Football-in-mouth disease, a national malaise

Naked Truth (2013) Kodakotype by Pants

It's National Reconciliation Week. 

What better time for an ugly, bone-headed brawl to demonstrate how much we need action on racism? Last weekend's incident during an Australian Rules football game made news all around the world. A 13-year-old girl shouted the word 'ape' at an Aboriginal player. A child's stupidity sells, unlike the ongoing tragedy of exclusion, disadvantage and exploitation blighting the lives of thousands of Indigenous Australians.

Then Eddie McGuire, (mental age 13), scored a spectacular own goal by suggesting on his radio show that the player targeted for racial vilification, Adam Goodes, might be drafted in to promote the musical King Kong, which is soon to open in Melbourne. McGuire is one of our many limelight hogs who has a monopoly on paid employment and apparently does none of it well.

His howler was all the more horrific as another of his 'positions' is president of the Collingwood Football Club - the very club whose 13-year-old supporter, er, kicked the row off in the first place. McGuire later attempted to claim it as a slip of the tongue and/or a failed attempt at irony. He wasn't too sure which exactly because he was so tired - presumably from trying to hold down half-a-dozen jobs simultaneously. A rewind of the exchange with his co-announcer indicates that neither excuse is plausible. As McGuire persists with his ill-starred point, his colleague sounds more and more nervous in his feeble rebuffs. Intentional racism? He says not but, at the very least, it's wilful ignorance.

Adam Goodes has been calm and gracious in his response, calling for a whole-of-society approach,

"We've just got to help educate society better so it doesn't happen again."

Which begs the question - how does anyone get all the way to 13 without understanding that it's wrong to call a black person 'ape'? Not just because it isn't nice to insult someone's physical appearance, but because we share a bloody and recent history of colonial oppression where conquered indigenous peoples were killed or enslaved by white settlers across the so-called New World in the belief that they were godless and therefore no better than animals. 'Ape' is a barb as potent as 'nigger'.

Further, how does a radio personality who is also president of the football club at the centre of the storm not understand that 'King Kong' and 'ape' are synonymous and that he is the very last person on earth from whom such a transgression would be excusable? And, since McGuire is supposedly so vehemently anti-racist himself, how does he not figure that a comparison with King Kong, the cartoon 'ape' who is stolen from his homeland, put in chains, forced into entertainment slavery and then killed when he rebels would be deeply offensive to an Aboriginal man. Now there's your irony.

The answer isn't complex if you've got a clear head and Indigenous leader Professor Mick Dodson puts it as succinctly as anyone,

"Anybody who understands racism simply doesn't say things like this."

And this really is the pointy end of the point. White Australia doesn't understand what racism is. Tossing a few dot paintings on the tails of Qantas planes and inviting some Aboriginal elders to open your school fete does not tick the full-commitment-to-equality box for once and forever. I'm a repatriated Australian and, as many of you have heard an insufferable number of times, not a particularly happy decamper. I returned after 27 years abroad a week or so before Kevin Rudd made his Sorry speech. I cried. We all cried. And then what? Nothing. It isn't enough to make a qualified token of atonement every fifteen or so years, no matter how tear-jerking. We are the champions of the shamefully hollow gesture.

Luke Pearson in this thoughtful piece suggests that the national effort should be directed towards anti-racism rather than non-racism.

'Anti-racism is not a stop sign. It is a learned skill. It benefits those who understand it by broadening their perspective, and it benefits those negatively impacted by reducing how often the encounter it from people who too often claim they “don’t mean to cause any offence."

I agree. The problem is deeply entrenched and requires more than superficial etiquette upgrades. Training white people not to say the wrong thing is not enough - although clearly beyond the ability of some to grasp. Shouted language is not the issue, it is merely one indicator. There are worse, covert indicators. There is a conspiracy of silence, a spurious sign-language created by white people for white people which operates in areas where Aboriginal people try to fit themselves into white suburbia. I live it. I feel it.

When I first started looking for a house to buy here in Larrikin's End, estate agents tried to direct me away from certain streets. It finally dawned on me that this was because some Aboriginal families lived in those streets. I asked one agent why he would infer that I would not want to live in a street where there were Aboriginal families. His answer really shocked me. He wasn't a racist himself, you understand. He lived in a street where there were Aboriginal families and had 'never had any trouble'. Yet he had presumed for me prejudices based on my apparently refined, middle-aged-lady appearance. I certainly wasn't about to wear his bogus overlay and told him so. The grand irony is that I'd come from Hackney in the East End of London and had lived in a predominantly black neighbourhood for most of my adult life. I was used to being the only white person on the bus. 

This is the problem that needs solving. Indigenous people in Australia face prejudice for simply being. An estate agent defied the evidence of his own experience and tried to influence a decision I might make, based on no indication from me at all that I might be a bigot. The only conclusion that I can draw is that bigotry is assumed to be the default position of, what? someone my age? a single woman looking for a house in which to live alone? any white person? That's what's so scary. Much of the fear and prejudice that exists in this country between the different cultures is a phantom creation. It's also what makes Luke Pearson absolutely right. Doing nothing is not an option. Those of us who are pro-equality and anti-racism must say so wherever and whenever necessary. 



PS: A couple of days ago, I signed an online petition to recognise the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the constitution of this country. There were only 140,605 names before mine. At that rate, the planned referendum to update the preamble to our constitution will be a long time coming. It's obviously worth doing but it isn't the answer to the intellectual and emotional log-jam that prevents this country from healing.

Pop. Quiz

Once were wankers (2009) by Pants

Whenever our population hits a round number, we panic for a few weeks, check the locks on the detention camps housing refugee women and children and, once we've popped a paracetamol or three, we sit down to have a 'conversation'. In our vernacular, a conversation is a 'yarn' and it is very like a ball of actual yarn. You never know how long it is until you unravel it. But in the end, all you're left with is wool. It never occurs to us to knit this wool into anything useful.

