through a hole in the floor which they call the Well of Contemplation - is particularly striking. Most war-related sculptures, at least in the post-WWI period, tend to be horizontal. Here, the prostrated man is vertical - the language of mourning.

Behind the Hall of Memory and down the stairs is the Hall of Service. The walls here are lined with soil samples from every town in New South Wales that has sent soldiers to war. There’s a circle on the floor, under a skylight, with more soil - these from the battlefields on which soldiers from New South Wales have fought. This goes as far back as the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, but frontier conflict isn’t represented.

After visiting the Anzac Memorial, we proceeded by train to Circular Quay, and after stopping for a quick drink, caught the Manly Ferry out to Manly. This took us past the Martello tower at Fort Denison, upon which a young Charles Lightoller raised the Boer flag as a prank in the early 1900s, and the naval base at Garden Island. Both Canberra-class helicopter carriers were in port - these are the largest warships Australia has operated since the decommissioning of the carrier HMAS Melbourne. On the port side of the ferry, as one approaches the heads, the foremast of the cruiser HMAS Sydney (the first one) can be seen on the shore. To starboard, one can gaze out through the heads to the Pacific - from here, the sea is almost unbroken until you reach South America.

It is somewhere northeast of here that HMAS Australia lies on the seabed, decommissioned and scuttled under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. Australia was a battlecruiser - the same class as the unfortunate Indefatigable. She missed Jutland due to damage from a collision with the third member of the class, HMS New Zealand, and thus never saw a major combat action. Her existence, however, deterred German raiders from sailing too close to Australia during the war (although I’d argue that it was actually the entry of the Japanese into the war that really coerced the Germans into fleeing the Pacific altogether.)

We lunched in Manly, and I took a look at the war memorial there - possibly Australia’s oldest, erected before the war had even ended in 1916. I had a look at the beach, too, but it was absolutely packed. We caught the ferry back at around 3pm, and then returned to Hurstville by train.

The real journey begins tomorrow - we leave early for Sydney airport, and then we have the long, long flight via Bangkok to Heathrow. This will be a long undertaking, but I’m not certain there will be much to write about - but I shall make a valiant effort regardless.

[ifreakingloveroyals]

24 February 2017 | Prince Charles, Prince of Wales launches a climate change 'raft' with pupils and teachers involved in a climate change education programme run by the charity, Size of Wales, at Blenheim Road Community Primary, in Cwmbran, United Kingdom. (c) Chris Jackson/Getty Images

[onecameraamillionstories]

Waking up in Wales

When you think of Wales, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe the skyline of mountains, sheep frolicking in the fields, or many history-packed castles? All of these are just some of the reasons Wales is a hot-spot for travelling, photography and camping alike. Speaking of which, I was fortunate enough to spend one recent weekend camping in Llandysul, also home to a section of the River Teifi. At 73 miles long, the river is one of the longest in Wales and a popular choice for fishing, kayaking and white water rafting. Little did I know that hitting the rapids wasn’t going to be the only memorable part of visiting Wales.

In the past, I’ve always put off camping for one simple reason. I hate the cold. I’ll do anything to avoid feeling it, even to the extent of putting off trips purely because they took place in winter. This time, I decided to brave the cold and say I conquered my fear both on land and the water. However, stepping out of the tent on day one, I was greeted by a frost bitten landscape that made the cold worth every moment. I knew that Wales was known for its picturesque views, but waking up to the pastel morning skies and icing of frost on the grass was definitely one for the books (or my blog!)

Some of my favourite photographs are the result of overcoming challenges to capture them, and without this chilling fear of mine, I wouldn’t have come home having witnessed Wales at its finest. Maybe one day I’ll thank it!

[veritywarner90]

The Far-Left History Of The Australian Greens

A paradox lies at the very heart of the Greens. ‘The first Green Party anywhere in the world began in Australia in 1972, the United Tasmania Group, which grew out of pioneering Australian environmental campaigns,’ the official creation story on their website reads. ‘Early elections saw Greens representatives hold the balance of power at the state level, including Bob Brown and Christine Milne in Tasmania. In 1992, the Greens formed a national party.’

Not only is this strangely condensed. It omits what one would think are details absolutely crucial to the story of the Greens.

