I"ll give you the first couple of verses- if you want to read it to it's end and sign, I'd be eternally in your debt.  There are two weeks till the South Australian election.  Every signature to this will make a difference to the Park's survival!  The end of the poem is here: Garden

An eyewitness account from last week's 15th Frances Folk Gathering:

Witching Hour at Frances, all was going well

till a bunch of new arrivals started raising hell

banging a tent together in the middle of the night

then yelling at each other until the dawn's first light

(To the tune of Kingston Town)

Down the Bay all the Knights of Jay

 sip cocktails on the deck of Kevin Foley's yacht

With every drink the ship did sink

for the Wets were caught in a Right Wing Plot

      And I'm sad to say that it's Goodbye, Jay

     We won't see you come Election Day

     Your polls are down, no chance to turn them around

     and little Adelaide will be a Liberal Town

In a few, mad hours this morning, state Labor’s electoral hopes have been damaged irreversibly.

Party faithful went to bed last night harbouring outside hopes of a state election victory.

A quick preamble to the song, which was wrtten two years agio on Woody Guthrie's "100th Birthday".  I've been a proud supporter of the campaign to save this park for a few years now.  A petition for it to become a War Memorial Park was submitted in the 1940s.  Last year's Upper House Select Committee into unethical official behavour in the swapping of this "sacred" land for a previously contaminated factory site is yet to, and probably never will, return an assessment of evidence that has mostly already appeared in an Ombudsman's Report

The SA/NT RSL have passed a resolution to support the preservation of this Park, and War Memorial Director Dr Brendan Nelson has given public support.  Given that it's now been rezoned to become a housing estate in the centre of his electorate, the Premier has declined an invitation to an Australia Day barbie next week.

(To the tune of "Bound For Botany Bay")

The Premier of South Australia

Here's a toast to Robert Burns, who taught to mark the time

by writing a song to sing each year for the sake of Auld Lang Syne,

for the past is filled with bad and good, the good should be remembered,

and in the shade of Christmas, when we're well and true Decembered,

I could but only bite at the news, coming hot on the heels of the announcement of Holden's Adelaide plant, that the 2017 Commodore would be made in China.

THE HAPPY SQUANDER

(Sung mostly to the tune of the song with the Val-de-Ri Val-de-ra chorus)

I'm True Blue as Colonel Sanders or a Chinese Commodore,

but all their stuff's so bloody cheap, should a cobber pay any more?

Settling for sleep one night I dreamed I saw a war

the like of which humanity has never seen before

A sea of grey that rose and fell as it spread acros the land

of barren soil- the nanotechs used everything at hand

Every body, every tree, every blade of grass

fashioned by technology to a dark and rolling mass

That held the hearts and and minds of all, for Gaia was within

bound within the construct to fulfill the masses' whim

Given the NSW Shennagans being uncovered by their ICAC last week, you have to wonder how many similar situations across the country exist. In South Australia we don't have an ICAC yet, and when we do we probably won't be allowed to hear what happens.

Over recent years I've been a proud supporter of a group of locals trying to save their community-bequeathed park from being bulldozed for housing in a dodgy land-swap.  In that time I've seen the leader of the protesters become elected as the Council's Mayor!

You better not poke, you better not reply, 

you better not tag, I'm telling you why- 

Facebook's Clause is coming to town! 

They're making a list, and checking it twice, 

then selling your profiles as consumer advice- 

Facebook's Clause is coming to town! 

There were movements at the stations as the emails passed around

Rudd's bolt of Old Regret had got away

Rumours ran like independants, Murdoch made a thousand Pounds,

and Julia Gillard's cracks began to fray

A Hawker of the Faceless Men came down to lend a hand

on the media cycle he so loved to ride

cracking Whips and Albanese as he Galluped through the pack

It was grand, the way that old spin-doctor lied.

But the hardy little Brisbane bloke could hardly raise a vote

and it looked like he would fail in his attack,

and he strained there, single-handed, till his sides were white with foam

as he begged the squatters (please) to bring him back

And those squatters, who had gathered from their homesteads near and far

stood and shook their heads at Kev in disbelief

When possession still is thought of as nine-tenths of modern law

The fact that Facebook won't allow the word "suicide" to be used in an event title shows how much the subject has remained taboo in this new electronic information age. While understandable that nobody wants to see folks invite others to their deaths, it certainly doesn't help those who are trying to stop more suicides from happening.

Found this on a South Australian site this morning

ADELAIDE (1/4/11) Indicating that a special Defence Cabinet would now govern South Australia, Premier Mike Rann will announce this morning that he and all of State Cabinet would be presenting their resignations to the Governor later today.

"You'll hardly notice any difference." Mr Rann told onlookers at the Norwood Pie Cart last night. "The Yanks know what they want, and we've been rubberstamping their stuff for years. The bloke running the shipyard used to be a Halliburton boss, if there's anything that needs sorting out, he'll manage."