May 2026

RayJack Johnston’s Incredible, and True, Journey

by RayJack Johnston’s 

G’Day legends! My name is RayJack Johnston! I’m Australia’s Number One Impressionist and Most Famous Man!

I was born on the shores of a crocodile laden swamp in Northern Tasmania. A little town called WALLAWALLOO!

Wallawalloo is a fascinating, beautiful place. It exists in its own space, outside of any of the world’s cares. Its wars, its changes and most importantly, its laws.

I remember it always being sunset as a child. Watching the Crocs lazily snap at passers by.  Wallawalloo is entirely surrounded by Crocs. Who are, in turn, entirely surrounded by kangaroos. The ‘roos stare into town angrily, with murder in their eyes. Only held at bay by the Crocs.

As such, I have always seen crocodiles as protectors. And have treated them accordingly.

My journey to the stage began as a rippa nipper, helping make props and backdrops for me mum’s one woman plays. The roar of the crowd as she reimagined Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” into a savage takedown of the Australian Government (with added car chases) had me hooked!

It took a while to make it to the stage though. I spent a significant amount of time working on the great Aussie soaps. On Neighbours I snapped up a job as a stunt double for Bouncer the Dog.

I also enjoyed a torrid sexual affair with Helen Daniels. May she rest in peace.

I wowed critics with my performance on Prisoner Cell Block H as the baddie prison guard “Vinegar Tits.” A mountain of prosthetics and my own chameleonic acting skills meant that audiences had no idea I was a bloke whose tits were, and still are, vinegarless.

Next it was a flurry of Big Screen Appearances. I was in four of the five Mad Max movies. I was not in Mad Max Three, Beyond Thunderdome as Tina Turner and me Granny (GranJack) have a long standing feud.

Sadly I was never able to gain a foothold in Hollywood due to a long, bitter battle between me Dad Ray, and his childhood best friend, Crocodile Dundee. Dundee has seen fit to keep me out of the major rooms in Tinsel Town. Their loss became Comedy’s gain.

I started out, as we all do, on the open spot scene. In Aussie, it is known as “the Lurban Scene.” Lurban being Aussie slang for a sort of well meaning drunkard. The kind of harmless drunk who will accidentally ruin your child’s third birthday but has also bought them a really ripper present.

I quickly became a hot property thanks to my Incredible Impressions. One minute I was Victor Meldrew, belting out his famous catchphrase “I don’t bloody believe this!” While the audience reeled from that, Mr. T would appear pitying fools and refusing to participate in the miracle of flight! Before anyone could rebound I would be embodying the spirit of Superman being kicked in the balls.

There was no pop culture icon that I could not and would not lampoon.

And so it went and I became the next big thing. I became Australia’s Most Famous Man. I am Australia’s Number One Impressionist.

I was on top of the world. So I took the next logical step.

I booked a three week residency at the Sydney Opera House with my self penned Operetta “Oh Mother, Where Art Thou?” An exploration of trauma and grief told through the eyes of a mother being fed to a crocodile by her son.

It was a critical and financial disaster. I owe a significant amount of money to the “Painters and Dockers” AKA The Aussie Mafia AKA The Oza Nostra.

So I find myself on the lam. Hiding out. I spent three weeks living in Danni Minogue’s house. She was furious when she found out.

 Another week I hid out in the Krankies’ Sex Dungeon. More comfortable than you would imagine, but the price of admission was high.

I spent a wonderfully happy couple of weeks disguised as a kangaroo. Bounding round the outback. What a joy it was, to leap alongside my fellow ‘roos. I gained a love and respect for them in that time, and took great pleasure in learning their internal rituals. I even nursed some joeys in an improvised pouch made from a repurposed bumbag filled with an old family recipe for ‘roo goo.

But nothing beautiful lasts forever and my debtors tracked me down.

I needed to make space, needed to make a move. So here I am. On the other side of the world. Climbing the Scottish Comedy Ladder.

Rung by McRung.

So what’s next for The Australian Sensation? I’ve made a list.

Firstly, try to put together the money to pay back my debtors. But so far no one on the Scottish Comedy Scene seems to have $275 Australian (with interest!).

Find a way to apologize to Danni Minogue for giving her such a fright.

Get my revenge on Crocodile Dundee.

And, of course, become Scotland’s Number One Impressionist.

That’ll do ya.

A Day in the Life 

LEXI CROCKFORD​

This is a day in my life, specifically the day of the 25th of April, which was a very busy Saturday. My day started at 10am, which sounds like a luxury, but I was up til 2am the night before. I get ready for work (or sleep in til 11 and then run out of the door), then I’m off to my first job of the day: The Cowboy Strip show at Maggie’s. To avoid this being a section of free advertising, I’ll only say that my job is to set up the sound equipment, monitor the mics, and play the tracks. However, starting your Saturday with several very ripped cowboys getting their kit off certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world. 

