Cassowary Crossing

His Mum a teacher, his Dad a teacher, Lindsay Thompson had little choice but to enter the blackboard jungle. Until his early 30s when the man relinquished his chalk for a calling in politics, winning a seat in State Parliament in 1955.

Tenacious, loyal, Thompson stuck to the Spring Street ruckus for 27 years, winning the leadership role for ten eventful months in the early 1980s.

Some 20 years on, back in 2004, The Age commissioned me to interview the State’s [then] four surviving ex-leaders. While each had their charms - including the narky master of phone-hockey Jeffrey Gibb Kennett AC - I’ll always retain the pleasure of meeting Lindsay in his Glen Iris home.

(Perched by a gas-fire we touched on kidnappings, poisoned chalices, car accidents, mistaken identities - always with a dose of charm and grace.)

Alas, for various reasons, an editorial change primarily, the combined profiles failed to run. Such is the journalism racket. I pocketed a modest kill fee for my pains, and let the piece doze on my hard drive. Until this week, hearing the sad news of Lindsay Thompson’s death from pneumonia at 84, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/17/2306311.htm, prompting a salvage job in his memory.

Rereading the profile, steeped in its moment, has helped revive the bon vivant. Trust the snapshot has an equivalent effect on you. Vale LT, and thoughts with Joan and the whole Thompson tree:

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THE WOODEN-HEADED ONE

Back in 1984, Lindsay Thompson, the former Premier of Victoria, was walking down the Strand in London, when he felt a tap on the shoulder.

‘I turned around,’ he recalls, ‘and this woman said, Your John Cain [another ex-Premier]. I said, No. She said, Yes you are, I’m positive. I said, Look, I’ll put you out of your misery, I’m Lindsay Thompson.’

The woman paused. ‘She had some skin her nose, I remember. She said, That’s twice I’ve fallen flat on my nose in two days.’

If that’s no clue, Thompson is a fine raconteur. Regardless the drama, his wit finds a way to shine. Such skill has made the ex-polly a hot ticket on the eulogy circuit. Despite his recent heart scare, his bronchitis, the electric chill of the various wires in his skull from a car-smash in 1999, Thompson still exudes charm. Holding court in his Glen Iris home, his feet elevated by a gas-fire under physio instructions. .

‘I might see something in the papers that makes me rant and rave, and Joan (his wife) will say you’re not in politics any more. Eat your poached egg before it gets cold.’

In 1981, Thompson took the poisoned chalice of leadership from his dear friend, and departing chief, (Sir) Rupert Hamer. ‘The Liberal party had been in office for 26 years at that stage. We’d only won the 1979 election by one seat, so I knew it was going to be very difficult.’ Thompson glances at Fox News in the corner. Sound down, a mute Mark Latham mouths a message to Camera 2, while Thompson continues. ‘Every second day was some crisis or other. I’d be working seven days a week, with worse weeks to follow.’

Thompson held the top job for 10 months, a glimmer compared to his previous 24 consecutive years where he held various portfolios under Bolte and Hamer. With a background in teaching, his darling niche was education. In the early 1970s, he oversaw a 1000 new classrooms being erected. It was also in that role that Thompson put his life on the line in 1972, acting as bagman in a kidnapping case.

Nine schoolchildren and their teacher had been nabbed from a one-room school in Faraday, near Castlemaine. The kidnapper demanded a million-pound ransom to be dropped off at Woodend Post Office. Overnight, Thompson and Hamer fast-tracked the money through Treasury, bypassing Cabinet to put lives first. At 5am, with two armed policemen in a staff car, Thompson drove to the dawn rendezvous.

‘If the kidnapper showed up,’ he recalls, ‘I had to jump out of the way, do some sort of backflip, and Assistant Commissioner Mick Miller, who was hiding under a blanket in the backseat at the time, he’d do the rest.’ A photo of Thompson, standing alone in Woodend hangs above the dining table, among a gallery of family photos, and Don Bradman memorabilia. The kidnapper, Edwin Eastwood, never fronted, and was later arrested. The children were safe. And Thompson won a special place in Victorian hearts.

