James Dibble has died.
If you are Australian and are not wearing black, you are not an Australian. If you are English then you should, because we’ll get upset when YOUR queen dies. Yanks – I guess the comparison is Edward Murrow, although it must be said Murrow was the greater man who took on demons and vanquished them.
Dibble is symbolic of … well of course whatever you want to him to be … but for me symbolic of the old colonial/socialist hybrid that was Australia, that ran on the well meaning corruption and crisp speaking we inherited from the United Kingdom. The elite were running the show, the workers had jobs, the indigenous people were tucked away out of sight, and broadcast was a signal that came from on high, holding it all together. The opposite of blogs like this.
Yet Dibble was one of the freaks, the stirrers. He was simultaneously the Voice of Control and out of control. He’d get in all kinds of escapades and could be found hanging out with the hippies and the punks in the right eras. That was part of the old system too. The ABC was an enlightened despot, as with the BBC, but with that tropical fever of the colonial administration.
In the 90′s Dibble got into computers and Internet. He probably was that 15 year old girl you thought you were chatting up on ICQ.
Richard Morecroft was like the ‘new doctor’, you know, when you grudgingly accept a younger reincarnated Time Lord and only realise how much you’d got used to him when he finally gets the shaft. Morecroft only lasted 20 years …
Must have been the flying fox he kept hidden under the news desk.
Now here’s a bit of weird shit. So I am reading about Dibble. Any cultured person would be, no doubt you already have. The odd thing is that a short while ago, out of the blue, I had a compulsion to read about Dibble. In times past we’d question what was meant by ‘a short while ago’ and did I really do so or is this just confabulation?
But browsers have memories too. On the 7th Dec at 9.23pm for some reason I did a search for ‘James Dibble’ and read his bio on Wikipedia. About a newsreader that last appeared in 1983 and I don’t think I had thought about him in quite a long time. Why?
Possibilities:
I am psychic about long retired television news readers. No.
He made a final mental broadcast from his death bed for all true viewers. Like it, but no.
I had posted on YouTube a cut up of the new ABC news theme I did in 2002 and it reminded me about the old news intro and consequentially James Dibble. Then he dies days later.
Sadly it’s number three. Jung would be well pleased, as it reinforces his ideas on synchronicity. As would Fort. But no psychic prowess required. Damn.
Hi Tom,
I may have posted this to you before, or to one of the Twister forums. Before you write me off as another Twister Loon, please check this link (one of Dibble’s ramblings/narrations with Russell Guy).
http://www.rumble.net/psychedelicatessen/
I’m sure you have a copy – but just in case it is lost in the archives….
Cheers
Lyle (Rhizomic)