Recently our national population hit 23 million. That's about as many as live in Seoul or Delhi. "Well," I hear you say, "these are very, very small people with nothing like the need for legroom that Australians have." Too true. Panic! The locks have been checked and changed, the appropriate medications ingested and now the yarn is beginning to unravel. "All righty", I thinks in me best Aussie accent, "let's join this flamin' conversation then." So, the other night I sat down to listen to this radio 'debate' with a panel of 'experts'.

Panic! Henny Penny called, she wants her raison d'être back. Not now man, can't you see we're freaking out here? Sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, panic. Don't you just love statement-of-the obvious experts? Never trust an answer that begins with the words, 'it's about how do you ensure...' Picture me shouting at the radio - 'we don't want more questions people, we got them in abundance. How about an idea - you have any of them?' Apparently not. What we got was a tedious restatement of the 'ishoos' we've all heard many times before. Honestly, it's like living in a perpetual brainstorming session - minus the brains.

The question was asked, 'how big do we want our Australia to be?' Now that's a bit like asking a five-year-old if she would like to spend the next twelve years of her life going to school. Her answer isn't relevant - she's going anyway. Failing war, bubonic plague or the more likely scenario of our heads all exploding at once, our population, on current projections will reach 40 million by 2040, at which point it is expected to peak. One hundred years from now, the population of Australia is expected to reach just over 60 million, i.e. less than the population of Great Britain is right now.

As usual, we the people are expected to solve the nation's future problems while those being paid to think about these things play bullshit bingo on national radio. Let's start by unpacking the apparently intractable ishoos.

Any talk of population growth is invariably linked to immigration which is itself inseparable from asylum-seekers who arrive by boat. This has traditionally been a panic button for us. When we talk about 'fitting' people in, there's a subtext. We're talking about people fitting culturally as well as physically. Our idea of an 'Australian' is someone who looks the same and acts the same as we do. We're suspicious of anyone who doesn't like to eat publicly charred pigs' innards mixed with sawdust and weep genuine tears when one group of large men in tiny clothes fails to steal a ball from another group of large men in tiny clothes. Regard, if you will, the picture above. It's a message stencilled onto the rear panel of a truck right here in Larrikin's End and it's far from a rare sight. This is our idea of a welcome mat.


There are too many moments when our 'conversation' about population expansion through immigration sounds creepily xenophobic. Australia isn't the only country where racists hide behind resource concerns to shield the 'stranger danger' message but in the UK, which I'll use as an example because I lived there for a long time, the 'rack off were (sic) full' types tend to be confined to the loony right. We are genuinely fearful of anything that strays beyond an extremely narrow band of cultural practices and that is something we really should talk about. We could solve this problem by simply growing up.

Recently the government announced that the so-called 'baby bonus' is to be scrapped. This is a flat payment of $5,000 to any woman who is a resident of Australia who gives birth here. It is not means-tested. No one, but no one complained. Now that is odd. Australians will not generally allow something to be taken away without a very good reason. My guess is that we're so conditioned to the idea of there being too many people here already that creating more and being paid for it seems too profligate even for Australians. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in twenty years time and even more interesting to watch the interplay with another of our great intractable ishoos - the ageing population.

The first of the baby boomers are retiring and living in their multi-million-dollar properties on their fiendish but entirely legal tax-insulated incomes. This is what we thought we wanted twenty years ago - people saving their own money and taking care of themselves in old age. We hadn't reckoned on the chaotic nature of free-market economics. It could be that the compulsory superannuation system benefits only this generation and it may have been better to capitalise on the high tax base while it was there for the benefit of all and not just the professional class.The thing about ageing is that it's entirely predictable. Instead of squealing about old people being a drain on services whilst taking pride in our ability to keep them alive well into their 90s, we should be thinking up ways for older people to continue earning if that's what they'd like to do. No one's even talking about internet-based work opportunities or cooperative living for the aged.

The word you'll always hear whenever anyone proposes doing anything even vaguely progressive in this country is 'stainabiliddy'. The Australian definition of 'stainabiliddy' most accurately translates as 'a way of stopping time'.  I think of it as related to the Spanish word mañana which means both 'tomorrow' and 'an indefinite time in the future'. Further, time has to have stopped somewhere in the 1950s when air was still fresh, faces were all white and gay people did not even exist, much less compete with you for wedding venues. Unhappily, we have a situation where we're agreed that business-as-usual is 'unstainable' so even by doing nothing, we're doing something bad. We really need to stop using 'stainabiliddy' as an excuse to write endless but ultimately meaningless reports, make some fair and logical assumptions about what we think might happen in this scary future and get on with the job.

Our most pressing problem seems to be that everyone who wants or needs to work, wants or needs to live in a major city, leaving the regional areas bereft of all but children whose parents run a pub or petrol station and old folks who potter in their gardens. Not a lot of productivity there. A further complication is that farmers, i.e. the people who make it possible for us to eat food that still has some genetic link to a plant or animal, are going broke in their thousands. No one appears to be considering the consequences of allowing that knowledge and expertise to end up on the dole queue. I could go on about this for ever. We can't even work out an area-based energy-supply mix that doesn't cost more than poor people can afford to pay whilst protecting the environment in a country that has every conceivable energy resource, few people and no snow.

'The environment' - now here's a subject about which we're almost pathologically conflicted. On the one hand, we earnestly believe that we have already destroyed our environment and on the other hand we're terrified of doing further damage to something that is already apparently destroyed so we do nothing at all. It occurs to no one that nature's job is to regenerate and it does it rather well given a fair wind and occasional rain. It may do even better if we became its ally rather than its enemy. Our environmental efforts invariably result in us destroying the native species we're trying to save whilst allowing feral species to thrive. My suggestion is that whatever we're doing now, we immediately start doing the opposite.  