Now it’s Lindsay’s own heart that’s causing the strife. His loving wife Joan recalls the ugly day in 2000. ‘I was getting Lindsay’s hat from the hallway when I heard this almighty smash. I knew something terrible had happened. I ran to the kitchen. There was glass everywhere. Lindsay was lying on the floor, not moving. I thought, well, you know…. I just started screaming.’

Thompson had suffered a heart attack, keeling over backwards, his head crashing through a door’s glass panel. ‘I smashed it with my head,’ he says, ‘but somehow I didn’t cut myself. Occasionally I was accused in politics of being wooden-headed, and they might have been right.’

Later that night, in Cabrini Hospital, our oldest ex-Premier was wheeled on a gurney, his pulse going haywire. Nurses looked into his pallid face and asked if he knew his own name. ‘I told them the football scores from that afternoon just to put an end to their questions.’

Football remains a Thompson passion. He’s a life member of Richmond, where his own son Murray, now the Liberal member for Sandringham, wore the black and gold. ‘I was patron of 20 things a few years ago but I’ve let a lot of them go. I’m the patron of the Australian Childrens’ Choir, the Prahran Cricket Club. I’m still pretty closely associated with Caulfield Grammar (his alma mater). They were nice enough to name their big sporting facility after me.’

On top of this, the Lindsay Thompson Fellowship is a $50,000 travel grant awarded to an outstanding Victorian teacher. Thompson himself spoke to 700 aspirants at Flemington Racecourse this year, though his speaking engagements are on pause while his heart is being monitored, and nearly stopped full-stop on August 27, 1999.

‘Joan and I were driving home from Broadbeach, on the Gold Coast. She was asleep, which was unusual. Normally she’s my second pair of eyes. I decided not to open the window – it might wake her – so I pinched my thighs a few times and kept going.’ Before he knew it, Thompson woke up with no teeth, and 20 fractures above his neck. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, his car nose-down in a water channel, south of Casino.

‘The doctors at Lismore Base Hospital said two things saved my life – good fortune, and golf.’ (When fit, Thompson is a keen 9-holer at Kingston Heath.) Let’s call it three things – golf, good fortune, and that durable political head.

What two Formula One champions contain dog food brands in their surnames?

SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB162 SOLUTION: SA(d)GLUM = MULGAS

As promised, the prayer for pisspots. I first heard the mockery in Tom Holloway’s grim drama, Don’t Say The Words, and wasn’t sure if the parody was original.

Turns out a jokey T-shirt company, and 500 other places around the net, carry the spoof. Minor variations exist around the traps but Tom nails the best draft in Scene III. As a lapsed Christian with a soft spot for hops, I couldn’t resist enshrining the scripture:

Our lager,
Which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink,
Thy will be drunk,
(I will be drunk)
At home as I am in tavern.
Give us this day our foamy head,
And forgive us our spillages,
As we forgive those who spill against us,
And lead us not to incarceration,
But deliver us from hangovers,
For thine is the beer,
The bitter and the lager,
Forever and ever,
Barmen.

Agamemnon is a warrior out of luck. The poor sap goes 15 rounds with the Trojans, only to return to his native Greece to learn his wife Clytaemnestra has been sleeping around.

Mind you, the warrior has returned with a tasty Trojan morsel by his side. A fair-skinned prophetess named Cassandra, whom nobody believes. Much like Agamemnon’s noble excuses.

But none of that condones the dagger jutting from the cuckold’s sternum come Act III, the bloody bathroom deed of Clytaemnestra.

Tasmanian playwright Tom Holloway beds down the template of the Aeschylus drama in his own Aussie tribute, Don’t Say The Words. (And if that title sounds familiar, starting mumbling the Split Enz tune, History Never Repeats, and see if the chorus doesn’t solve your déjà vu.)

