Last year when I was doing Com­mu­nity Care Work, one of my reg­u­lars, and def­i­nitely my favourite ol’ chum was named Bill. I took him out twice a week for over a year.

Sadly ol’ Bill was couped up in a high-​care ward of an Aged Care Facil­ity, not because he required high lev­els of care, but sim­ply because he liked to wander.…everything else was on high-​beam. I reckon he got bored to death. He wasn’t suf­fer­ing from any kind of con­gen­i­tal disorder…he’d had 2 prangs and smacked his head in the same place both times. Must’ve been a few things he’d just really wanted to forget?

As Bill got less and less able to walk long dis­tances (5 klm or more was our norm), we would walk more & more to the pic­tures (for any o’ you young whipper-​snappers in the crowd, that’s ol’ fella talk for ‘Tha Moofies’ ). So over a few months we grad­u­ally saw more movies until we were see­ing roughly a movie a week.

Dur­ing that time ‘Aus­tralia’ (the movie), was released in the­atres, with all the accom­pa­ny­ing ‘hoopla’; I thought, oh, screw that! It looks daggy. And 3 BLUDDY HOURS of it! No way Jose! So I assid­u­ously avoided it. I fig­ured, as with most movies, I’ll wait for the DVD.

Well, bug­ger me, if not a cou­ple of weeks ago, my ‘dearly belovem’ (that’s Karen ), turns up at my place with a bunch o’ movies for our rit­ual week­end veg…Ooh! I mean intense cross cul­tural com­mu­ni­ca­tion stud­ies… ;-P And amongst her high den­sity, high fidelity horde was?.…Have a guess?…No, goooor­rrn! Have a guess! Read More »