This week the newly elected big Conservative, LNP Queensland Government restored the name of Queen's Counsel to the Senior lawyers - to honour our Monarch in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
ACROSS THE MILES & TIME
Growing up in England, there was the Queen and there was my Nan. In all her 90 years she never had the desire to go to London to see Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London and the Changing of the Guard. She was happily parochial residing in the middle of the small island surrounded by family, with annual respite to the seaside somewhere south. |
| E for ELSIE |
Nan was important to me; like my personal Head of State.
I went to her when I didn't know what to do about my Dad being unfaithful... (She didn't have the power to stop the train of events, but it helped I could tell her my crisis when I was nine).
The other remarkable thing was Nan and the Queen always had the same hair style!
By the time I was 14years and gearing up to leave my birth country behind to start a new life in Australia I was singing the Sex Pistols punk song GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
That statement stopped me in mid-sentence! My mind has been occupied with these two topics for most of my life! Nanny travelled 13,000 miles to see her grand-children and two new Australian grand-daughters crossing off her wish list.
No, we were not going to fit in a snippet of conversation about Nelson Mandela being free in the Bingo break!
As they said in the working-men's or ex-servicemen's clubs: You've gotta laugh..........(or you'd cry).
Born and Bred from generations of West Midlands Coal Mining families I imagine Nan inherited this jewel of wisdom as a survival strategy: keep your head down and stay out of trouble - or if you do, keep it hidden.
She knew her place in the system - cleaning the wards at the Queen Elizabeth 2 Hospital, running the domestic scene and caring for her husband dealing with Parkinson's Disease.
So what's my excuse for being 'out there' for freedom of expression, information and political activism - a mental illness?
You've gotta laugh the comedian said, (or you'd swing as swift as a polar bear with a mood disorder).
AN EXCERPT FROM MY DIARY:
AN ALP Spill - Kim Beasley no longer the leader. Kevin Rudd from Queensland in!
Julia Gillard is Deputy.
Yes, this is a good move.
Curious biographical detail came out of Rudd brought up a Catholic and converted to Anglican!
I have been asked on a handful of occasions if I am a Christian.
My answers have been,
- I'm a woman. Religions are Patriarchal and exclusionary.
- I have come to believe Spirituality arises from your brain chemistry...and what Time of the Month it is!
- I reckon Karl Marx was on the right track when he said "Religion was the Opium of the Masses".
I'm sure if I'd been rehearsing in a Hindu temple with the sacred text of the Maharataba, my highly suggestible mind would have a Goddess wrapping her arms around me.
Mum said the Priest who visited the birth ward at the QE2 Hospital in 1963 told her even though she was baptised one of them, the Roman Catholic Church saw me, her new born as a 'Bastard' because she'd married a Protestant!
I'm a free spirit.
And I watched our hereditary, constitutional monarch and head of the established(by the sword)Anglican Church's Thanksgiving Service at St. Paul's Cathedral... for pure research purposes.My Novel-in-progress "Love in an English Republic" is based around my commoner cockney ancestors who fought in Cromwell's New Model Army in the English Civil War. (Best pay and clothing they would ever have in their lives.)
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| Lord Protector of the Commonwealth 1649-1660 Cromwell Green, Westiminster |
Like a leaking pipe the ethical, moral values of our gallant political representatives vanish to squash dissent and exposure with cover-ups of their dastardly deeds
(a compassionate thought here for the plight of house-arrested Australian citizen in England, Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange).
This week's Diamond Jubilee event showed the British Hierarchy arriving at Christopher Wren's great 17th century Cathedral. They've don a good job of managing to fortify their class ceiling against the commoners for most of the last 400 years.
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| THE QUEENSLAND GOVERNMENT STATE FLAG WHICH SHOWS BRITTANIA STILL RULES - AND TO MY HUSBAND AND I IS A ANACHRONISM AND NOT EVEN THE QUEENSLAND GOVERNMENT REALLY KNOWS WHAT THE WHY THE BLUE MALTESE CROSS IS UNDER THE IMPERIAL/TUDOR CROWN. |
Queen's Birthday Public Holiday 11 June 2012 - Queensland, Australia.
(She is a Queen so gets to have more than one birthday)
(She is a Queen so gets to have more than one birthday)
Moving to Queensland was a culture shock, for this pommie sheela, who grew to adulthood in Melbourne, however reading about the reforms by Labor's Wayne Goss gave us impetus to migrate.
Winning the reins of power (thanks to ABC's 4 Corners program on the "Moonlight State" May,1987), at least there were Fitzgerald Inquiry recommendations being implemented and progressive people coming out of the wood-work.
