Pissed Off: 3,300 Baby Boomer Gripes

Australia has five million baby boomers. At seventy-one, I am one of them. I am so pissed off about the state of things, I’ve listed 3,300 gripes (and they are all numbered). Among them:

  • otherwise bright folk, from the PM down, who say ‘amount’ of people instead of ‘number’
  • Australia’s richest person is said to earn $33,000 per minute
  • being beaten at Scrabble by his Filipina mother-in-law, English being her second language
  • leaf blowers
  • lowlife who put needles in fruit to try and kill us
  • greed
  • when the pathology nurse says, with a deep sigh, ‘Let’s try your other arm!’
  • Michelangelo didn’t endow David a little more generously
  • the link between his dentist’s fees to extract his teeth, and the dentist’s kids’ school fees
  • wanting to know if Dynamic Lifter works the same as Viagra
  • asking for a friend
  • the exorbitant cost of building Australia’s major roads: $155 per inch per lane
  • wanting cave rescuers Drs Richard Harris and Craig Challen as joint Governors-General
  • will the in-studio panel on ABC TV Insiders ever drink the coffee?
  • half a large pizza is never enough
  • not knowing how to use most of the functions on his phone
  • five-year-olds, who get away with murder
  • after coronavirus, the millennials plan to do away with all remaining baby boomers
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27 Days a Pilgrim

In October 2013, I trekked the historic 800-kilometre Spanish Camino de Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, from St Jean Pied-de-Port in southern France, to Santiago in north-west Spain. Come with me on my epic journey.

The Way, as it is called in the movie staring Martin Sheen, is a thousand years old. St Francis of Assisi walked it. Popes have walked it. Movie stars have walked it. Prisoners have been made to walk it. I walked it, but not without some mishaps.

Join my adventure including how, after straying off the official pilgrims’ path in half-light, I sensed I was being followed by a man dressed in black, known to be the garb worn by the apostle Saint James, in whose honour the pilgrimage is dedicated. Six times I glanced back to see if he was still following me; three times he was there, three times he’d vanished. But there was a two-metre high cyclone fence either side, providing no way of escape! Was Saint James there for me?

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JACKAROO

Over 8,000 copies sold. Nominated by the publisher Penguin for the National Biography Award.

One reader, Robyn, wrote: ‘I passed over JACKAROO and read some other books, then finally I got to your book. Previously, I’d thought it probably was a superficial story, more suited to try-hard city folk than someone who’d grown up on a farm. Well, how far from the truth was that! From the moment I started reading the book, I was enthralled. Your gift for telling a story is amazing. Your honesty, humour and candid portrayal of each situation is wonderful. Congratulations.’

Reader Neil wrote, ‘JACKAROO should be required reading for every Year 12 student’. (Not a bad idea!)

We continue to search for a production company keen to turn the screenplay into a movie or TV mini-series. My mentor on the film script, the late Malcolm Robertson, a doyen of the film, theatre and TV industries, believed the screenplay to be iconic, better he said than Red Dog, Priscilla and Man From Snowy River combined. Such a compliment!

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