My blogs evolved in various places from December 1999 onwards — among them Angelfire and Diary-X.
October 2002
It is only with WordPress that I can trace my Christmases and Decembers with confidence back to 2005, without resorting to the Wayback Machine, which has preserved fragments only from Talk City, Angelfire and Diary-X. My Blogspot entries I transferred to WordPress.
So December 2005
New bridge for Scarborough
12 DEC
Meanwhile there were good things happening locally.
Lawrence Hargrave Drive was closed between Clifton and Coalcliff, north of Wollongong, in July 2003 after rock falls made driving dangerous. The NSW Government announced last year it would build a bridge to provide residents with a reliable and safe road. It will open up access to the northern Wollongong suburbs of Coalcliff and Stanwell Park, which have been affected by the road closure.
The old road was replaced by two bridges which run parallel to the coast, about 30 metres to the east. One spans the southern headland, the other the middle headland, with both connecting to form the bridge. The road then returns to the existing route through the northern headland.
Wouldn’t mind seeing that. It really is a beautiful part of the world down there.
Happy with my coachees!
17 DEC
Erwin managed Band 6 in English, and both Erwin and Ben are on the above honour roll as top all-rounders!
Later
A subsequent email from Ben in Hong Kong says he…
scraped an 88 in english… pretty stoked about that. and just to let you know, khoa do, who is mentioned in your cronulla entry today, came from our very own aloys. he came into school earlier this year to address our assemby to tell us how he came fresh from a poor asian country to a school whose name his family could not even pronounce. so yeh, a really nice, interesting guy, of course bestowed with very jesuit/aloysian values. =)
Pretty much the values you find in Eureka Street, and even at South Sydney Uniting Church.
He also mentions some recent happenings in Hong Kong which I shall check out.
Well that’s that at The Mine
21 DEC
Just back from my last end-of-term drinks (at the Bat and Ball) as a staff member at The Mine, though it is likely I will reappear there in various casual and consultative guises. It’s a more inclusive place and much less macho than it was twenty years ago, and that is all to the good.
I like to think I have had some degree of hand in that, some of which you can see on my other blog, though much really is down to natural change. Some people said some very nice things to me.
Lord Malcolm
22 DEC
I spoke last night to Sirdan and hope to speak to Lord Malcolm, perhaps to see him, today. He is likely to be in hospital for some time. Our Christmas plans are on hold.
Christmas Day
25 DEC

M turned up last night with a box of chocolates. My brother rang first thing this morning from Tasmania, where it is 13 Celsius, unlike Sydney (40-ish yesterday!) Just back from church now — really nice. Lots of hugs. Even kisses: Sam’s was good
Now to Sirdan’s for lunch, and the idea after that is to kidnap Lord Malcolm for a while.
* * *
The best entries 2005 collection includes: two from May 2005, three from June 2005, four from July, three from August, three from September, six from October, eight from November, and three from December. That’s it for now!
Do look: I am happy with the way things look on Angelfire, if not so happy with the popups. The on-page ads however are usually tasteful. This “best of” site is a really good way to review a representative sample of my better rants and reviews.
And speaking of “The Mine”
Handled brilliantly by the Boss at the time — and it (and they) all turned out well. I referred to such things back in December 2005.
The Mine and the Islamists
12 DEC
Since I am at work today, I dropped in at lunchtime on the Islamic Students’ Society. They have had the occasional bit of controversy around them, as you may see above. I was interested to see what they, as intelligent teenage Muslim boys, felt about Cronulla and all that.
The gangs like the one(s) that have been causing trouble for years in Cronulla they utterly reject. “Leb arseholes.” (They mean of course those indulging in antisocial behaviour in groups in public. None of these young Muslims I spoke to today could be accused of bad manners, inconsideration, insensitivity, racism or sexism. But then they are confident, intelligent, and genuinely religious.) “Some of them are really bad people.” (That from a boy who knows the Lakemba/Campsie/Punchbowl area well.) As much to do with Islam as the Hells’ Angels are to do with Christianity. Definitely not practitioners of Islam. “They worry us as much as they worry you.”
