Out soon: the 3rd book in my Aussie alpine trilogy. This one is the incredible story of Kosciuszko – blending Polish, American & Australian Aboriginal history!
In Albury the other day and took the overnight first class carriage to Syd. 83 bucks, slept like a baby, coffee and muesli/yoghurt for $7.80 for brekky and walked off with all my baggage! Our trains ain’t quick but they’re less stressful than
#Qantas
or any airline tbh
#4corners
Erin Molan asked: "Would the thousands who marched around the country to protest global warming in the School Strike for Climate feel just as passionately about protecting Australia if we ever came under threat?"
We are under threat and that's what they were protesting against🤦♂️
The people voting no because “there’s not enough info and we don’t know what this thing will look like” must surely abstain from electing governments, getting married, having kids, adopting a cat or dog, ordering a fking sandwich ffs
Non-AFL followers may be unaware that Sam Newman played his entire 300-game career with Geelong. Here was a time for him to celebrate his old club's success. Instead he piles dirt on the Swans and Uncle Jack. As ever, sport reveals character
I just got a scam call from someone purporting to be the Australian Tax Office, and when I said "is this a scam call?" a voice said "Shut up you idiot dog" and hung up, and actually, the way the tax office has treated me over the years, now I think it wasn't a scam call.
Without wishing to alarm anyone, if you go directly to the internet, you can get news from trusted sites without going via an American social media giant. Truly revolutionary idea
Some classic John Barilaro bullying in today’s lead
@abcnews
story. The Barra quotes obtained last week by
@friendlyjordies
were about 100 times more damning, yet they are still reported nowhere else but his channel. I officially no longer understand how media works
I’ll never stop sharing my pics of two ponds, one trashed by hard-hooved animals, one not. Alpine wetlands provide corroboree frog habitat and are sponges ensuring our streams never stop running. How can patriots with Aussie flag avatars care more about imported horses than this?
Nothing against Ch 7 but I'm so glad to hear that old mate is suing. I've worked with many of Australia's dumbest journalists and often been one myself but I've never worked in a newsroom where you'd name a mass murderer without being a TRILLION percent sure. How did it happen?
OK here's what just happened.
Australia just hit 50°C for the first time in 24 years. Such readings are rare historically but now more likely.
> Mardie in Western Australia reached 50.5°C
> This was Aust's 2nd-hottest temp on record
> Record is 50.7°C
The mountains of northern Kosciuszko National Park do this Uluru thing where they turn the most absurd colours at twilight. This is Mt Bimberi (1913m) last night. Kangaroos somewhat nonchalant
Noosa. Cruise ships. Financiers on ski trips to Aspen. It’s getting harder not to view this crisis through a class lens. Brazilians are certainly seeing it this way. Rich spreading it, poorest hardest hit. Discuss.
1. They're not heritage. They're descendants of escaped farm horses trampling a national treasure to worthless mud
2. Would you cheer for feral fish eating the Great Barrier Reef? That's the equivalent of what you're doing here.
3. READ THE FKING BRUMBY WARS AND EDUCATE YOURSELF!
Hello friends and frenemies. I'd be grateful if you'd be inclined to sign this petition to stop the slaughter of Australian Heritage Brumbies. Nearly 200k Australians already have.
Always surprised how many Sydney-based journalists, many of them ardently pro-climate action, use Canberra airport. The bus is just 3 hrs: 15 mins to Central
Short 🧵because who wants to read a bloody essay
There's a thing some of you saw this week but you need to know the full quite hilarious story.
It's about cookers getting totally cooked by their own misinformation. Absolutely barbecued. It's the Easter gift we all needed.
I see Gen X is trending again. A reminder that we had neither the jobs-for-life & affordable housing of Boomers nor the digital nativity of those born after us. We of course have our flaws, but we've also overcome hurdles.
Also, we can make sentences without emojis
An early Twitter highlight today is the delicate sweethearts crying about Fraser Island reverting to the name K'gari, then misspelling Ayers Rock to show how much they cherish the integrity of those whitefella names
Sydney Airport is now 35.7°C, its hottest September reading in nearly 100 years of records. With no sea breeze in, expect other stations across the city to follow
Thread on the
#4corners
brumbies ep tonight. My book The Brumby Wars came out in 2021 and features most of tonight’s spokespeople, plus many more. Writing it nearly broke me. Here’s why: Most enviro books are polemics, as they should be. Our rarest ecosystems must be protected!
