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- Aug 11, 2005
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And from Australias best journalists, The Chasers....
And among the swastikas, a little Aussie flag was flying...
Wednesday, 22 February 2006
One of the great joys of being an Australia living abroad is basking in the reflected glory of our countrymen and women who have made a name for themselves in the big, wide world.
We all walked a little bit taller when Germaine Greer entered the UK's Celebrity Big Brother. We love it when Warney's text messages are front-page news. When Peter Andre got it on with Jordan (owner of the most famous silicon breasts in the UK), we thought it rocked. We still treasure the memories of Pauline Hanson making front-page news around the world ... oh, how now we laugh at how busy we all were having to ‘explain' that one to a curious world. And let's not forget a personal favourite of mine: electing the Queen. Nice one!
NewsJunkies everywhere, we have a new national champion to personify our dreams and to globalise our ambitions. Take a bow, Lady Michele Renouf – former society wife, beauty queen, academic, self-styled "anti-Zionist", socialite, Australian and moron.
Students of history will know that this is the same Lady Renouf who gave Sir Frank "the Bank" Renouf, the New Zealand multi-millionaire financier his third, and final, spin through the matrimonial wringer. (He later described the marriage as a "nasty accident", which isn't very chivalrous of him, but does tell you quite a lot about the sort of accidents that can happen to you when you're a multi-millionaire financier). Frankie flicked her when he found out that she was the daughter of a truck-driver from The Entrance, and not a Russian noblewoman as she had claimed. Men are bastards, eh?
Our Michele has made a big splash at the David Irving trial in Austria. (For those not following the story, David Irving, the reviled author of Hitler's War and other works suggesting that the slaughter of Jews by the Nazi regime "never happened", was arrested and has been standing trial in Austria for denying the Holocaust and glorifying the Nazi regime, which is a crime in Austria).
Although billed by his supporters as a rousing defence of free speech, David Irving's denial of himself as a Holocaust-denier turned out to be nothing more than a fairly open plea for mercy by simply retracting the claims that had made him a darling of gilded racists of Lady M's circle. Far from ‘defending' his right to air his views - on the record for decades - Irving entered a plea of guilty, said he'd had a change of heart and begged for mercy. You see, the amazing thing is that it turns out (he told the court) that papers written by Adolf Eichmann (one of the architects of the Final Solution) persuaded him that perhaps there were gas chambers in Nazi camps, after all. You can only assume that if only Irving had realised in 1989 that these "fresh documents" (now over 50 years old) changed the situation somewhat, we might have all been spared a fair bit of bother.
(On the other hand, I am not sure that Austria comes out of the whole affair all that well either - Irving's arrest warrant was 16 years old. But a ‘message had to be sent', declared the judge. Hmmm. Who exactly are the Austrian authorities trying to convince? The former Nazi satellite state and home of Jorg Haider and the modern far-right doth protest too much, methinks!)
Nor were his defence team exactly in a combatative mood. When your own legal team describe you as "not a professional historian ... just a lonely, abused 67-year old who has said some horrible things," a lesser man might have thought that things were looking bad. But undeterred, Irving strode into court brandishing a copy of his own book, Hitler's War, and described the proposition that he might be jailed as "stupid". He got three years.
But enough about Irving – we're here for the crazy Aussie chick.
Cue Lady Renouf and the waiting press. "I am here," she announced grandly, with all the dignity and gravitas that goes with being an ageing, racist, slightly ditzy gold-digger, "to free David Irving and to free Austria from these totalitarian laws". Flanked by the standard-issue "unnamed men" wearing matching flag-pins, she knew her place, her moment and her mission: she was there to stand up for Queen and Country (and David and Adolf).
Irving, she argued, was "standing up to the Zionists". Most fetchingly of all, she demanded – nay, decreed! – that the "so-called Holocaust victims to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas". The press corps took this in their stride. (By this point, most of them had managed to download the coverage of her previous outings, including her deriding them as a "Jewish cabal" in 2001). One young and slightly over-earnest Austrian journalist remonstrated with her, but without much enthusiasm. The rest looked at their feet. A moment of awkward silence passed.
Now, standing on the cold paved steps of a building in which Nazis famously beheaded resistence fighters, begging the assembled media pack for a chance to rifle through the remains of the victims of death camps to check whether you can still smell the Zyklon B, is an odd place for a former Miss Newcastle to have ended up. But Fate makes fools of us all – and Fate has pretty self-evidently made a fool of Our Michele.
Perhaps, in her head, this was a rousing call to arms. (You heard it here first: Gentlemen, grab your shovels - we ride for Auschwitz!). To the rest of us, I gotta say, this just sounded like one of the last stops on a downward spiral. Join the dots. She's in the news, she's "controversial", she says stupid, hateful, provocative things. With, I must point out, a faint hint of an Australian accent.