After that finishes, usually around 2:30, I dawdle off home, stopping by to check the local tescos for some cheeky yellow label items for dinner. Today’s pickings was a deli meat pizza, which was pretty good, if not for the fact it was still three pound bloody fifty. If the yellow labels are going to be that high, I’ll skip them all together and rifle through the bins. 

After my shopping spree, I get home and try not to have myself a little nap. At 4pm I wake up, and start cooking my dinner. I put the hot water on to do the dishes after I’ve eaten, take my pizza out of the oven, then sit down to watch some Doctor Who and talk with my girlfriend who’s hot off rehearsals for our next show (Fandemonium 7th/8th/10th May if this comes out in time. If it doesn’t, just follow our page at “Martyr Theatre,” we’ll be announcing a fringe show soon 😉). Needless to say, my wife and Doctor who are much more interesting than the potential of doing the dishes, and as 5:30 rolls around and I need to leave for my next job, I swear I’ll do them when I get back to the house. It’s a mental swear, that both I and whatever good lord exists know, will be pushed back to tomorrow, if I’m lucky.  

My next job takes place in Polo and I have the honour of teching for the Rasperry Cabaret, hosted by Tootsie Annie. A whole Cabaret dedicated to , the artist formerly known as Prince. This is a grand old time, getting to do sound and lights in the polo club, for a whole show full of Burlesque, hula hooping, musical performances, and even live puppetry! This just unironically is really fun, especially as some acts bring unique tech challenges with them, and I’m apparently nerdy enough to get really enthused about having to set up somebody’s wireless headset, fresh out the box! It does also help that the Annie is wonderful, a good pal, and buys me a cheeky drink to say thanks (which on top of the actual show fee, I feel is far too kind. Not that I’ll ever say no). Just an all around good time with a raffle, lasting from 7-10. But wait, the night isn’t over yet! In fact it’s just beginning, as 10pm marks the end of my polo shift, and the start of my Riding Room shift, just upstairs in polo. Who’d’ve guessed working in a gay bar would suit me so well? 

Riding Room holds a special place in my heart. Not only is it my most regular job where I’ve made good friends, learnt lots about my trade, and had an amazing time at, but it was also the location my first professional tech job, which has led me to all of my other employment avenues. So when I say that this weekend is the 14th Birthday of oor wee joint on the corner, I mean that it’s not just a longer shift, but a wee celebration of my home bar. I joined just after the 9 years anniversary if you’re curious. The normal evening bill would be two burlesque acts and a 15-25m singing or magic act; or a hour singer set, but for tonight’s special occasion we have 3 burlesque acts and an hour singer. 

Tonight did not disappoint at all. Truly a lovely night, filled with the top talent I’ve come to know and love. Double shout out to Emma Lynne Harley, who not only sang a bangin’ pop set tonight, but will be debuting her solo show “Walking on eggshells “14th-16th May @Summerhall, 22nd May @Paisly Arts centre 😉)  And as I write this, I hand over to my wonderful friend Paul Puppet to continue Djing the room for the night. I can happily say I do live a good life, sappy as that is; but I do wish to stress this is the busiest my life does get. Frankly, had I written this on a Monday, I would’ve only detailed me watching youtube, playing video games, and eating a delicious microwave meal. Still, I find the days where I do nothing all the sweeter for my busy ones. 

Thank fu*k I didn’t have a comedy set coming up next week. Else I’d’ve had to do all that, and ignore writing my material.  

George Steiner 

If you have ever wondered why there has been no Sophocles or Euripides in the modern age, or why American culture is so bad, then this month’s influencer George Steiner can give you an answer.

George Steiner was a French-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, and novelist known as a "polymath" who explored the relationship between language, literature, and society, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He was a leading European man of letters who believed in the transformative moral power of art, while grappling with the fact that high culture failed to prevent, and sometimes existed alongside, barbarism. 

Frances George Steiner was born on April 23, 1929, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near the capital of France, Paris, and unlike previous influencers, his formative years play a much more crucial part in his life’s work as Steiner was the son of  Viennese Jewish parents, his father was a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, his older sister was born in Vienna, but the family had subsequently moved to Paris before George’s birth to avoid the growing anti semitism in Austria. 

Steiner said that his father had thought "Jews were endangered guests wherever they went” and wanted to equip his children with languages to allow greater mobility, so young George was raised with three mother tongues: German, English, and French.  His father believed in the importance of classical education, and taught him to read the Iliad in the original Greek when he was five years old, and Steiner recalled being tutored in Latin by German Jewish refugees who had fled to Paris.

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In 1940, during early part of World War II, Steiner's father moved the family to New York shortly before Paris was occupied by the Germans, and of the many Jewish children in Steiner's class at school, he was one of only two who survived the war, something which profoundly influenced his later writings, stating that "My whole life has been about death, remembering and the Holocaust." 

