Turnbull's memoir threatens to lower Wagner's colours

The Ring Cycle is built, majestically, of the four towering operas Das Rheingold, Die Walkre, Siegfried and Gtterdmmerung.

How has it come to pass, this tragic, coronavirus-triggered utter mismatch, this cultural equivalent of a rugby union match between New Zealand's bemuscled All Blacks and a plucky XV of elderly, vegan Icelandic metaphysical nature poets who have never played the game before? .

Well, like millions of thinking people the wide world o'er, trapped at home but with an abundance of time, I have been setting myself the self-improving projects of getting to grips with some legendary works of genius (especially works of Literature) one has hitherto never quite found the time to engage with.

Loyal readers will know this has been the virus-time theme of recent columns. I have been reading some wondrous novels on the prescribed lists of books-you-must-read-during-the-Quarantine. I've read some timely rippers including Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (of course a parable about loneliness and isolation), and the Collected Poems of the reclusive Emily Dickinson, everyone's best working-from-home hero.

But as well, a classical music tragic, I have been investing my lockdown times in some musical catchings-up.

Somehow, to my shame, though I love Wagner, I have never tackled his whole, soul-stoking Ring Cycle. Now, with time enough and YouTube enough, I am embarked upon immersing myself, over a fortnight, in all 15 thrilling hours of it, between operas, to get my breath back, going back to great books. I have just finished watching (my soul still tingling as I write) Das Rheingold.

I mention all this because I have a sense that the Coronavirus experience, the Grim Reaper swaggering among us, will turn out to have changed so many things about us as a people, as a nation, as individuals.

In those of us who have been moved to use quarantine to bodybuild our brains with fine things there may be a continuing better sense of what really matters, of what ennobles the intelligence and what insults it.

And this is where Turnbull's book, although an influential opinion-former like me feels one really should read it, pronto, is struggling to attract me, even though its purchase is only two clicks away on my device.

Its subject matter, the trivial deeds and behaviours of the intellectual and moral dwarves of Australian federal politics, is dwarfed by the Ring Cycle which deals with things of Eternal Importance as acted out by gods, demi-gods and giants.

Mind you, having skimmed through newspaper excerpts of Turnbull's book, Tony Abbott does emerge as someone eerily reminiscent of Das Rheingold's vile Alberich, a malignant dwarf. Then, too, Abbott's fearless, armour-wearing, steel-helmeted warrior-woman puppeteer (with Tony her puppet) Peta Credlin seems almost modelled on the Ring Cycle's terrific Brunnhilde.

Perhaps Ms Credlin has consciously modelled herself on Wagner's Brunnhilde, wanting in political power some political equivalent of Brunnhilde's feat in singing the longest, mightiest aria in all opera, the 20-minute Immolation Scene which ends with her, Brunnhilde, burning down the joint (Valhalla). If I'm right this might explain Ms Credlin's otherwise hard-to-explain destructiveness.

But I have digressed, because my point is that now that COVID-19 has moved us to lift our horizons, to renounce trivia for ever, some of us may never go back to our dirty old habits of following news and current affairs. Why ever again soil our minds with following the mediocre mortals of politics and their wriggly little earthwormy ways? Henceforth we may only bother ourselves with the goings-on of the gods.

Meanwhile Sotheby's, the world's legendary brokers of fine art and precious collectibles, has approached me about my roll of John Howard lavatory paper.

I really do have one of these precious, scarce, novelty artefacts, (the National Library of Australia has another and considers it its second most precious treasure after its handwritten Endeavour Journal of Captain Cook) part of a very limited edition issued by a fun-loving leftish manufacturer during the Hell of the interminable Howard Years.

Sotheby's invites me to allow it to auction the toilet roll, calculating that, an already precious collectible, it now has breathtaking added value at this time when toilet paper is so famously scarce, when there are presently only about as many rolls of toilet paper as there are Rembrandt self-portraits.

Prompted by Sotheby's interest I have taken the toilet roll out of its safe to look at it, at the cartoon Howard likeness on each tissue, I am powerfully reminded of what a consolation it was whenever one went to the lavatory during the poisonous Howard Years (1996-2007) to feel one was wiping the smug prime ministerial Liberal Party smirk off his face.