The Bassett family site
Maxwell Edgar Fatchen, AM (3 August 1920 – 14 October 2012) was an Australian children’s writer and journalist and a cousin; see https://www.bassetts.com.au/tree/index.php?route=%2Ftree%2Ftree%2Fbassett-sandry%2Findividual%2FX8271%2FMaxwell-Edgar-Fatchen
A Sydney pest controller has claimed a world record for spending four hours in a tank with 105 deadly funnel-web spiders. This has caused an immediate surge of interest down our way and challenges are coming fast from Cockroach Corner, where I live in constant peril For Instance, there was my sojourn in our garden …
A day (at the beach) in the life of a grandfather… The request always comes on one of those summer days that a grandfather loves—the air-conditioner humming softly, cricket in full flight on the telly, and the head laid back on the chair. Enter the beautiful apparition of a daughter-in-law as welcome as the witches …
Other people get publicity for their overseas trips, but my wife is disappointed about the low PR our last excursion generated. It’s all contained in her “My Trip” journal, some 180 piping-hot-prose pages of the devastating doings of two Antipodeans who never turned at single head in Piccadilly and weren’t even worth a horse’s snort …
Nobody has thought of offering an alternative Games site out in the old paddock by the schoolground where I won the obstacle race 50 summers ago. Sport, like everything else, has become so sophisticated: where is the egg-and-spoon race where one cracked more than a smile? The bags of fun in the sack race; the …
It was described as a small, energetic low, moving to the north east. It suddenly appeared and surprised us all It surprised the slow, basking sea under the influence of that climatic layabout, the slow-moving high. It unshackled the sky. It fell like tears of contrition for the dry spell, it fell on parched shrubs …
Getting people off in trains and aircraft has become rather an art with me. Indeed. I make the modest boast that none of my people has missed a train or aircraft yet, although I have reduced those concerned to a mass of nerves, to say nothing of an uproar of shouted hysteria. In my spectacular …
Ever since my wife read the story from Gill Martin in London (The Advertiser, 11/10/83) that courtliness and romancing are back in vogue I have been told to lift my game. In other words, more hand-kissing and less finger-licking How about a few nice compliments? Why not a stroll in the moonlit garden? Why not, …
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We are in a much-surveyed society. People are always trying to bring us down to ticks in a column; to put us among the percentages of affirmative or negative; to gallop us willy-nilly into some poll or other. Strangely, they have passed me by; I have been left unsurveyed, uninterrogated and no- body has asked …
***INCOMPLETE*** (Des Colquhoun AM: 1931-2005 was a journalist colleague of Max and co-columnist at The Advertiser) Oh, capricious fate. On a day The Advertiser is in high spirits over its part in freeing Edward Splatt, we lose some of our heart. Max Fatchen retires today. And The Advertiser will never be the same again. A …
The elimination of pronouns can, in some cases, result in repetition of the subject or object to an extent that the drafting can become awkward or convoluted in form and can also cause particular problems in regard to the use of reflexive verbs as it is impossible to have a reflexive verb without a reflexive …