We had wondered what form God's wrath at the terrible and sinful Brexit decision would take and we only had to wait until Tuesday morning (AEST) to find out.
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The Almighty's intervention, for Iceland and against England at Euro 2016, is the only possible explanation for the supernatural 2-1 triumph of Iceland (population 350,000) over England (population 53 million).
God will have noticed, seething, that 52 per cent of English voters chose to leave the EU. It would have been nice if He had taken the feelings of the other 48 per cent of the English into account but as we know from the Old Testament the Almighty's wrath is never very surgical and nuanced. Perhaps 48 per cent of the citizens of Sodom were good folk but with fire and brimstone God blotted the whole city out.
The English press is unforgiving when an England soccer team underperforms like this. When England lost to unfancied Sweden in 1992 The Sun created the all-time-great headline "Swedes 2 Turnips 1".
Meanwhile here in these colonies the despair some of us feel over Brexit begins to be replaced by stiff-upper-lipped resolve. A very pro European Union reader has written and sent us his setting of Gloria Gaynor's 1978 pick-yourself-up-off-the-floor anthem I Will Survive.
At first I was afraid,
I was petrified.
Kept thinking I could never live
Without the EU by my side.
But then I spent so many nights
Thinking how England had gone wrong
That I grew strong,
And I learnt how to get along.
And so we're out,
In outer space,
And even "leavers" walk around
With a sad look upon their face.
We should have changed that stupid vote,
We should have shown UKIP the door,
If we had thought for just one second
That those fools would make the law.
WE WILL SURVIVE.
It is just as well for the Australian Sex Party that God is distracted by events in Europe. The party's delightfully blasphemous election ad song and dance video The Vatican Can (praised in Tuesday's column) will leave God quite irate if ever He notices it on YouTube. youtube.com/watch?v=rCDGMbPqNb4
Our picture is a still from the video starring Ashley Knowles as a very camp singing and dancing priest cavorting with an ensemble of cheerful choirboys. If Knowles doesn't get an Aria Music Award for this we will know the Vatican has intervened with its usual influential stealth.
In 1972, Sammy Davis Jr had a number one hit with The Candy Man Can. He is said to have hated the song's saccharine words and so probably he would prefer the Sex Party's version. It makes scathing criticisms of the Vatican's attitudes, including its forbidding of gay marriage.
"Who controls the weddings/So gays can't say I do/Blames it on a book and a 2000-year-old Jew?/The Vati-can, ooh the Vatican can."
Worried about attracting God's glowering gaze we hurry away from this controversial work of art, The Vatican Can, to a sober and profound work of art that cannot knot any knickers. It is Ninon Geier's bust of the great surveyor Charles Robert Scrivener (1885-1923).
Late in 1908 federal parliament chose Yass/Canberra (it beat Dalgety by a nose) as the site for the federal capital city. The federal Department of Home Affairs borrowed NSW's Charles Scrivener to survey the suite of possible Yass/Canberra places.
Scrivener sallied forth into the Yass/Canberra wilderness in January 1909. He took with him the instructions of the Minister for Home Affairs, Hugh Mahon, and they included, famously, the insistence that the site-seeking Scrivener was to bear in mind not only practicalities but also that "the federal capital should be a beautiful city, occupying a commanding position, with extensive views, and embracing distinctive features which will lend themselves to the evolution of a design worthy of the object ... for all time".
Scrivener found the most virtues in the pastoral Canberra site on the Molonglo River (where Canberra then arose). But he always had doubts about whether the capricious Cotter River could, unassisted, provide a city at Canberra with enough water.
Always preoccupied with the practicality of water's availability it is appropriate that today he has Canberra's essential dam named after him. It is placed exactly where he said that lake-creating dam should be plonked down.
His biographer Terry Birtles* notes that "Walter [Burley Griffin] continues to be promoted exclusively and even divinely as Canberra's city father" while we ignore the part that unsung others, and especially Scrivener, played in wrestling with the exasperating Chicagoan's fancies and impracticalities. In the biography the bush-travelling, encampment-dwelling surveyor, hard-headed, scientific and skeptical Australian makes quite a contrast with the visionary Americans, Walter and Marion, and their world of Theosophy and fairies.
Ninon Geier (1923-2015) with her Scrivener bust (other busts by her, for example of the Griffins and of Manning Clark are sprinkled elsewhere in the city) does not quite do justice to her subject's spectacular, real-life drooping moustache. We have a dream that one day there will be a portrait balloon of Scrivener's distinctive head and face flown in our annual Canberra Balloon Spectacular.
We've had memorable portrait balloons in Canberra skies, including a giant Darth Vader. But what an educational balloon Scrivener would make! Everyone knew who Darth Vader was, but nine out of 10 Canberrans, gazing skywards at Scrivener, would gasp "who's that?", whereupon governments and the media would enlighten them about this pivotal figure in our city's history.
*Charles Robert Scrivener – The Surveyor Who Sited Australia's Capital Twice. By Terry Birtles. Arcadia.