Queensland had revealed another facet of Australia I didn't know about: the German-Lutheran farmer immigration of the nineteenth century. Their influence is still felt in the current Liberal/National coalition party which now governs Queensland, although I don't think they would get away with the autocratic policies against aborigines whom they "Protected" in every part of their lives to the point of starvation during the Joh era.EMPEROR FOR LIFE - KILLORAN'S QUEENSLAND
The other tribe in Queensland's polity are the Roman Catholics, who form a large part of the Australian Labor Party. Not unlike England's Puritan Leveller women, Labor women have had to work doubly hard to win the franchise and reproductive rights to their own bodies.
A Labor Government could legalise brothels under certain conditions but it's Queensland Members of Parliament continued to ignore their own party platform hard won by, to take abortion out of the nineteenth century British Criminal Code adopted by Queensland, and hasn't been deleted in this 21st century.
Rule Brittania,
Brittania rule the Waves!
 No Disrespect as I confess I am an Australian Republican to |
| Queen Elizabeth 2's Representative in Queensland, Her Excellency Governor, Penny Wensley AC at a local International Women's Day function 2009. (I won't divulge the cat she let out of her hand-bag) |
Since the recent Labor rout, the name of former long-term Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson is restored with nostalgia by some, no matter that he was swept from public office in disgrace over a culture of corruption.
The problem with proud up-standing Christians in politics is they often come a cropper. Lest we forget.
I remind locals of the many young creative youngsters I had met in Melbourne, who uprooted themselves to flee the censorious, aggressive Police State.
Like the Lord Protector Cromwell, Sir Joh encouraged the suppression of anybody who marched, dyed their hair, wore bright t.shirts rebelling against a National Party vision of an orderly, tidy society.
The present Federal Member for Griffith, Kevin Rudd might say that fortunately some folk were able to keep beavering away at their studies until their Time came to change things.
READ THE ESSAY FAITH IN POLITICS by Kevin Rudd M.P.
We are a product of our his and her stories. Christian citizen and Parliamentarian, former P.M. Kevin '07 may be Divinely guided, but when I'm running by Holy Spirits I reach for the Lithium salts...and the mighty Pen!
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| & Lleutenant-General, 1st Baron, Artist/Writer |
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| A Legacy of the vision of Lord Baden-Powell. Selly Oak Brownie, c1973 |
I was eager to get to know the comrades, and be around like minded people as there was a leadership spill going on in Canberra. My husband and I discovered in conversation, most branch members and friends were practicing Roman Catholics!
Why the discomfit?
I have a self-identifiable love/hate neurosis with the Roman Catholic heritage and stubborn doctrines on sexual health policies; Remaining loyal to a hypocritical hierarchy of men who caused ongoing harm to women's lives...(especially now in African and other impoverished countries).
Of course we were all Catholic once, and if it hadn't of been for King Henry the Eighth's desperation for a male heir I wouldn't have been babtised in the reformed Church of England headed by the Monarchy.
Perhaps I am floundering with the idea that people still have Faith in a Supernatural Being instead of Science or themselves?How does on continue to keep supporting an institution which has covered up crimes against generations of children when their own Saviour, Jesus was said to have told his disciples of the priority of little children in the Kingdom of God. (Mark 10:13)
Church and State are often hypocrites and collude to protect their power even to crimes against humanity and progress, even since human civilization began.
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL and though I sometimes have a dark night of the soul staying with the ALP on certain issues I return to the fold with reformist zeal.
All the middle-aged women along the festive trestles wore a gold crucifix. I tried not to be mesmerised, switching to sharing a story
which I hoped would bring communion with these loyal Labor Ipswich folk.
I told them how I grew up being the only Proddy family in a street of Irish Catholics, but the neighbours believed she was one of them, and the Avon Lady was so sure mum was Irish and Catholic in her blood so she would deliver the talcs and creams to my strident anti-Catholic mother,(who was blessed by being brought up by nuns in an orphanage), along with tiny bottles of holy water she'd collected from her pilgrimages to the blessed Lourdes site in France.
The local Parish Priest suspected Mum was one of his lost sheep and would stop her in the street and ask why he hadn't seen her in Church? Slightly nervous she would say she wasn't a Catholic.
"Oh, I apologies, Mrs....You have the look of the Irish, y'know!"
Being a Bastard from the time she was conceived, Mum didn't know about her family tree. It was an era of concealment and shame especially if your life had anything to do with a Church or a discriminating State apparatus.
In the convivial atmosphere one woman confessed good-humourdly to an addiction of the Communion wine! She said she had a deal with the priest to give her the leftovers from Sunday Mass!