Yes, the Greens were born from the United Tasmania Group. It itself sprang from the Lake Pedder Action group, the body formed to try to revoke the removal of national park status and flooding and enlargement of the south-west Tasmanian lake as part of a hydro-electric project in the late sixties and early seventies.

The group was created to contest seats at the 1972 Tasmanian election, as flooding was set to get underway. It came within a few hundred votes of winning a seat, but its vote declined at the next election. Many of its members and other Lake Pedder activists drift ed into the Tasmanian Wilderness Society in 1976, including the Launceston general practitioner Bob Brown.

The Wilderness Society was formed to continue and expand the work of the Lake Pedder campaign— and harness its energy to stop the Hydro-Electric Commission’s planned Franklin Dam on the Gordon River in the state’s rugged south-west.

Brown was a prominent figure in the Wilderness Society from its earliest days. He wrote about rafting the Franklin River in the very first issue of its journal and became the society’s director in 1978, putting him at the very forefront of the dam debate.

It was an Australian Democrat, Norm Sanders, who was first elected to the state parliament off the back of the controversy. He became a member for Denison in a by-election early in 1980, the first Australian political candidate elected on an environmental platform. But Brown very much became the face of the ‘No Dams’ campaign as it spread beyond Tasmania and mounted as a federal issue as the 1983 election loomed.

Sanders resigned from the parliament at the end of 1982 in protest at what he described as the ‘totalitarian’ treatment of dam protesters by the state government. More than 1500 had been arrested, including Brown.

Under Tasmania’s electoral system, a count back was held to determine who would succeed Sanders in Denison. Th e successful candidate was announced on January 4 1983. It was Brown, who the same day had emerged from 19 days in Hobart’s Risdon Prison for obstructing workers at the Franklin Dam site.

Brown had contested Denison at the 1982 poll as an independent. He was returned in the 1986 Tasmanian election, along with a second environmental campaigner from the neighbouring seat of Franklin, Gerry Bates.

The movement continued to grow in strength. Both Brown and Bates were returned at the 1989 election, and were joined by three other members— Christine Milne, Lance Armstrong and Di Hollister—largely elected in protest against a proposed paper pulp mill at Wesley Vale, outside the north-eastern centre of Devonport.

It was during this term of parliament that the movement got a name. The Tasmanian Wilderness Society had already spread to the mainland, dropping the specific state reference as its work broadened. The growing political organisation found a title too.

The title came from the Green Ban campaigns in Sydney of the early 1970s which had begun aft er women from the well-heeled suburb of Hunters Hill, rebuff ed by the local council and Liberal state government, appealed to the hard-left New South Wales branch of the militant Builders Labourers Federation to stop local development. Jack Mundey, the BLF leader, coined the term at the start of 1973 to differentiate its environmentally-focussed actions from the traditional union ‘black bans’.

The actions spread in 1973 and 1974 across different parts of Sydney. The union and activists joined forces to block developments in Potts Point and the Rocks, in the Anglican-church owned areas of Glebe, and against a freeway development that would have cut through the inner-western suburbs of Ultimo, Annandale, Rozelle and Leichhardt.

The movement impressed a young visiting German bureaucrat from the European Commission and left -wing activist, Petra Kelly. She was fascinated by the collaboration between the workers of the BLF and the residents of the bohemian or rapidly gentrifying areas where the Green Ban actions occurred.

The name stuck with her and when at the start of 1980 she became a key driver in an effort to unite groups of environmentalists, peace activists, anti-NATO, anti-nuclear and anti-industrialisation protesters into a single movement in a drive for real political power and parliamentary representation in her homeland she bestowed it on the new body. They became Die Grünen, the Greens.

The emerging political force in Tasmania borrowed back the name. They had originally been ‘the Independents’. At the end of 1991 they became ‘the Green Independents’. By August of 1992 they had become ‘the Greens’.

At the same time, the movement took the green triangular logo that had been the symbol of the Franklin protestors, removed the words ‘No Dams’, and replaced them with the party name.

It was an act rich in symbolism— and hypocrisy. The anti-Franklin protests, like the protests against the flooding of Lake Pedder before them, had been community-based social movements.

A political party had appropriated their symbol while at the same time adopting a name that attempted to hide the fact that it actually was a party. Even now the media simply refers to them as the Greens. It was telling that the day after Milne discarded her agreement with the government that Julia Gillard, for the very first time, referred to them as ‘the Greens party’.