To be fair, one of the panellists on that radio show did come up with a radical idea - satellite towns within commuting distance of our major cities. One small problem - lack of 'infastrucha'. Yep, this is the thing we Australians can't seem to get our heads around. If you have more people, you will need to have more schools, hospitals and that thing that is as mysterious to us as would be the complete works of Thomas Pynchon set to music by John Cage - public transport. Better not to have any more people. Right. Who's for a banger in bread then?

Just kidding. Let's talk about trains. What we now find with the benefit of hindsight is that we really should have put underground rail in our cities a hundred years ago as rail lines alone now cost more per inch than premium cocaine. And that's not counting the cost of the rolling stock and the staff and the silly ticketing machines we can never seem to get to work. The answer to this conundrum is dense population centres with business-quality internet technology. If you can't move people around without bringing city traffic to a standstill, then they need to be able to either walk/cycle to work or work from home.

Another of our national myths is that most of Australia is uninhabitable. Well, there is that big deserty bit in the middle but there are also all the lush green bits around the coast. I have driven around a fair bit of the state of Victoria where I live and I can assure you that most of it isn't desert and only a little bit of it is mountains. Compare Australia with Egypt - a continuous, settled agricultural civilisation of at least 10,000 year's duration. Almost all Egyptians live on just five per cent of the land because the rest of it really is desert and there are more than 90 million of them. Egypt is about 1 million square kilometres. The state of New South Wales has a population of 7 million in a surface area almost as large and much of it is habitable. We know that because people do live there.

But let's not worry too much about that for the moment because we do have big regional cities in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria where eco-development would be beneficial. Big money must be spent on high-speed rail links between cities, especially since building an extra airport for Sydney (pop. 4.6m) seems well beyond our wit. Just a reminder - Greater London (pop. 8.5m) has 5 international passenger airports - Heathrow has 5 terminals and Gatwick has two. New York (pop. 20.5m) has 5 international passenger airports - JFK has 8 terminals, LaGuardia has four and Newark has three. We know that moving people and product around in this country is a big problem. Let's solve it by rail and be done with it.

From Larrikin's End it's four hours to Melbourne by car and about an hour more by train. Yes, you read that right. Our train travels at 70km per hour. If I'd not personally experienced it, I couldn't possibly have imagined it. At the moment, half of that journey is by replacement bus. This has been the case for the past six months. On my last journey to Melbourne a week ago I got the opportunity to question someone from the rail company. He told me that the problem is with the signalling system. Approaching trains weren't triggering the barrier gates at level crossings. He told me that a piece of testing equipment was being brought in from 'interstate' to test this faulty signalling system. It sounded like it was having to come from North Korea. And what? We don't have testing equipment here in Victoria to 'ensure' that country cars pootling over rail lines aren't mown down by locomotives? Although, at the speeds they travel, possibly not too much risk there.

We don't have a particularly good record of building cities. I haven't done extensive research on this but the most recent example I could find of a planned attempt to create a new Australian city was this one in Churchill, Victoria. Initially envisaged as a support town for the coal industry, construction commenced in 1965. Churchill was supposed to have reached a population of 40,000 by the year 2000 but it clearly didn't have the chutzpah of its namesake and limped to a peak of only 5,000. That's some planning catastrophe - and if you're superstitious, you'd question the wisdom of naming any town in Australia after a man so intimately linked with the disaster of Gallipoli. Perhaps it's not surprising that our planners are keener to mend and make do rather than splash out on a bolt of best worsted.


Australians are opposed to central planning but we might need a little more of it in the future if we're going to avoid the twin disasters of too many city folk with dwindling opportunities and too few country folk to grow our food. Yes, it is difficult to plan long-term, but someone does have to do something because pretending that we can freeze time isn't going to cut it. In previous centuries, temples and cathedrals were commissioned that would take 300 years to build. I'm guessing that no one was thinking there'd be a cure for death in a few year's time back then. These were cultures that had vision. The surviving buildings and monuments from ancient times are amongst the most precious structures we have in this world. Some are still in use and they all connect us to the grand project that is humanity. Which brings us to the final ishoo. Australians are obsessed with the notion that 'quality of life' can somehow be quantified. Except, of course, we don't know how to do it. The simple answer to that is that it can't be done.You just have to know when you're living a good life and part of that involves facing challenges and making adult decisions.

Here's the thing - we humans inherit a lot of stuff from our ancestors. We discard what we don't want and find a use for what seems valuable to us. Not too difficult, surely. Australia does a have complex relationship with its history - which is both very short and very long at the same time. This too often translates into complete inertia. We appear to want to save every scrap of the past, unless of course there's some mineral underneath it in which case it's Bamiyan, baby. I do understand that too much of the foundations of our major cities were indiscriminately lost to the wrecking balls in the 1960s and that's why we feel so passionately inclined to protect what's left of the founding footprint of our fledgling cities. But these buildings are gone and gone forever and we have to get over it, like Berlin got over it and Warsaw and Dresden and the 50 other cities annihilated in World War 2 got over losing their built history.

Melbourne has recently overtaken Sydney as our fastest growing city and already has a housing crisis to rival its ugly sister's. Melbourne also has reasonably good inner-city public transport but a rubbish long-commute train service. The obvious thing to do in the short term is to build more housing on in-fill land and redundant industrial sites close to the city where the good transport and jobs are. The upward trend is towards single-occupancy. Build small and cheap and give young people who like to live close to the cultural centre a chance to clamber onto the property ladder. Oh, and reclaim a bit of industrial land along the river for parks while you're about it. Every now and again someone bobs up with the statistic that Sydney has more people per square kilometre than either London or Paris which is then erroneously translated into the claim of higher-density living. It means nothing of the sort. Both London and Paris have huge swaths of land given over to public parks. People in London and Paris live closer together but have much greater access to green spaces.

