Around the World in 80 Days with Brad Hogg
The original movie adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, with George Jetson as the intrepid leader and, as a narrative device, making references to Aussie landmarks around the world.
2 July 1986 – Illawarra Mercury
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he (Seamus Heaney) writes of the magnificent space spent travelling to around the world. In 1965 Heaney celebrated his 80th birthday and wrote this poem
Sunny days and dreary nights.
Where the one car is in a field far away
Are the other Australians in buildings;
Halfway around the world they visit some?
“Some don’t stop. Some stop and think about it,
Others just get started.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t see why/That you drive,” Don Quixote says, as he approaches Spain, “in that awful land/Surely, nobody who sees/Blessings on the day to day is at all surprised
To seek the land that is – and to again find
Not even a sight or a note but certainty
Without an end place or dream.”
“Sometimes it’s not that long,” a teary old man, walking in Paris, the Rhone river rushing past, tells You Can’t Always Get What You Want. “But on others it’s so quick/You’ve done your thing and it’s done.”
Paul Keating, the far from encouraging predecessor of Julia Gillard, took issue with Jeton’s selection of Australia as a world destination.
“I think that you send very, very mixed messages when you make a comment like that,” Mr Keating told Ben Fordham in an interview for the ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1987. “I mean we’re not an island that ends with an asterisk. We’re a major player in the globe.”
One wonders if Julia Gillard’s out-of-office-for-now marathon may yet send another long pause to Julia Gillard…