Last night I saw an amazing film. It uses South Australia as a post-Collapse landscape, compellingly. The Rover. Apart from the number of actors being shot dead at point-blank range with no warning, I found it beautiful and strange. The credits rolled and I leaned forward eagerly, trying to see who had made all that intricate and baffling music. The guy in front had pulled out his phone and was already deeply immersed in his messages. That the world could collapse while you’re in the cinema, in the dark, unable to do a thing to prevent it or hinder it. That by staying on top of the endless loop of chatter and information masquerading as insight, you could prevent this. Well, I guess at least if you never really live, presumably you can never die.
Blog
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ute tray of goodness
In the back of my ute is so much soil and sundry scraps of leaves and dirt that I just found, in the seams of the rusted steel, a tiny plant growing. I plan to leave it and see what becomes of it. Maybe I can drag a fruiting tree behind me round the town. Put in a cane chair and folding picnic table. Add a coloured cloth & give readings. Uh huh.
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this most severe moon & I
A house nearby is small, wooden, and humble, a tiny workers’ cottage in the classic Queensland style. Only it’s been done up like an Ascot knot with a formal grey-and-dark-grey paint job, art-gallery landscaping (blades), and an unpleasant extension bigger and taller than the house that clamps onto its back side like some shuttered and illegal petrol station. It looks like a small, private jail for teenagers. It occurs to me that is perhaps what it is: the parents maybe have built this for their kids who were too big to leave sprawling round the living room and too small in the eyes of the world to take their chances under a beckoning dancing and quite shameless moon. As with beads, as with knucklebones, as with tealeaves: who can tell.
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Four Horsemen
“To truly understand something is to be liberated from it.” This fascinating film held me riveted. It’s completely reinvigorated my view of the everyday life I lead and its purpose. I’m so glad I stumbled on it. Hooray, humanity, I love you and I will serve.
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Jack the Hammer
Fought the good fight, and won. The battle if not the war. We came home an hour ago to the sound of jackhammers ringing up and down our street. It was 10pm. I rang the police. They said, they can do nothing, I would have to ring the Council. So I got on my ugg boots and walked down to the guys who were carving up the roadside with their gigantic hammer-carrots.
There were two of them, young and decent. Two older guys who work for a different company – the ones who take charge of blocking off the road – sort of shrugged when I spoke to them first, nothing we can do. I went and tapped Jack the Hammer on the shoulder. “Hi!” I said over his mate’s continued noise. “Do you realise this is a residential area? And it’s 10 o’clock at night?”
He pulled his earplugs out to speak to me. After a while his mate stopped work and we all chatted. I said, when my brother was doing that work, he used to wake up with his hands locked in a gripping position. Yeah, he said, feelingly. I said, you know in some practices like yoga, they suggest you do the exercise that’s the opposite, so that you undo some of the damage. Like if you hunch over a desk all day, you can lie back over a ball, to stretch it out. You could maybe stretch your hands this way… He tried it. “So that you don’t feel like you’re 75 when you’re only 28,” he said.
The other guy was calling his boss. He came back. “Boss says he’s sorry. It’s actually not in his control. You would have to ring the utilities company.” I said, “Can you please give me their number?” He wrote it down on a pink post-it note for me. He said, most probably it’s the local businesses who wanted the water to not be shut off while they’re trading. He said, You should have got a notice through the letterbox, a noise notice. He said, Usually we do this work during the day.
I went back home and called the utilities number. The guy at the other end was unhelpful and bullshitty. His smooth corporate speak annoyed me. “Yes, there’s nothing I can do,” he said several times. He tried to tell me the guys on the road would have “just said whatever to get rid of you, not meaning to be rude.” He slid the responsibility smoothly equidistant from all parties like a bead floating on an abacus so there was no sum. I kept him on the line for quite a while before giving it up. Then I heard the truck pull up stakes and park outside our door.