Much of inner Melbourne has street after street of teany-tiny old houses worth a bomb. Very sweet and charming but, if we're talking 'stainabiliddy', I can't think of a major city anywhere else in the world where anyone would expect this density level to last forever. Melbourne currently has a population of  4.25 million. The inner urban areas of London (8.5m) and Paris (10.75m) comprise mostly medium-density housing. In London, large three and four-storey terrace houses have been converted into up to six separate flats. Paris has its five-floor tenements. No one can tell me Parisians do it tough on the QoL scale. You need a reasonable population concentration to support neighbourhood services that you can walk to, never mind keeping a healthy number of restaurants, bars, cinemas and leisure centres afloat.  City planners should look at redeveloping a lot of that housing over the next thirty years. They should start talking to the residents of those neighbourhoods now and do the thinking together. Perhaps they wouldn't mind swapping their damp little cottage for a modern eco-flat and be left with enough money to retire on.

Complex doesn't have to mean impossible. I grew up in Sydney in the 1960s and well remember the protracted wars over the design and building of the Sydney Opera House. Looking back, it's a miracle that it's sitting there. If it were proposed in the present day, it would never be built. Can you imagine Sydney without its signature building? It would be like Paris sans La Tour Eiffel, n'est-ce pas? I have a tough time thinking that my fellow Australians have actually taken a couple of steps backwards since those days but I'm afraid it's all too true. We do have one great challenge and that's to make peace with all the contradictions - past, present and future - that this island continent presents us with. 

Oh, and could the experts please start experting right now or stay away from my radio...

Cry 'havoc' and let slip the dogs of peace

The sun never sets on war (2013) Kodakotype by Pants

ANZAC Day conflicts me. Saying that, it does and it doesn't. I find the hullabalooness of it appalling and that's unequivocal. I come from the generation that studied Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year in secondary school. The play, written in 1959, slams the day as 'one long grog-up'* In 1959, many of the marching World War 2 veterans would have still been young men with the memories of horror and lost mates still raw. A day of inebriated mayhem was inevitable but unpalatable for the general population. The men thought they deserved it once a year as no one else understood. They were right but the world had moved on. These days we understand much more about the long-term impacts on combatants.

ANZAC Day faded into irrelevance throughout the 1960s and 70s, aided by a powerful resistance to Australia's involvement in Vietnam. Then along came the Bicentennial in 1988, and with it, a hunger for a unifying identity. Enter Gallipoli nostalgia. It proved the kiss of life for ANZAC Day which has risen from the trenches and become a juggernaut of gauche, cliched nationalism. The children and grandchildren of my contemporaries rejected our anti-war ideals. They are a generation or two removed from the personal experience of growing up with a parent traumatised by his war experience and are able to rewrite it as one great heroic and glorious quest, stripped of its futility. Somehow, a battle in far-off Turkey in 1915 which, incidentally, we lost, has become the defining event of nationhood.

There is something unnerving about seeing film of a nineteen-year-old bawling at Fromelles for a great-great-great-grandfather who fell a hundred years ago. Worse still are the ones who crack up at Gallipoli despite having no family connection. Sobbing celebs on Who Do You Think You Are? are bad enough - you expect histrionics there. Tick-box tragedy tourism I just find tawdry. And you can be certain that no one will be rushing home with a burning ambition to start a peace organisation.


The delusion of all this is inconceivable to me. I had long left Australia by 1988 and was not to return for another twenty years. When I first went to live in the UK in 1982, there were still huge swathes of the East End of London that had not been rebuilt after being flattened by the Luftwaffe. Unexploded bombs still made regular appearances on the evening news. Britain had been shattered by both world wars yet marked this only with a ubiquity of red poppies in mid-November and frequent reruns on BBC2 of The Dam Busters and Passport to Pimlico. That is the dignified way of going about remembrance. Getting all gooey over Gallipoli not only smacks of insincerity but discounts completely the price paid by innocents. War is not just a game for khaki toy soldiers. Where in our nation-shaping legend are the women who were pack-raped, the children who were burned in the their beds and the six million plus victims of the holocaust? Many Jewish survivors came to live in our cities after WW2. Where do they fit into our narrative? Where are the First Australians, the Aboriginal people, in this story? Where are the Vietnamese, Iraqi and Afghan refugees whose countries we helped more recently to shatter?

My father didn't talk much about the war. He was, by the patchy accounts we have, an ambivalent  participant - not gung-ho, more like making the most of a bad lot. There wasn't conscription in Australia during WW2. Pa Pants joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in 1941, fought in the Pacific and remained in service until June 1946. He never marched on ANZAC Day. He died in 1981 at the age of 60. He was a strong and fit man and his war service was considered a contributory factor in his relatively early death. This turns out to be very important to Ma Pants who, at 83, is the beneficiary of enhanced pension and health benefits because of it. She belongs to the War Widows' Guild and always attends ANZAC Day services.

Ma Pants and I have just had a two-hour debrief by phone on her ANZAC experience. She was very angry and upset. An RSL** sub-branch official had used the ANZAC Day service to deliver a diatribe against immigrants and asylum-seekers and lambaste the current government. It was hateful and disgusting, she said. She was just as concerned that others didn't seem upset. I asked her if she'd responded in any overt way. She hadn't. We concluded that people probably just didn't know where to put themselves and that she can't possibly be the only person in her community who isn't a vile racist.

