Awelye*

One of the things that surprises me about both Australia and New Zealand is the regionality of newspapers… In a country of less than twenty million, and in an age when network technology can reproduce a British morning newspaper on the doorsteps of Europe, Sydney has the Sydney Morning Herald, and Melbourne, less than two hours’ flight away, has The Age.

Both are full of assessments of the Little Johnnie’s ten years in power. The vox pops at the bottom of the analysis suggest that the feeling that their country has become a meaner and less pleasant place to live overall is a price Australians feel is worth paying for prosperity, or at least the dream of an achievable prosperity. The Australians I’ve been talking to in Sydney feel rather less positive about Howard’s union-bashing and racist identity-mongering than that: for Elizabeth, the recent passing of restrictive anti-union legislation was a tearful moment, and for Ngaire there seems no escape but exile from the “parochialism, racism, fascism, general apathy and democratic decline which seems to be in abundance in Australia”. While the aftermath of the Cronulla riots dies away, Howard, and even his treasurer Costello, still feel confident enough in their racism to declare that immigrants who don’t share ‘Australian values’ are not wanted, like some obscene parody of the Brown-Blair united front.

If Australian is ailing, perhaps a different kind of Australianness is the answer? While I was in Sydney, I read Germaine Greer’s Whitefella Jump Up, in which she suggests that the remedy for the sickness in White Australians’ souls is to adopt the principal of aboriginality for all Australians, to declare an aboriginal republic, and to adopt aboriginal attitudes to the land and ecology in particular.

There is only one way to purge the taint, uncover the secret and ease the otherwise eternal regret, and that is not to give the country back to the Aborigines, because it isn’t ours to give, but to admit that it has been an Aboriginal country all along.

Excavating the history of settler literature, and in particular Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles, she exposes white Australians’ hatred of the twisted and bitter landscape as a fundamental misunderstanding of the continent’s ecology: they denuded its forests, poisoned its water, and planted alien crops. When they got lost on their way to ‘open up’ new land, the Aboriginal people fed them and sent them back only to see them try again, as they failed to see what was possible and not possible in Australia’s ‘senescent bush’.

Just how strange is Australia, with its marsupials and gums, seemingly impenetrable mountains and gullies, and fire-prone coastal bush? On my bush walks I was almost willing myself to see it as ‘alien’, to revel in a strange landscape of dry scaliness and absence of slime, but aren’t these just trees and bushes? If European farming methods are inappropriate, Australia is nevertheless a net exporter of the archetypal European grain, wheat, to more than fifty countries, most notably Iraq: the other big story the Herald and Age were covering was the AWB’s wheat-and-bribes-to-Iraq scandal.

Most people think that New Zealand has a much better relationship between native people and European settlers, its very foundation based on the mutual Crown-Maori Waitangi Treaty. It’s the only place I know that the dominant white colonial-legacy population refer to themselves by the indigenous people’s name for them: Pakeha (gaijin in Japan know they are gaijin, but they’re also inferior), and it’s rare to meet even a white-bread kiwi abroad who won’t impress upon you their knowledge of a few words of the Maori language.

For some, however, that’s not enough. Ani Mikaere in her lecture Are we all New Zealanders now?, argues that the imbalance of colonisation can only be redressed on Maori terms. The land is still a Maori land, and so therefore the principles of Tikanga Maori (Maori ethics) are the only basis on which Pakeha can assume their status as manuhiri (guests) among the Tangata Whenua (the people of the land), and can never rise above that status:

For Pakeha to gain legitimacy here, it is they who must place their trust in Maori, not the other way around. They must accept that it is for the tangata whenua to determine their status in this land, and to do so in accordance with tikanga Maori.

It’s a much harder proposition to accept than Greer’s vague assertion of ‘Aboriginality’, but then it’s made by an indigenous person rather than an colonial Anglo-descendent in exile. I have two problems with Mikaere’s approach: firstly, I don’t think that a set of ethics, Tikanga Maori, developed to regulate traditional Maori society are capable of regulating a complex and industrialised society like New Zealand; secondly, in a society of global population flows, migration and refugees, the Tangata Whenua principle is dangerously inhospitable. Apply it to most of Europe, where whites can claim with some justification to be the native and indigenous population, and you have a moral framework for treating all immigrants and their descendants as permanent guests, subject to the ‘indigenous’ rules, and materially exactly the same kind of racism with which Howard and Costello are manuring the Australian polity.

