Unpredictable World of Bluest Mountains

"I have become convinced that movie people and politicians spring from the same DNA. They are both unpredictable, sometimes glamorous, usually in crisis (imagined or otherwise), addicted to power, anxious to please, always on stage, hooked on applause, enticed by publicity, always reading from scripts written by someone else, constantly taking the public pulse, never really certain, except publicly."
~ Jack Valenti (quoted in Burton Paretti, The Leading Man: Hollywood and the Presidential Image)

NSW businessmen and politicians sure can pack a room. Former Labor MP Eddie Obeid and his family left a smell like a "dead cat" on a failed coal mining deal, a businessman has told a NSW corruption inquiry. John Kinghorn, the founder of RAMS Homeloans, also told the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) on Wednesday he was so "furious" a director of a mining company was querying the $500 million venture he wanted to "chop his head off"; New South Wales Labor minister Luke Foley has vented anger towards former colleagues for their demonstration of "shameless contempt" for environmental protection and coal exploration licence approvals Foley said the "cowboys were in control" and the NSW Labor government declared itself "open for business" after the departure of former Premier Bob Carr Google on Corruption ; Tripodi unaware of any corrupt activity; Transcripts of ICAC

[I]f there was an age when "fiction was king,” surely it was the Victorian era, when writers like Dickens and George Eliot and (in a very different American context) Harriet Beecher Stowe were treated as profound social critics and moral sages. Almost all major novelists since then have at least occasionally suffered from the feeling that they came on the scene too late.

Capturing Sunday Conversations at Boronia House of Bluest Mountains ...