The Commonwealth Games have been a redundant concept for years. The world changes, not least the sporting world. Where once we celebrated Matilda the kangaroo at the Brisbane 1982 Games, we now salute the Matildas as we host the FIFA World Cup, a much more relevant & worthy event
If the rumours of no more cricket on ABC radio are true, many people will be lost to the game forever.
Cricket Australia is playing a dangerous game now. The game in Australia is more than bats and balls and archaic headwear. It is a smell and a mood and a radio crackle
There’s a meanness at Thredbo evident everywhere. Staff won’t give u an extra recyclable cup. They don’t smile when you hold a door open for them. After u pay $200 for a lift ticket, they still charge $5 for a smart card to load it on. The culture needs fixing like the chairlifts
Iceland: no wins, one draw
Australia: no wins, one draw
Iceland: 2 goals scored, 5 conceded
Australia: 2 goals scored, 5 conceded
Iceland: population 330 thousand
Australia: population 25 million
Iceland: people eat sharks
Australia: sharks eat people
#WorldCup
I just googled “Labor policies”. There are 27 subject headings, each clickable, whereupon you find multiple bullet points and further detail. The NDIS is one section. Memorising the precise details of each section would be super human stuff. This election campaign is exhausting
I do not mean to adopt a triumphal tone in the above thread. I would rather these bastards grew a brain and allowed our largest alpine national park to recover from hard-hooved intruders which it was never equipped to carry on its fragile soils and wetlands. Good evening.
Back in the mountains working on a project. News not good. Vast tracts of alpine ash forest are gone, probably forever. They don’t recover quickly like lowland forests. Two burns in 17 years means this will now become scrubby heathland. It’s a loss as profound as coral bleaching
I interrupt my self-imposed Twitter exile to say f the middle Australian enviro-vandals driving on beaches and through riverbeds in TV 4WD ads. Go for a bushwalk you nature-destroying wankers
Young Bernard Tomic once boasted he would have the “heart of Hewitt, the groundstrokes of Federer, the mind of Sampras”. He achieved none of that. But he did manage to develop the personality of a complete dickhead.
Putting aside analyses from partisan hacks today, here’s what happened in
#EdenMonaro
. ScoMo is reviled locally for his fire performance but respected for his Covid actions. The latter didn’t quite outweigh the former but it nearly did. I was there all week. Trust me. That’s it
Never forget that John Barilaro saw the 0.16% of the Aussie mainland which miraculously, almost impossibly, contains delicate plant communities more like the high Swiss Alps or Siberian tundra and said, “Fk it, I’ll legislate to make this joint a muddy horse paddock” to win votes
I’m
#BlockedByGuy
and I’ve never heard of him till today. Not the faintest idea why he blocked me, but what a lover of democracy and free speech he must be!
We have never seen winter heat like this in Australia's southern states.
A day after its maximum of 38.5°C obliterated South Australia's old winter heat record by two degrees, Oodnadatta registered a new record winter high of 39.4°C on Saturday afternoon
Those rugby league players who won’t take a flu jab. What do their belief systems say about the painkillers that get them into the field most weeks? Do they drink water with fluoride in it? Stupid dopes don’t deserve to return to work on May 28
Assistant police commissioner tells Ray Hadley that eviction had nothing to do with a daughter toilet stop, and that "the man was trying to get access to the grandstand". I'M GONNA TAKE A WILD GUESS THAT THE GRANDSTAND IS WHERE THE TOILET WAS
What Space Karen doesn't get is that Twitter has always felt like OUR space. It always belonged to Big Tech, of course, but it FELT like it was ours. The X rebrand is another step that shatters the sort of user goodwill that money can't buy. It feels like Elon has renamed our dog
I'm just some guy from Sydney with a passing interest, but I have never, ever heard a more biased call than the unofficial Collingwood cheer squad in the commentary box
#AFLGF
It's truly a miracle that a tiny part of mainland Australia has alpine plant communities resembling the Arctic tundra, and it's an ongoing tragedy that some of Australia's loudest, stupidest people believe that raggedy escaped farm horses are more valuable than that. Aaaanyway...