There was a lack of honesty in its actions, an ambiguity—an ambiguity that continues to match the paradox of the party that is so obvious today.

The 30th anniversary of the election of the Hawke government on March 5 this year was also heralded by the Greens as the 30th anniversary of the saving of the Franklin. Hawke had promised to block the proposal. UNESCO had awarded world heritage listing status to the wild rivers of Tasmania in December 1982. The incoming Hawke government went on to introduce legislation to stop work on the Franklin Dam and successfully defending its acts against a High Court challenge by Tasmania, saying that as they dealt with a listing under an international treaty, they were constitutionally valid under the Commonwealth’s external affairs powers.

The environmental issues of 2013, however, are very different to those of 1983. True, some are still fought on a case by case, location by location basis. But at the very core of the Greens’ philosophy today is that the planet itself is faced by an existential crisis that can only be resolved by radically remodelling not just the economy, but society itself—and the relationship of both with the ecology.

At the heart of that existential crisis—or at least one of its most crucial elements—is the supposed threat of climate change, of global warming caused largely by the production and use of coal to generate the electricity that not only powers our industries, but powers—and empowers—our society.

The great paradox of the Greens is that their origins lie in a campaign to fight the development of a source of renewable energy, hydro-electrical power, that their great day of celebration marked the effective end of the push to develop this cheap and carbon-neutral means of powering the Tasmanian economy.

Nothing was said about this on March 5 by this supposed party of the environment. It is a fact that simply cannot be acknowledged by any member. This dark, guilty secret, the party’s very own original sin, is kept absolutely hidden. Which begs the question: what else do the Greens have to hide?

The Lake Pedder and Franklin Dam struggles are central to the Greens mythos. So, indeed, are their Tasmanian roots.

It can be seen in their choice of parliamentary leaders; Bob Brown, the friendly family doctor politicalised by the Pedder debate who goes on to lead the fight for the Franklin. His replacement Christine Milne, the country school teacher and farmer’s daughter who becomes a force in the campaign against the Wesley Vale pulp mill because of what it will mean for the local environment. And the heir apparent, Peter Whish-Wilson, the Wall Street master of the universe who is humanised by the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks and retreats to his own little part of Tasmania where he becomes a simple vigneron and raises a family, only to find his solace disturbed by yet another milling project which drives him into activism.

The Tasmanian Greens present their story as a tale of ordinary folk driven into politics by threats to the environment that also threaten their community. If we look at the entity known as the Australian Greens—and how it came about, we find a very different story.

True, the story of the Australian Greens is the story of social movements, but these represent far more than local environmental mobilisations. They have drawn their support and platform from organisations that involve trade unions, the peace and disarmament movement, opponents of the two Gulf Wars and involvement in Afghanistan, anti-urban development activists, the women’s and gay rights movements, animal activists, the community legal centres movement, opponents of coal seam gas, opponents of genetically modified organisms… the list goes on.

Their former national convenor, Stewart Jackson, said in his doctoral thesis ‘the Australian Greens has a complex history, bringing together a number of different strands of social and political thinking.’

This, of course, has assisted the Greens with their rise to the current position they enjoy as the balance of power party in the federal parliament. But it has also created tension in the parliamentary party and the party organisation with the promise of more to come, tension that with Brown now gone as leader and the more abrasive Milne in charge could become unmanageable, particularly if—as the polls suggest—their parliamentary representation in Canberra is set to fall.

A look at the history of the Greens’ representation in the Commonwealth Parliament shows the very different backgrounds of members of the party to the Tasmanian branch. Brown might have been the first member of the Australian Greens to sit on the red leather benches of the Senate. But he was not the first Green. That honour went to West Australian peace and anti-nuclear activist Jo Valentine.

Valentine entered the Senate on 1 July 1985 after election as a member of the Nuclear Disarmament Party at the 1984 poll. She took her seat, however, as an independent, having left the party along with its figurehead Peter Garret in April 1985, saying it had been infiltrated and captured by the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.

Valentine was re-elected at the head of her own ‘Peace Group’ ticket in the 1987 double dissolution, but sat as the representative of the Greens WA from 1990.

