wit is just educated insolence
My name is Jen and I live near the Murray River in a beautiful part of Australia.
I enjoy good writing as much as intriguing images, and I really admire creativity and originality.
Most of all, I love to laugh - and I believe that wit and a sense of humour are very appealing attributes.
~ ✰ My most passionate post ✰ ~
My other blog, which archives 7 years of my Stumbleupon posts is at CATEGORIAN
Posts tagged with “celebrating australia day”
‘Shearing The Rams’, by Tom Roberts, was the inspiration for a more recent advertising campaign for ‘aussieBum’ underwear.
In the advertisement, Roberts’s muscular male shearers are still hard at work – but in their undies. The designer, Sean Ashby, described his advertisement as ‘promoting what it means to be Australian today’ – an aim very close to Roberts’s own when he made Shearing the rams.
Ashby explained further, ‘more of our iconic businesses and traditions like shearing are either being sold overseas or dying off … we wanted to remind people to value their heritage and buy Australian, in a cheeky way’.
We can only speculate what Tom Roberts would think.
How much ‘Australiana’ can a Koala bear?
What a ripper retro video! This extended play on words was a huge hit for its creator (Austen Tayshus) and many of the phrases have since become part of our language.
“Well Bill said he’d like a smoke. Nobody knew where the dope was stashed. I said “I think Merinos.” But I was just spinning a bit of a yarn. Barry pulls a joint out of his pocket. Bill says “Great, Barrier Reefer, what is it mate?” “Noosa Heads of course. Me mate Adelaide ‘em on me.” And it was a great joint too, Blue Mountains away and his Three Sisters.”
The full ‘lyrics’ and explanation translations can be seen here: http://justin.com.au/oz/australiana/
Quote: “Hugh Jackman is single-handedly responsible for more hotness and wetness than climate change.”
by: ME.
* fans self*
» Geroge Mikes
Ron Moss is a Tasmanian visual artist, poet and lover of haiku. His poetry has won international awards and been translated into several languages. Ron’s art is sold as limited edition-prints and originals. He has been featured in poetry journals and has designed several book covers.
Ron explains: “I consider myself a student of the Zen arts, which have fascinated me from an early age. I enjoy the distilled conciseness of haiku, the exploration of art and mixed media, and sometimes, as in ancient times,
I like to combine the two. My passion is to push the boundaries of images and words into new ways.”
Michael Hutchence was another great talent that left us too soon. His voice, his extraordinary good looks…that raw (yet slyly knowing) sexuality made him a compelling performer. Yep, all the ingredients for a messy and untimely demise.
This is the last known footage of Michael performing and is taken from a morning TV show on a local network.
I don’t know if it’s 20/20 hindsight, because even though he sounds great, to me his eyes tell another story.
Brett Whiteley is one of Australia’s most revered artists. His lyrical expressionism and lack of inhibition placed him at the forefront of Australia’s avant-garde art movement. He won many prizes and awards and his work hangs in numerous galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In the last years of his life Whiteley travelled far and wide, taking in England, Bali, Tokyo, and spending two months in Paris in an apartment on Rue de Tournon.
On 15 June 1992 he was found dead from a heroin overdose in a motel room in Thirroul on the NSW coast. The coroner’s verdict was ‘death due to self-administered substances’. He was 53 years old.
Read more here
HE’S been a pirate, a royal speech therapist and a pelican… but yesterday Geoffrey Rush accepted his greatest role when he was named Australian of the Year.
See his filmography here. ( I reckon I’ve seen most of them.)
Traditional Aussie fare - lamingtons!
Small squares of plain cake, dipped in chocolate icing and coated in desiccated coconut. Said to have been named after Baron Lamington, a popular governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901.
(Source: farm3.staticflickr.com)
“Hi there my old mates, Sir Les Patterson here.
