Rally shows city no hotbed of intolerance Authors playing cuckoo
ON SATURDAY, about 50 people attended the Reclaim Australia Rally in Townsville.
The rally went off without an incident, unlike similar events held in the capital cities where there was violence between the Reclaim Australia and No Room for Racism protesters.
By any measure, the Townsville event attracted a poor turnout and was a lot less than the nearly 1000 protesters who turned up to the same rally in April.
The numbers were also significantly less than rallies in Mackay and Rockhampton.
The Reclaim Australia protests are centred around opposition to the spread of Islam in society, with proponents wanting to ban halal food and the burka.
City leaders say the low turnout is a sign that Townsville is a multicultural and tolerant city, with the vast majority of residents rejecting such sentiments.
It’s hard to disagree with this point of view.
Yet there are still some people in Australia’s capital cities who like to paint a different picture of Townsville.
Who can forget Melbourne shock jock Neil Mitchell last year questioning whether North Queenslanders were rednecks during his radio show?
Some of the most violent clashes between protesters occurred in Mitchell’s hometown Melbourne during the weekend.
Meanwhile, Townsville was a picture of peace and tolerance. Assaults on police must stop MORE than three police officers a week are being assaulted across the region.
In just the past month, more than a dozen of our city’s finest have been seriously assaulted across the Townsville police district.
The men and women who sign up to protect us should be able to go to work each day without the fear of being assaulted hanging over them. Sadly, this is not the case. The perpetrators of this violence should feel the full force of the law. LAST year produced global celebrations to commemorate 450 years since the birth of the son of a glove- maker. The actor, who got bit parts in the Globe Theatre, was without a patron and classed as a vagabond.
He had to supplement his income with odd jobs despite the fact that several history plays later attributed to him had been published. It was only after he received a mysterious source of income he could buy shares in Black Friars Playhouse.
After he returned to Stratford he became a moneylender, grain merchant and property developer. His original monument was the enshrined bust of a man leaning on a sack of grain. At some point this was transformed into a writing desk with parchment and quill.
It is ludicrous to believe that recent discoveries like an annotated Bible or an engraving on a book on botany have anything to do with the man, whose name has been found only on commercial and legal documents, including an arrest warrant.
I have waited in vain for acknowledgment of the man, who died 400 years ago on July 10, and was perhaps the world’s greatest playwright and poet. The costume drama Anonymous with its American bias of the Earl of Oxford as the Shakespeare candidate got it totally wrong.
The title is ironic because almost a dozen anonymous plays have now been shown to be not only part of the Shakespeare canon, but the work of the Member of Parliament and foreign diplomat, Sir Henry Neville.
These apocryphal plays match the political themes, the vocabulary and image clusters of many of the traditional ones, as well as tie in with the annotated sources and biographical details of the man whose name was encoded in the Dedication to the Sonnets.
It would appear that the most famous playwright today who decided to write under a nom de plume is J. K. Rowling. After her failure to gain commercial success for The Cuckoo’s Calling as Robert Galbraith, she has gone on to write a play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: thus keeping her promise never to write another Harry Potter novel!