Ten years

It is ten years since the first post on this blog. Some kind of retrospective seems called for.

I had lurked on others’ blogs for years.  I probably caught the blogging wave just as it was about to recede.  As early as September that year I wondered if that was so as I saw blogs falling by the wayside.  That may have been more churn than decline, but by 2012 or 2013 other social media were clearly leaving blogs behind.  Now it is mostly the older and more fixed in their ways who persist.

2007 was the last glorious year of Howard-hating.

At the start I had a backlog of material to unleash on an unsuspecting and generally oblivious world. A number of those early posts continue to attract a steady trickle of attention.

The earliest of these is a post on my childhood choirmaster, who turned out to be a sexual abuser who killed himself in Indonesia in 2006 when confronted with fresh accusations.  At first, many of my fellow choristers were reluctant to concede that the man they knew and remembered gratefully could be the same person.  In the end the dots were pretty conclusively joined.  Other traffic to this post was probably looking for material about a “controversial” and notoriously tough WA chief detective who was murdered, allegedly as revenge for his shooting of a bikie.

The second is: Never fall in love with a prostitute.  Good advice but not always easy to follow.  I cited a Chinese proverb, 戏子无义 婊子无情, roughly “A performer is unrighteous; a whore is heartless.”  One rueful comment: “of course i know this saying but still fallen.”

Another is Are you Gay? Can you prove it?

Yet another is Rice Queen, Potato Queen.  In that post I took advantage of the strong opinions on both of a young overseas student from Malaysia, Je.  Daniel, Je’s not much older Australian boyfriend, took offence on Je’s behalf.  Not that Daniel disclosed that he was Je’s partner when he did so, but it wasn’t hard to work out.  After Je returned to Malaysia (which was a condition of his scholarship), they split up.  You could read all of this on the internet in those days and I am amazed to find you still can.   Daniel (who according to Je was the dumper) is still a quite the keyboard warrior.  Je stopped posting in about 2010.

I published a number of other posts on gay/asian/in Australia topics at that time.  It’s hard to tell because I am now totally out of any “scene,” but my feeling is that this is an area where, gradually, the cultural/racial/sexual frontier is smoothing out and the terms on which it is crossed are becoming more equal.  There’s still a way to go, though.

Meanwhile, in terms of the racial border and who is crossing it, if you see two men, one “East” and one “West,” out and about, D and I reckon they are more likely to be gay than not.

Caveat Solicitor is a not very interesting post which whose title nevertheless exerts an attractive power.  If you come up against the one you are likely to be looking for the other.

Pussy porn was brazen and quite-successful-for-a-few-years click-bait and my first post featuring my cat.

I wrote a post on Geoffrey Leonard, a self-avowed “boy-lover” who courted fame and (with a bit of help from A Current Affair) found it. This led to his conviction and imprisonment in 2008 for a self-published and internet-published book which was held to include child-abuse material by reason of his reproduction of an edited police fact sheet and edited police statements of 2 boys whom he had been convicted of abusing in 1989.  (The sentence was imposed concurrently with a sentence for possession of since-deleted child pornography on his computer to which Leonard pleaded guilty.) This post still attracts attention because Leonard has become a kind of internet cult figure.

Two later posts on the Guardianship Tribunal (now a division of NCAT) and the NSW Public Trustee and Guardian still attract attention because so many people are caught in the toils of one or the other or both, generally when a family member (usually a parent) becomes incapable by reason of age. In my opinion the Tribunal is far too ready to resolve any intrafamilial conflict by conferring powers on the Public Trustee, which is surprisingly expensive and apparently almost totally immune from any effective oversight.

These posts all still get readers because (apart from “Pussy Porn”) they meet some otherwise unanswered niche demand of one sort or another.

Early on I also indulged in an orgy of self-dislosure on the themes of jobs I have had and homes I had previously lived in.  Since then I have remained in the same job. I have yet to bring things up to date in relation to my last two homes.

I suppose I could try to identify my own favourite posts.  That depends on my mood and probably requires too much context to determine.  Instead I shall confine myself to one generally neglected post.  This, based on a Court of Criminal Appeal judgment, retells an almost comic and possibly fantastical story of one night in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney when a bunch of Arabic drug dealers decided to muscle in on the turf of young Yuri Mogilevsky.  I changed the names in the post to protect the Mogilevskys who had meanwhile found themselves in hotter water with the police after moving to greener pastures in St Ives.

I’m a bit disappointed this story hasn’t made it onto the small screen.  My favourite bit is where (as Yuri claimed) one of the gang putting the heavy on him said: “I’m going to enjoy killing you … I’m Palestinian, do you know what we do to Jews.”  Some hapless Irishmen were drawn into the events as well.

When I started this blog I identified my interests as “in no particular order: law, music, opera, gay issues, and China.”  After working off a bit of initial steam, I haven’t said so much more about “gay issues” and I haven’t ended up saying much about China.  I was last there in mid-2014.

That’s partly because, in order since then my cat, my stepmother, my father and my aunt have died.  It is a matter of privacy rather than disrespect to the latter three that the cat’s death has had more coverage on this blog.  He would have turned 20 last month:

This retrospective would not be complete without also remembering my friend and onetime housemate, S, who only went to operas if they were set in Egypt and included female nudity.  This March it was five years since he took an early mark at the age of 45.