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Almost everyone in Australia knows someone who hailed directly from Malta or is the child of Maltese parents. There are about a quarter as many Maltese Australians as there are Maltese Maltese so it is an interesting place to visit; where almost every cab driver or waiter announces that he or she has relatives in Sydney or Melbourne.
It was raining in the mountains on Easter Saturday.
We'd decided to take a couple of days break in the Blue Mountains and do some walking. But on Saturday it poured. In the morning we walked two kilometres from Katoomba to more up-market and trendy Leura for morning coffee and got very wet.
After a train journey to Mount Victoria and back to dry out and then lunch in the Irish Pub, with a Cider and Guinness, we decided against another soaking and explored the Katoomba antique stores and bookshops instead. In one I found and bought an unread James Bond book. But not by the real Ian Fleming.
Ian Fleming died in 1964 at the young age of fifty-six and I'd read all his so I knew 'Devil May Care' was new. This one is by Sebastian Faulks, known for his novel Birdsong, 'writing as Ian Fleming' in 2008.
Thomas Carlyle coined this epithet in 1839 while criticising Malthus, who warned of what subsequently happened, exploding population.
According to Carlyle his economic theories: "are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next" and in 1894 he described economics as: 'quite abject and distressing... dismal science... led by the sacred cause of Black Emancipation.' The label has stuck ever since.
This 'dismal' reputation has not been helped by repeated economic recessions and a Great Depression, together with continuously erroneous forecasts and contradictory solutions fuelled by opposing theories.
This article reviews some of those competing paradigms and their effect on the economic progress of Australia.