I SHARE MY LECTURES IN the Masters course I’m enrolled in with architects, civil engineers, a few property developers, and one or two landscape designers. I’m one of a very small minority, I find, who’ve ever spent any time down in the humanities or social science end of a university—and it’s something of a shock to jump over into the space of the other of The Two Cultures.1
SCOFIELDTOUCHED MY ARM. “HERE we is,” he said.
We had come to a huge tenement building.
“Where are we?” I said.
“This is the place where most of us live,” he said. “Come on.”
So that was it, the meaning of the kerosene. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe they had the nerve. All the windows seemed empty. They’d blacked it out themselves. I saw now only by flash or flame.
“Where will you live?” I said, looking up, up.
“You call this living?” Scofield said. “It’s the only way to get rid of it, man…”
—from Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, first published 1952
THEPREDOMINANCE OF ASSIMILATIONISTCONSTRUCTS… meant that questions about how Australian institutions had responded to an influx of people of non Anglo-Saxon origin simply did not come to the surface. There was no ‘decision’ to rule such questions out of order. They did not arise; they were not ‘confronted’…1
That’s your favourite Australian domestic sociologist and mine, Jean Martin, describing non-decisionmaking in action—when something’s simply ruled out of public knowledge as a subject to have ideas about.
THEPEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts blood dyed its every fold….
Jim Connell wrote the song, and gave it to the social democrats and labourists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The British Labourists still sing it; even the Australians still know the words.
Norwegian kids can’t be that different to the young women and men I spent my twenties arguing with. Like A, I’ve been an earnest teenager in a youth wing of a moderate, labourist, reforming Party. For pleasant and unpleasant times, for all their enthusiasm and compromise and cynicism, they’re my people. And to read the news makes me sick to my heart.
It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human rights and human gain.
FORM IS TEMPORARY, CLASS IS permanent—or so, apocryphally, did Steve Waugh appropriate a cricketer’s hundred year-old cliché. The aphorism’s also served as a common student politician’s reasonably witty running joke, punning on the Marxist sense of class conflict, and it’s served as at least one conservative candidate’s election motto, that I know about.1
ON THEWEEKEND OF JULY 9-10, the august sovereign body of the Australian Labor Party (New South Wales Branch), the State Conference, met at the Sydney Town Hall. It’s been a while between drinks, and we were all hoping, I think, for an uneventful two days out. If you’ve never been to one, you’ll have to imagine a cross between an undergraduate debate, a dissenting Protestant worship service, Modern Times, a crowd scene in an Altman movie and Thunderdome. But, you know, in a good way.
Open microphone, with Johno at the head of the queue
THISMORNING I HAD MY upper front tooth surgically removed and replaced with a temporary bridge. In a couple of months, once the bone has solidified and the dentist is prepared to put it in, I’ll have that bridge replaced with an implant and another more permanent bridge. It’s all from being kicked in the face when I was 15, and apparently my upper jaw is now a bit of a dental curio. They tried to hide the excitement, but all of the other dentists in the surgery came around during the procedure to have a look down my throat to see what was going on—I’ve never seen so many eyes peering over white masks. Honestly, about halfway through I felt like the middle of a two-up school on ANZAC Day. “Hand me those forceps and more gauze. No more bets please. Come in, suction!”
PLEASEALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE myself, I am a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for many a long year… and while Liam hasn’t been looking I’ve pinched the keys to the blog and I’m fanging it around for a joyride—or at least the closest thing to it you can get between speed bumps and school zones and chicanes and traffic lights in this pissant Nanny State. I’ve got the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson polishing a Smith & Wesson M&P .38 Special in the passenger seat and the ghost of someone who says she’s Janis Joplin in the back. Hunter seems to believe her, and if 66.6% of the car says that’s who she is, who am I to go against a majority? Especially as half the majority is holding a gun. But I digress.
LISTEN TO ANOTHERPARABLE. THERE was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country…
—Matthew 21:33
If you’ve skimmed the Gospel, you know the story. After making sound property and infrastructure investments, a vineyard’s owner’s slaves and sons go to collect the dues, but meet gruesome ends. The landowner, as you’d expect in a story told by the Son of Man, “[puts] those wretches to a miserable death”.
The moral, of course, is if you’re a tenant with a garden, don’t stop paying rent no matter what the dispute, put all communications in writing, have the number for the CTTT handy, and read your Residential Tenancy Agreement.
My favourite TV show when I was ten was the A-Team. You know the plot: someone attractive needs saving from drug lords, Communists or an African dictator, BA Baracus refuses to fly, the A-Team scrounge together very improvised weapons, there’s a car chase or action scene and George Peppard smokes a cigar wearing leather gloves. Wholesome entertainment.
I already have an office chair, a hoodie, some old sneakers and paint-spattered jeans. Now all I need is an FAL and I can be light anti-aircraft defence.
(The full series is terrifying and amazing in about equal measure, and reminds you that despite smartarse beret-wearing Westerners there’s kind of a war still going on).