I told them what the call-in guy had said. “He said we should just wait til business hours and then report it.” “Hah! How does that help you?” Jack the Hammer rang his boss again, then his bigger boss. He came back to our door and stood shyly, courteously on the path, until I noticed him and came back out to ask what gave. He showed me on his iPad all the hydrants up and down the streets of Brisbane that need work done. I said, Is that all the places where you have the pleasure of jackhammering in future? He said, “He shouldn’t have said we would tell you anything and that we were just bullshitting you.” I said, “I know! I thought that was rude. He was just trying to avoid taking responsibility.” He rang his boss again. “Yeah we’re hammering in the middle of all these houses, mate. This needs to be done during the day.” He so impressed me. Courteous, friendly, warm, pragmatic, and with humour. Stood up to his boss and to his boss’s boss. No soft soap, just genuine humanness. I felt like offering them a cup of tea. My eyes felt like they were peeling. He said, “I’ve got my big boss to come out here… he’ll be about a half an hour.” I said, “Well, if he needs to talk to me, can you get him to come knock? I’m going to try and get half an hour’s sleep.” He said, kindly, “Would you prefer he rang your mobile number? That way he doesn’t have to disturb you and that.” I said, “Yeah, that’d… No, wait. I reckon it’ll be harder for him to tell me, to my face, that you’re about to start jackhammering at 2 o’clock in the morning.” “True,” he said. We shook hands with great affection. I told him, “You did a good thing. You’re very very decent and I appreciate it. Thank you.” He said, “Well, you need your sleep.” And then they went away.
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the good ship junk
At my last place I cut down one of those plastic “NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE, thank you!” stickers and clapped it on my letterbox so that it said: NO JUNK. This didn’t stop some people who felt that their pizza-shaped pizza menu, Thai takeaway special delivery offer or local dentist’s surgery was immune. So at the new place I kept the “you!” Now it says: You! NO JUNK. *dusts hands*
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buy a smoke
I went and sat in a church for an hour. Outside and around us the traffic and screaming world swirled. I sat limply, examining nothing, letting my gaze rest like butter on the high colour windows and glowing long pews. God was there for me, the god who is not grand but great and not distant, proclaimed by all the world’s most dangerous people and who doesn’t really exist, I think, but to whom I somehow cry out in moments of deep joy and crushing down grief. I gazed at the flowers, the candles, the keys of the lovely old organ. Afterwards trailing up the street with a frangipani tucked in my bag I smiled at two celebrating ladies, with their backs to a wall of constructing industry, all the ingredients of their afternoon laid out: smokes, supermarket catalogue, bottle of a possibly mixed fizzing drink. “You look beautiful!” said the younger one; I nearly fell over with surprise. I mean, I tripped. I went into the post office. “Has this got a battery?” she said. “It’ll go by road but not by air.” “Ok,” I said. I paid for the parcel. In the Chinese grocer’s I brushed my knuckles across all the fronds of the barrel of brush brooms to choose by the feel which I would carry home. Paid four dollars and balanced it across my arms like a bayonet. The Aboriginal man who spends his afternoon by a tree on the hillside said, How are you. His mate, a red-faced white man with a spreading lap, said, judgelessly, “Saw you eating something off them bushes there.” “Lillypilly,” I said, “you want one?” And uncurled my hand to show a pink-stained palm lumpy with fruits. The first man reached across himself for a pocket. “Buy a smoke off you,” he said. I said, as I always do, “I finally quit! Sorry ~” and spread my hands, because my first thought is not to make a smoker who’s not yet quit (every smoker) feel bad in their still smoking cave. Around us the afternoon was fresh and untamed. Up the hill little houses crept, clutching their gardens. The two old men had a bag of wine plump between them like a jellyfish beached and slowly dying in the sun. I went on up the hill and behind me another climber approached, this time a man in a suit, already reaching into his breast pocket as the old man sang out, “Hey, Michael!” “Heya, Marty.” “Buy a smoke off ya?”
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The Saturday Paper
Bought The Saturday Paper, the one not owned by a misanthrope sadist. Carried it into my favourite weekend cafe and sat down. They were playing the Rolling Stones: bloke music. The first sentence that caught my eye was: “Trying to explain why fiction matters, novelist Ian McEwan put it simply. ‘Cruelty,’ he said, ‘is a failure of imagination.’”
Common-sense headlines followed: “The real budget emergencies: households around the nation face genuine hardship, with terrible consequences.” “European austerity breeds far-Right support.”
The article titled Failure of Imagination was by Sean Kelly. He explored the reaction to Hockey’s budget and said, what he is hearing is not only individuals lamenting their own losses in this new deal, but a nation of people who worry about the impact on their fellow citizens, “imagining,” for example, “the everyday obstacle course imposed by disability.” He said, “There is harder work ahead, work many of us have still largely failed to do because what we are being asked to imagine is too far removed from our own experiences.”