Having gotten herself home and calmed down, she began to think through what protest action she might take. I suggested that the man was almost certainly in breach of his organisation's Code of Conduct and that it might be a good place to start. She could write a letter of complaint to the RSL firmly requesting that he be disciplined. She was at pains to make clear that she would defend his right to think what he likes in the privacy of his own warped mind and that her main objection was that he had exploited the most solemn of occasions in the most disgraceful way imaginable. It is wicked to hijack a remembrance service and distress a captive audience of mostly elderly people who have come for reasons of very personal tribute. Ma Pants was there to honour the contribution made by her husband - my father. He risked his own life defending the freedoms this man was so risibly trashing.

We talked a lot about freedom of speech. I think the rules are straightforward. One's rights extend only to the boundary of the rights of others. If you use your freedom of expression to oppress others or rob them of their own rights, then you are not freely expressing, you are committing a crime. Australia does have laws against hate speech but they are impotent in most jurisdictions, including the one Ma Pants lives in. Just because the law is an arse doesn't mean the man isn't an arsehole. Ma Pants and I are in agreement that such a speech in a public forum, although repugnant, would have been acceptable. It is better to allow bigots to speak in an arena where they can be challenged rather than concede to them the moral high ground by refusing them a voice. Silencing them is certainly not going to change their minds but reason has an outside chance.

Once we'd worked our way through all of this I asked Ma Pants,

'Why is ANZAC Day such a huge thing here when war memorialising isn't anywhere else?'

Her answer was immediate,

'Because the RSL is so powerful,'

'What?' I responded with incredulity, 'vested interests did all this?'

I shouldn't have been surprised. The whole country is in service to a couple of billionaire mining magnates so why shouldn't the country's biggest chain of boozers have a finger in this lucrative pie? Suddenly it all made sense and right away I knew we wouldn't have been the first to make this connection, so I opened a line of enquiry. (I've had house guests so was a bit behind on the news.)

A few days ago, Don Rowe, President of the New South Wales RSL set a cat amongst the pigeons in this interview with The Sydney Morning Herald. He is furious that the clubs are exploiting the ANZAC tradition for unseemly profit via alcohol sales and gambling. He says,

''Our business is a not-for-profit charity looking after the welfare of veterans and ensuring they are properly cared for.''

I hadn't realised that the money machine that is the RSL club and the benevolent society that is the RSL branch are separate entities. The RSL clubs are very big businesses and a major component of their business model is gambling. As a follow-on from Don Rowe's outburst last week, The Sydney Morning Herald has today printed this article describing how a war widow in her late 80s fed her entire life-savings of $750,000 into the one-armed bandits at her local RSL after the death of her beloved husband.

I feel vindicated that my instincts about ANZAC Day were right. It always seemed so phoney. We're gullible and have been manipulated in the most cynical way. I'm sure it's much easier to see from a distance. When I left this country ANZAC Day was on its last crutch. A generation later, it's the second biggest occasion of the year and the only day apart from Christmas Day where most of the shops don't open, at least in the morning.

By chance, English friends now living in New Zealand happened to be staying with me on ANZAC Day. I asked them if it was anything like this in New Zealand. It isn't. After a long day's sightseeing, we stopped to buy beers. Mr NZ, schooled in the fine art of beer-hunting by beer-ignorant Pants was sent in to get a six-pack of VB. It sounded highly erotic to Mr NZ. Waiting outside, Ms NZ and I watched a dapper veteran exit the bottle shop with his brown-paper bag of 'grog'. A small man with a full head of perfectly oiled hair, his suit was adorned with so many medals, you wondered how he was able to walk. There was no way you could avoid being moved by the dignity with which he carried himself. He had to be over ninety years old and looked very frail. His quiet presence demanded respect. The one thing you couldn't, wouldn't do, was begrudge him a drink. It was a long way from The One Day of The Year. Ms NZ, a lifelong pacifist, whispered something like, 'good for you old fellow.'
 
And that is the bit that conflicts me. It must be possible to care for our veterans and honour our war dead without the twisted hoopla and jingoism that allows, and possibly even encourages, the hideous vitriol that Ma Pants had to endure at her ANZAC Day event.

*Australian for piss-up.
** Returned & Services League - an organisation for veterans and serving military personnel.

Thatch Despatch

Hell's that way, save me a pew (2013) Kodakotype by Pants

Millions of us have anticipated this day and wondered how we would feel. The woman we only ever referred to by her last name is dead. In truth I feel nothing. It's just too late for celebrating. I departed Britain five years ago. Thatcher departed relevance in 1990. The manner of her ejection from power left little scope for further direct influence. We were grateful for small mercies. One day Godzilla in a pussy bow, the next - an historical curiosity. We can't so easily shed her, er, legacy.

Legacy is generally assumed to be a benevolent word. The OED's primary definition is 'an amount of property or money left to someone in a will.' Here in Australia, it's the name given to the organisation that helps the families of fallen soldiers. Then there's the apposite secondary interpretation - 'something left or handed down by a predecessor'. Consider the example given,

'the legacy of centuries of neglect'.

That phrase could have been written for Margaret Hilda Thatcher (1925-2013), except she didn't need centuries - a decade was enough. In 1945, Britain lay in ruins after six years of war. By sheer determination and with the collective cooperation of the people, it forged itself into a new welfare state. Fifteen years later, that project was complete. Now, more than twenty years after Thatcher merely removed its foundations and supporting beams, it has not been rebuilt. A Labour government, given thirteen years couldn't, (or perhaps wouldn't), fix it. I think it's fair to say that Thatcher was more destructive to Britain than Hitler was. Why? Because she achieved the one thing that Hitler couldn't - she destroyed the people's spirit.

Dementia is a terrible disorder but one could almost resent Thatcher for acquiring it in later life. The memories of all the dreadful things she did conveniently erased, she was relieved of the responsibility of self-critical reflection once her cannibalistic chickens had all come home to roost. Lists of her misdeeds and the permanent damage of her anti-social onslaught on the country she apparently loved so dearly are rolling out. It's a prodigious record which doesn't need to be regurgitated here. 

