Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: activist

  • this German sweetness and its love

    The best thing about living in Berlin so long and getting better with my German again is I can really enjoy people. Quite often, Berliners are just sweethearts. Today I phoned the handmade brush and broom shop that stands not so far away, in a leafy street I covet and run by the man whose grandfather must have founded it. His name is the same. I said, I would like to buy one of your dustpans, and he said, Ach I just live upstairs! Come over and ring my doorbell and I will come down.

    I jumped on my bike, feeling a bit overexcited. Imagine buying a handmade dustpan which is prettily polished from steel. Imagine buying it from the fellow who made it.

    His shopfront is more of a billboard for his principles. He has filled it with neatly hand-lettered exhortations reminding us we are all Mitmenschen, fellow humans, and when I first passed the shop he had a giant orange inflatable louse suspended and slowly twirling in the front window, with the label on it, “TRUMP.”

    So I rang the doorbell and he let me in. The inner stairwell felt so cosy and sweet. Immaculately swept rush matting, a neat row of letterboxes, and more exhortations about common humanity. “My brothers are black,” I read, “my sisters are red.” From above I heard a decorous commotion as Mr Brush came down. Two other people gossiping at their upstairs doorway greeted him as he passed. “Hallo, ihr lieben,” he said: hello, you loves.

    He let me into the shop, by the back door, revealing an organised back room that resembled some earnest party headquarters. Pamphlets were stacked in boxes and on benches, a German flag stood furled in the umbrella stand. He gave me the dustpan and I explained to him, I have no heating at my place right now, I have been warming terracotta pots in the oven and then standing them in the living room to radiate heat. Today the Handarbeiter (the hand workers, that courteous term by which every German plumber, chimney sweep, and boilermaker is known) are coming to finish up and reconnect the heating. I’ve been wanting one of your dustpans for ages but today, I’m going to use it persuade these guys to clean up after themselves.

    I waved the dustpan at him like a pennant.

    Getting back on my bicycle I saw a woman in the accountant’s office next door, she was blowing up a silver foil balloon and we smiled at each other through her open window. The balloon was in the shape of a 3. “Machen Sie Party?” I asked, are you having a party. Nudging my chin towards the three: “Ihr kleinste Kollegin wird endlich drei?”

    Your littlest colleague is finally turning three.

    She started laughing into the balloon. “Keine Kindersklaverei mehr,” I encouraged her, “ist vorbei!”

    No more child slavery! we are done with it. She threw back her head laughing, the balloon for her three- or more likely 30-year-old colleague wobbled and squeaked in her fist. I rode home with the beautiful, perfectly polished dustpan reflecting an increasingly blue autumn sky. Trees passed in my basket as though I had caught them with this tray. At home I opened the door to my Handarbeiter, who set up in bathroom and kitchen and as I was typing I could hear the older guy, hammering in my bathroom, muttering to himself. “Well, that’s never going to work, what are you about, Micha? That’s better.” I emptied the garbage basket to get it out of his way and ran back downstairs, carrying compost in one hand and trash in the other. An incredibly tall, good-looking guy was standing by the rubbish bins. He opened the lid for me, courteously. “Wouldn’t it be good if we had separated rubbish collections,” I said.

    “Yes,” he said, “it’s so ridiculous that we cannot recycle. I tried talking to them about it.”

    “And?”

    “Didn’t get an answer. But maybe… if we all tried…”

    “Wow,” I said, “gute Idee, good idea! Maybe we can all apply at once. Or all sign something.” We stood smiling at each other. He was still holding the bin lid. His wife stood in the tiled hallway holding both their bicycles by the neck, like horses. She waved and I waved and we all dimpled at each other. “A beautiful rest of the day!” we wished in turn, as Germans do.

    When they opened the street door I glimpsed a woman walking past with her kid on a little training bike. This is how Germans teach their babies to ride bicycles with such confidence. A toddler training bike is walked rather than ridden as it has no pedals, thus it strengthens one’s walking and one’s riding at once. I heard a snatch of what she said to him: “weil die anderen Leute…” Because other people…

    This is how Germans socialise their kids, to keep brewing this lovely society in which if you find a scarf dropped in the street, likely you will drape it carefully round a nearby lantern so that its owner can retrace her steps and find it. The street door closed and I went back upstairs two steps at a time. The Handarbeiter was still telling himself off as he worked. His blue overalls were stained with plaster and he carried all his tools in a large bucket. I loved that people – if not our landlord – care that we should recycle and cherish everything. It seems to me ecological awareness is a form of appreciation, and appreciation is awakeness, is love. I loved that the man who makes brushes by hand as his forefathers did spends his spare time spreading leaflets which speak to our common humanity. I loved that the child who passed our door was looking up from his little bicycle to his mother; that she seemed to be explaining something.