A whole album of Mick Jagger’s plaintive lope later, paying for breakfast I joyfully brandished the new enterprise to the cafe owner, standing at his till. “Finally you can buy this locally!” I said. “What is it?” he said. He had not heard it’s happened. I showed him. Staff clustered round. “Can I take a photo of that?” “Can I too?” Careful pictures of the back-page subscription form disappeared into several phone cameras. They jostled behind him to leaf over pages, pointing, reading. The guy in the cap covered in little Lionel Ritchies levelled his finger at me, the bearer of better bad tidings. “This is genius!” he said. The owner said, it hurts to buy five copies of The Courier-Mail and five copies of The Australian every Saturday. I said, you will love this. It’s full of interesting points of view. Over his shoulder the tall barista said, “There’s no Sports!” The cafe owner flicked the paper open at the back. “Yes there is,” I told him. “You just didn’t recognise it because it has a photo of a woman athlete.”
Reading the paper had left me filled with an unholy rage, but without the sick feeling I get from Murdoch’s certainties, a deep fury empowered rather than overwhelmed. “This isn’t us,” I felt, “this isn’t right.” The cafe owner and I talked it over in a few despairing sentences. “Every morning this week it’s been all about the State of Origin,” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “cos nothing else is happening in the world. Nobody’s struggling, nobody’s suffering…” “People read it,” he said, “people buy it, but I can’t believe they like it.”
I said, “I just read this from end to end. Not one photo of an Indigenous person saying how their low income and premature death rate are really their own fault. They should work harder.” We both had tears in our eyes. “It’s really good to see you,” he said, “really good.” “Thanks for your halloumi,” I said. “Thanks for your hospitality.” Afterwards I cried all the way home. My Berlin companion, who his first weeks in Brisbane had worried he would not be able to live in a country where every morning this kind of crackling cruelty unfolded over the breakfast table and whispered from every headline its slimy innuendo, asked, What is it. I said, bursting, People don’t want this! This is not us! I can’t believe in their real hearts Australians are so racist and greedy and selfish and cruel. “Our country has fallen into the hands of thieves.” I remembered pelting across Berlin on my bicycle to vote at the Australian embassy, the sense of resolution and purpose in the room, mostly young people, filling the forms in, voting. I remembered keeping an appointment the next week with a shiatsu masseuse I had fallen in like with, who said when I showed up, “You look pale. What’s the matter, are you ok?” And I said, “Something terrible has happened in my c~, in my country,” my voice broke and I sat on her futon and sobbed. Who could have guessed then how terrible it was. The vengeance on anyone vulnerable and poor. The vindication of everyone landed and privileged. The silencing of anyone who is not white, in a country built on burnt rich black and red soil. My belief in life is that people are kind, it is only our damage and pain that makes us take out more damage and pain on each other. Tony Abbott’s government feeds to that a small, poison doubt, telling and insidious: Maybe not all people are only cruel because hurting. Maybe there are some, walking amongst us but psychopaths, who seem functional and believe in themselves but who gain satisfaction from inflicting suffering. Satisfaction, pleasure, and release.
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comfort reading in a world gone wrong
My comfort reading is romances and children’s literature from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. What I find comforting is that it describes a world I can recognise, whereas the world outside my door feels oftentimes too jarring to be borne. What’s disorienting about it is what’s sprouted and what has been lost. Today I read a novel written by Pamela Whitlock (15) and Katharine Hull (16) and which they sent, with temerity, to Arthur Ransome as he was their favourite author. Ransome fell in love and persuaded Jonathan Cape to publish it. Like most English children’s stories of the time – this one published 1937 – it is the story of wealthy, bored white children on holidays who seek adventure. The world they move in, on ponies and by bicycle, on foot and occasionally by boat, rises off the page crackling and ripe. There is more life in the world then than there is now. “As she dashed through the heather, furry-tailed rabbits scuttled from their earthworks and green lizards slunk from beneath rocks and slid into patches of sparse grass. Kestrels and hawks winged ceaselessly to and fro in the vast sky. Jennifer ran on and reached a pile of boulders. (…) Where was the herd of wild ponies?”
I don’t know how to put out my hand to the world I so loved and which seems to be slipping, unadvertised and increasingly silent, into liquid and so down the drain. On the way to the grocery store and back I pass people sitting staring into their phones. That lost world must be somehow captured in there, or seem to be, as the wild ocean can seem to be present in large round windows in a rich man’s office wall. Not perhaps its shimmering life and deep sweet sweating intensity, but merely its unpredictable sameness, its free-running ever-altered landscape, its uncontainable never to be urbanised tribal sense of joy and discovery. I miss that and I want to find it outside my computer screen, a porthole on a world now merely mythical.