Recent deaths noted

*   Clive Robertson, the cranky persona-ed news reader and broadcaster, died last week.   I hadn't thought about him for years, but his death reminded me how much I used to enjoy his late night news show.   His droll, dry wit was very amusing, and I miss that we have nothing similar today.

 *  Australian author John Marsden has also just died (at only 74 - as I age, I long to read only about deaths that are at older ages than that!).  I only read his famous first book in the "Tomorrow - When the War Began" and thought it was OK, but I knew he had been very influential in the youth fiction market, and in youth education generally.   I didn't recall this:

John’s youth was harrowing in different ways, and he never hid the fact that he was a bit bruised by life. He became suicidal as a university student and was institutionalised; he once wrote that the world of the psychiatric hospital was in some ways “more real than the one outside. In here the masks are off, people don’t pretend so much. [They] don’t have the energy or strength.” Perhaps that’s why he was able to inhabit his characters so fully. It is extraordinary for a man of his generation to write teenage girls so convincingly and with such empathy.

Update: yes, as Tim points out below, now Michael Leunig has died, aged 79.  (Again, fellas, for my long term planning, I only want to see people start to leave this mortal coil from about 85!)   I guess like most people I didn't mind Leunig at his peak, but his brand of idiosyncratic eccentric takes did start to wear thin in the long term.