  • my favourite moments of the May Day march

    The people dancing on bus stop rooves.

    The leggy punk marching in ugg boots.

    The giant skinhead I followed for several blocks who had a gentle face, was six foot eight or nine, and had a dolphin tattoo round the back of his skull.

    The raddled Australian surfer turning steaks on his roadside barbecue and serving, in Strine, with ginger hair falling all over his face. Hours later I saw him propping up the corner of a pub, huge beer in his hand, giant smile on his face; he toasted us wildly, no splashing.

    The fact that 25,000 people marched and the roar from the crowd that went up when this was announced.

    The fast pace! Australian marches are often rather leisurely. At March in March last year we spent much of the route actually dancing. This was like 12,000 people running for a bus, for miles: actually three hours. A kind of political marathon.

    The old dude, late into his seventies, who had modified a bicycle trailer with boombox speakers and was blaring the deepest, darkest old school hip hop for everybody’s edification.

    The young guy who having accidentally kicked over a bottle someone had left standing in the street scooped up all the broken pieces and carried them to the side of the road to stash neatly under an overflowing bin.

    The fact that people were marching with beers in their hands but there was very little broken glass.

    The line of police officers blackened and bulky in head to toe riot gear, boots tapping to the music as they stood otherwise impassive with arms folded.

    The smart punk who was combining politics with business by dragging a very narrow steel apparatus on wheels, strung with four large stripey airport bags, into which he harvested other people’s discarded bottles, choosing those with the highest deposit.

    The stupid punk sitting in the middle of the road with his mates who refused to get up when an ambulance came sweeping towards him, and the ambulance driver who simply sped round him without bothering to swerve.

    The pink blossoms fallen like tissues all along the centre strip of Kottbusserdam.

    The blue, blue sky and the green, green trees and the river of black in between.

    The people watching and waving from their windows along the route.

    The bumper stickers people seemed to have clapped onto parked cars as they marched by, or which perhaps drove in on them, like: Sure. You can be a Nazi. It just makes you really crapola.

    The hand painted sign two well-dressed women were carrying which said Out of the way, capitalism, the next decisions will be made by all of us.

    The City rubbish collectors clad in hi-vis orange who were dancing as they swept up, dragging a wheeled trash can.

    The piles of rubbish people had built after the bins were filled, in planter pots and around the bases of trees.

    The intense conversations later that night sitting outside our friend’s photography studio and the various people who kept trying to come in because in Kreuzberg, a wide-open living room resembles a bar.

    The songs that kept dragging me at a run back down to the milling square just when I got settled, for more dancing.

    The raised cobbled square at the end of the march were everybody was dancing to a really good DJ. The silent disco that transpired when it came time to switch the music off and the DJ started handing out headphones for a 20 quid deposit.

    The moon that came up as the sun finally went down.

    The headphones, and the song whose name I didn’t know that pierced my waters as I skated under the fizzing trees in silence.

    The dancing.

  • super moon to the rescue

    A knock at the door when we finally trudge home, carrying our groceries, exhausted. It’s the darlingest neighbour in the world. “Oh, hi!” “Hey Cathoel. Just wanted you to see the last supermoon.” I have gasped and clapped my hand to my mouth. “Oh my god!” He is telling me, “It was even better last night. But,” confidingly, “it’s pretty good tonight.” I am still gazing at the moon. “Fuck!” I say without meaning to. It has just sailed up coolly from behind a giant building. It has the sky to itself, apart from a few pilot fish like lesser boats milling round the giant sleek swans at the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. My neighbour tells me shyly, “I love the moon.” He is wearing ugg boots and a pair of work shorts. It felt like summer today, suddenly, but it grew chill as it grew dark. When we set off to the shops an hour ago I had to laugh: partner in his ugg boots, me still stubbornly wearing sandals. “The pessimist and the optimist set out on a shopping trip together,” I told him, to make him laugh too.

    At the supermarket we saw a display of premature mince pies. They were packaged in festive red and green with silver holly. September, October, November, December. I spoke to a man with a trolley full of plastic bags about whether he might ever think of bringing his own. A look of weariness passed over his face. He explained what I couldn’t know: They use them again. His particular household – the boy gaping silently from behind the flowering trolley – has special exemption. Circumstances. Babies. “We have a baby at home who uses disposable nappies.” I felt the sinking in my heart, could say nothing. He said, kindly, shifting into higher-pitched Real Estate Voice, “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure it’s helping.” You see, it’s different for me. I am selfish. I am lazy. I got my own reasons. We got a baby at home using disposable nappies. God knows you could never wrap those in, say, newspaper. I was blinking back tears and had to run outside to collect myself. When a pair of ugg boots appeared inside my line of vision I looked up. He was blinking, smiling, holding out his hand weighted down with the shopping sack rendered from old cement bags. We walked home and took refuge in our house and then the neighbour winkled me out and now the suberbmoon glides up this grey concrete sky as though drawn on an invisible string. It is blond and impervious to smaller, humbler craft, like the frantically blinking jet plane cruising low toward the harbour. It is better than anything you’ve ever seen. It just is. If you’re alive right now, run outside and look up.