If I had known all the words to an Irish pub song like my mother knew I would have started the sing-song there and then, but maybe that was being too familiar. Mum had been pissed, and I don't
drink with all the prescription pills I have to take to keep me sane and sober.
Instead the entertainer in me sought to capture and educate with the recollection of the time when I was ten.We'd only recently got a telephone so I was very professional as I took a phone call. A male voice said he was going to throw a bomb through our front window, because he knew we were the I.R..A!
I peeped through the net curtains and mum said, "Who is it?" and I replied that a man said we were the I.R.A. and was going to throw a bomb through our window!
Mum could carry herself like Boudicea when she wanted(or a frill-necked lizard), but would have nothing to do with politics or religion(she got on well with my Nan!).
Politicians were as trustworthy as priests.
She had daring though; I watched her get up from the comfy chair, open the front door, step up to the front gate and dare dare any bleeder who could hear her to come and face her with such bullshit! (People said she learned to swear like that from growing up in Australia).
It was all a hoax. She found out from our neighbours who knew everything that the terrorist was a reader of the evening newspaper and had the wrong house number. It was a "Birmingham Post" misprint.
The news report said a police raid in Selly Oak had found weapons and bomb making equipment at the house opposite to the church hall where I went to Brownies.
The man who was arrested was believed to be a member of the I.R.A. was aged 26 from Exeter Rd. and not from number 26 which was our house!
That was my first dealings with the press and how one slight mistake can change your life... or end it.
And here's a story I can reveal which is related to the themes of today including Power corrupts....even a Brownie-guide, which if I thought I was going to be in politics I would not share!
FIXING THE VOTE AT THE BROWNIE LEADERSHIP BALLOT BOX 1973
Saint Wulstan's Church hall was on the corner crossroads a few houses up from us Higgins's, opposite the Cypriots fish 'n' chip shop. I was a committed and enthusiastic Brownie Guide from ages 7-10, and I hate to say now what I did back then -
Better out than in, says my inner-blogging therapist. Time to 'fess up. I have a stain on my character, from fixing the secret ballot for the leadership of our 6 members of the Pixie group, or was it the Elves or Gnomes?
I couldn't have revealed this if Brown Owl was alive. I was like her little protege. She trained me to sing for talent competition for Birmingham Brownie and Girl Guides, and solo-singing on the Church altar steps.
Quite naturally when asked us to put ourselves forward if we had the qualities to be leader of our group I didn't hesitate, and was surprised another girl was going to compete with me! Obviously I was a superior candidate.
With swift efficiency I organised the papers and pens, told everybody to keep the name a secret and swept the folded papers into the tin and announced I would go and count them.
Nobody challenged me as I marched through the swing doors into the kitchen as though this was the way things were done, but there I discovered I hadn't won!
I couldn't believe it - my certainty that I was the best and knew better than those girls, and that I had to decide in a time-pressured moment how to deal with it came out of my delusional self-importance.
I stole two of my opponents votes, stuffing them in my pocket until I could destroy the evidence of my treachery later. I quickly replaced them with similar sheets of paper with my name upon them, folded fast and returned to the box declaring myself the leader of the Gnomes or whoever.
Showing how everything was above board, I laid the scraps of votes onto the table to prove to everybody I won with 4 votes to 2 or something like that, afterall I have buried this wickedness for forty years.
I'm glad nobody noticed the fraud. I cast the votes in the rubbish bin, and suggested we get the activities box out. I live to tell the tale, but as UB40 sing, I carry the burden of shame.
Not to worry - we live and learn by our mistakes, and my ambitious drive has dissipated with the disappointments and rejections of lovers and employers, and chronic bi-polar affective disorder.
I am no Royalist or Tory voter but I still enjoy the sight of a fine horse hearing a Divine new hymn, "A Call To Wisdom" by the Diamond Choir at St Paul's Cathedral.
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| An Australian Tourist at Whitehall 2010 |
And enjoy the music.
Her Majesty
by the Beatles and Chumbawamba
POST-SCRIPT: ABC News 6th July 2012 - Girl Guides Australia, after wide consultation have removed reference to God and the Queen.
The old Guide Promise
I promise that I will do my best:
To do my duty to God, to serve the Queen and my country;
To help other people; and
To keep the Guide Law.
The new Guide Promise
I promise that I will do my best:
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs
To serve my community and Australia
And live by the Guide Law.
Now the whole country could follow their example.
A Queen's Birthday Wish from Queensland por Julie McNeill se encuentra bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 3.0 Unported.
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