The play is running at the http://www.griffintheatre.com.au/ in Kings Cross for the next few weeks, a dinkum Greek tragedy set in a Gothic bathroom. All three actors (Jack Finsterer, Anna Lise Phillips and Brett Stiller) live the nightmare with grim fidelity, while Matthew Lutton’s direction enhances the script’s intensity.

A stranglehold of language, the script’s stern repetitions and sparse ambit offer no relent for the audience. Rather than a viewer, you feel more a witness, the reverbing words like so many noose coils around your throat. Here’s a snip:

- So he yells at you and then what?
- He hits me again.
- Right
- Punches me.
- Good.
- Knocks my head against the tiled floor…..

Et cetera, et cetera. Being a tragic for tragedies, I swotted the original script on the Parramatta Rivercat before immersing myself in Holloway Version on Thursday night. I found the differences as profound as the echoes. Aeschylus, I’d say, was writing to a less secular mob in his day, allowing him the allusions of fate and divine justice. Hence the Greek script is richer as a text, yet more static as a drama.

Holloway has a shallower grave to dig. He must entrust two aggro, laconic males and a battered missus to do his story-telling. (Cleverly, the chorus role crops up amid the hypnotic catechisms that both men throw at Clytaemnestra - or C as the script dubs her.) Overall such ground rules create a less luscious effect, sparer, yet more threatening as a spectacle.

Other overlaps intrigue. Like a sacrificed daughter in Script 1 being an aborted child in Script 2. Yet the theme of ‘wealth’, as explored in the original, is surprisingly sidestepped by the Taswegian. Perhaps for reasons of brevity, a further omission is the absent son (think Orestes in the original) – the father’s future avenger.

But please. You don’t need to dabble in Agamemnon to lap up Holloway’s achievement. The script stands alone as ambitious, potent writing, a toxic vernacular loop of hate, fear and ulterior intimacy. Just don’t expect to laugh too often. In fact the bathroom’s only ripple of laughter is a pub-crawl import – an ocker prayer to alcohol that deserves its own posting later in the week. Till then, amen.

Can you align two words for forlorn,
(The first with its final letter shorn),
Then reverse the cluster to shape
Hardy trees in the Oz landscape?

(The low-built trees - at 6 letters - will be common to most Australians.)

SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB161 SOLUTION: Lush & toper

Like I say, addictive.

Where I should be finalising a book proposal, preparing for a freelance seminar, polishing a script, making puzzles and every other task known to a beleaguered writer, I’m Googling EQUIP and ALOFT to register 613 hits.

And then LITHE and KORMA for 558.
FETED and PRAWN gives you 505.
Just a few more than VELDT and NAVVY. [Did you mean NAVY asks the Google gatekeepers?]

I can tell you that QUOLL, a catlike marsupial that skirts your campfire in northern Tasmania, is Google gold when it comes to a low-hit rate. Combine the critter with most things (ODDER for 240 hits, or WRYLY for 73) is a whacker’s paradise.

But then, QUOLL is hardly a common word. Not outside Australia, anyway.

So my next theory for low scores – alternative spellings. I dabbled with OCHRE and VEINY (1000) and FETED (509). But when you Americanise things to OCHER, and add a more Australian idea like DAGGY, you enter the Eden of 220.

But my lowest tallies for my misspent hour across the working week read like so:

FETED and VEINY, 219.
RHOMB and FETED, 189.
TEXTA and UDDER, 99.

And the best? TEXTA and CIVET, 56. The chief hit relates to endangered species, namely the Malabar civet and some Israeli snail with the zoological alias of Helix texta. What are the blooding chances?!

But I’m not done yet. Off to Sydney today on a mix of work and family time, armed with growing list of rare Google species, I hope. Combine the right two, and I may end up with that evasive grail of a single integer. See how far I get with THRIP and BEVEL and EXUDE and LUCRE….