Now if anybody should be the voice of Australia Day it should be bloody me, diplomat and mate of the Australian taxpayer. So this Australia Day I’m releasing something special, my new comedy CD and book, The Traveller’s Tool ENLARGED. It’s packed with practical advice for the modern man on the move and the woman who waits on him hand and foot
I’m a man’s man and I call a spade a spade, so if you’re a blue-nosed wowzer, a raving pillow-biter or a loony old lezzo with a face like a half-sucked mango, I’d chuck this book away now because in the pages that follow I employ the direct, no-holds-barred lingo of a serious Australian diplomat at the top of his profession and the height of his sexual powers.”
In The Traveller’s Tool Australia’s most articulate high-flyer lays bare the international life-style as he has lived it. The book is not only packed with practical advice, but is also, in Sir Les’s own words, ‘as funny as buggery’.
Sex Down Under – What a Red-Blooded Bloke Might Come Up Against is a self-explanatory chapter title typical of Sir Les’s state-of-the-art approach to matters that the majority of readers will have in hand, as they fondle the raunchy reading material.
The book includes advice on drinking (“I’ve got full-on everything in the alcoholic alphabet from Advocaat to Zambucca, no worries”) and some tips for the married man (how to keep the wife off the scent).
Sir Les’s Blue Guide to his favourite hot-spots around the globe will fill a gap felt by every randy, high-profile world traveller, and Sexual Abuse in the Work-place – A Buyer’s Guide examines one of today’s burning social issues.
The Australian Tongue – How and Where to Use It is a guide to contemporary Oz-speak for visitors to Sir Les’s beloved, wide-brown continent. Readers will find a large appendage at the back of the book which includes jokes for every occasion and Sir Les’s all purpose speech which will stand on in good stead whether accepting the Americas Cup or categorically denying scurrilous, tasteless and baseless allegations of corruption at the highest level.
The Traveller’s Tool is an up-market man’s man’s manual which will find its place next to the Nivea on every executive’s bedside table.
So get yourself a load of Sir Les. Come on Australia!
(For those of you unfamiliar with Sir Les, he is very closely related to an another Australian icon and National Treasure, Dame Edna Everage)
The Amazing Lyrebird of Australia - Unseen Footage.
Australian wildlife. Taking the piss out of itself - and overseas visitors - for centuries.
(Source: youtube.com)
From the artist:
1. Welcome to Country — the “land down-under” — GONDWANALAND — Australia — my country …
2. I respectfully acknowledge that I live on Aboriginal land and recognise the strength, resilience and capacity of Aboriginal people in this land.
3. As an Aboriginal-Australian, I strongly identify with my Wangkathaa ancestry and cultural heritage.
Aboriginal (spiritually-centred) culture is dying, slowly but surely withering within most who claim such heritage — contaminated, corrupted, polluted — disappearing before my living eyes. My heart, my spirit ‘sings’ when ever I have the opportunity to get a glimpse of its remnants, its power, its potency within those few who still struggle to embody the essence of this most ancient ways of relating and living amongst these modern daze.
The younger ones mostly want to be “rappers”, get down, “shake da booty” — in acculturated and soul-numbing manner. It is the ways of these times, no fault nor blame, it just is for most.
For years I have pined the loss of the spiritual-centre of the Aborigines and their cultural Laws and principles. A loss not only to those of the Aboriginal nations of this country, but also a loss to all of us, of meaning and perspective regarding our inter-connectedness to all that is.
I am privileged to know this young man. I know his mother, and I knew his Grandfather. I know his story, his struggles and challenges. And I have witnessed his smile, when he dances in the way of the ancients — I see “them” light-up his being, whenever “they” are sung-up, to dance within him. My heart sings for that time, that moment, that glimpse.
And then all returns to normal… I trust he can continue to weather the “storms” that gather around him too often in the people of his kind. I can only hope he grows stronger from each battle he overcomes, calling on the essence of his Spirit from within his body, beneath his skin.
I have done this image as a gift to that young man, and to his ill and ailing mother. I wish to share this further, to others whom may hear the humming of the Storm Dreamer — I feel its time to dance, to “dream”, to clear the toxins and the toxic once again, anew…
They call Australia downunder for a reason. We also like to celebrate enthusiastically.
