As an undergrad student at the University of Queensland I wasted weeks, possibly months of each year in the library, browsing magazines. OK. Maybe I didn’t actually waste that time, seeing as how I went on to work in magazines a few years later. Let’s just say I ‘invested’ a heap of extracurricular time with my feet up on the cheap, institutional coffee tables flipping through magazines I couldn’t afford to buy myself.

I still waste, or invest, a huge part of each week flipping through magazines. Except that nowadays, for the most part, I do it on my iPad. Sometimes, due to a turf war between old media publishers and Steve Jobs, on my Kindle. Each week, without fail, when I turn on my Kindle some time between Friday and Sunday, I’ll find a new copy of The New York Times Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harpers, and occasionally the weighty, stentorian wordage of Foreign Policy. Each one costs me a couple of bucks a month. Less than I spend on store-bought coffee every day.

I work in the industry. I understand the difference between professional journalism and the risible lack of standards that characterise much of what we call citizen journalism when we’re being kind, and amateur ranting when we’re being accurate. I know what went into writing those stories I paid for. I know that for the most part I can trust them, even if in the case of, say, The New Republic, I have to apply an ideological filter when I read them. I know they are worth paying for.

And yet. And yet…

As an atheist, one of the most common questions I get asked – apart from “would you please leave?” – is “Why are you an atheist?” And it is a fair question: for the average person, it’s pretty hard to understand why a man would turn his back on tradition, social norms, and all semblance of common decency in order to pursue a life of nihilistic excess and death-worshipping futility. It’s perfectly natural for ordinary, hard-working Australians to assume that I am simply, at heart, an evil person, and let’s be honest, I’m pretty much asking for it. As a non-atheist of my acquaintance pointed out recently, “That Richard Dawkins really irritates me”, and it’s hard to argue in the face of that sort of logic.

However, I always think it’s good to look beneath the surface, and so I do like to take any opportunity I can to really “flesh out” my religious beliefs, so that people don’t make superficial judgments based on simplistic stereotypes, and instead make superficial judgments based on complex stereotypes. So I’m going to answer the question “Why am I an atheist” in a way that will hopefully clarify just as much as it disgusts.

I suppose the seeds of my atheism were sown in my teenage years, when I first realised how enjoyable it is to pointlessly rebel against authority. I remember the giddy thrill I felt when I spat in my father’s eye for no other reason than I was bored. It was exhilarating! I thought, “How can I spit in my father’s eye on a society-wide scale?” Atheism, of course, was the obvious answer. Forget spitting in the eye of my father – how big a rush would it be to spit in the face of The Father? And as I grew up, my need for showy, immature displays of empty oppositionalism has only grown more intense.

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On July 29 this year, Tony Abbott declared on Nine’s Today show that carbon dioxide was “an invisible, odourless, weightless, tasteless substance,” making its industrial emissions too hard to measure. Anyone with a Year 10 chemistry textbook could have proved him wrong. But if we were expecting a response to such a sizeable error, we found a nation’s media staying strangely quiet.

It seems that every bulletin in the last six months has opened with Abbott, in a hardhat or a high-vis vest or a pair of safety goggles, prodding at a piece of machinery like a gibbon with a Scrabble set, then crankily soundbiting the same evidence-free statements he made the day before at a different dog food plant or Slinky factory. This is a toxic tax. It’ll cost lots of money. Lots of jobs. Ruin our economy.

Each rehash is reported as though it were news. For an industry keen to avoid accusations of bias against the Opposition, these blue-collar-meets-clean-white-collar publicity parades are in the national interest. But ‘unbiased’ does not mean allocating each side 37 seconds in the lead bracket. It means that journalists should report what actually happens. If someone has nothing to say, you’re allowed to mention the fact.

News Ltd columnists can always find time in their busy days to complain about left-wing media bias, having apparently missed the memo that their employers own 70 percent of Australian newspapers. The lack of scrutiny of the opposition leader’s claims indicate exactly the opposite tilt.

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I met Dave Graney in South Melbourne, between rehearsal and gig; he is as always immaculately, exquisitely and uniquely attired. We take a stroll down Clarendon Street looking for somewhere quiet to grab some calories and Do This Thing.

As we walk we’re chatting about the inner suburbs, architecture, the bar/pub/venue scene and all kinds of stuff. I ruin the mood of course, being shallow and stupid enough, when talking about a new bar, to make reference to “a Dave Graney style”. He cuts me off, seemingly offended by the implication that there is such a thing.

