Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

process. Please notice that the individuals he lists includes dissenters who
are swimming against the stream. Did not someone say only dead fish swim
with the stream? Among some of those listed are individuals who through
‘connections in corrections’ have avoided jail time. That is an injustice
perpetrated upon those prisoners who did not have those connections
when it came to sentence-time.
I salute them all for giving a rats
Peter Goers, Sunday Mail, 4 October 2009
LET’S hear it for flaming bloody ratbags. They make life more
interesting. This very Australian term gained currency in the 1930s but
no one knows how, where or when it started.
A ratbag is an Australian eccentric with unpopular views doggedly
espoused.
The term is a badge of honour and I’ve never known a ratbag who
objected to the appellation. Ratbags are born not made.
Ratbags are contrarians maintaining their rage against the tide of popular
opinion and at best we love them for it and at worst we offer grudging
respect.
They never lack the courage of their convictions and seem immune to
the slings and arrows of criticism. We are never in doubt as to what a
ratbag thinks or what he (but rarely she) believes.
They are crusaders against the grain and that is a great Australian
tradition worth celebrating and encouraging.
A ratbag is an anti-disestablishmentarian.
They haunt and enliven the letters pages of newspapers, which are all
the better for them.
Ratbags are forthright but never objectionably rude - benign not malign.
Cruelty disqualifies ratbaggery. Thus climate-change denier Andrew Bolt
is a card-carrying ratbag but Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben ain’t.
Ratbags are generally outsiders. They can be spoilers and knockers but
rarely whingers.
A bit of ratbaggery adds curry. Tim Winton is a very fine Australian
writer but only a bit of ratbaggery stops him from being truly great.
Sometimes today’s ratbags are tomorrow’s prophets on the rare occasion
that they are right.
Until recently republicans were ratbags but now it’s the intransigent
monarchists who are the ratbags. Arch-loyalist royalist David Flint has
now become a leading ratbag.
Hippies were once ratbags but now nostalgically celebrated and their
ecological crusades have proved them right.
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