As a Yank, I was under the wrong impression that the only traces of Tasmanians were the children of comfort women kidnapped and raped to serve sealers, whalers and fishermen. I should have known, rapes were very common among the conquerors and slavers in the States, even to the present day.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010-A Personal Comment--Part 1

I first came across Thomas Hardy in grades 11 and 12 in Burlington Ontario. His novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were the novels we studied in those last two years at Burlington Central High School. I was a good student, near the top of my class, but I remember finding Hardy: heavy, cumbersome, difficult reading, although nowhere near as difficult as the Shakespeare play we also studied each year. I did not come across Hardy again until some thirty years later in the early 1990s when I taught matriculation English at a technical and further education college in Perth Western Australia. Again, it was Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

And so it was, when I saw this novel brought to life by some of Britain’s best young acting talent, filmed in the U.K. in 2008 and shown on ABC1(1) on the last two Sunday evenings, I could not help but reflect and so wrote this prose-poem. Greek humanism in its optimistic and pessimistic, cynical and skeptical, forms and not Abrahamic revelation, in the end, stands out in Hardy. It is a road I would have gone down myself had I not discovered a new Flame-Voice and Its extreme solutions, a new prophet placed in Israel’s oven where the heat consumes everything but compassion.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1) ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010 and(2)Roger White, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, Oxford, 1992, p.102 and p.97.

How could one forget your words:
happiness is but one occasional....
episode in a general drama of pain!
No wonder I found your ponderous
descriptions tested my patience back
at the age of 16 when the oils of youth
were bulging out seeking to grease and
light my life beyond that world of sport,
school, girls and endlessly familiar stuff
that filled my life and days way-far-then.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010-A Personal Comment--Part 2--Here is the rest of that prose-poem.-Ron in Tasmania

school, girls and endlessly familiar stuff
that filled my life and days way-far-then.

Your reputation for extreme pessimism,
your pessimistic pantheism, precedence
of feeling over thought.....religious and
metaphysical uncertainties...a nostalgia
for the things of everyday, a longing for
lost faith, seeing change as superficial in
your world—its doomed stronghold of
ancient ways of life, morbid in a way, but
also sublimely compassionate: your many-
sided personality, Thomas, very attractive.

Your sense of dignity, of awe and a power
of endurance in a timeless universe: what a
grand and strange place which we glimpse
only momentarily through the accidents and
coincidences, the tragic fate and a series of
kicks on the long road, long haul to disaster:
no light at the end of your tunnel, eh, Thomas?

Ron Price
16 April 2010

It's perplexing that Rodney Croome hasn't mentioned that,
like his fellow Tasmanians Peter Sculthorpe and Graeme Murphy,
William Buckley was a lavender laddy,
as are nearly all famous Tasmanian ex-pats.

What a strange thing to claim Proxy. Ex-pat lavender laddies like Errol Flynn, David Boon and Ricky Ponting?

Steven F,
I didn't claim it:
http://www.rodneycroome.id.au/comments/645_0_1_0_C/

If it's true, then William Buckley provides yet another role model for young Tasmanians coming out.

Proxy,

It wasn't me who claimed Graham Murphy was gay. He was listed on page 66 of the December 1997 edition of the Australian gay magazine Outrage, as one of Australia's 143 "power gays", alongside Robin Archer, Christopher Pearson, Bob Brown, Robert Dessaix, Monique Brumby.

I fail to see what this has to do with my argument about Tasmania and Victoria. Address the issue please.

The issue is that you lack credibility.
You publicly "outed" Graeme Murphy and Peter Sculthorpe,
assuming them to be homosexual when they weren't
Even now you can't get "Graham"s name right.
You falsely claim that 11% of Tasmanian youth are something other than heterosexual.
This lie is perpetuated by otherwise intelligent schoolteachers in Tasmania who are somehow under your thrall.
Thus, you push falsehoods to newspapers and you are instrumental in pushing falsehoods to children.
Someone needs to call you "out".
On the plus side, maybe you were instrumental in Graeme Murphy and 40 year partner Janet Vernon getting married just 5 months after you "outed" him.

Proxy,

The 11% figure comes from a survey by La Trobe University of students in secondary schools across the nation including three schools in Tasmania. It was the students themselves who claimed to be not heterosexual. I didn't make this claim for them.

Anyway, thanks for elaborating on your views. I can see now that your concern is denigrating gays, not defending the truth, and certainly not progressing arguments about Australian history.

You're not "progressing arguments about Australian history".
You have some sort of victim complex which can, fortunately for you, be parlayed into a career in this day and age.
Homosexuals are victims of "homophobes";
Tasmanians are victims of Melbournian revisionist historians;
etc, etc (I'm sure you can expand this list).
We're all victims!
Except white males of course, unless they're "gay".
I wonder how many taxpayers it takes to support each fully fledged member of the victim industry?

Rodney, "Proxy" is just the latest sockpuppet of a serial troll at OLO whose previous incarnations include "KMB" and "HermanYutic".

Homophobia is just one facet of his bigotry. I recommend asphyxiation via lack of textual oxygen.

Interesting article, by the way :)

Proxy, My point was Victorians are the victims of their own denial.

CJ, Thanks for the advice. That'll be my last word to whomever this Proxy person may be.

CJ,
Thank you for the implied compliment that I'm multi-faceted.
You've made my day.
No need to reply.