Eric Riddler

A close up view of an angled parking space, with the white line fragmented across the asphalt, the section leading to the concrete gutter vaguely resembling an exclamation mark

!

Dive! Dive! Dive!
Silver gulls feeding at Bald Hill Beach.

Applause!

An early morning view of eucalyptus trees on the bank of a river, with the sunlight starting to bring out the red-brown trunks and grey-green leaves above the shadows of the ridge behind the photographer

OTD ten years ago: Wambuul Macquarie River, Dubbo, Wiradjuri Country, 2 August 2015

Album artwork for "Better In Blak" by Thelma Plum

🥁 Hottest 100 of Australian songs: #53
#Hottest100 #AusHottest100

#NowPlaying
🕝 2:36 pm

🎵 Better In Blak
🧑‍🎤 Thelma Plum

🎧 Apple Music / Spotify / YouTube Music

📝 Lyrics

Album artwork for "Sound As Ever" by You Am I

🥁 Hottest 100 of Australian songs: #81
#AusHottest100

#NowPlaying
🕦 11:57 am

🎵 Berlin Chair
🧑‍🎤 You Am I
💿 Sound As Ever

🎧 Apple Music / Spotify / YouTube Music

📝 Lyrics

The next time an early 2000s revival rolls around, hopefully in the next week or so, some Melbourne indie group’s gonna have to add a new song to the playlist that begins with Spiderbait’s ‘Ass-hugging pants’ and Kisschasy’s ‘Spray-on pants’

I’ll tut-tut and say “too soon” as soon as I work out which “too soon” is the “too soon” that’s the most “too soon”…

When your path to the throne resembles the plot of “On the Beach” more than “King Ralph” it’s just not going to open doors for you. Accept it…

It’s always the 11th century, isn’t it?… I’m plausibly descended from Æthelred II myself but (a) not by primogeniture and (b) some complete and utter Sea-En-You-Tea usurped the throne from grrrrreat-uncle Edmund II, anyway, so it’s a pretty useless triviality…

On a slightly overcast winter’s day in the central business district of Wellington, a “double saloon” tram has cleared the junction of Lambton Quay and Willis Street as pedestrians begin to cross behind it. The tram’s destination is just visible: it’s on route 2, an inner-city shuttle service, running to Courteney Place from Wellington Railway Station, with advertising signs for Lux soap and a real estate sale on its front cab. This photo was taken exactly a year after the Pacific arena of the Second World War had come to an end and, to mark the anniversary, the Bank of New Zealand building behind the tram has a letter “V” above its curved corner billboard

Found slide: Willis Street, looking north towards Lambton Quay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 15 August 1946. Photo by a visiting USAF personnel member

When a song from the eighties suddenly starts to soundtrack your social media feed and you spend several hours wondering “where did that come from?”

My own photo of Z3 212, one of the last Z3s still bearing the marigold colour scheme, Elizabeth Street at Lonsdale Street, October 1989

I feel that Melbourne’s last Z3s should revert to their old Marigold colour scheme for their final months

About four years later, the Wave Hill walk-off sparked a successful legal challenge to the post-colonial denial of the Gurindji people’s land rights 2/2

A widescreen view of a weather-worn gate across an unsealed road through northern Australian grassland. The left side of the gate bears a white roundel, indicating that it marks the entrance to the Wave Hill cattle station, twenty miles away. The photographer, a Commonwealth Government radio technician, was probably more concerned with the gate’s suitability for the CinemaScope frame ratio than the living and working conditions of the station’s Gurindji employees at the time but history remembers Wave Hill in the nineteen-sixties as the crucible of the Land Rights movement, celebrated in Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s song “From little things big things grow”

National Sorry Day: “From little things big things grow…”: Found slide: Gate to the Wave Hill cattle station, Kalkarindji, Gurindji Country, Australia, taken in mid 1962. Photo taken through a CinemaScope™️ lens by John W Smith 1/2

Take this with a grain of salt, however… I still remember the Met’s 1990 April Fools’ Day announcement of high speed Swanston Street trams, which bore some resemblance to the Bondi tram story…

I’ve been told it’s because the Bondi tram, in its early days, ran express from the City to Bondi Junction, with the Waverley tram toddling behind, stopping all the way. Didn’t last that way for long but the phrase stuck

Ah, The BBC Experience in 1999, bless… somewhat more analogue slide heavy than the ad suggests, complete with awkwardly misfiled carousels [“in 1963 we met the Fab Four: John! Ringo! George! Blank wall!… (5 minutes later)… in 1984 the world was shaken when BBC footage from Africa revealed: Paul!”]

