Sunday Bloody Sunday: To the Sydney Opera House’s Bowels (the drama theatre) to watch a very Melbourne play, Sunday. An artistic muse and social radical from the heart of the Melbourne establismnet Sunday Reed have always been a figure on the fringe of stories that have long fascinated Obadiah. The Ern Malley literary hoax, the fake poems written as a protest against modernist poetry by two famous poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart, suckered Sunday Reed’s husband John who co-published then with Max Harris a storied Adelaide figure. (In his callow days, Obadiah would venture into the Mary Martin bookstore where Max Harris sat like a Buddha surrounded by the books).
Note to self, keep the nostalgia down to a dull roar in this column.
More central to the play is the creation of artist Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series during the famous menage à trois at the Reed’s Heide estate.
The first half of the play is a frolic, with the wild, passionate Sunday behaving more like a person called ‘saturday night’. All rebellion, defiance of conventional morals of suffocating Melbourne society, all transgression. After the interval, the play grows darker, as Nolan breaks free of the Heide scene, and Sunady is bereft – here, paradise on the Yarra is ruined. Tragedy – not covered in the play follows.
Obadiah is strongly tempted to see it as a parable of Romans 6:23 – but in this play, there is no free gift of life to redeem the consequences of over-adventurous lives
###
A Good Weekend profile of former AFL coach Danielle Laidley recalls a funny nickname: “a coach (nicknamed “The Bible” because she was so hard to read).”
###
A first pod recommendation: Local songwriting outfit City Alight gets an adulatory episode of Rececorded, a US podcast about Christian music. How an Australian Church Is Changing Christian Songwriting is well worth a listen, even if you might not be a fan of The Gospel Coalition. Put that prejudice aside (if you have it) because this is a well-crafted telling of modest local heroes. “About 10 years ago, a church in Australia noticed these problems. They tried a different songwriting process. It was slow and clunky and never should have worked—and yet it did.
“Odds are, you’ve sung their good theology in your church, in your car, or in your kitchen.”
Why has Obadiah not been into recommending pods – not sure, he tends to listen to non-Christian ones.
###
But here’s another: Aussie-in-England Glen Scrivener has produced what many regards as the best response to the resignation of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. (The “many” includes astute Anglican commenters like Michael Jensen and Ian Paul.) The archbishop resigned following the publication of a detailed inquiry, called the Makin Review, into the sadistic activities of an evangelical leader and barrister, John Smyth QC, and a decades-long cover-up by evangelicals in the Church of England.
Here’s a bit of Scrivener: “We have certainly commented on Justin Welby’s Theology of Marriage, but is that the note to strike at this hour? So, some see the issue as conservative theology. ome see the issue as liberal theology. .. Justin Welby has told us why he has resigned. He might have taken far too long about that. He certainly has taken far too long about addressing victims. He certainly took far too long to address the abuse of John Smyth, but he has at least now honourably resigned and he has told us where our focus should be. …
“Our focus should be the cause for which the Archbishop resigned, which is the heinous abuses of John Smyth and the long-maintained conspiracy of silence that allowed it. If right now you’re choosing to foreground Justin Welby’s politics or even his theology or his managerial style within the Church of England, or the fact that he didn’t sufficiently save the parish or whatever it is, all those causes are good and right causes.
“I have views on all these things, but those are discussions for another day. Our focus should be the Makin review, which was the resigning matter that Justin Welby acted upon. To make this about something else misses the point of the resignation. It dishonours the victims. It fails to learn the lessons that the Makin review wants to teach us, and it is engaging in the kind of tribalism that has led to this long conspiracy of silence.
“Tribalism is precisely the dynamic that enables abusers because we circle the waggons against our guy and we consider that all the problems are in the other tribe. This kind of tribalism is exactly what it allowed John Smyth to abuse. When people say that Justin had to go because of X, Y, and Z when X, Y, and Z are the hobby horses they had been riding for years. Anyway, all that proves is that they are tribally motivated.”
The week’s reading 1: “It’s still true. The body of the church reinforces its individual parts when they are weak, including me, just as when I have a toothache on the right side of my mouth, I am prepared to let the left side take over the chewing for a while. Often I have felt this strength of being “carried along” like a small boat in a flowing current by the community of faith.”
Luci Shaw, writing in the essay collection Nouwen Then, Zondervan 1999.
Letter from America: Reader John Siegrist has given The Other Cheek a picture of the US from a native American. The parts of the letter that resonate most with Obadiah are the idea that Trump was able to get working-class support as some form of protest vote, and that the Democrat party has had especially bad ways of choosing candidates that have contributed to election outcomes.
Hi John,
You posted an opinion piece recently by Matt Garvin, where he tries to make sense of the US election of Donald Trump. I can understand how it is very difficult for an Aussie to try and do this.
The way I explain Donald Trump to my Australian friends is that he is an almost perfect protest vote. The Republican Party has been making promises to its voters going back to George Bush Senior in 1988 and then promptly not keeping them. Additionally, they pay lip service to the real issues Republicans are concerned with and either work against those issues or do little to nothing to block the Democrats from doing the exact opposite.
Then around 2008, the TEA Party was started by a number of rank and file Republicans who had had enough of the high taxation and terrible regulatory burden being put in place by the US government. The Republican Party leaders responded by declaring war on their own voters and going out of their way to lose elections rather than let TEA Party aligned Republicans get into office.
When Trump came along 8 years later, the Democrats went wild against him as did those traitorous Republicans who had just backstabbed their own voters. His list of enemies was the biggest endorsement he could have received. When he went on to show that was actually willing to stand up and fight against both the Democratic Left and the false Republicans on the Right, that sealed the deal.
An amazing thing happened when Trump took office: he actually set out to and was very successful at keeping his campaign promises. He did this better than any other president I recall seeing in my lifetime.
Because the US economy was much better during Trump’s presidency than either Obama’s who preceded him or Biden who followed after, he was an obvious choice in this last 2024 election. The US economy has been pretty bad and it has affected enough people from both sides to attract a sizeable number of Democratic supporters.
On the Democratic side, don’t forget that the party has recently been alienating its voter base. In 2016, they used a corrupt system to nominate Hillary Clinton as the candidate over the popular choice of Bernie Sanders. In 2020, Biden was more or less selected as a compromise candidate no one really wanted even though he was far behind the front runners. In 2024, Kamala Harris was installed even though she wasn’t a candidate in the Democratic primaries. By ignoring the will of their voters, the Democrats basically gave their people many reasons to start looking for alternatives. And it seems many of them also found Trump to be a great protest vote against their party leaders or they simply sat out the election.
Anyhow, apologies for the long note. Hopefully it helps with making sense of the crazy politics you’re seeing in the US.
God bless you,
John Siegrist