Wellington’s Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa has a nearly-bewildering array of Maori cultural objects and artifacts, from a full-size meeting house with incredible low-lit carvings inside, to kiddies’ interactive build-a-pataka (storehouse). Most interesting is the Whanganui Iwi exhibition, an exhibition presented by the Maori people of the Whanganui river area (and presented in the second person, a Maori ‘we’ rather than ‘they’), covering history and interaction with Pakeha from environmental despoliation of the river, suspected genocidal acts, and culminating in the 1995 occupation of Moutoa Gardens and reestablishment of the Pakaitore, part of a new wave of Maori activism.

I don’t belong in either of these countries: my pale celtic skin flares pink at the gentlest touch of this antipodean sun; I lost count of the number of times in Australia I found myself replacing the ‘crazy country’ thought with the ‘crazy white people’ thought. But not all the problems of European-colonised societies are locked in the roots of the act of colonisation. There’s enough obvious similarity between the politics of Howard and the politics of Blair (NZ parliamentary politics by contrast are a welter of playground sexual taunts) to see that parochialism, racism, fascism, general apathy and democratic decline are diseases that affect the whole world.

* Germaine Greer refers to this use of the word ‘Awelye’, Emily Kngwarreye’s only given titles for some of her paintings, meaning “the whole lot”, summing up Aboriginal artists’ understanding of painting as a reflection of the totality and interconnectedness of all things, rather than individual representations of particular things.

Sydney shouts

First and foremost Vanessa, for her generous hospitality, rides to the airport (when the car was licensed), hanging out the washing, and providing a limitless supply of tea and white toast for an Englishman abroad. Elizabeth and Eric for two gorgeous Sundays spent exploring the bush, animals in the wild and seeing things I’d never have seen otherwise. Saskia and Adriana for a night out in several very dubious venues. Ngaire, for Cinque coffee and a chat about how things are in Australia. Max for rescuing me from torrential rain in the convertible Smart, and for a potted history of Newtown. And Jacinta, back in blighty, for the rough rough rough rough rough guide, the maps, the hints, the explanations and the inspirations.

Oh, such a perfect day….

A perfect last day in Sydney. It begins at 8am with a BridgeClimb. Overpriced and overhyped it may be, but there are few structures as nakedly impressive as the Sydney Harbour Bridge whose owners are happy to let you clamber over it like a playground climbing frame. The whole trip takes three and a half hours: after an induction you get dressed up in shiny boiler suits, remove anything that can possibly fall off your body (even large earrings), and hook yourself onto a continuous rail that runs all the way along the underhanging walkways beyond the pylons, up one side of the southern half of the bridge and down the other. A mixed group of eleven (it would be twelve, but there’s no other singletons to pair up with Lonely Guy) includes Howard from Oxford, a retired structural engineer who can’t get over saying how primitive and crude the engineering of the bridge is (to me it has weight and character the flimsy glamour of the Anzac Bridge can’t match), some butch Americans and a couple of other English people; no ozzies, natch.

The actual climb is almost disappointingly unscary; the closest it gets is looking down from the planked walkways to the road. There are stories on the way up as we pause for the groups ahead (look up at the bridge any clear day and you’ll see at least three groups of climbers on each other’s heels – they pack them in at quarter-hour intervals), including one about a falling bridge worker who cheated impending death by throwing his wrench into the water below him to break the surface tension that otherwise would have killed him. The view from the top is truly stunning, the Opera House below, tiny ships tracing fluffy troughs in the water, and the incomprehensible maze of inlets and bays that is the harbour stretching westwards and upriver.

