Nebo’s look out point will give you a rough idea of the lush landscape still only marginally inhabited in the north of the city and the crucial Moreton Bay islands beyond. A prime snogging spot, I reckon, well maintained with amenities like barbeque grills and information plaques, but just isolated enough to service the needs of those seeking a moment of solace and quiet contemplation. Which is why we are here; to feel embalmed in the therapeutic powers of Nature. It just so happens that a team of some six or seven loud Aussies have had the same idea at exactly the same time. They were incongruously led by a Geordie.
I couldn’t quite work out what they were intending to do up there, grouped in their loitering, noisy huddle. But this is dangerous logic, because it brings into question exactly what we were intending to do up there, late on a Tuesday night, when you would rightly think that people have much better things to be doing. You could practically hear my stiff upper lip tighten as they discussed Toyota’s antiskid braking system quite antisocially (or some other car-talk), and most affective driving routes in the way that competitive thirtysomethings tend to do, but all in a way which ignorantly suggested that they hadn’t fully acknowledged - even noticed - the rolling green hills that lay open, wild and enthralling before them. We trundled back down the winding track into Brisbane feeling more blemished than embalmed, as the strange gathering continued guffawing around their parked cars, waiting, I presumed, to see whether Citroen’s hydropneumatic suspension is really all it’s cracked up to be.
This bridge takes you directly into Fortitude Valley, a district which lays claim to Brisbane’s phoney Chinatown district, complete with whimsical tiled fountains and scenes of restless squalor, not to mention licensed sex shops boasting ‘Everything Adult’. This is where a slightly unsteady, barrel-shaped Australian in bare feet and standard-issue ocker hat decides to converse with me at a road crossing. He had already made quite a successful attempt at being drunk before lunchtime. “Fucking Chinese,” he says. “I’m an Australian. This is Australia, isn’t it.” The absence of a question mark here is telling, because this wasn’t asked with the slightly inquisitive tone of most Queenslanders you meet (who, especially the younger girls, tend to go up at the end of every sentence whether asking a question or not), but rather barked as a dogged fact, and not even in my general direction. In hindsight, I don’t think he was addressing me at all, as he was still mumbling expletives as we crossed the road.
And since we’ve accurately stumbled upon casual racism, further down the road (Brunswick Street, to be accurate) is where you’ll mostly find the one corner of Australian society that Toxic Math has so far neglected to mention in his travels - purposely, I should add, in order to fully gleam as much understanding of such a complex, pressing and morally unpalatable issue. I talk, of course, of the sorry figure of the modern day Aborigine.
My first experience in this department was back at the packing sheds of Bundaberg. Kym was our only Aboriginal worker; quiet, yes, but wholly pleasant and unassuming in an environment of similarly unassuming people. “Strange,” said a colleague during smoko, “because the blacks don’t tend to stay here for too long.” It was the ease in which he said it which surprised me. I asked if there was a reason for this but one wasn’t forthcoming, so the sentence has remained with me. I made a mental note there and then to look into this at a later date. Kym’s hard work ethic and the high esteem of which she was clearly held amongst her colleagues proved to be my first impressions of the apparently distorted cohabitation between the Aborigines and the white folks: courteous, yes, but was there something lurking beneath the pretence?
An overwhelming proportion of the Aborigines in Brisbane are of quite a different kind. Even during daylight hours, you can see them in mostly scattered numbers, hunched over grog bottles, listlessly walking or watching from the streets with wild, glaring eyes. Their hostility here is quite palpable but it is rarely active: unlike the street dwellers of England, there are no appeals for hand outs or sympathy. Australians seem to have become so familiar with this sight that life, quite incredibly, goes on around it. On Brunswick Street, tanned Gold Coast blonds conduct market research alongside a drunk Aboriginal couple who sink deeper into the contours of a park bench. You wonder whether this is a reaction borne out of ignorance or helplessness. It’s probably a bit of both.
