My mate Alan the police photographer
snapped this one of me at Narwee
the night Sydney celebrity crim
Louie Bayeh was gunned down.

Men behaving atrociously
6 January 2000 Pseudo-millennium hype forces Nick and Jo to go to bed with old comedy tapes and Jo explains her new theory of modern comedy.

The Distributor tolls for thee
13 January 2000 Joadja recalls that we were warned there would be serious resistance to the $3 toll on the Eastern Distributor and weird political operator Rodney Johnstone pops up again.

madness@wall.street.com
20 January 2000 PR wankers Bruce and Tarkis break out the champagne to celebrate the big internet merger and Nick tries to explain to them how real capitalism works.

Rose of the West
27 January 2000 Nick flies to Perth to look into BHP's attack on the unions, the break-in at Rose Porteous's place and an escaped cane toad.

The Grey Mardi Gras
3 February 2000 Nick is asked to investigate why anybody would want to steal a huge quantity of human growth hormone. 

The fear of living dangerously
10 February 2000 In which Nick's daytime snooze in Joadja's garden is interrupted by a call from Jakarta where a 'creeping coup' by the army is feared. 

The Lunch for Comment Affair
17 February 2000 Nick is on the trail of the mysterious 'third man' who lunched with 2UE shock jock Mike Carlton and John Sharp at Eduardo's Restaurant in Noosa. Was Mike tempted into changing his line on Badgerys Creek airport?

An ocean view is like sex or money
24 February 2000 CEOs roll in wealth while poor Aboriginal kids are gaoled for stealing a few pencils.

An undertaking of great advantage
2 March 2000 Nick gets his tail chomped by a Killara pig-dog and Bruce and Tarkis burn their fingers on internet stocks. 

Darville should be called in for questioning
9 March 2000 Helen 'Demidenko' Darville, fraudster author of the anti-semitic novel The Hand That Signed the Paper surfaces in Australian Style magazine. 

Dead men walking
16 March 2000 The filthy rich escape gaol everywhere and Paul Keating reckons it's "cheerier" in Jakarta than the West.

Keeping up with the Pratts
23 March 2000 Money: for some people it breeds in the dark, for others it arrives in a sickly little trickle, but Nick gets an eerie feeling that money has changed somehow.

An incident on Oxford Street
30 March 2000 Nick gets a casual job counting consumers on Oxford Street and gets into a punchup with a bunch of rugby hooligans. 

The best of all possible crashes
6 April 2000 In which Joadja reckons Ross Gittins is the Dr Pangloss of economics and Old Possum explains why Wall Street today is scarily similar to Wall Street in 1929. 

When Push comes to shove
13 April 2000 In which Joadja discovers Paddy McGuinness is the attorney for atavism and the Rumpole for the reactionaries.

Chasing the dollar
20 April 2000 Nick gets involved in the greyhound doping case and has nightmares about his father's death. 

The long, lost, weekend
27 April 2000 The Easter long weekend catches Nick by surprise and he gets hideously drunk. 

A fevered vision of heaven on an autumn afternoon
4 May 2000 Nick comes down with Possum Creek Fever, goes to heaven, and discovers where Sydney Anglicans go when they die. 

A tale of two Sydneys
11 May 2000 In which Nick is hired to get the dirt on the a rust belt redevelopment proposal and tails a developer to Circular Quay. 

Looking backwards, looking forwards
18 May 2000 Nick and Old Possum catch the ferry to Manly and Old explains the mechanism of a stockmarket crash. 

Passing the licence test
25 May 2000 Nick discovers a very curious defence of teachers who have sex with their pupils in one of Paddy McGuinness's columns. 

Reconciliation by the river
1 June 2000 Joadja and Nick go on the Reconciliation march and then ride the Airport Line to visit a threatened Georgian villa by the Cooks River. 

The dead leaf test
15 June 2000 Three National Parks firefighters die in a freak firestorm and Joadja explains that the bush, like the sea, can turn on the unwary.

An Olympic bed-time story
22 June 2000 In which Old Possum revisits the modern morality tale of film director Leni Riefenstahl who got into bed with Hitler (politically speaking). 

