I never thought I’d say it, but I can no longer go on working.
It takes all my effort to breathe and I’m not managing that too well. And now my mind is getting wobbly – hard to think, let alone concentrate.
So I am afraid there is not much point in continuing to push the rock up the hill. I shall retire to my Lazy Boy recliner and doze over the television watching (or not) old sporting replays, propped up by drugs, oxygen, and the occasional iced coffee. I am rapidly winding down
I am sorry to cut and run — it has sometimes been a hairy career, but I hope a productive one and always fun. My gratitude for all your participation.
So a seasonal Hallmark message:
Christmas is coming and Australia is flat
Kindly tell us ScoMo where the bloody hell we’re at.
And when we’re certain that you know that you don’t haven’t got a clue
Then join in our Yuletide chorus as we sing: FUCK YOU!
Thank you and good night.
Cheers, Mungo.
Mungo MacCallum is a veteran political journalist and commentator. His books include Run Johnny Run, Poll Dancing, and Punch and Judy.
mungomccallum@staging-johnmenadue.kinsta.cloud
Comments
88 responses to “That’s all she wrote”
I remember always having a copy of the Nation Review in my backpack while as a young hippie I hitch hiked around the country, Mungo was always my favorite and his was the first article read. Thanks Mungo, you did good.
Hi Mungo:
Being a bit younger than many of the people here, there’s not much more I can add to what others have more eloquently said.
Suffice to say, I will miss the ascerbic wit and keen analysis you’ve brought to us with your takes in The Monthly, on Pearl’s and at Independent Australia.
And in those cryptic crossword puzzles.
You’ve informed many of my takes over the years- but most of all, you’ve made me think- and made so many of us think that, maybe it’s all worth fighting for after all.
To find a journalist as entertaining with a degree of moral fibre is both rare and a privilege to experience. Thank you and may you have inspired many to follow your lead. We need them now more than ever.
Rest and Recreate!
Take care and good luck Mungo. Have been reading and enjoying your fine work since the Nation Review days. You are unmatched as a politics writer.
Thank you Mungo, your wit and wisdom will be sadly missed.
Thank you Mungo. I can’t think of anyone who’s contribution to political journalism I’ve appreciated more over the many years since Nation Review. I’ve followed you around. Insightful, humorous, fair and always constructive. And on the right side without being blind to deficiencies. I, along with so many others, will miss you greatly. Enjoy your time – and try not to think about politics, if that’s possible.
Cheers Mungo, enjoy the eazy chair as much as I’ve enjoyed reading you.
I wish you all the best Mungo; and to think, I only savoured the last decade of your laser focussed pen!
There might have to be a ‘very best of the last 50 yrs of Mungo’ compilation published. Take care….
A sad day for Australia Mungo. Having followed you from your Nation Review days, I will miss you. Your writing has always provided a witty and erudite beacon of sense and sanity, especially amid all the blizzard of bullshit and clap trap that currently passes for politics in Australia. Thanks for everything – we will all miss you and good luck.
Dear Mungo,
thank you for so many wonderful writings, I’ve got a little list and you surely will be missed!
From Nation Review ’til now it has been a joy to follow you. I guess that re-reading your books will have to do.
I wish you well.
Your journalistic presence will be greatly missed. I have followed and admired your work since Nation Review days. Look after yourself and stay with us as long a possible please. Very best wishes.
Thanks Mate. We have been so lucky to have been invited into your brain for as long as we have. What a feast you have given us! Now, you enjoy those iced coffees and we will keep telling the bastards to ‘bugger off’.
I’ve counted it a brush with fame for decades to have sat on the same east-side grass as you at Manuka oval at some now-forgotten cricket match. Nobody does politics better!
Mungo’s contributions normally were the first to win my attention each day unless some other truly rant worthy topic interposed itself. His illness has been developing for some time, yet he was able and motivated to provide us with his regular, cutting observations. I expect my enjoyment of P & I will continue if somewhat diminished. In the meantime, I counsel Mungo to concentrate on his health and to enjoy the contributions of others here and elsewhere without the effort of thinking of how he might need to add to them.
Mungo, my Year 12 literature teacher (Frankston TAFE) gave me your address and I wrote to you – and you replied. It was quite a thrill to have a personal letter from you. Thirty years on and I am still a journo and loving the game. Thanks for that letter and your writings since. Love your work! Great way to bow out too. Would expect nothing less…
Sorry to see you cease your offerings Mungo … I shall certainly miss their reading. But as one “ol’fart” to another … Time just keeps marching on …
Thank You ever so much for your contributions and efforts. Your writings for me, have always been insightful and thought provoking. Please stick around to hold the door open to usher out this mob of misfits and desiccated coconuts from both houses, in perpetuity. If you can muster any effort at all Mungo, I would kindly request that you write one last piece for the true believers, that would be published on the morning after the coming “sweetest victory of all”, as this mob exit government. For they are true bastards.