Valentine cited the Quakers and the Vietnam Moratorium movement as keys to her activism. While a parliamentarian, she was arrested protesting outside the Australian/ US joint facility at Pine Gap. She also marched against the American Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

She resigned citing ill health in March 1992 (while continuing active involvement in various anti-American, anti-uranium, anti-nuclear and anti-urban development campaigns) and was replaced by Christabel Chamarette, a psychologist and Christian anti-war activist who served until she was defeated at the 1996 poll.

Another Greens WA Senator, Dee Margetts, a former high school teacher and librarian until 1988, when she took the role of coordinator for People for Nuclear Disarmament, was elected at the 1993 election and served one term.

As well as the disarmament movement, other disparate factions from the Left founded the WA Greens in 1990. Key amongst these was the Alternative Coalition; a largely Fremantle based group of members and former members of various communist parties left politically homeless by the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The experience of the WA Greens does not only demonstrate the diverse interests of the party. It is the best example of how Green parties developed autonomously and independently across Australia. It applies equally to the growth of the party in others states. As in Tasmania and Western Australia, the NSW Greens developed organically. Its genesis however lay in yet another very different group, members of the Labor left from Sydney’s inner west expelled for backing far left ‘independent’ candidates in the 1984 local government elections in the Leichardt municipality— Rats in the Ranks territory.

Many of these were involved in a broader Labor Party reading group, set up in part as a response to what the participants saw as the regrettable dilution of socialist principles in the party at the time.

A Green party was formally registered in the state in 1985. Its members were concerned about wilderness preservation and forestry, but urban development issues and ideas around direct democracy were maybe even more significant. As one of its now leading lights—and then a dedicated servant of the Moscow aligned Socialist Party of Australia— Lee Rhiannon has observed, the band of political pioneers consisted of ‘environmental and resident activists, nuclear disarmers, dissidents from the Labor Party, feminists, anarchists, those inspired by the German Greens and socialists of various kinds.’

Rhiannon says the party’s platform ‘emphasised social equality and a just society, with support for a nuclear free, peaceful and sharing world; grassroots democracy; social freedom and equality for all people; a liveable city and a sustainable and just democracy, working in harmony with the natural environment.’

Another key influence on the NSW Greens was the short lived New Left Party. The Communist Party of Australia had split with Moscow over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The hardliners had continued on as the SPA while the CPA became increasingly Euro-communist in outlook.

A broad left conference in Sydney in 1986, the 1989 issuing of a ‘Time to act’ statement propounding the founding of a new political party and the collapse of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe lead to the formation of the New Left Party. Its manifesto called for ‘social justice, the expansion of democracy, a diverse multicultural Australia, an ecologically sustainable society and a non-violent nuclear free world’.

Its founding conference took place in Leichhardt in June 1990, where a constitution, political program and decentralised organisational structure were ratified. Many members of the old CPA and other communist groups, including Castroites, joined and it was hoped the party’s name would attract activists from across the Left. The party failed, folding in the early nineties, but searching for an alternative, many of its members found the Greens. The New Left Party became a crucial crossing point between communist and the Greens and gave a unique ideological flavour to the NSW organisation.

The Queensland Greens had a very different origin. They were founded to support the bid for the Brisbane Lord mayoralty in 1984 by veteran anti-war, disarmament and land rights activist Drew Hutton, who had also taken an interest in urban development issues such as evictions from the inner city for new projects and freeway plans, as the Brisbane Greens, their core largely drawn from anarchist groups.

The group became inactive after the unsuccessful campaign, but an undercurrent of activity gradually grew by the start of the nineties into the Queensland Greens Network which, after issuing an edict banning members of the hard-left Democratic Socialist Party in 1991, rechristened itself the Queensland Greens.

The DSP also caused trouble for the development of the Greens in South Australia. Their initial manifestation, the Green Electoral Movement, was a DSP front. DSP influence also ran strong in its successor, the Green Alliance SA. For a brief time in the early nineties the Green Alliance fought with a group calling itself the Green Party of South Australia until it purged itself of the DSP influence by proscribing members of other political parties and the Green Party of SA was deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission when its membership fell below 500, enabling the Greens SA to be formed in 1995.