The flight to Versailles
29 June 2000 Crazy rightist commentator Paddy McGuinness and Treasurer Peter Costello fly to Paris for the high season. 

Working on Sunday
5 July 2000 Crime Boss Louie Bayeh is gunned down at Narwee and Nick reflects on the transient nature of tough guys.

Losing touch with reality
12 July 2000 John Howard hits London, acting like a pig-dog on speed and the Salvation Army mullahs take over Australia's drug policy.

Star City blues
20 July 2000 Nick ponders the death of Fashion and wonders why the casino enquiry will tell us what we all knew before Star City opened. 

Bullshit travels faster than light
27 July 2000 In which physicists claim to have broken the lightspeed barrier and Nick and Jo go into partnership with Federal Parliament Inc.

A race to the bottom
3 August 2000 The trucking industry is a quiet, never-ending, tragedy that polite society politely ignores. 

Rinse the celery juice off my toga
10 August 2000 Nick is hired to investigate Bob Carr's weird behaviour and discovers he's infatuated with the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Lights-out time at the loony bin
17 August 2000 New evidence shows Richard Nixon sabotaged the '68 Paris peace talks.

The times they are a'changing back
24 August 2000 The Brushtail Café is trashed by a drunken mob from the new-look Sydney Morning Herald. 

Twenty minutes into the digital future
31 August 2000 Are virtual journalists the wave of the future? Maybe the Scientologists are onto something.

Higher, faster, dumber
7 September 2000 Final Olympic preparations are in full swing, and the bracing competition between Third World terrorists and the security specialists is just one aspect of the pursuit of excellence. 

Keeping bad company
14 September 2000 The ghastly aging shock jock John Laws escapes jail and Nick wonders whether some journalists aren't keeping very sinister company indeed.

Obeisance has to be made
21 September 2000 Poisonous jellyfish and lawnmowers at the Olympic opening ceremony confuse overseas viewers and the Indonesian army is up to a few tricks of its own. 

Burning oil, wasting time
28 September 2000 The world has already used up half the oil in the ground. From now the price will keep going up all the time but the politicians are likely to go on a witch hunt rather than face the truth. 

Pyrotechnics on a spring night
5 October 2000 An American stripper beats local favourite Rose Porteous/Handcock to gold in the Womens' Freestyle Wealth Redistribution Handicap -- the last event of the Olympics.

(Nick was unwell and his column didn't appear on 12 October 2000).

The discipline problem
19 October 2000 Our hero falls victim to a terrible bout of Possum Creek Fever and is hired to investigate bashing allegations at an exclusive Anglican school. Palestinians and Israelis negotiate in their characteristic fashion.

Dead men talking
26 October 2000 Down at the Sydney Hotel a mysterious spindoctor tries to hire Nick to bump off Peter Reith and Peter Collins.

The Fairfax follies
2 November 2000 The Sydney Morning Herald ain't a happy place as the once-favoured Bog Irish editor Paul McGeough gets an offer he can't refuse. 

Hate and wait
9 November 2000 So how come the odious Peter Reith got away with what are arguably crimes in his attack on the wharfies but got crucified over the phone card affair? Old Possum explains. 

Stranger things have happened
16 November 2000 How Ralph Nader could end up President of the USA. 

Faith, hype and clarity
23 November 2000 Nick investigates a dot com code warrior and feels glad he sleeps in the ceiling above an office he owns. 

The night of the Nigerian scamsters
30 November 2000 In which Nick gets a curious fax from Dr Idris A. Boro, JP of Lagos, Nigeria, who wants to park $28 million in Nick's bank account. A cautionary tale.

A premonition of radical evil
7 December 2000 A "Lace Curtain" is descending across Europe -- old Possum explains Poland's historic dilemma.

Mobile madness
14 December 2000 Nick is called in to mop up when capitalism goes mad in an orgy of mobile phone freebies.  

A Christmas card from Bruce (includes the prequel, Rumours of Bruce)
PDF 4.0 download . A4 format, 1.8 Mb.
Nick's latest search for his long-lost business partner, Bruce Possum, began in Perth in late December 2000. A cryptic Christmas card sent our hero on a visit to Tanzania. This is the sequel to the classic Rumours of Bruce, which is in the same PDF booklet.