Rest and enjoy your coming birthday and Xmas comrade. All the Best and again, Thank You Mungo
Geeze, some people know how to put a dampener on Christmas don’t they?!
Very hard to say anything that hasn’t been said already … so I will just say thanks for your unique contributions – they will be missed – and wish you fair winds.
Mungo, I’ve been reading your journalism all my teenage/adult life. I’ve always appreciated your insight, political savvy, sanity, humour, courage, and wit. You’ve kept me going through several dark patches.
Blushing slightly as I type this: you are a hero to me because of your uncompromising integrity – the most difficult of virtues. So, thank you for being you.
Have another iced coffee!
Just as I was organizing a campaign to reduce incompetence and malfeasance by eliminating not the States as you might expect but the Federal Government, you retire hurt and leave the field.
It’s very disappointing, Mungo.
God Bless, from another Nation Review reader.
Thank you Mungo for keeping us sane. We’ll miss you.
Thank you Mungo. You have done your bit, fighting for a better Australia.
Dear Mungo…I shall very much miss your stylings – your kicking down doors wit and take on life. First came across you in Nation Review days and have cheered your parade ever since. Go well! Wendy Harmer
I first heard of you, mungo, when I was about 13and a radio comedy show – possibly Cactus Island; definitely a Reilly Sattler production – and it was an imitation of Bob Hawke speaking, and he says some lame joke, and one person in the press gallery laughs uproariously. Hawke says ‘shut up Mungo’. I was intrigued and found out. I’ve enjoyed your writing ever since. Rest well.
For singular services provided in dressing Blacktown Town Hall when Richo’s mob couldn’t get around to it, many sincere thanks.
Guess it’s time after all, now it’s 2 December again…
For hospitality, friendship and entertainment from even further back, more thanks.
From the refugee who looked like he’d sold all his gold teeth to buy trendy gear.
Loved your work Mungo and still recall the highlights/lowlights of late nights in the Non-Members Bar travel well or as well as possible you have been a wonderful contributor (except when perhaps when you told me gleefully in Kings Hall that Ivor Greenwood was to be my next Minister!).
All my adult life I’ve been reading your astute, entertaining and insightful commentary, Mr MacCallum – and it is still one of the main things keeping me coming back to P&I. Please accept my best wishes for your continued health.
Go well Mungo. I have valued your contributions since I was a little tacker and have always enjoyed and been informed by them.
Thank you Mungo, for the great reading since the Nation Review. I hope your retirement to the recliner is a long and peaceful one. Although I have to say I never did try to work out the cryptic puzzle in the Saturday Paper – I guess it’s too late to try it now?
Mungo, for years, most mornings when I log on to my computer to find out what’s going, you’re the first person I go to. Thanks for your magnificent contribution. Take it easy.
Heartfelt thanks from me Mungo, your courage to keep going as long as you did is remarkable.
Your insights and honest humorous journalism will be sorely missed.
What can I say – other than it has been a privilege to read and follow you all these years. I wish you peace and time to reflect on a life with so many (unseen) friends you made with your writing.
Mike Steketee
Oh no! Amongst the many memorable lines, the best, I reckon, was the description of Billy McMahon as a Volkswagen with the doors open. Words as pictures. All the best Mungo.
That’s bloody hard to beat Mike.
Thank you Mungo for so much writing and insight. Our word relationship goes back to Nation Review so I’ll miss your wit and perspective.
Thank you Mungo, especially for these last months when it must have taken such effort of will to again hone the wit to so effectively skewer the ridiculous and mendacious. Yours has been a wonderful contribution to Australia and an inspiration. You will be sorely missed.
Fair well Mungo , like many l have followed you since Nation Review days you have always been erudite, droll , humorous, sceptical but most of all extremely interesting. We will miss you old mate
Enjoy your retirement
Mungo I’m 62 and have been reading your insights since the Nation Reviewwhen I was in high school. A huge “thank you” for your fire, clarity and humour. Stick around for a bit longer please so we can see the end of ScoMoFo and his blithering minions.
What a great innings – an example to us all. Thanks for the insights, the irreverence, the laughs, well … everything.
Another legend hanging it up. All the best comrade and your thoughts and musings will be missed by a hell of a lot of people, me included.
Bugga. So sorry to read that, Mungo. We’re about the same age so thanks for everything you’ve written & I read. That’s some…..
Dear Mungo,
Thank you for your wonderful contribution to Australia. Since the days of Nation Review I have always admired your dry wit, astute observations, general ratbaggery (in the nicest possible way) and commitment to keeping the bastards honest.