Steiner became a "grateful wanderer", saying that "Trees have roots and I have legs; I owe my life to that."  He wrote extensively on language, literature, and the Holocaust, examining how high culture failed to prevent, and sometimes accompanied, barbarism.  He argued that the humanities express the best of humanity, but are incapable of hindering the worst. He observed the paradox that high culture—such as a deep appreciation for Bach and Mozart—could coexist with extreme cruelty, with some Nazi bureaucrats being connoisseurs of classical music. He argued that culture cannot exist as a "neutral zone" and criticized the "high seriousness" of European intellectuals who saw culture as a supreme value, ignoring the "guilt of civilization" 

Upon arriving in New York in 1940 the then eleven year old George was met at dock by his father whose first words to his son were “remember we’re going back!”, and although Steiner gratefully acknowledged that the USA had saved his life by sheltering him from the Nazis, he was never at home in that country. He couldn’t accept the lack of irony or the daily pledge of allegiance which he found very alien.  His father briefly sent him to an American school, but his disdain for American educational standards saw him removed to the French Lycee of New York where he would complete his schooling and where he was taught by Jewish academics who had fled the Nazis including the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss  who was there teaching geography. 

Steiner’s most notorious work was "The Archives of Eden" (1980), which claims that American culture is a "custodian" of European high culture rather than a creator of its own, and argues that American society is intellectually provincial and acts as a pawnbroker that collects, archives, and commodifies European artistry and ideas. He challenges American artistic achievement, arguing American music and philosophy are secondary to European achievements.  Specifically on the subject of music Stenier wrote:

“Up to this point in its history, however, American music has been of an essentially provincial character. The great symphony of ‘the new world’ is by Dvorak. It is Varese’s Amériques which comes nearest to a musical transposition of its spacious subject. Again, limiting oneself to the twentieth century - a limitation inherently weighted in America’s favour - it is obvious that there are in American music no names to set beside those of Stravinsky, of Schoenberg, of Bartók, of Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, that the oeuvre of a Prokofiev, of a Shostakovich, perhaps even of a Benjamin Britten represents an executive ‘density’ and imaginative continuity strikingly absent from the work of American composers. And even if the Stockhausen- Boulez era is now passing, its role, its formal and substantive logic in the history of western music, are on a level which, until now, American composers have rarely challenged, let alone matched. “

After Stenier finished his schooling at the Lycee he spent a year at the University of Chicago where he became enamoured of science, he had previously studied literature and philosophy at the Lycee, and set about studying mathematics and physics with one of his teachers being Enrico Fermi, however Steiner’s hopes of a scientific career were dashed by his advisor of studies who told him that despite his ability to  memorise countless scientific formulas he was told that “there is not a spark of mathematical creativity”, and strongly urged him not to go into science, something Stenier called “utterly heartbreaking”, but he took his advice and after spending a bleak year at Harvard he returned to Europe to study as a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford.

The subject of Stenier’s Oxford Doctorate in Philosophy was the foundation of his book “The Death of Tragedy” (1961) which argues that true tragic drama, which peaked with the Greeks (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and Shakespeare, died in the modern era due to secularism, the rise of scientific rationality, and the optimistic, egalitarian nature of modern society. This is along the same lines that previous influencer Max Weber had argued regarding the disenchantment of the world.  Stenier argues that “tragedy is tied to a metaphysics of divine intervention in human affairs, and divine enmity to man, notions which had rapidly lost their strength after the middle of the eighteenth century”.   Steiner asserts that modern, optimistic worldviews (Marxism, bourgeois liberalism) cannot sustain the existential despair and necessary fatalism of "absolute tragedy". The shift away from myth toward scientific, rational explanation destroyed the necessary metaphysical framework. Christian "optimism", Stenier regarded Christianity as “anti tragic” and modern political ideologies argue that human suffering can be remedied by political means, destroying the premise of fatalistic suffering necessary to tragedy.

Steiner lived in Cambridge from the 1950s until his death there in 2020, he was a founding fellow of Churchill College, but his denial of a permanent academic position led him to become Professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of Geneva, where he lived in Geneva for 7 months of the year and Cambridge for the other five, and Stenier held this position until he retired.  He found English academic life provincial, and as a continental European he felt more at home in Switzerland and at Geneva where he could teach in all the languages that he knew, and had the opportunity to “live Europe” due to its centrality.

Apart from the two works referred to above, Steiner wrote many other works, a couple of examples are  Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967), essays exploring the role of literature in a post-Holocaust world; and  In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971), which explores the impact of the Holocaust on Western civilization and anti-semitism.  

George Steiner can properly be regarded as the last of the great generation of European comparatists scholars – Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek – who did so much to establish the discipline of comparative literature. In an era in which World Literature has emerged as the dominant methodology, their almost exclusively European focus is now counter to the dominant trends of the age, but Steiner’s work was characterized by a deep concern for the survival of humanism and high European culture, particularly after the atrocities of the 20th century. Ultimately, Steiner's work represents a profound defense of literacy and the word ("Logos"), even while acknowledging the terrifying silence or destruction that can follow them. He remained a believer in the power of the teacher to pass on the "responsibility" of high culture.