Appalling behaviour by ABC journalist Jamelle Wells
This completely bogus story clearly came from one of the pro-brumby groups which Wells has been courting, per
@ABCmediawatch
. No one got the number of horses wrong. That's the lie brumby advocates tell again and again
Hands up who else had never heard of Michael McCormack until today and who still couldn’t pick him in a lineup unless the lineup contained 3 brush turkeys and a purple swamp hen?
I’d like to make a final comment on fires, having dodged them for nearly five weeks on the
#AAWT
. I made a point of asking graziers, 4WDers, Park Rangers, anyone I met, if they knew specific examples of greenies preventing back burning. The answer was always a firm no.
Not so much a criticism as an observation: Why did Warney die and 5 minutes later an MCG stand gets his name while it took Sydney 23 years to go uhhh, yeah, Freeman is pretty much synonymous with this place
This is historic - today we named this stand at Accor Stadium after the incredible Cathy Freeman.
Making it the first ever stand at a major stadium in NSW to be named after a woman.
Just read my Voice pamphlet. The NO case is full of phrases like too risky, too costly, won’t help Aboriginal people. If these people had heeded their own advice, the First Fleet would never have sailed
We can have mud and horses, or pristine alpine streams and no horses, but not both.
Congrats to
@PennySharpemlc
for taking a tough but necessary decision to cull Kosciuszko brumbies by air. It's the only way to do it humanely and quickly.
Media: feel free to call me for info
The Baw Baw plateau in southern Vic has not burned in 80 years – the only part of the entire Australian high country to avoid fire, and its snowgums are beyond stunning. Pics from this week’s strong spring cold snap and more here via
@skicomau
Hey everybody, we ran this story by John Millman earlier this year on
@playersvoice
. He talks about Federer and being broke and getting an office job in the middle of his career to survive financially and it's just bloody great
#USOpen
Beaches are the last bastion of Australia’s fading egalitarianism, and while it’s tempting to put all the wankers in one spot so we can laugh at them, the day it costs money to sit on a beach is the day we lose our soul
Imagine you wrote a book. Did old-fashioned journalism from all sides of an issue. Interviewed 60 people, from 96 yo Order of Aus recipients to violent psychopaths. Thought maybe you'd help facilitate understanding.
I'm resilient. Fear not for me. Fear for our national dialogue
So sick of this. Kosciuszko is the most beautiful place in Australia and it's held hostage by pea-brained morons cheering raggedy mobs of vermin-riddled escaped farm horses that churn the alpine landscape to mush. It's like cheering for coral bleaching. Good story
@Laura_R_Chung
Always worth re-sharing this passage from The Brumby Wars, in which I interviewed both Jordan and Barilaro. This paragraph lays out clearly the difference between gratuitous racism and targeted mocking of a man’s self-crafted image
To all the Americans who don't get it, Matt Damon did this cross to your Today show from an Australian betting shop. We call betting on horses "punting" and everyone here is going crazy about "Good Will Punting" and that's all
The detailed imagery for which they paid $78K so that they could argue "brumbies are awesome!" revealed tracks, erosion and other damage wrought across the landscape by... wait for it... brumbies!
This was one of the worst own-goals you could ever see. But wait, there's more...
Every time I see Philip Lowe I just think geez, it's been a looooong time since he stood in a supermarket pondering whether to lash out on Barilla pasta instead of Zafarelli
RBA Governor Philip Lowe on rents: "The underlying issue is supply and demand." He points to the decline in average number of people per dwelling. "It just doesn't work...We need more people on average to live in each dwelling." More:
#auspol
@SBSnews
As anyone who follows me here knows, I adore the Aussie High Country with its plants and animals found nowhere else in. The brumbies absolutely decimate the High Country ecosystems. Check these two adjacent high alpine ponds. One a miracle of nature, the other a filthy mud pit
As the inevitable tweets bagging Buddy Franklin appear, a reminder that he has kicked 1000 AFL goals and you haven’t. He’s also been fantastically consistent over a nine-year deal which exceeded everyone’s expectations. Also Lockett never won a GF with Sydney. Also thpppft 👅
There is only one way to fix this
@FFA
. Fly the whole family to Perth for the
@ALeague
grand final, put them in the best hotel, free tix, free food, the lot. You know it, we all know it.