Instead, I'd like to make a couple of comments about one of the demolished foundations of the welfare state about which I do know a little something - social housing. When council tenants were given the right to buy the houses and flats for which many of them had been paying rent for a generation or more, I did not object. I was a council tenant myself by then and thought the principle sound. Working class people should have a place on the property ladder. The money that tenant buyers paid could have and should have been used to fund investment in new council rental properties - except that's not what happened.

The tenants who did buy initially were the ones with the best properties. They were also the best rent-payers. Very quickly, the most cost-effective housing moved into private hands leaving many councils carrying maintenance costs well in excess of the rents they were able to collect. At the same time all this was going on, Thatcher managed to abolish the Greater London Council, leaving one of the great cities of the world without a unifying authority. I'm still reeling from the shock of that. The GLC also owned many large housing estates. These were transferred to local authorities who did not have anything like the resources or capacity to deal with the management and maintenance of them. I was a tenant on one of those estates. The money collected from the sales of council houses and flats was frozen for about fifteen years. In that time, the cost of property in London quadrupled. Never again would it be viable to build social housing on a scale that would allow working-class families to stay close in the neighbourhoods in which they'd lived for generations. 

When Thatcher said, 'there's no such thing as society', she was wrong. There was such a thing when she said it and there will remain such a thing long after the memory of her destructiveness fades. I'm glad I lived in London during most of her reign. I know who she was. I lived under her tyranny. I can also say it was exhilariting to be a young person in that situation. You really want someone to kick against and she was certainly an inspirational adversary. 

The news of her death came in strange circumstances. I was watching Q&A, a political panel discussion here in Australia. Unusually, the show featured a panel of women. Germaine Greer was the star pull. Also appearing were Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle de Jour), Aboriginal opera star Deborah Cheetham and a couple of local journalists. Towards the end, the male host dropped the btw that Thatcher had just died into the discussion. It was taken up by the panel as a hypothetical. Perhaps they didn't realise it had actually happened? I switched over to our insanely inadequate at the best of times ABC News 24 and it was live-streaming BBC. She had indeed died and there was clearly no love lost. Grudging footage was offered by presenters who were demonstrably bored by having to continuously loop these scant offerings.

Make no mistake - as a grunt who had to live with the 'legacy' of her decisions, I hated her. But I did have a moment when I thought, hey, isn't she more than a footnote?

 

Getting Smart

Tar 8 with water bottle (2013) by Pants

In the film Master of Stillness, Clive James speculates that the painter Jeffrey Smart chose to spend most of his life abroad because Australian grandees seemed inexplicably compelled to annex the arts for their nation-building agenda. That feels true. Australian artists, writers and filmmakers were then, as they are now, expected to contribute to national identity by 'telling our stories' - as if stories were not universal. James says of this faux earnestness that his friend is 'above all that'. 

There may well have been more pressing reasons for Smart's, er, decampment. His wittily named and erudite autobiography Not Quite Straight gives no hint that he was conscious of a debilitating imperative to paint only Australian subjects - although, as a painter of urban life, he did just that. He had left Australia as a young unknown. I suspect that he wanted what so many of us who leave for an indefinite period want - to see what the rest of the world is like.

Smart is an artist of uncommon discipline and focus but also clearly one with a great social capacity and keen self-awareness. He appears never to have been particularly troubled by his discovery of his own homosexuality, unlike his friend and contemporary Michael Shannon. In the cloistered Australia of the 1930s, he had no way of knowing that he was not alone in the world but he does seem to have had an uncanny faith in his own ability to navigate its hostility. 

There is one ominous note in Not Quite Straight that suggests a very good reason why he might want to leave Australia. He was a sexually active gay man in the 1940s, when homosexuals were routinely and savagely abused. He was also an art teacher who was having regular sex with one of his students. He had the horrendous experience of seeing a friend in similar circumstances arrested. That friend was jailed and also flogged. That's right. This was in Australia, after World War 2. Where would you go? Why Italy, of course.

This is a very roundabout introduction to a review. But this is one of my 'reviews that is not really a review'. A few days ago I drove to Healesville - four hours from Larrikin's End - to see Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart Paintings 1940 - 2011 at the TarraWarra Museum of Art. 

The TarraWarra experience is a discombobulating one. TarraWarra Estate is one of the new breed of Australian winery that combines food, wine and the arts. They're all a long way down the road to nowhere. They all have those vast, clattery restaurants serving tiny dollops of putty-shaped food on enormous plates finished with drizzles of this and sprinkles of that and a teaspoon of wine in a glass the size of a bird bath. Some of them stage huge concerts featuring people you thought were dead and some have art galleries.

When you're in the middle of a high-risk fire area and intend to display millions of dollars worth of things that don't need much coaxing to ignite, I suppose 'bunker' is the only real answer to the design question. The TarraWarra Museum of Art fits that description to perfection. It's more mortuary than museum. The sense of time being suspended persists throughout my visit. The building, set between gentle rolls of grapevines, screams incongruity in its concrete lumpenness. And inside, the torpor continued.

I waited several minutes while two people behind a counter stared into open space rather than ask me if I wanted anything, like the opportunity to buy a ticket perhaps. There were no catalogues (sold out) and no souvenir ticket for gluing into the diary - now that was annoying. Even worse, there were no postcards. It's hard to imagine an easier way to make money than to produce postcards of an exhibition that someone has made a 600-kilometre round trip to attend. I'd have bought five at $2 and I'm meaner than a billionaire sitting down to complete a tax return. Australian galleries don't seem to have cottoned on to this business opportunity. They have postcards to be sure, but they're invariably of artworks that you haven't seen. It can't be a copyright issue as I've never struck it anywhere else. I would have bought a catalogue as well. Art books are my indulgence. So there's another $50 unbanked. It's available from Booktopia but I'm not in the zone now, am I.

