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
The current debate about films too horrific for young eyes and the ensuing censorship wrangles takes me back to the movie days when, the most daring cinematic ploy was the occasional glimpse of Alice Faye’s knee or later, the long, lissom legs of Betty Grable. But the most dreaded occurrence at the country cinema where …
The news that fat men may lose their sensual charm has made my eyes bulge as well as the rest of me. The statement at a Melbourne conference titled Towards a Slimmer Australia was made by a stern and well-meaning doctor who said that obese men could be romantically impeded. This brought local sniggers and …
West Wyalong is in flames. Hay is clutching at its last straw. Motels are reeling. Draw together, defenceless ones. The grandchildren are coming. Everywhere relatives are putting on their best face. Welcoming banners are being erected. Warning signs are in place. The toilet wall awaits its graffiti. The bathroom is ready to become a flooded …
They’re calling me Max the Minder down our street. Why? Because I recently became that overwrought human being, the home minder for those away on holidays the sad stayput who waters other people’s potplants, who presides over pet food, who is savaged by goldfish while the care- free owners are living it up from Semaphore …
I must confess that I read with trembling hand and twitching eyelid that story in Two AM (10/2/ 84) about the TV show that turned down an offer of dishwashers as prizes because they were too sexist. This raises questions about the whole sexist apparatus of the kitchen and the role-reversal situation in which I …
Continue reading “Crackpot set for breakdown in role-reversal kitchen”
The country carnival cricket will soon be with us, bringing its adherents to the luxury of turf wickets and wall-to- wall grass. They’ll come from country grounds of questionable surface, surrounded by oceans of straw. Harvest-hardened hands will grip the Gray-Nicholls, the Gunn and Moore, the County and the Slazenger and all the other great …
Christmas time, says my Oldest Country Cousin, always reminds him of an old strainer, fencing post that stood at the corner of the homestead property and acted as a letterbox. At first it was a totally primitive system, the mail being left under a piece of limestone rock on the top of the post by …
People, now that I am supposedly retired, keep asking me what I do with my time. In fact people, who are still working, will hurdle moving cars, leap over newsstands and cross dangerous streets just to ask me accusingly: “What are you doing in town?” as if I was unlawfully on the asphalted premises of …
When Norman Hanlin saw the great masts and yards of the squarerigger Herzogin Cecilie soaring above in the wharf sheds at Port Adelaide as he rode by in the bus in 1933, he knew he must make a closer inspection. So he climbed off the open-topped, double-decker bus at the next stop and hastened to …
IT WAS A meeting of metal dinosaurs, a congregation of great grain gobblers, of lumbering, snouted machines. For one fearful moment I expected them to pick me up, winnow me from my flesh, granulate my bones and send me off to the silo. We were all gathered where the barley grows heavy of head, delicate …