Just back from Kosciusko. The place is absolutely glistening at the moment. So thankful we have national parks, or at least parts of them that are still free of 4WDs and other intrusions
A clueless nong of whom I was previously unaware called
@WesFangMLC
whined in parliament that all the damage was probably caused by goats.
Brumby advocates always do this. "It's goats! It's deer!" Yet their own aerial images showed not one goat or deer.🤦♂️One more tweet...
Nothing to see here. Just a record-breaking winter heat buildup in Central Australia as max temps in places like Alice Springs rise to within a degree of the SUMMER average!
The England innings of 67:
0104010000000000000400W0000000W00000400000000102000000100110000W0000004000201100100104W000000020100001000002000000010004W00000W00040400000001000W00012W00004402W010000W
#Ashes2019
#Ashes
#Ashes19
As a pro weather writer, I post stories based on weather data and let adults take it from there. I am being abused by climate change deniers this morning. You always think these people have disappeared, or that their invective can’t hurt anyone. In truth, it’s deeply disturbing
It's really not hard to understand how a delicate Australian alpine landscape with soft spongy plants cannot cope with 300 kg hard-hooved horses when the heaviest animals that lived there for millennia were little hoppy things, echidnas and such. Must work now. Brumby banter done
Gemma realises she has sided with Australia's dopiest culture warriors, is embarrassed because that compromises the intellectual persona she tries so hard to confect, and now plays the victim, falsely telling Twitter that a swear word used for emphasis was directed personally
Hottest December day on record at Sydney Airport with 43.5°C
Temp reached 44°C as forecast in western Syd
Meanwhile in Adelaide it rained all day (per the loop below) and with temps below 16°C since 9 am, it was likely the coldest Dec day in 55 years
Retweeting my 5 yr old tweet because
@wallabies
sponsor Santos is the mob behind the Narrabri Gas (Pilliga) Project, the most protested-against protect in NSW planning history, which looks likely to proceed. Not sure how a principled organisation kicks Folau out but endorses this
A year ago, I was the last person plucked out of Kosciuszko National Park before fires engulfed it. In the chopper was pilot Col de Pagter and chief fires officer Ian Dicker. Ian just sent me the loveliest New Year message. To you too mate, and to all health & emergency workers
@JuliaHB1
@jaybee825
There was a reasonably strong indication when you said, "I'd choose Andrew Tate's life *every single time*"
Is Elon's capacity for self-owning infectious among his acolytes?
You can see why people think they’re magnificent. Now look at a creek nearby in the only brumby-free valley in the area. The creek in the previous tweet is scarified, denuded. See how this one has rich alpine vegetation and is much narrower? I’ll tweet more when
#4corners
starts
Not joining the stampede to mastodon as I don’t think Elon will destroy this joint as badly as some fear, and also who the f wants to start all over again building a network of friends and banterers elsewhere. I’d rather just de-digitise. Anyway, have an Aussie wildflower or two
So
@ISCAustralia
through its campaign
@ReclaimKosci
shared aerial pics showing damage by brumbies (feral horses) to Kosciuszko National Park.
The 1st pic is one of them.
The 2nd and 3rd pics are mine, showing how brumbies turn pristine alpine vegetation into worthless mudheaps
I just walked 510km through the Australian bush, dodging fires and twice being evacuated. All fires I saw or knew about were sparked by lightning or accidental human causes like electric fences. Historically, arson is a major fire starter. Not so much this summer
Aerial culling recently resumed after a 20-year lapse, a gutsy move from
@PennySharpemlc
. With 20,000+ horses, this was essential.
Pro-brumby folk said "We'll dispute the tally and hold up the count!"
So they raised $80k for their own aerial survey of horses. Oops. Big mistake!