This feels like the third or fourth time in this election cycle that a politician / apparatchik has used the “people are stopping me in the street and saying…” line. Could one of our MSM journos do a reverse “Negus v Thatcher” and ask for names and addresses of these people, just once?

A slightly faded and stained photograph looking along a typical inner suburban Australian Main Street. In the middle distance an angular nineteen-seventies tram, in its eighties-into-nineties green and yellow colour scheme, is heading towards the camera

Happy (belated) fiftieth anniversary to Naarm Melbourne’s Z class trams, the first of which entered service on 5 May 1975… here’s my snapshot of Z1 number 1 approaching in the distance along Carlisle Street, Balaclava, on Valentine’s Day 1996, just about to take me to Glenferrie Road

A pair of widescreen colour slides, both taken, inadvisedly, from the open door of a moving railway carriage. The top photo looks towards an approaching steam locomotive, bearing a destination sign reading Southport, the then nearest railway station to Surfers Paradise, travelling through typical eastern Australian bushland. A railway works shed passes by at right, while a level crossing can just be made out in the distance between the two trains. The bottom photo looks from another level crossing, with grids to stop livestock wandering along the tracks, towards a curved culvert over Bulimba Creek and signs of what was then the outskirts of suburban Meanjin Brisbane

Found slides: Two views from a South Brisbane-bound train: passing a Southport-bound train near Fruitgrove Station and crossing Nathan Road, just north of Runcorn Station, Chepara Country, Queensland, circa October 1961. Photos taken through a CinemaScope™️ lens by John W Smith

Looking upwards towards a tall art deco bell tower, partly framed by a sinuous tī kōuka palm tree

Looking upwards towards a bulky art deco monument, with statues of service and medical personnel standing guard

Anzac Day: Lest We Forget:
(1) Carillon, Pukeahu National War Memorial Park, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2019
(2) Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Warrane Sydney, Australia, 2022

Looking along an escarpment above a large regional city towards a group of sightseers at a lookout, taking photos, looking through telescopes or just walking around. The clothes suggest a warm day: one man, slightly more formally dressed than everyone else, is drinking from a glass soft drink bottle, presumably supplied by the local Parkinson’s company, as advertised by the tea room at right, just past a rather Tardis-shaped red telephone booth

Found slide: Sightseers at Bulli Lookout, overlooking the City of Wollongong, Dharawal Country, Australia, 1958. Photo by a member of the Down or Tyler families. The tea room is selling Parkinson’s drinks, “the Toast of the Coast”: a tie-wearing man just left of the centre is finishing off a bottle

Done!

On a sunny, slightly smoky morning, a bronze equestrian statue, standing in front of a yellow-brown classical revival sandstone building, is reflected in the still water of a simple ornamental pool

‘The offerings of Peace’, by Gilbert Bayes, outside Naala Nura, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Warrane Sydney, Australia, 2025 #gilbertbayes #artgalleryofnsw #naalanura #sydneysandstone #35mmfilm #filmisnotdead

A red chair next to a white tablecloth, with a patterned red and black carpet below, recreating the now-closed Marigold yum cha restaurant in Sydney’s Chinatown

A pile of red chairs leans awkwardly towards the decor recreating the now-closed Marigold yum cha restaurant in Sydney’s Chinatown

A moment of quiet reflection upon past yum cha moments at the Marigold… last days of Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆 @artgalleryofnsw #cao_fei #marigoldyumcha

A white bird with a black head and beak rises from a reflective pool, ringed by ripples caused by its wings as it cleaned itself. Glimpses of a Sydney sandstone building can be seen in the reflections

Wurrung Australian ibis bathing outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Warrane Sydney #wurrung #australianibis

“The Killing of Angel Street” (1981) and “Heatwave” (1982): both fictionalised speculations based on heritage campaigner Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance in 1975

Pompeii fresco find possibly depicts 2,000-year-old form of pizza Ancient painting includes fruit that looks like a pineapple – although it is almost certainly something else

“… and I’d like pineapple, too… oh, right, Columbus and all that… what have you got?… that yellow thing?… yeah, that might work… this is, like, the 23rd, right?… www.theguardian.com/world/2023/j...