From Slow TV - the Monthly
Last night the First Mate and I went to Malcolm Fraser’s book launch at the Seymour Centre in Sydney Uni – courtesy of a couple of free tickets from Melbourne University Press and Glebe Books.
It was hosted by Ray Martin and a great night was had by all – even Western Suburbanites who filled in dozens of bogus draft registration cards when Malcolm Fraser was the Minister for Defence under the Holt Government.
The book looks promising and unlike Hawke, Keating and URK ! Howard’s forthcoming spewsheet, it does, as Ray Martin said – promise to be a good read.
In the mean time – here’s an interesting video link to the Monthly’s Slow TV with Mungo MacCallum taking a look at the Ruddmeister.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Mungo always looks like one of Santa’s little helpers to me… something about that beard, the gnomish grin and the twinkle in the eyes… or is it just me?
🙂
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We have got ‘Mungo’s Canberra’. Read many times. Puffing Billy story about Billy McMahon, a classic. Mungo doesn’t seem to have aged at all.
Another well fingered edition of a different genre, is a comic book of the 1971-72 editions of Sun Books of the adventures of Barry McKenzie, written by Barry Humphries, called “Bazza Pulls it off”!.
Of course, no literary comparisons but very funny with the drawing by Nicholas Garland. Does anyone remember?
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In our upstairs loo I keep a number of old books for those occasions when it takes a little longer.
One of them, a stalwart of this and toilets past, a survivor of the fire,is a book called “Mungo On The Zooplane” with illustrations by Patrick Cook.
The “Zooplane” of the title is the other jet full of journos that follows the Prime-Ministerial aspirants jet full of minders and spin doctors. The jet in question was the journo’s jet during the 1972 to 1977 elections.
I still read bits from time to time and Mungo’s humour is what draws me back.
When he calls Paul Kelly “the professor” in this video we all laugh because we know exactly what he means and Paul can laugh too because he knows that’s what he trades on. It doesn’t diminish Kelly really but it does give us a better good humoured way of pricking his occasionally all too pompous pronouncements.
I’m reminded of that fabulous old Carpenters hit which I shall now adapt, “What do you get when you fall in love? A guy with a beard to prick your bubble.” Mungo can always be relied on to show our latest political or pundit lover has feet of clay and that every bubble is full of nothing.
Mind you, it’s one thing for Mungo to reassure us all that Rudd is actually as described on the packaging we bought him in; it’s quite another for us to be able to believe him. I’m afraid that Rudd’s “true labor soul” as Mungo describes it, is still too well bound up in spin and half hearted attempts to deliver his many election promises, hard times or no, for me to quite believe him yet.
But Abbott? He makes me shudder with apprehension.
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I watched the first part, most interesting. I like Mungo, he lightens it up with humour, which is always a blessing.
I don’t mind his beard either, it suits him; it wouldn’t be Mungo without it!
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