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Everyone has a Gough (C8) story, right? Like Ann Madsen of Mount Annan: “In the 1980s, I was living in a remote Northern Territory town. At election time, word spread that Gough Whitlam would be visiting with the local Labor candidate. We gathered outside the council office and my friend Steve, a huge fan of the ex-PM, managed to speak with him. Steve wasn’t a tall man and Mr Whitlam was leaning in as they chatted. Out of the corner of his eye, Mr Whitlam noticed Steve’s wife, on the edge of the crowd, aiming a camera towards them. Mr Whitlam straightened his back, puffed out his chest and rose to full height. The photo shows Mr Whitlam a head taller than Steve, looking very statuesque and Steve looking up at him, somewhat confused about what had just occurred.”
Sarah Hammond of Surf Beach recalls “a theatre review in one of the Sydney papers which referred to the Whitlam family at interval sitting around a table ‘looking like Stonehenge’.”
“Mention of The Best of Column 8 (C8) prompted me to dust off my copies and re-read the introduction, which notes: ‘The management once or twice used its columns to attack unions and left-wing parties, leading to the Communist newspaper Tribune dubbing it Column Hate.’” We thank Allan Gibson of Cherrybrook (who doesn’t feature in either book).
“In our area, the channel-billed cuckoos are very noisy about secreting their eggs into the nests of other birds,” says Ian Dance of Wollstonecraft. “I think they originated Airbnb.”
“While the Gold Coast V8 Supercar event was on, I took refuge in Brisbane to escape the ear-shattering noise,” writes Michael Dunlop of Surfers Paradise (Qld). “I left my apartment overlooking the fastest part of the circuit for four days. On my return, I discovered that the glass canopy over my cooktop had ‘exploded’, with pieces being flung over six metres. I believe for sound to break glass it needs to be of a high intensity, 105 decibels or more. Could the noise of the supercars have caused the tempered glass to ‘explode’, or was it a manufacturer’s fault, just waiting for a loud V8 to race by? No other glassware suffered this fate.”
Joy Cooksey of Harrington thinks, “The future changes to occur in the US education system (C8) appear to be aimed at making only the carefully chosen, trumped-up Americans great again.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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