“I don’t think about style ever, not at all.”

Malcolm Turnbull had his shot at leadership of the Liberal Party and bollocksed it up royally, but no-one would believe for a second that means he’s given up on the idea — and nor should he. In Canberra’s political firmament he’s the only star on either side with the combination of balls and brains, chutzpah and charisma, vision and intellect that has been missing from Australian politics since Paul Keating’s demise. Someone people can vote for without wanting to punch themselves in the throat before they leave the ballot box.

And then suddenly the shaking stops and there isn’t a goat next door.

For most people, this won’t appear to be a problem. Not having a goat next door has become, in this modern world of iPads, Twitter and ironic moustaches, the expected state of affairs. In fact, very rarely do you hear our young people of today walking past a house, looking into the garden and saying, “I expect their goat’s probably round the back.”

No, our young people of today say things like “Ooo, what a lovely bed of iPads in that garden”, on account of it’s all modern now.

But it is a problem for me, because until the moment I realised there wasn’t a goat next door, I hadn’t technically been aware there was one, because there wasn’t.

(Now, at this point I can understand many of you might be considering your options. It’s a new magazine, you don’t know if it’s been worth your money, and you’re naturally leery of one of those wanky columns where the guy just likes to bugger about. Don’t worry though, this will soon come to a neat ending where all the jokes tie up neatly and it turns out I was just being a bit silly. Just like one of those columns in the Good Weekend magazine, which you love.)

I live, and this is important to know, in the Dandenong Ranges. If you’re unaware of it, that’s a sort of idyllic semi-rural eyrie just east of all those suburbs Chris Lilley and Gina Riley don’t really like, filled with the simple bucolic charm you might have seen in shows such as Midsomer Murders. It’s not like that Northcote they’ve got in town, with its restaurants and tram.

When I moved here from that modern Preston a couple of years ago it was difficult, what with my colourful clothing and children on the street making signs to ward off the Evil Eye, to know what to expect from village life.

One of the more striking features of life on my street was the appearance and then equally mysterious disappearance of various farm animals on and around what are essentially suburban front yards.

One neighbour brought a cow home for a weekend, let it wander around their lawn for a bit, then made it vanish again come Monday.

Across the street there is sometimes, but by no means always, a strange and eldritch Shetland Pony. Once there was a boy I’d never seen before, standing next to it, holding a Frisbee, just staring at me. I almost built a panic room.

Once I looked up from a bit of idle ironic moustache growing to find what I still insist was a llama staring at me over the fence. When I looked again, several weeks later, it was gone, so I was unable to gauge the reaction of the llama to my by-then fully established handlebars.

It is fashionable to the point of cliche to intone wisely that the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ no longer have any meaning. Let’s call this the Disappearing Left/Right Hypothesis - DLRH.

Supporting argument for DLRH goes something like this: in western democracies, which tend to have a two-party system, both major parties try so hard to appeal to average voters that they converge on the centre, with a set of policy prescriptions bland enough to offend no-one.

Additionally, there is meant to be a consensus on economic management. There is no longer any real debate between which is better, a market-based economy or a state-run one, the former having crushed the latter in the debate of acceptable ideas. So we have ended up with rough agreement on the fundamentals, with some differences around the edges as to how big the safety net should be.

No more towering arguments about Communism versus Capitalism: we are all smug, mixed-economy aficionados now, the very splitting of the difference, with its soft landing on the sweet spot between the two extremes, being proof in itself of our un-left/rightedness.

Where I live, where I choose to live, where thankfully my presence is tolerated, would be described, if this was America, as ‘backwoods’. There are five commas in that opening sentence, and that’s the sentence I’ve really thought about. So we are possibly not in snappy, easy to read magazine territory. There may not even be pictures. My advice would be find something simpler somewhere else in the publication because that opening sentence is like a beacon of light compared to the structure of the article. Still here? OK, let’s press on. To recap:

I live in hillbilly country, for better or worse.

Randy Newman wrote a song one time that opened with the lines “We talk real funny down here, we drink too much and we laugh too loud” and there you have both a description of where I live, and why I live here. There is plenty of elbow room. Many are crazy, hardly anyone gets hurt. There is a small population spread across a glacial, mountainous island. It is hard enough to cut a road through to a lot of it – and a road is your most basic communication pathway – so much of the information revolution has not happened here. Much of it won’t, because of the technical difficulties, and the lack of any possible economic gain.

