The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read Online Free

look back and fantasise about having a big family. I didn’t do it. However, there’s a lot to lose when suburbs become dominated by single young men and women living alone in flats. Arid landscapes where children are an endangered species.
    A recent family trip to Japan, where the birthrate is one of the world’s lowest, revealed a sad reality: playgrounds grown over with weeds and scattered with broken glass; swings and slides rusted and broken. We did not see children anywhere.
    Visits to dinky gift-shops sent the owners into a frenzy of anxiety. Children were an unwelcome, unruly intrusion into an ordered, adult, existence. Strangely, there were no children at Tokyo Disney, either. Every ride—from the tea-cup twirly-whirly to the roller coaster—was packed with giggling, infantilised thirty-somethings in Mickey Mouse ears.
    Finding an Australian street populated with children is becoming increasingly difficult. Perhaps it’s the families, not the elderly, who now need gated communities. A place where parentsagree that the sound of children shrieking with laughter is what makes a neighbourhood. We have “wildlife corridors” where possums can meet and form gangs that romp on your roof. So, too, we could have paths where children can meet and have adventures.
    Remember when you and the children down the street would roam from dawn till dusk during the summer holidays? Where do children go these days? Judging by the sound coming from the backyard, they’re at my place.
    While some people place nesting boxes to lure fauna into their backyards, my husband and I have put in a lot of effort to make our yard “kid central”. We’re lucky to have a big block and a pool. We’ve strung up the hammock, the rope swings and the trapeze. We scored a trampoline on council clean-up day. Then we added the magic ingredients of ducks and baby chickens. Voila! Tribes of children appeared from every corner of the neighbourhood and our two disappeared.
    The Xbox and television have been abandoned. There are any number of commentators who bemoan that children these days suffer from “a lack of imagination”. No, what they suffer from is a lack of playmates. And with the best will in the world, a mum who specialises in jigsaw puzzles is a boring substitute.
    Observing three little girls spend a day making dollies out of ice-block sticks and pipe cleaners is enough to make a Bratz doll manufacturer blanch. Gangs of smallish boys still stage treasure hunts, sword fights with sticks and build cubby huts out of brooms and bits of corrugated iron. Baby chickens, alas, remain unco-operative circus animals. Some things, thankfully, never change.
    So by all means let’s make our cities environmentally sustainable, but not at the expense of family size. We need to encourage the next generation to have more children than we do now, and to have them earlier.
    Otherwise parents will have to play with their kids—and no one wants to be crawling into a cubby house with 50-year-old knees.
    Believe me, I know.

DANNY KATZ
Love is never saying sorry … so there
    You younger readers probably won’t know what I’m talking about here—anybody who wasn’t around in the 1970s and ’80s, that golden era of wonder and joy, when computers were only used for playing Frogger, peanuts hadn’t started killing children yet, and circumcised doodles were the cutting-edge of male pret-a-porter high-style fashion. In that glorious age of innocence, there was a famous cartoon series called “Love is …”, which featured a little naked boy and a little naked girl, cuddling and kissing each other, with a romantic caption underneath like “Love is … being able to say you are sorry” or “Love is … a picture of happiness”, and everyone adored these cartoons because back then, naked eight-year-olds getting it on was considered charming and sentimental.