  • palace of wasted

    The number of times I have been sitting in some cafe and have said to the staff or even the owners, Gee, guys. Since you have all of this organic stuff and social justice ideology going on…. wouldn’t it be great to provide actual glasses instead of plastic cups at your water station? Imagine if you even maybe offered people a little discount for bringing their own containers for a takeaway? Or: Don’t you reckon your local cash and carry would get in corn-starch takeaway cups if you asked them? They’re easily available. The number of times owners and staff have said, Gee, yes. That is a really great idea. We should do that. The number of times they have actually acted on it. The number of disposable everythings sprouting from the council bins outside each venue. Are we doomed purely by our own selfishness? And not just us but every living thing bar certain bacteria and fungi and cockroaches?

  • the plastic to drown us in

    Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her three apples, her two mandarins and her kiwi fruit each in separate plastic bags lest they contaminate one another. When the guy turned away to change her fifty dollar note I spoke.

    Excuse me. I’m just so distressed by the… amount of plastic you’re consuming. Could you, I mean.

    Her expression helped me. Goofy, caught out, unblaming, sprung. I gathered pace. Couldn’t you please think about bringing your own bags? I know, she said, looking down. I know I should. I said, pleadingly, They drift into the oceans. They sort of fly about. If you are a turtle or a fish they look like food, jellyfish.

    I know, she said again, I should. Please, I said, please do. It’s really really time. And we smiled at each other and she walked away carrying her kilo of petroleum byproducts and once I’d paid for my bouquet of greenery and come out from under the awning into the wintry sunshine, so pleasurable, my partner was standing there opening wordlessly his canvas shoulder bag and as I fed the spinach and fennel in feet-first I was aware of the plastic bags girls passing us, seeing this transaction, maybe taking it home and owning it: we can normalise what seems a chore. However tonight standing at the checkout of a grocery store I felt unable to address the woman standing in front of me in line who had put every morsel of fruit and every mortal vegetable each into its own noxious, off-gassing solitary confinement. Bad, naughty vegetables, you suffer in there until you learn how to behave. I looked her over from her wood-heeled boots up to the leopard scarf that was slung so perfectly casually across her sleeves. I thought how I might say, Couldn’t you consider, and how she might say, It is none of your business, and how I might say, But it is my business! I have to live on the planet you are desecrating.

    In between I visited the nut store in West End where everything is in tubs or big sacks, and you point and say, I’d like a half a kilo of those please, a wedge of that. The good-looking and ordinarily bearded man who came out from behind the counter cheerful and broad said to me, Would you like a bag for those? I said, No thanks. See I think I’ve already used up my lifetime’s…. quota of plastic bags. A laugh of surprise spurted from him. I think I probably have too, was all he said. After the grocery store lady with her terrifying scarf I walked home in a kind of fugue. The moon hung like a slim segment of moon high in the blackened and starless sky, a plastic bag drifting in a bottomless trench. How can we have come this far without catching on to ourselves, I thought. Is the water just too dark and warm? Are we asleep?

  • 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.

  • dancing, just dancing

    Dancing in the dark. It’s so beautiful. I heard about it back in Melbourne, where it was born (and so was I), and just kept not going because I felt too shy to go on my own. In Berlin I signed up for the No Lights No Lycra facebook page and waited for them to organise an event but they never did. Finally last Tuesday the old Ukrainian Community Hall in South Brisbane with its solemn Cyrillic listings in gold of every president since 1949 and its overpowering fake floral stench from the immaculate brown-tiled bathrooms downstairs came through for me and truly delivered. A girl in a slouchy beanie stood bopping on the pavement, holding an envelope. “You here for No Lights?” She slipped my five dollars inside her envelope and pushed the door wide. “C’mon in, we’ve just started.”

    Inside the dim foyer were big double doors. I went through. The darkness bloomed all around me like mould, soft and plentiful. Oh, the delicious sound, oh, the song I had not heard in so many years and which swept me away like laughing salt water. The song took me by the throat because I used to love it, in the day, the day when days were nights and I was only waiting for the soft darkness to fall. I remember driving to a club I loved and smiling at the doorman whom I knew from a Government lecture at Uni and who never charged me, and just falling onto the dancefloor and dancing until I had to go to the bathroom, until I needed a drink, until they closed. The dancefloor was tiled in black and white and I was very often the only one on it. I didn’t care. Alcohol helped me to get there. A man said to me once in a park, I know you! You were dancing at the club and you smiled at me. But I hadn’t even seen him, I was smiling at god. I was god. The music was everything.