It's a shame about the catalogue because I'm in the habit of referring to this useful device when writing my recollections. Fortunately, John McDonald has published this excellent essay in the Sydney Morning Herald and this is not really a review, remember. (The exhibition finishes tomorrow, and most of you don't live in Victoria or even Australia so there wouldn't be much point). If you find yourself insatiable for more Smarties you can also munch on this study guide from University of South Australia.

Jeffrey Smart paints industrial bleakness with an intriguingly apolitical sensibility. Rather than critique the utilitarian designlessness of post-war urbanisation, he endows it with a beauty that it does not seek for itself by simply painting it beautifully. In the film (Master of Stillness), which is conveniently on rotation at TarraWarra, he says he loves the messiness of Italy. At the same time he seems compelled to fashion some order from it. In another life he might have been a worker at a tip sorting bottles into colour categories and lining them up by height. There's a strong sense in his paintings, as in the photographs of Diane Arbus, that without him these scenes would go unnoticed. He says, 'we should paint the things around us', which is why you will see exquisitely executed satellite dishes displayed prominently on his canvases.

Clive James notes,

'He was painting the future, the country we live in now. And somebody once said, eventually everyone will live in the Smart country, in Smart Land. Well that was a good guess and the world now looks like what Jeffrey was painting back in the mid-sixties in Italy.'

The overwhelming impression you get from this retrospective is one of quiet accomplishment. In the film, Smart is shown painting his last work, Labyrinth. Once it was completed and at the grand age of 91, he retired. The opportunity to see this painting more than justified my 600-kilometre round trip. It also gave rise to a fine example of what my gallery pal Ms O'Dyne and I have dubbed 'Look Beryl' moments.  A 'Look Beryl' moment involves the overhearing of an unusually idiotic observation.

Our most memorable 'Look Beryl' moment occurred at the Napoleon exhibition last year. Mesmerised by a beautiful china cup and saucer ensemble accompanied by the designer's drawings, a woman says to her friend, 'Look Beryl, they actually designed the set before they made it.'The Beryl exchange in front of Labyrinth went like this, 'Look Beryl it says 2011. This must have been one of the last paintings he did before he died.' He's dead? I thought. No one told me.

And of course he isn't. The misunderstanding can only have been due to misleading captioning. A large sign in the entry reads Jeffrey Smart Paintings 1940-2011. Another  mortality metaphor. I was rather glad to get out into the fresh air and discover that the world hadn't, in fact, ended. 

At the end of Not Quite Straight, Smart recounts an incident while buying tickets at the Sydney Opera house,

'The girl asked for my credit card, so I slid it across. As she was recording the details she exclaimed, 'You're not the Jeffrey Smart!' I confess I felt a lovely, warm surge of ego-fruit when I said, with easily assumed pomposity, 'Yes, I am indeed the Jeffrey Smart,' and we both went into fits of laughter.

That is the voice of someone who has lived, and is still living I'm pleased to add, an impeccably examined life.

 

 

The lights are off and there's still no one home

Good parenting (2012) Kodakotype by Pants

I'm not participating in Earth Hour tonight. My reason? Well, apart from the usual curmudgeonly one - that I refuse on principle to obey orders that originate from any source other than the Australian Tax Office or Ma Pants - I'm simply not prepared to descend to that level of pettiness. Yes, pettiness. Besides, the whole thing makes me feel wretched for the squandering of effort it generates and the opportunity it creates to feel smug about doing just this one thing and nothing else.

Australia is the champion of the hollow gesture and now we've managed to export our love of tokenism to the rest of the world. Let's give ourselves a big pat on the back for that. Do we really imagine that turning off the lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge for an hour will somehow cancel out our huge and, by many accounts, world-leading per capita carbon footprint? According to WWF, the organiser of Earth Hour,

'Australia has one of the world's largest ecological footprints per capita, requiring 6.6 global hectares per person. Over 50% of Australia's footprint is due to greenhouse gas emissions, with the average household emitting around 14 tonnes of greenhouse gases each year.

If all countries consumed the resources that we Australian's (sic)* do, it would take the biocapacity of three Earths to support their lifestyle. The message is clear and urgent

We have been exceeding the Earth's ability to support our lifestyle. Habitats are being destroyed, the soil and waterways are being irreparably degraded. We must get back into balance!'

We adore the thought of being world-class but this is one gold medal that should truly shame us. Yes, I get that Earth Hour is, you know, symbolic but in the book of Pants, hypocrisy neutralises misguided symbolism. This is the seventh Earth Hour. If it were going to make an impact on behaviour, it would have done so by now. Even worse, this displacement activity may produce a net negative. Every year when Earth Hour comes around, experts pop up to warn that the energy required to re-power all the turned-off things combined with the surge when they all come back on at once will cancel out the nano-savings we aspire to make. 

Why do we never learn? And what are enthusiastic Australian Earth-hourers doing tonight? Let me take a wild guess. Barbecuing. They will probably have pre-used some electricity during a peak period to chill beverages and boil potatoes and pasta twists for salads. They may have driven many kilometres to a retail park to buy special solar-powered outdoor lights and they may also have invited lots of their friends to drive many kilometres to their house to enjoy these lights. They will certainly have fired up their barbecues with gas or wood. And then they will hurl huge chunks of beef onto hot grills. That would be beef from the methane factory that is a cow. And half of that meat will probably end up in landfill because there has never yet been a barbecue where all the food gets eaten. 

However, if there is a prize for not wasting beer, I claim it on behalf of our nation.

