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If you want to see the best football code in the world, you have to visit Australia in April-September. Port Melbourne footballer Maddy “Maddawg” Patterson was a tree planter but now she’s a sparky. (Electrician.) Her focus and concentration on the game and on her team is cool, calm, poised and beautiful. And what is it on the field that drives Maddawg’s commitment to her club and her nation’s native game? It’s wonderful goals like this sublimely skilled evasion of opponents by teammate Kaitlyn O’Keefe.

Anthony Albanese, Pay attention to my truth. As the grandson of a celebrity chef, Clarissa Fox, and of two distinguished theologians, Professor AC Fox and the Right Reverend JR Blanchard, as a man who was a Registered Midwife for 30 years, as the creator of 4 head-of-government-significant art displays in the fourth biggest country in the world crucial to Australia’s future and as a man in poverty and denied the aged pension for a year because of two unaccountable female bullies and one cold emotionally incompetent man at Services Australia, I say to you: It is time that you recognise...

AUSTRALIAN Journalist Lauren Tomasi has been shot by a rubber bullet fired straight at her by an LAPD officer in Los Angeles. Demands are being made in Australia that Anthony Albanese call Donald Trump to protest. Should The Donald pick up the phone or have any such call redirected to Newsom?

Since I first started following Aussie Rules footy at the age of 9 in 1967, the qualities I have most loved seeing are courage at the contest and skill, speed and flair. Outstanding players I have seen in this regard are Barry Price, Keith Greig, Robbie Flower, Barry Cable, Garry Ablett Senior, Eddie Betts, The Krakouer brothers and the current Number 5 of the North Melbourne Kangaroos AFLW team, Tess Craven. As a human being Tess is modest, kind, friendly and helpful and always puts her team ahead of herself. The strength, skill and determination she shows above in tackling...

Women are rising in western society in all spheres of life. In the picture above North Melbourne defender and co-vice captian Nicole "Flash" Bresnehan points her fellow players to move forward attacking the goal. If the rise in women means a rise in misandry, then men should be very very concerned. But if it means better sharing and caring, we will all be better off. And when it means that football is becoming more beautiful, more collaborative and more impassioned, then I love seeing the shared leadership of women like Flash.

My friend, the late Anna Rumaderun, was a young Indonesian woman totally dedicated to friendship with The West based on the bonds of history forged in World War Two. Like me she had huge respect for General Douglas MacArthur. She trusted traditional medicine and died from breast cancer. She was terrified of modern medicine because two of her friends died post mastectomy. She leaves behind a husband with movie star good looks and a six year old little boy named after me. Rest In Peace, Anna. We miss you deeply. We know you ARE WITH GOD.

I love watching women’s football (Australian Rules). It provides a better spectacle and healthier community than the men’s game. Watch the strength, agility and quick thinking of number 22 from Aberfeldie as an example of how good the women’s game can be to watch. (click link to see video) With a fantastic tackle she dispossesses a powerfully built Hillside opponent of the football, and then gets to her feet and brilliantly anticipates the trajectory of a handpass from another Hillside player to knock the ball behind an opponent and run around that player to possession for her team and race...

Yesterday, I had the enormous privilege to witness the three quarter time huddle of the Hillside women’s senior football team in a match against Aberfeldie. Hillside had gone into the match undefeated and Aberfeldie were second on the ladder with two losses. At halftime it was a point the difference but Aberfeldie completely outclassed Hillside in the third quarter to go five goals ahead. The determination of Hillside to fight back reflected in the fierce raw of their voices in that huddle was the most passionate sound I have ever heard from a group of footballers. Previously it has been...

Father Hunger is an astonishingly insightful phrase that has been profoundly meaningful to me ever since I first heard it from my friend, poet Patrick McCauley, 2 or 3 decades ago. (Patrick is in mourning for the recent tragic loss of his deeply loved daughter, Eliza.) This morning, I made this little prayer at the side of St Patrick’s cathedral, Melbourne, where there is a wonderful statue of St Francis of Assisi: FATHER HUNGER, an old Aussie immensity, that touches us all. I am not sure if I know what Father Hunger is, but my instincts tell me that it’s...