May you continue to enjoy your time, peaceful in the knowledge that your contribution to the body politic has been immense and far reaching.
All the best
Michael
You have enriched my life for fifty years or so, Mungo. Sincere thanks, and best wishes for the finale..
Thank you for being an inspiration Mungo. Your legend as an insightful and gifted writer on politics and especially the politicians will long outlive you. So will your less well known feats as a long playing member of the Press Gallery cricket team. There will never be your equal as the deliverer of the slower ball. With fond regards, Geoff Kitney
Thank you Mungo. You are an inspiration and a wonderful Australian voice. So very sorry.
Dear Mungo, much love from all of us, thank you for building relationships through word and presence. We are all holding your hand.
Mungo I know how it feels mate . You may not remember but we were contemporaries at Cranbrook School in the quaintly named Remove class (aka first year of high school) . You were funny and witty even then. Like you, I increasingly ask myself the question – is my mind still up to writing political commentaries? Is it time to hang it up ? I will try to keep going a bit longer , as I hope you will . If bloody Howard is still active out there, we cannot leave the field to his lies and false narratives
Best, Tony (Anthony) Kevin
Oh dear! All my best wishes in your retirement. I will greatly miss your perceptive comments, which I have enjoyed over the decades. I fear you are irreplaceable; I know of no other journalist who writes with such clarity and wit. Thankyou for providing such excellent journalism; there is so much awful drivel around these day. Goodbye and good luck.
God bless you, Mungo. You have brought so much pleasure to so many over so long. Thank you.
Dear Mungo
borne on the 21.12.1941 (like you), I’ve followed your writing for 50-odd years, and listened to you speechifying at the steps of Civic Square (Canberra) during Vietnam war demos – a war about which you helped to frame my thinking. Specifically that the LNP were a bunch of lying sods who were prepared to waste young Australian lives for some ill-defined objectives which could be most easily summarized as ‘sucking up to the Yanks’.
Labor, for all its faults having, by comparison to such sleazebags, been more or less on the side of the angels.
The Libs & Nationals remaining pretty much true to their type. Morrison for example. Chunder.
Mungo, I’m very sad to hear this, you have been my go to contributor on this site, both for an accurate .description of politics & politicians in this country along with a healthy dose of cynical humour, The latter usually at afore mentioned politicians expense. I wish you the best with your health, health comes first after all.
Thank you Mungo, I have admired you from when I first encountered you in print in the early 70s via the Nation Review. Back then, along with John Hepworth, you were (and still are) my go to sources. I am sad to see you leave and wish you all the best with the lazy boy, replays and iced coffee. May you be in peace.
Thank you. Mungo. Loved your perceptive columns over many years. Don’t overdo the iced coffee.
Sir,
I will miss your contributions. All the best.
Sincerely,
Teow Loon Ti
Thank you for sixty odd years of incisive comment from a wicked ‘pen’. You will be seriously missed, and never replaced.
Mungo, although yesterday I wrote a critical response to your piece on China in these pages, I have read many of your pieces over the decades, and have always regarded you as a voice of sanity and reason. Your insights and humour have long been appreciated by Australian readers. I am very sorry you are feeling the way you do. I hope your condition improves. Meanwhile my sincere best wishes for your present and your future.
Well! Thank you, you thoughtless bastard – that’s really put the icing on 2020.
Next, I suppose, I’ll be told Phillip Adams is chucking in the towel, too. We fans can only hope that “Pearls & Irritations” keeps a spot open for you when, incensed by some moron on tele, you kick start the satire/irony/sarcasm tricycle into action. I can’t believe it won’t happen.
I have read you since the Nation Review. You were and are the first read. Take the smoko. You have earnt it.
And also the admiration of the Gough generation for the writing. You were and are the best of them. By a country mile.
Oh Mungo, I too have been reading you since the Nation Review days–I remember laughing with my father over your article about the first full Whitlam cabinet (after the duumvirate with Lance Barnard) and your crack about the selection of Ken Wriedt, a sailor, as Minister for Primary Industries-“sheep go baaa, cows go moo”! so that means you have been informing me and challenging for almost 50 years. You gave me a badge at Old Parliament House in 1972 with the profile of Billy McMahon and the words “Stop laughing at Billy!” I still have it. Thank you for it that 50 years of fun and anger.
I see that Mungo’s contribution yesterday has so far generated 72 comments. Come on Meeple, Barney and others – with a bit more effort we could make his last innings a century!
We’re doing our best, Richard. 🙂
Well done Mungo and thank you. I particularly enjoyed your unerring perception of character, or rather what passed for that in the members our political class.
Thank-you Mungo for all your refreshing and truthful words. I just don’t know what to do now. Like you, I might just retire to my Lazy boy recliner and watch videos and the ABC.