Strength refortified by an emu pizza at the Australian hotel in the rocks (Emu? It’s at the beefy end of chicken), I head once again beneath the banner marked ‘Manly departures’ and across the water. I can’t face joining the crowded conga line of swimmers bouncing up and down in the surf in the narrow space between the life-saving flags on Manly beach itself, and head instead to the calm of Shelly beach and its snorkellers and scuba divers. It’s almost at a 90-degree angle to Manly beach, and protected by rocks: there’s no surf to manage, and I bob up and down in the water for 45 minutes, stretch my arms swimming a little, and duck my head right under the water to envelop myself in a tiny little bit of pacific. I’m only slightly unnerved by a German-sounding lady who tells me that two-foot long sharks may be in the vicinity, and warns me not to pick up any shells that may contain tiny blue-ringed octupi that will kill me in five minutes. Beautiful beach, she says. I come here every day.

I’ve been warned…

The reason why the monorail is evil is because it was the first big private/public project in NSW. It was built by a private company that went bust because they couldn’t make any money off it and then the state government had to take over the debt. And it’s ugly. It’s alright when you’re on it but it just hangs over the street looking shit the rest of the time.

but I take the controversial step of a ride on the monorail. I don’t mind the rails hanging over the street… I think it looks quite cool ducking in and out of buildings, and there’s not much could make the CBD any uglier. I spin round twice, and get off where I got on (that’s a fairground ride, not public transport) to meet Vanessa for dinner on Stanley Street at the original no-name Italian restaurant, hidden upstairs in a little gelato parlour. When you order a schnitzel, just that comes: two tasty slices of hot breaded veal on a plate, in about two minutes.

We meet Steven, and jump a cab to the Opera House to meet Max and collect our tickets to Kiki + Herb, a deranged and dark cabaret drag act that begins with The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed, then gets deeper and weirder: a pet cow from the original manger, immortal absorbers of Mary’s placenta, a lost biracial child, and lots of Canadian Club with a whisper of soda. Inside, we’re sitting cabaret-style, and Bob Downe is at the next table. Outside, we stand on the terrace drinking champagne, watching the sunset drift across the bridge and the hills of the North shore.

How could you leave Sydney in a better way than that?

More photos online

Photos here, all jumbled up in the usual Yahoo galleries fashion. More ker-razy japanese street signage and smoking notices, plus the sights of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

Open Democracy

Q: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
A: His lips move

Modern parliamentary buildings, like Australia’s new Parliament House, or the Fosterised Reichstag, are structured around public access. The facades are welcoming, the main entrances are for the citizens, and after the obligatory airport checks and confiscation of of penknives, you can wander round to look at your representative democracy in action, from galleries and balconies, even through glass roofs.

Of course the combination of capitalist managerialism and corruption ensure that few of the decisions that really affect our lives are taken in these parliamentary spaces, rather than merely spoken about. Everything from wheat deals to war deals, privatisation and removing rural phone boxes: these decisions are made elsewhere, and none in anything that we would recognise as a democratic fashion.

So the public display of democracy is just a display of the display of democracy. We turn up, and gawp from the gallery, peer through the glass. We don’t even need to hear what’s being said. We’re just checking that their lips are still moving.

Cycling Canberra

Despite a significant set of countervailing conditions (limited cycling proficiency: never did take that test; limited fitness: just can’t get that ozzie gym buzz; thirty-degree heat; and the fact that Canberra’s built on a scale for cars), it’s not as bad an idea as it might sound renting a cycle for the day for twenty dollars from the hostel and setting out to explore Canberra’s sights by bike.

Getting into and out of the car lanes and across Lake Burley Griffin (a late water-feature addition to even this eminent twentieth century city, personally pushed through the budget by Menzies in the sixties) presents the first challenge; locating the entrance to the new Parliament House presents the next; I manage to cycle round the entire hillock containing it once before realising that what I was looking at first really is the public entrance, and there’s still no bikerack for the wheels so I leave it standing up in the underground carpark.