Its first parliamentary representative, Legislative Councillor Mark Parnell, has said that while many of the Greens SA foundation members had close links to the ‘non-government organisation conservation sector’; many others came from the ‘community legal centre movement and human rights groups’. Parnell himself straddled both worlds, as a lawyer with the Environmental Defender’s Office, a free community legal centre specialising in public interest environmental law. The human rights angle can be seen in the Greens’ first Senator from the state, Sarah Hanson-Young, a former Amnesty International official and campaigner for asylum seekers.

The DSP again posed problems in Victoria. It formed a front organisation that took the name, the Victoria Greens Alliance. This competed with a broad-left body the Rainbow Alliance, a largely academic-orientated group founded by La Trobe University’s Joe Camilleri and RMIT teacher Belinda Probert. It advocated a range of left policies on a broad front of issues including urban planning, ecologically sustainable economics, Aboriginal land rights, equality, peace and disarmament. It slipped into decline in the early 1990s, particularly after the election of the Kennett state government in 1992, and was formally dissolved in 1996.

The Australian Greens Victoria emerged in 1993. The party contested just one seat in 1993 federal election and performed poorly in the 1996 poll despite a well-publicised campaign surrounding their lead Senate candidate, the controversial philosopher and animal rights activist Peter Singer. It was not until 2010 that the party finally succeeded in having a candidate elected to the Senate, the year the Greens made their House of Representatives breakthrough when Liberal preferences delivered the electorate of Melbourne to Adam Bandt, the first federal Green to win a lower house seat at a general election.

The frenzy of factionalised state-based activity, ironically, delayed the development of a national Greens party. Bob Brown’s official biographer, James Norman, recalls how the NSW Greens frustrated the creation of a national grouping as they owned the rights to the name ‘The Australian Greens’.

The story of the development of the Green parties outside Tasmania and the creation of the Australian Greens exposes the broad range of activist groups over and above the environmental campaigners that have most been identified with the party.

All of these come from the Left. All of them, by deliberate decision, by attempts at hijacking the party, by something akin to osmosis or by simply having nowhere else to go that offers any possibility for action, have adopted the Greens as the vehicle they can use to implement a broad, hard-left agenda.

These left activists must be delighted that the Greens have gained the balance of power in the Senate and a key vote in the House of Representatives at a time when the ALP primary vote is at levels unseen since the early 1930s when it saw supporters follow Lyons to the UAP and others peel off to back Lang Labor.

The political spectrum swung to the right in the eighties, when the Hawke government embraced economic reforms squibbed through the Fraser years. Now, under the influence of the Greens, we are seeing it pulled back to the Left.

For the first time in our political history, a party of not just the Left, but the emphatically ideological left, controls the balance of power in the Senate.

The Australian Democrats became increasingly left leaning as the party evolved, but it was born as a body that rejected the policies of both Labor and Liberal as too extreme. It was naturally inclined towards negotiation and compromise; to improving legislative outcomes rather than blocking them. Even under leaders such as Natasha Stott-Despoja and now prominent Green Andrew Bartlett, Democrat Andrew Murray won the admiration of both sides of politics for his efforts to maximise the social outcomes of government while minimising its cost and reach.

Likewise, despite the near-successful efforts to rewrite history, the Democratic Labor Party was a party of the centre too. It stood against communism—but for the working man. Now, with the rise of the Greens, the political dynamic has changed.

The Labor Right grouping within the ALP has been able to restrain the Left faction for a generation now with warnings of what loss of support from the great body of the voting population will mean electorally. Now, with the party under siege from both sides—and the Greens surging into what was once its heartland—the Left faction have seized an opportunity to set the agenda. This can be seen in the debate over the original mining super-profits tax and on calls to lift the dole, in Doug Cameron’s calls for increases in taxation, but nowhere is it more obvious than in the field of renewable energy.

The massive renewable energy spending over recent years, let alone the $10 green slush fund established under the carbon tax laws, show the power of the Greens and their allies in the environmental NGOs and their influence on the government. The renewable energy lobby, along with the public health and education activists so beloved by the Greens have not just taken the place of the manufacturers of half a century ago as the nation’s most successful rent seekers. Like them, they are successfully inserting themselves into the bureaucracy in a bid to guarantee more bounty flows their way.

This new proximity to power, however, has, as always happens when power is at hand, raised tensions within the party over what direction to take and how far to go, tensions that are beginning to alert the electorate to the true nature of the Greens—and threaten to spark major division in the party.

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