So what was all that about getting 'back into balance? Here at Seat of Pants, I will be conserving energy just as I do every day. And water too - even though there's no meaningless 'hour' devoted to it. I will be eating vegetables from my own garden and I will be enjoying the warm glow from just one energy-saving light as I do every night. If militant Earth-hourers want to argue with me, they can bring around their electricity bills and we'll soon see whose stand on the moral high ground has the sturdier legs. If we all took a sensibly spartan approach to daily energy use instead of showily donning a fresh hair shirt for one hour on a Saturday night in March we might get that 'better world' that we all so earnestly claim to desire.


* I know I'm always doing this but, really, you would think that an organisation of WWF's stature would at least get a proofreader. There's no punctuation mark after 'urgent' either. Just sayin'.

If you're happy and you know it clap one hand

Rose Tint (2012) Kodakotype by Pants

Today is officially designated The International Day of Happiness. Did you know? Neither did I until this morning. The UN is fond of springing behavioural directives upon us.  For once I am able to comply without even lifting a weary finger. I am happy. It requires no effort on my part. The mere fact that there is a double door between yours truly and the cause of most unhappiness here at Seat of Pants, (other people - I am firmly in the Sartre camp on this one), ensures positive delirium.

Happiness clearly means different things to different people. For me, it's silence, stillness and solitude (and a nice glass of Chardonnay - or a mediocre one, for that matter). There are people for whom that would be a version of purgatory and whose happiness can only be secured by the presence of a large cast all talking at once, several slobbering pooches and the imminence of a shopping trip. Vive la différence.

According to the UN,

'The day recognizes (sic)* that happiness is a fundamental human goal, and calls upon countries to approach public policies in ways that improve the well being (sic) of all peoples. By designating a special day for happiness, the UN aims to focus world attention on the idea that economic growth must be inclusive, equitable, and balanced, such that it promotes sustainable development, and alleviates poverty. Additionally the UN acknowledges that in order to attain global happiness, economic development must be accompanied by social and environmental well being (sic).'

This idea, crudely put in the statement above, has been around for a long time. Unfortunately, the UN's attempt to simplify it has stripped the concept of meaning. Broadly, the premise is that GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and GNP (Gross National Product), the measures used by nations to gauge prosperity, are not fair indicators of how the commonweal is faring because they only represent one side of the balance sheet. The hint is in the 'gross'. These measures don't take into account the negative impacts of productivity. For example, here in Australia, our resources wealth has protected all of us from the recession that most developed nations have been experiencing for the last five years. But, the aggressive and ruthless practices of powerful prospectors have divided and, in some cases destroyed, communities where mining happens. The human and environmental costs are not counted. Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton has written eloquently on this, notably in his 2003 book, Growth Fetish.

Reading on we discover that,

'The initiative to declare a day of happiness came from Bhutan – a country whose citizens are considered to be some of the happiest people in the world. The Himalayan Kingdom has championed an alternative measure of national and societal prosperity, called the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH). The GNH rejects the sole use of economic and material wealth as an indicator of development, and instead adopts a more holistic outlook, where spiritual well being (sic + sic)** of citizens and communities is given as much importance as their material well being.' (sic + sic again)***

Bhutan has come to own the idea of 'happiness' as a measure of net well-being. I'd point out that the UK-based New Economics Foundation has been championing a similar concept for a decade or more. And yes, Bhutan consistently appears right up there in polls for the world's 'happiest' people. That couldn't possibly be because the country expelled all of its Nepalese dissidents in the early 1990s now could it? Getting rid of people with opposing viewpoints might make some happy but I don't want to live in a society with no capacity for debate. Sadly, even the NEF has fallen prey to a populist take on net planetary well-being, using the blunt instrument of a crude ecological-footprint calculator to determine community contentedness.

Happiness is such a subjective thing. Australians are not a particularly happy bunch. We worry about everything, not least of all things that probably will never happen. It seems the more secure we are in our GDP/GNP outlook, the more anxiety we have about it all going to hell in a handcart. We are isolated and almost impossible to get to, yet the thing we fear the most is being invaded by small groups of unarmed people landing on our most distant outposts. We are only 22-and-a-bit million people occupying a vast land mass abundant in every resource needed for human thriving, yet we are consumed with the fear of not having enough - of anything and everything.

Being rich doesn't make you happy. Just ask our favourite billion-heiress Gina Rinehart, who's currently at war with her own children. If a prime example of too much never being enough were needed, surely this is it. Wealth and the relentless pursuit of it can have a corrosive effect on the soul. I wouldn't mind seeing a Gross National Happiness calculation for the damage done there. Australian community well-being is being choked by big gobbly fish wanting to eat everything in their path. We fear the oceanic Great White Shark above all other predators. Few of us will ever be bitten by one of these. It's the land-based great whites that are more likely to want to snack on us - and they won't just be wanting a leg.

Ask anyone in Australia how they feel right now about the future and you'll be guaranteed to get a sour answer, no matter how solid their own financial position may be. The political instability and its incomprehensible pointlessness has everyone rattled. There's only one thing worse than a political crisis and that's a phoney political crisis. How does a populace respond to a parliamentary system that's descended into chaos when our fiscal outlook couldn't be brighter?

The only possible answer is to wipe off that (completely bogus) gloomy (fiscal) outlook and put on a happy face (emoticon optional). If you really want to get into the spirit, you can make a pledge to 'try to create more happiness in the world around [you]'. Nearly 20,000 of the seven billion available of us have undertaken this wholesome activity so far today. That's some reach, huh! Clearly this sort of effort is much more meaningful than, say, refusing to buy clothing that is made by enslaved children or refraining from filling your fridge full of food that you will later throw in the bin or ... you get the drift.

'Here's a little song I (didn't) wrote. You might want to sing it note for note. Don't worry. Be happy ... '




*Crusty old pedant here - it really isn't possible for a 'day' to 'recognize' anything as it is not animate.
** Sorry, but this is the UN's official website. There are also punctuation errors that I haven't bothered with.
*** Ditto.