We know you have it though. We are not so far away that we can’t see you, mainland Australia, and your smart phones and internet–that’s-faster–than–a–pigeon. We can see the back of you as you march into the future. Confusingly, because we are in the same temporal zone, you don’t get further away and the sight of you marching into a future that we can’t see looks exactly like you’re trampling your perfectly good present into the dirt.

So I live in a place where we still make our own fun. In fact we make most of our own everything, but let’s settle on fun for now. We get our good duds on and go visit the neighbours, small groups of people gather to play appalling music (in private mostly thanks to modesty and the threat of violence) and football exists at a very local level.

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You’re eight or nine years old, slight and small of stature, asthmatic and allergic to a whole raft of things. Shy.

You have a friend, your best friend, a bullet-headed, nuggetty little scrapper named Fitz. They leave you alone when he’s around, but when he’s not, you’re a red rag.

The worst of them once picked you up and threw you from one end of the classroom to the other when the teacher was out of the room one day. You hit the floor with a thud and mostly just slid across the floor to the wall. It hurt.

It was like that.

Years later, someone tells you that this same guy wound up getting pinched for stealing cars and spent time inside. You think, “I hope he got the living shit beat out of him while he was there”.

You’d forgotten his name, and you’ll forget it again in an instant. You certainly can’t remember it now.

You wonder whatever became of Fitz.

You used to tell him stories that you made up during lunchtime. He liked those.

We all know the salutary tale about the boy who cried wolf: his repeated but baseless entreaties became so familiar to the townsfolk that they ultimately ignored his cries for help when he actually needed it.

The fable’s lesson is a simple one — if you make a habit of crying victim for no reason, people grow desensitised to your alarms and will eventually become deaf to your calls for help.

This lesson seems to be lost on some young women today: they’re quick to label any ridicule or criticism of women as sexist. But is this really misogyny? Is sexism really rife in today’s public discourse or are these women simply crying wolf?

Most people, regardless of gender, search for the reasons that underlie their disappointments and failures. We wonder whether it’s because we’re too fat, thin, young, old, plain, attractive, disciplined, spontaneous, reserved or exuberant. Did we not put enough effort into something, or did we obsess and overdo it? Did we misread a room, a person, a set of instructions? Or read too much into it?

Dear Atheists, what are you so worried about?

One of the most amusing things in the lead up to this year’s census was the almost paranoid vigour with which some atheists encouraged other non-believers to make sure that they ticked the right box on their form,

“Don’t write Jedi, you won’t be counted.”, “Make sure that you don’t leave the question blank instead of choosing ‘No-religion’”.

Even funnier were the attempts to convince people who still identified with a religious group to select ‘No religion’ instead,

“But you only go to church twice a year”.

Given my history as the world’s greatest Treasurer and second greatest PM (after God, I mean Gough), I am allowed carte-blanche to comment on anything I fucking well want. No fucking editor tells yours truly what to write!

So, I will write about the impact of Mahler in New York in the early 20th century.

Just kidding, that is next issue.

At the moment, ask yourself: Do you pay enough tax? I know the answer and you are wrong. You do not pay enough tax.

So, you’ve just read a thoughtful and erudite piece of online political commentary. Enlivened by new ideas, you’re keen to continue the conversation, share your thoughts, and maybe even re-evaluate a few of your positions. Your cat has never shown a particular interest in the impact of the carbon tax the economic debate and there’s no one else around, so trembling with intellectual anticipation, you click on the ‘Show Comments’ link.

JULIAR. FASCIST LEFTARDS. GREEN NUTTERS. REDNECK RIGHTISTS. HACK JOURNALISTS. BUDGIE SMUGGLERS. SEKRIT MUSLIMS. COMMUNIST.

You recoil in horror.

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Remember Punch and Judy? Those wacky, zany puppets who smack each other (and anyone else who comes near) around with big sticks? Well there’s a new puppet show in town, with a host of little Punches and Judys lining up to take a whack. The target of their attention? Poker machine reform… and the puppeteer is ClubsNSW.

Let’s be very clear about this. The single biggest, loudest and most aggressive opponent to poker machine reform in this country is ClubsNSW. Every other dissenting voice is simply doing their bidding as they pull the strings and direct the play.

So who are the puppets in this ensemble? Who does ClubsNSW have lined up to fight their fight for them?

There’s a host of great articles about Fred Nile swanning around the internet at the moment. Many of these are witty, erudite, informative and relevant. I felt like I needed to contribute some kind of honking, goose-like piece to balance the spectrum.