Can you re-upholster UPHOLSTER to make two words of equivalent meaning? Every letter is used once only.

SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB160 SOLUTION: Ghost Rider (go/strider)

Warning – this can get addictive.

Just enter two familiar five-letter words into your local Google engine, and see if you can register a minimum of hits. (Yes, I may have too much time on my hands this afternoon….)

But leaving aside Welsh violins, Inuit snow and Pashtu sweetmeats, just opt for common vocab, and only five-letters apiece.

For starters, AXIOM and WHORL yield a staggering 91,800 hits, mainly due to macramé sites, and Ancient Mayan Women. These lost-world artisans are implicated in such sentences as:

Raven says that the third axiom of spinning is “The fewer the number of fibers that … Type C is an ultralightweight whorl with a very small diameter and a

So I tried GAUZE and NUDGE for 16K, predominantly a slew of first-aid suggestions and some wink-wink websites about hospitals.

GAUDY and KRILL? This combo ushers your mouse into a biosphere of florid Antarctic writing with gaudy-eyed albatrosses ogling schools of diaphanous krill etc. Nine thousand purple bits of icecap. (Though several invoke a bloke named R Gaudy, an oceanographer from the 1970s….)

ooohcake.blogspot.com awaits the idle searcher of WHISK and INAPT, along with 3,249 other hodgepodge hotspots with a penchant for messy mixing.

And damnit, the more I write about this Google-whacking challenge, citing random words along the way, the less chance future explorers will find virgin turf. This solemn meditation alone has embedded INUIT and COMBO for posterity. My apologies.

So here’s your quest. Using only common five-letter specimens, can you score a two-figure hit? I’ll keep trying this week and see if I can’t steal the grail before you. STRAY and FORTH.

What 2007 film sounds like a word for travel beside one who’s traveling purposefully on foot? Coincidentally, the film’s hero seldom strays from his vehicle of choice. The complete title is (5,6) in length.

SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB59 SOLUTION: All eight are misnomers: a radiator relies on convection, Greenland is white, koalas aren’t bears, Oktoberfest opens in September, Bombay duck is a type of fish, Australian Womens Weekly appears monthly, Ben Folds Five is a trio and Chinese checkers derive from America.

To quote Shakespeare (or was it Homer?) – d’oh.

My efforts to unravel a Lear clue from this week’s Times crossword had me barking, like a dog of war, up the wrong tree.

For those new to Grid-gate, the clue read as follows:

Lines from Lear don’t show fate, sadly, protecting a king (3,5,2,4)

Sniffing anagram, I swirled the phrase DON’T SHOW FATE around AK and got precisely nowhere. My hunch leant towards an answer like THE SKINS OF SEAL, or THE SKINK OF SHAW….at least these stabs obeyed the grid’s pattern, if not the clue’s wordplay.

Only remedy, I thought, was to skim King Lear in search of those elusive lines, a kinda half-cheat reliance of supplementary texts to boost my growing tally of solved Times puzzles.

So anyhow, as Big Love played on the teev, and the dog scratched his jowls, and the son clacking frantic in his chatroom, I fast-tracked the mad monarch, looking for a matching phrase.

While I never found paydirt, I did locate some Elizabethan jewels in the playscript, including several skink-ish insults. Namely:

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

I am a very foolish, fond, old man –

… I’m a prize turkey of twoscore years and upward myself. I waved the white flag in the morning light, only to discover the answer was an anagram of DON’T SHOW FATE around AK, and the ‘lines from Lear’ were not the King, but the Irish bunkologist, Edward.

His poem, THE AKOND OF SWAT, is a vague after-image of reading time in Grade 1, sitting on scratchy mats, the smell of band-aids, armpits and stewed urine in the air. You can read the damnable claptrap here http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/akond.html and take a certain Schadenfreude in my own wild-goose capers.

Back to 1-Across, Puzzle #1, and please, no more red Irish herrings.