Image         Jack Charles born at the Cummeragunja Mission, NSW in 1943

This is Jack Charles. With a face older than time and a gaze of steady seeing, alas he died recently.

His life was crammed to spillage with criminality, art and struggle, he spent most of it mutely accommodating the wrongs inflicted on him by the institutions of his day: that is to say the system.

Eastern Australia has become an inferno of bush fire, vapourizing the trappings of Western industrialization and culture: it must be excruciating to watch, terrifying to live through.

At Mallacoota on the tip of promontory along the coast of New South Wales, people were driven by fire into the sea where they waited for the wind to change direction.

The last twenty years, which began with such hope and fizzing excitement of gorgeous potential, have not ventilated thinking with the steady wisdom one might have hoped.

Rather, the fresh Millennium is a pock-marked portrait of our excesses. These two decades comprise the Globe’s picture in the attic.

A Criticality is the term for the worst event imaginable. We’ve arrived at a new term: criticalities.

At the time of writing, the fireworks have just leapt from Sydney Harbour’s bridge. Wouldn’t it be ravishing if all peoples took a moment to gaze into their hearts and act on what they see?

Shall we and Twenty Twenties be kinder to one another?