THE STARS:

In these confusing times, it’s often helpful to think of government as the cast from the hit Christian television show, 7th Heaven. Fred Nile is already the Father of the House in the House of Representatives and he truly does think he is the patronising, dead-eyed father from 7th Heaven, doling out unwanted advice to his terrified children. But instead of the feel-good plotlines about less-hot daughter trying her darndest to help a rambunctious African-American basketballer find Jesus, we have Father Nile taking Bob Brown to electro-shock therapy and counselling Julia Gillard about her living in sin issues.

The main thing people tell you ahead of your first visit to the United States is that it’s expensive. “You’ll leave America broke,” they say, nodding sagely, “a loaf of bread is, like, $8.”

Who knows when the collective travel unconscious picked up this particular factoid - maybe in an alternate-1980s, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen - but it’s a monstrous falsehood: America is unquestionably, eye-wateringly cheap.

But what was thrilling on my first journey to the States in late-2009, with our dollar buying about USD$0.86c, paradoxically feels alarming on my third trip, with the exchange rate even “better” now, hovering just under USD$1.10.

Great for holiday shopping, but alarming because thinking a little more deeply about buying that large punnet of organic blueberries for a steal at $2.99 leads you to wonder exactly who IS making any money over here.

It was reported this year that the wealthiest Americans - the fabled “1%” - take in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income; “In terms of wealth rather than income,” the report in Vanity Fair expanded, “the top 1 percent control 40 percent.”

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I hate this dance we do.

It starts with something small. Something barely noticeable. Sometimes it even masks itself as something positive. Like maybe you suddenly decided to clean the house from top to bottom. To the untrained eye that’s a good thing. But this isn’t my first rodeo and I know better. I know this was a compulsion you couldn’t control. An imperative mandated by the demons that echo through the corridors of your mind until you comply. It would be fine if you wanted to make the house sparkle, but that’s not the case. You HAD to do it.

I try to shake it off by rationalizing that at least it wasn’t something harmful. Like the time I came home from work and noticed your swollen hand. You told me you got so angry you just started punching the bedroom door. Nothing specific caused your anger. Which is scary. And I won’t even get into the senseless arguments we have on an increasing basis.

Some days I wake up bleary-eyed, with the idea that the nation has begun a headlong slide backwards into the hungry, toothy maw of a new Dark Age. I would not raise an eyebrow were I to switch on to ABC News 24 to find that legislation has been introduced into Parliament calling for the destruction of witches through a National Ducking Stool Network. It’s a creeping miasma, driven by gut feeling and a fair whack of fear. Scientific fact is a matter of opinion, Occam’s razor ditched in favour of Abbott’s fluffer. A nation loping down a rocky trail towards isolation, insularity and ignorance.

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Spouse so enjoys the currency of a dessert crafted by his own apt hands, trumping the meals we enjoy with family and friends. Some may call it overly competitive, I call it his perfectionist streak and a penchant to thrill. Most recently his infamously rich and luxurious renditions of Zabaglione have given way to perfecting the Tarte Tatin.

Tarte Tatin is essentially an upside - down apple pie. It was immortalized by Curnonsky (Prince of Gastronomes) who named it Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin, and according to Larousse Gastronomique, was first served in Paris at Maxim’s. It was created, according to legend, in error by Caroline Tatin at the hotel restaurant she ran with her sister Stephanie, in Lamotte-Beuvron, France, around 1898. The taste of caramel and the flavour of apples cooked in butter is absorbed by the pastry that covers the fruit during cooking and subsequently becomes the base of the tart when the cooked dish is inverted. Glistening, caramelized apples, the colour of rich butterscotch nestle in their syrupy sauce on top of the pastry.

…So succinctly said the late André Tchelistcheff, the pint-sized (all 150 centimetres of him) dean of American winemakers, and those words, to many winemakers, still ring true today. Other grape varieties have bad raps (Viognier translated from Latin means ‘road to hell’) but Pinot Noir is the proverbial Holy Grail and Hell for lots of winemakers, making them jump through a series of hoops in the vineyard and the winery, vintage after vintage, teasing and tantalizing and torturing them and giving them hope that they are iterating closer and closer to that ephemeral, mysterious elegance that eludes so many. It is a bastard grape - from start (propagation – there are over 1,000 clones versus 12 for Cab Sav) to finish (wine making and ageing) and holds a disproportionate level of importance and reputation in the Australian wine scene given its relatively tiny position, amounting to less than 1% of wine crushed each year.

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