    In the darkness the first song made me dance and very quickly the dancing made me cry. I remembered all the times I had wanted to dance and couldn’t. I realized: nobody can see me! I’m invisible. I’m hardly here. I felt the hot freedom pouring like molten sand through me and through me, like glass, a kind of tide of revelation, only me in this full space, me and the lyrics, me and the bass. And as I realized the extent to which I always feel observed, counted, and noticed, and to which I hinge and hem myself, and won’t let myself go, it all got too much and I started to cry. The crying lasted only a moment, a long moment, then the next song took me in its arms and I got this big broad grin across my face, a grin that almost hurt, that lasted several songs before it disappeared without my noticing it.

    By the time that boring song came up I didn’t care, I was dancing. My feet came up towards my chin, I flung my shoulders like a bird. I shuffled forward between the blurs. Ever so slowly as my eyes arrived I could make out through the teeming darkness people in a trance of dance, their arms flung up, their heads hanging low. People hopping, jumping, one woman just strutting in a long walk back and forth from one pillar to the next, making a shadowy sashay. Just for herself. She didn’t need to be anything, do anything. Everybody looked absorbed in their own element. I was dancing. We could not make each other out except to keep from colliding. Somebody laughed. Somebody set up a clap and its contagion caught across the wide old hall.

    I noticed the second Tuesday something that felt really familiar in me but which I had never consciously seen before: that a lot of the time my dancing involves throwing myself slightly off-balance, so the dancing is more like a falling, a forever falling. Just in time I catch myself, I stave off the floor, I rescue me.

    Spun on the spot like a floss I faced the back. The thread of light under the double doors and upright in between them reflected dully on the dim floorboards, resembling an upside-down cross. At the end of every song we grew still and soon another song started. Some were from the 70s, 80s, some were woven by machine. I went out to get cool air under my shirt and let the sweat roll between my breasts and pool in the tiny belly button cave and run down my arms; the night breeze struck me like a soft tree, ineffably; across the road in the old church hall a dozen drummers had set up a racket, independently, a rhythm, they sounded like they were conducting ceremony rather than just rehearsing. I walked round the hall and peered in on them before plunging back into the throbbing, dancing dark. “Last song!” she cried and everybody whooped. At the end of the hour a small light went on up the front and people gathered along the side bench for their bags. As we left two by two or singly or in threes the girl with the beanie was there, gallantly holding back the door, greeting everybody the same: “Nice work, ladies.” Only then as the street trees dipped over the road tropically did I parse the vision I had seen but not really noticed, when the lights came on: these people are all women – it is us who dance, it’s we who want an hour off from being seen, we are here to hold our freedom in our mouths like berries too many to swallow, the jaw dislodges and the voice unhinges and juice rolls fatly and purply downhill, over the hills and valleys of me. Of you, who is me.

    I opened all the windows and drove silent home. Thinking about a man who courted me by visiting with drugs. Who used to ply me with pot and I always accepted it and we would talk about music for hours, hours and hours and hours, maybe playing one song over a third, a fourth, a sixth and seventh time to see through the weave. He said to me, When you perform, remember: it’s all in the approach. It’s in the way you walk over to the guitar. I nodded, I had no idea what he might mean. And I got up and danced, irresistibly, through my own house like a thicket of books and ideas dense and shifting like sleeping cattle swaying upright, he loved to watch and I didn’t care, I let him, I’d forgotten him, and once I danced up in a sprung crouch onto the kitchen sink, under the taps, flicking the wall with my flat hands, I played the house like my instrument, I ran out on the verandah and threw my head back my mouth open where the rain poured down from the broken gutter and that night when I came in again and the song had ended my suitor was lying back in his chair, looking very grave, his long fingers a tent, and he said, “Yeah, I know you got the voice, like I said; I realize that you’re this big poet and all. But in my view: you are more yourself in the dance than in any other form.”

  • she-moon

    Can there be anything more magnificent than clouds passing, at night between us and the stars, unhurriedly and without pause passing from east to west like the sun. In the distant western hills a community of storm birds screeches and wheedles and spools and yearns. The visitor I brought back with me from Europe had never seen the Southern Cross. It took him a long time to see what I was pointing at, some weeks back, because it is famous and small and dim: a cross properly. Dame Southern Land. The reef, the trees, the ineffable quiet hills. All of the creatures who burrow along the branches or through soil here underneath my head. The long beach, the wrecked mountains, the pulse. I’ll fight for you.