Paraphrasing the words of the Notorious RBG, “You have fought for what you care for” for all of us.
Time to rest.
Thanks Mungo for 50ish years of enjoyable commentary and sharp wit.
Like many others I’ve read you since the Nation Review days, and enjoyed your wisdom and wit. It is really sad that we may not hear from you again, but I can hope that there will every now and again be something from you – but that is selfish of me… Please rest well… and all the best.
Dear Mungo. Thanks for everything! Enjoy a well-earned rest. Ian
Very sorry to get this news Mungo. You have been a stalwart of sanity in the Australian media for so many years. Many thanks for keeping the faith. I wish you the best possible retirement, you have earned it, and we owe it to you.
Thanks for it all, Mungo, all the way. From the halcyon ‘lean and nosey like a ferret’ days, Dismissal days, to dismal days right now, today, this very moment, you’ve always been here, telling the likes of Smirko, ‘fuck you’, even if not in so few pertinent words. Sit back and relax, enjoy your days or months or years of whatever takes your fancy. I’m sure you’ll not stop seething inside at these dreadful goings-on. Again, thanks for keeping me company through all these decades.
And me
A wonderful innings by any measure – always first read – so many thank you. Enjoy your deserved time in the grandstand. Travel well great scribe…….
I have followed your work for over 40 years. Thank you for your insight and humour. Hope you will have a few more ice coffees
Just when it seemed nothing could get worse, you send us this, Mungo. How are we going to cope in an era of lies without your cleansing blasts of irreverence? Without you updating the list of grovelling prime ministerial statements to US leaders? This has been a bad year, and you taking to the recliner compounds it. Those of us who remember better days salute you.
Alison, ‘I desire to associate myself with that expression of regret.’ (WS Gilbert). Go in Peace, Mungo! Michael
Mungo, I’ve never laughed more than on the days when you and Ken Begg were at the table in the old Parliament House dining room telling tales that might not have been publishable. Your columns in the Australian (when it used to be a newspaper) were the first thing everyone read on a Saturday morning. And this note is still up there with the best. Paul
Very sad news, Mungo. I’ve been with you since the start and always hoped your writing career might survive my own ability to read. Many years ago we shared drinks – in Canberra and in Bougainville (despite your protestations back then, Tok Pisin is still a real language). I wish you well. I wish you a revival. But most of all I thank you for what you have brought to me and others. An insiders view with humour and without the arrogance.
Thanks for hanging in there with your insights and analysis for so long. I was proud to be your friend in Camelot.
As another member of the Gough generation, Mungo, a heartfelt thanks for your contributions over the decades. Who could forget your description of Billy McM as a VW with both its doors open. Hang around for a while longer please; don’t disappear overnight as John Clark did, will you?
Or JW Howard “the unflushble turd”. Thanks Mungo. You are in the pantheon.
So sad to read this farewell Mungo. I am one of the 1000s of readers you do not know who have enjoyed your writing for years. It was a secret pleasure to see you sitting with your dog in your special place at the Poinciana Cafe back before some idiots bought it and cut down the trees- ah life has its disappointments. I hope that you enjoy the peace in that glorious part of Australia and maybe occasionally you “let fly” to let us know your views.
Much love and many thanks Mungo.
Stay with us as long as you can please Mungo. I’ve followed your writings since I was briefly in Canberra in the ‘70s in the reign of Saint Gough. The days when we feminists thought if we just pointed out how consciousness worked, we’d have achieved the revolution by next Wednesday. You’ve given a lot of pleasure, humour and explanation to many Mungo – and we thank you.
Thanks and best wishes to you Mungo. You have indeed helped preserve the sanity of the Gough generation.
I have been reading your articles since the middle 70s . Thank you and all the best, take care.
I can only wish you all the best for a safe, comfortable retirement Mungo. You will be sorely missed; I have always appreciated your direct and accessible writings. You don’t overcomplicate things, you’re clear and concise, and the passion is very apparent in everything you write.
You also call out right wing nut jobs for what they are. Well now you can relax a little; your side won the political argument a number of years ago, and what you see now in output from the right is just sour grapes.
I hope it’s not a total retirement, and we still get to read your output from time to time.
Thank You Mungo, I have followed your articles for some years now and have always enjoyed your particular viewpoint and humour at the antics and deceits of our political class. You will be sadly missed and never replaced. Thanks again and enjoy your rest and iced coffee.
Thanks Mungo for your very perceptive views of Australian politics over a long period.
Travel well.
Oh dear! Mungo You have been a joy to read and follow since I first came across you in the Nation Review days. I have looked forward to reading every thing of yours I could find. May you have a long and peaceful retirement. We’ll miss you. Very best wishes and a heartfelt “thank you” for your enormous contribution to political life in Australia.