The boys have heard around the traps that more bad things are going to happen…
I told them the Uniting Church in Redfern had prayed yesterday for tolerance and understanding between Muslims and other Australians. They told me the same had happened in their mosques. Let us all get behind those prayers. And reach out in friendship and respect.
They forgave me for growing up in Cronulla.
And see also…
7.30 Report: The Mine and the Islamists
22 AUG 2005
Well, that is quite a story on tonight’s 7.30 Report about The Mine and the weird Islamic fundamentalists. It is worth revisiting my diary for July 28 2005, July 27 2005 and July 26 2005. There were many earliier entries on Diary-X referring to the Islamic Student Forum in 2003, but they sadly have gone. There have been two forums since, but I did not attend them. My friend the Mufti of Watson’s Bay was one of the speakers at the first and second ones, and in fact told the students in no uncertain terms before the second one to make sure no “total crap” was handed out. The bulk of the sessions was reasonable, or where fundie/conservative (not the Mufti, that’s for sure!) it was sadly like Christian and Jewish glazed-eye literalists, the usual “I have a hotline to God” routine, you know: “The Book says, and it’s true because the Book says it’s true and when the Book says it is true it is true because the Book says it’s true because it is a True Book etc — in eternal circularity…” Mister Tariq, the principal fundie at the seminar, seemed to take everything literally and regarded Abraham, for example, as his best mate and as real and as knowable as John Howard. He also had this line where covering your wife (as in hijab) was cool because she was a precious possession, and just as you’d cover your Porsche if you had one… (Mind you, head scarves don’t offend me in the least if that’s what the wearers want to do; they even look rather nice quite often.)
All of which is sad, and the Khilafah mob are crazy as cut snakes in many respects. The argument on The 7.30 Report last night went thus:
JONATHAN HARLEY: The group may be small in Australia, but Hizb ut-Tahrir spans the globe. It’s strongest in Central Asian republics where it’s being fiercely repressed by authoritarian regimes threatened by its radical ideology. The party is banned too in a number of Arab countries. In Russia and Germany it’s listed as a terrorism group and in Denmark a Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman has been convicted of submitting anti-Semitic propaganda, the substance of which an Australian spokesman has refused to renounce.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL CRISPIN BLACK, TERRORISM INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: A lot of people call it a conveyor belt towards terrorism, others have called it a precursor organisation towards terrorism.
We now know Khilafah and Hizb ut-Tahrir are one and the same, which is very recent knowledge for those of us on the outside of the Muslim community. In 2003 on Diary-X I wrote:
Khilafah: extreme but not necessarily terrorist
In a wholesale rejection of what we in the West might call the postmodern condition, in a yearning for a pure and noble state rooted in the dream of the past, in rejecting the undeniable humiliation of Muslims over the past few centuries and the depradations of the capitalist and imperialist world, very many seem now to be turning to a movement that I can only see as ultimately disastrous. It should definitely be added that not all people who adhere even to these views are terrorists or condone random violence, but there can be no doubt that it is such an ideology that drives those Islamists who are terrorists, just as anarchism and communism inspired terrorism in the past.
Is Khilafah the communism of the 21st century?
We should recall that just as in McCarthyist times thoughtful people who criticised US policy, or who questioned this or that about capitalism, were labelled as “Commies”, “dupes”, or “fellow-travellers”, often without justification, so too today any Muslim or Muslim group who questions the assumptions and policies of the US government is likely to be labelled “a conveyor belt to terrorism”. We do need to be careful. Was David Lange “a conveyor belt to terrorism”?
Let’s hope the HSC English course subverts my young friends thoroughly with its emphasis on what a text is, multiplicity of readings, nature of “representation” and importance of context, and that they proceed not to insulate their Holy Book from the rules of textuality.
I was glad to see, when I dropped into the Islamic Students’ meeting last Thursday, that they were mucking around with a tennis ball when they were meant to be praying…
They are really nice kids in fact; what they do in the school is done under exactly the same rules that apply to the Christian group and the Jewish group.
Entry revised 23 August. See also on this blog “Muslim Marginal Man”.