Can an appearance on a reality TV show be far off?
And among the swastikas, a little Aussie flag was flying...
Wednesday, 22 February 2006
One of the great joys of being an Australia living abroad is basking in the reflected glory of our countrymen and women who have made a name for themselves in the big, wide world.
We all walked a little bit taller when Germaine Greer entered the UK's Celebrity Big Brother. We love it when Warney's text messages are front-page news. When Peter Andre got it on with Jordan (owner of the most famous silicon breasts in the UK), we thought it rocked. We still treasure the memories of Pauline Hanson making front-page news around the world ... oh, how now we laugh at how busy we all were having to ‘explain' that one to a curious world. And let's not forget a personal favourite of mine: electing the Queen. Nice one!
NewsJunkies everywhere, we have a new national champion to personify our dreams and to globalise our ambitions. Take a bow, Lady Michele Renouf – former society wife, beauty queen, academic, self-styled "anti-Zionist", socialite, Australian and moron.
Students of history will know that this is the same Lady Renouf who gave Sir Frank "the Bank" Renouf, the New Zealand multi-millionaire financier his third, and final, spin through the matrimonial wringer. (He later described the marriage as a "nasty accident", which isn't very chivalrous of him, but does tell you quite a lot about the sort of accidents that can happen to you when you're a multi-millionaire financier). Frankie flicked her when he found out that she was the daughter of a truck-driver from The Entrance, and not a Russian noblewoman as she had claimed. Men are bastards, eh?
Our Michele has made a big splash at the David Irving trial in Austria. (For those not following the story, David Irving, the reviled author of Hitler's War and other works suggesting that the slaughter of Jews by the Nazi regime "never happened", was arrested and has been standing trial in Austria for denying the Holocaust and glorifying the Nazi regime, which is a crime in Austria).
Although billed by his supporters as a rousing defence of free speech, David Irving's denial of himself as a Holocaust-denier turned out to be nothing more than a fairly open plea for mercy by simply retracting the claims that had made him a darling of gilded racists of Lady M's circle. Far from ‘defending' his right to air his views - on the record for decades - Irving entered a plea of guilty, said he'd had a change of heart and begged for mercy. You see, the amazing thing is that it turns out (he told the court) that papers written by Adolf Eichmann (one of the architects of the Final Solution) persuaded him that perhaps there were gas chambers in Nazi camps, after all. You can only assume that if only Irving had realised in 1989 that these "fresh documents" (now over 50 years old) changed the situation somewhat, we might have all been spared a fair bit of bother.
(On the other hand, I am not sure that Austria comes out of the whole affair all that well either - Irving's arrest warrant was 16 years old. But a ‘message had to be sent', declared the judge. Hmmm. Who exactly are the Austrian authorities trying to convince? The former Nazi satellite state and home of Jorg Haider and the modern far-right doth protest too much, methinks!)
Nor were his defence team exactly in a combatative mood. When your own legal team describe you as "not a professional historian ... just a lonely, abused 67-year old who has said some horrible things," a lesser man might have thought that things were looking bad. But undeterred, Irving strode into court brandishing a copy of his own book, Hitler's War, and described the proposition that he might be jailed as "stupid". He got three years.
But enough about Irving – we're here for the crazy Aussie chick.
Cue Lady Renouf and the waiting press. "I am here," she announced grandly, with all the dignity and gravitas that goes with being an ageing, racist, slightly ditzy gold-digger, "to free David Irving and to free Austria from these totalitarian laws". Flanked by the standard-issue "unnamed men" wearing matching flag-pins, she knew her place, her moment and her mission: she was there to stand up for Queen and Country (and David and Adolf).
Irving, she argued, was "standing up to the Zionists". Most fetchingly of all, she demanded – nay, decreed! – that the "so-called Holocaust victims to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas". The press corps took this in their stride. (By this point, most of them had managed to download the coverage of her previous outings, including her deriding them as a "Jewish cabal" in 2001). One young and slightly over-earnest Austrian journalist remonstrated with her, but without much enthusiasm. The rest looked at their feet. A moment of awkward silence passed.
Now, standing on the cold paved steps of a building in which Nazis famously beheaded resistence fighters, begging the assembled media pack for a chance to rifle through the remains of the victims of death camps to check whether you can still smell the Zyklon B, is an odd place for a former Miss Newcastle to have ended up. But Fate makes fools of us all – and Fate has pretty self-evidently made a fool of Our Michele.
Perhaps, in her head, this was a rousing call to arms. (You heard it here first: Gentlemen, grab your shovels - we ride for Auschwitz!). To the rest of us, I gotta say, this just sounded like one of the last stops on a downward spiral. Join the dots. She's in the news, she's "controversial", she says stupid, hateful, provocative things. With, I must point out, a faint hint of an Australian accent.
Can an appearance on a reality TV show be far off?