Last year, on May 22nd, because of three weeks of stupidity and bullying from most but not all of the staff at the Services Australia office in Foostcray, I had a nervous breakdown in the office and collapsed to the floor howling in agony. The Services Australia response to my distress was to shut me out. I remain shut out to this day. As a result I have not received the Aged Pension which I need to survive and maintain a home in Australia. When I complained about this to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s office, I was fobbed off. So,...

84 years ago today, Bob Dylan was born. At his Nobel Prize winning best, from 1961 to 1966, he challenged us to rethink everything with everything he wrote. Donald Trump, born about 5 years after Dylan, in 1946, looks to me like he is just entering into a period of his Dylanesque best. Trump forces us to revealuate this modern world all the time. Bob Dylan mastered and elevated American music twice to great literature in a few short years, first as a folkie but then as a great rock n roller. Potus 45 surprised everyone to come down a...

only God can judge the human heart, the extent of understanding & the level of freedom & consent The above words were entered by George Pell into his prison journal on May 22nd, 2019. Lest We Forget a great Man of God.

The best thing about being in Melbourne, Australia, is watching the free flowing glories of Australian Rules football in the state where the game was born. I love watching fast skillful free flowing football, especially the rapidly rising female Aussie Rules action. Its the best part of Australia for me.

mysterious Lord: the silent hidden God mercy and refuge lodge inside the shadows of His wings My friend, anglo-catholic Anglican bishop David Farrer, describes George Pell’s prison journals as “remarkably uplifting” and said he is grateful for the way they help us to pray. Above is a prayer which I have shaped today from words of the Cardinal about mass in the May 20, 2019 entry to the journal and from the words of Psalm 57 which he quotes in that entry. Lest We Forget: Cardinal George Pell, a truly great man of God, thrown to the lions by a...

I think that men and women should be treated as equal in everything except the three female spheres of activity of being pregnant, giving birth and breast feeding. But I think that there are subtle differences in abilities and tendencies between men and women such as a slight tendency for women to be more empathetic than men. Overall, empathy is also a very common quality in men, but my life experience has been to see a little more empathy in women than in men. To me there is an emotional beauty in the way that the Fitzroy footballer pictured in...

The day I took this photo of Melbourne ruckwoman Georgia Campbell being tackled by key forward Tayla Harris, the configuration of elbows, heads and hands caught my eye as something special. Together, the two players looked like a Lotus Flower - the Buddhist symbol of purity, spiritual enlightenment and rebirth. I asked Tay if she'd like a song to be written about it and she said she'd prefer a rap. So I tried (without huge ability in the art form) to make one. (click here) In Melbourne, Aussie Rules football is often called a religion. Could the game become more...

Newly re-elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is now claiming that his government is a symbol for what he is calling "progressive patriotism". I will now compare some claims made for this way of thinking with the reality of Socialist Left governments. “Albanese begins second term with a new slogan.” Albanese and his party, the ALP, are much better at sloganising than they are at governing. "Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is pledging to strengthen Australia with a second-term agenda that eases division ......." Albanese won the recent election with a brilliantly effective but viciously unfair negative campaign against his conservative...

Dockamentry film maker, Jim Cousens, opens up on what it is like to be a man in modern Australia: Jim says: "Being faced with the reality of the feminism which has got its claws into just about all of us is a little bit like when you've got visitors over and there's a rat in the kitchen ........ ......... If you say, 'Oh God, there's a rat in the kitchen.', then you've actually drawn their attention to the problem. Maybe, if you'd just kept your mouth shut ,they would never have noticed. But if you keep your mouth shut and...

Donald Trump and Pope Leo. How will they get on? Who will win?

Yesterday, conservative Australian political commentator, Andrew Bolt discussed a proposal for British-style AI intelligence cameras in Melbourne. Mr Bolt asked his audience: “Do you want to be safer or do you want to be spied on?” and said that rising crime and terrorism is turning Australia into a “surveillance state, Chinese-style, you know where they even have a system of recognising you in the street and if they don’t like, if you’ve got a bad social credit, they can stop you doing things like catching a train.” The Lord Mayor told Bolt: “As Lord Mayor, I am very firmly committed...