For a city like Brisbane, which makes no qualms in celebrating its indigenous heritage - in fact, it actively promotes it, as we’ll see in a bit - there is a bizarre sense of double standards going on here which can’t possibly go unnoticed. Here is a city with an almost self-conscious reverence for upholding Aboriginal traditions despite the degradation which is overlooked everyday on its doorstep. It’s important to add here that there are drunk, angry white people out there too, but you don’t need a calculator to work out who is in the minority, further backed by the astounding statistic that in some parts of the country, the average indigenous life expectancy is some 20 years shorter than that of non-indigenous Australians. 20 years! I’ll expand on this in later entries, but for now, there is certainly some truth in Bill Bryson’s perception of the Aborigines as “Australia’s failed people,” in more ways than one.
AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Election 2010’
The current political trend for hung parliaments is catching on. As I write this on a Sunday morning, Labor have had a terrible election, handing out seats to Coalition occupants who, although almost neck and neck in the polls, have managed a 5% swing against Labor. Gillard made a speech full of sinking determinism, while the robotic Abbott declared his party were “back in business” to a party faithful of moshing drunks. He’ll still need support from the independents to run the country with any form of a majority.
This all followed frantic scenes yesterday across the country as electorates cast their votes for fear of a fine and a potential court hearing. It is compulsory to vote here and the penalties are severe. Because elections are won and lost on television, it makes sense to look at how the TV networks fared on such a tumultuous occasion. Welcome, then, to an election night special on AU Tube.
The BBC should count themselves lucky: do you remember Jeremy Vine’s virtual Parliament, which placed him right in the holographic centre of a swinging auditorium of blue and red politicians, or Emily Maitlis’ giant iPad? Leigh Sales is a Maitlis protégé who can only manage to point at a basic bar graph on a television screen most likely to be found in a sale at Harvey Norman. Kerry O’Brien, the ABC’s Jeremy Paxman by way of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, was on fine form throwing to outside broadcasts while having to subdue some last minute Tally Room campaigning from a pair of Liberal and Labour politicians. At one point, these pundits both answered their telephones live on air, ignoring O’Brien’s questioning in a telling rebuff. But then he does have a tendency to drift into contemplation, and a seemingly complete lack of urgency. “I can’t help but think back to nine months ago,” he says, back when Labour (under Kevin Rudd) were at the top of their popularity. That’s all very well, Kerry, but haven’t they just announced the Melbourne result?
Clearly Channel 7 got the short straw when it came to choosing a name for their election coverage. ‘Your Call’ sounds more like some whimsical ‘X Factor’ results show rather than a general election. Breakfast TV presenters David Koch and Melissa Doyle try to look assertive as a slue of names and percentages cover the screen like an incomprehensible cricket match. All the presenters here look like American estate agents from the 1980s - power suits, open collars and vibrant tans. I noted a slightly worrying moment when Doyle’s confusion got the better of her, asking one of her associates, “So what is actually happening tonight?” But at least Channel 7’s version of Emily Maitlis has a computer generated Parliament to play around with, while Koch successfully condescends the Coalition's youngest ever politician: Wyatt Roy, elected to Parliament at the age of just 20 years old. “Can you sing ‘Baby Baby’?” he asks him, but Roy sticks to protocol and comes out of the exchange looking more like the adult. But, credit where it’s due, Koch saved his best material for when discussing what former tennis player John Alexander will bring to Parliament now he is the new Liberal representative for Bennelong. “A good forehand drive.” Ba-doom. Something tells me he’s not taking this very seriously.
I’m not sure I completely agree with Channel 9’s psychedelic courtroom studio, with far too many talking heads clouding the hosts who are perched on an elevated platform gabbling hot air over the bodies of even more reporters in the foreground, who sit facing each other like naughty children. Presenters Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson are in the dock, the latter of which is in desperate danger of being overshadowed by her own eyebrows. Wilkinson is clearly unnerved by the thought of a hung parliament, probably because she doesn’t seem completely sure of what it means. “So is all of this actually written in the Constitution?” she asks one of her panel during a more clueless moment. The death of any political career is represented by a ‘Dead Ducks’ graphic where a shotgun appears on screen to blast away their profile pictures, adding to the circus motif which Channel 9 seem to have achieved quite accurately. While TV’s unhealthy Twitter obsession seems to be rampant here, with a designated Twitter Board where off hand comments are treated with much more importance than they’re worth. I thought about Tweeting this observation to them, but then they’d probably only go and read it out, thus somewhat proving my point.
No comments:
Post a Comment