So, the weird postal survey is go!  I waited until the High Court gave the nod before posting on this, but let me be clear from the outset. As far as I am concerned there are no good reasons to vote NO to a proposition that does not alter the status of any existing marriage or make compulsory any particular views about marriage. All voting YES will do is enable a sizeable minority, if they so choose, to have their relationhips recognised by the state as marriages. Churches within their own communions will be free to do what they think best. No doubt there will be many same-sex couples who don’t want to be married according to law, just as a substantial number of man-woman couples these days choose not to be married. But they can be if they want, and all the YES will do is extend that to same-sex couples. There are indeed conservatives who are voting YES because they want to encourage all couples to enter into legally binding committed relationships.

Eric Abetz, to take just one example, encapsulated everything wrong with the NO case brilliantly on the 7.30 Report last night. See also Same-sex marriage postal survey: the five worst arguments for voting No. I may have more to say — politely of course — about such piffle later on.

Meantime, let me replay Random Friday memory 20 – July 1990.

…And today in 1990 in a pub that is no more, in a century that is no more, I met M…

A year or two on from 1990:

memorabilia 13: 1993-4

Posted on January 24, 2009 by Neil

Clearly this is Christmas, and it is here in Elizabeth Street, but I am guessing which year*. Oh my, have I ever aged! But fifteen years or so is a long time…

George, me, M

* It may well be Christmas 1992, the first in Elizabeth Street Surry Hills.

And the pub of course (12 July 1990) was The Albury: mais où est l’Albury d’antan?

And someone comments on Bruce’s album:

Such an beautiful original old pub destroyed! I was saddened when I finally moved to Syd and it was gone. I met a lovely guy there on my first visit around 1996 and didn’t leave empty handed….a big deal for a country boy!!!

“Such an beautiful original old pub destroyed!” indeed. I hope Bruce finds a few more to share in that “boot box full of photo memories.”

I have cropped a couple and given them the art makeover treatment.

Here is a 2007 post:

M’s 18th 19th Australian Christmas

16  DEC 2007

Even if he will be spending it on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

M arrived in Australia from Shanghai in December 1989. He has told me how disappointed he was that year in Christmas, thinking it would be something like Chinese New Year back in Shanghai, only to find the streets of Auburn were less than vibrant on Christmas Day! (I met him around six months later.)

Christmas 1999 – New Year 2000 he was in Bodh Gaya being taught by the Dalai Lama.

Gets around, does M.

Finally, from 2009:

I too was offered a free trip to China…

28 MAR 2009

… and M was once thought to be a Chinese spy.

Back in 1990 when I first met M, then very recently arrived in Australia, I was living in Paddington at PK’s place – and a nice place it was too. The first morning M appeared at breakfast PK was quite nonplussed – being of Lithuanian background he had fairly strong Cold War views in some respects, though not in others. He did indeed suggest soon after that M may be a Chinese spy. He later changed his mind and may even deny the story today. 😉

No doubt among the very large influx of Chinese students at that post-Tiananmen time there would have been some spies, mostly there to monitor the other students. Chinese were used to being monitored. M solved the problem back home in China by joining the neighbourhood spooks – hiding in plain sight, you could say. The neighbourhood committee of spooks also had a benign role; as well as reporting suspicious activity they were agents too of social welfare. M claimed he was particularly lax on the reporting side, especially given his own association with quite a few westerners.

My students at the language college I then worked in more or less assumed someone could be a spy, or “a boss” as they tended to say, and sussed one another out before they started opening up about certain topics.

About a decade later I was offered a free trip to Shanghai by the parents of one of my SBHS students – and not to influence me, as it was offered after the exams. As M said, they were just being Chinese and were grateful I had helped their son. I found a face-saving way of refusing the gift…

25 years ago, July 1990! I can’t believe it!