The new (1988) parliament house is pretty impressive to look round, though there’s no session sitting. I go up to the roof and have a look down the massive avenue that leads across the lake and up to the Australian War Memorial (for a country that’s only ever joined in other people’s wars, there’s a huge emphasis laid on the military legacy in Canberra), then I latch myself onto a guided tour and learn a) that the colours of the lower and upper chambers rather than being baize green and ruby red like the Commons and Lords, are the colour of gum leaves and flowers respectively: shades of grey-turquoise and rusty pink; and b) that the coat of arms of the brave new nation featured the kangaroo and emu because they’re both incapable of walking backwards. This guide also says that the English Parliament’s mace used to be used to hit people on the head with, so I’m not sure whether to trust her…

I don’t think I can bear a lecture on the history of Australian parliamentarianism, so I give new Parliament House at the bottom of the hill a miss. Far more interesting is the Tent Embassy, an aboriginal protest spread out across the lawn in front of the parliament building. Several huts, tents and wooden structures are surrounded by flags and posters condemning the aboriginal genocide, some couching the struggle in Christian terms, others outright denying the possibility of any reconciliation at all. I would have loved to talk to someone, but no-one’s around.

The National Gallery of Australia has a proper bike rack, right by the entrance, and I pop in for a quick spin around to see the controversial Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles (controversial not for its CIA-routine abstract expressionism, d’oh, but for the gallery’s US$2m purchase of it in 1973), and the famous Sidney Nolan 1940s Ned Kelly series, the most famous of which shows Ned Kelly from the rear with his trademark bucket helmet, the sky showing through its letterbox visor, like Magritte painting Don Quixote.

Back over the river, past the National Carillon, which sits on the water playing gentle trills of bells to the glory of the Australian nation, and is only marginally less silly than the Captain Cook water jet, a twenty-metre tall funpark jet of pointless and continuous spume. The riverside cycle trail is very pleasant, and on a cooler day with less to see a full ride around the shores would be very pleasant.

Instead I cycle up the ANZAC parade towards the Australian War Memorial, past a series of subsidiary war memorials commemorating first the A/NZ partnership (a giant pair of carrier-bag handles, with pots of Gallipolli soil buried below, the shared birth pangs of ANZAC militarism), then various individual conflicts including Korea and Vietnam, both of which are quite formally inventive, the Vietnam one peppered inside with all manner of quotes, from battlefield commands to recalling returning to firendlessness after discharge. The AWM itself is a large building on a hill, and contains a museum. WWI is about all I can stomach, and certainly not rooms of boastful display of Australian military technology. In the research centre, it’s surpisingly easy to get a war record printout for my dead friend Arthur Thickett, who fought with the ANZACs in Korea as part of his lifelong search for the enemy. It tells me his number: 210104, and the units he fought in: 1 RAR and 3 RAR, which were deployed in the earlier phases of Australian involvement, but nothing else about his record is available — the Korea and Vietnam files have not yet been released, according to the helpful volunteer guide.

Last stop, in a leafy lane of cottage scientific institutes, I stop at the National FIlm and Sound Archive, previously called ScreenSound and now back to its original name to much satisfaction all round (take note, those working on rebranding exercises). The permanent exhibition has a good selection of Australian sound, film and television history laid out in themed little booths, though the screens are a bit small. The surviving scenes of the Kelly Gang film are on show, though the amount of nitrate damage means it reminds me of Decasia more than The Great Train Robbery. The giftshop is giving away all its old screensound postcards for free, and I get chatting to Jane working there, who when she hears that I’ve been working at the bfi offers to organise a tour of the archive for me, but alas I don’t have time.

Though all I’ve really learned about Canberra as a planned city is that it is, as I expected, totally constructed around the capacities of motor vehicles as transport, the bike’s not a bad way to go… there’s not much problem cycling on the sidewalks and malls if the roads aren’t friendly, and I’m almost reluctant to hand the bike back in at the end of the day.

 

 

Moving Melbourne

The newly-opened Federation Square in Melbourne houses a full complement of civic-pride art galleries and museums in the very latest trappings of comtemporary architecture: blocky edifices surfaced in a mixture of glass and polished sandstone, broken into a tesselation of hectic polygons.

I make straight for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, apparently unaffiliated to the film archive ScreenSound, whose Memory Grid must surely be the envy of all those working on the BFI’s new south bank mediatheque. In a grand central space, five pods are scattered, each with three very comfortable seats, headphones, a large plasma screen and a touchscreen below it from which you can choose what you want to watch. The selection is not entirely inspiring: no features, only shorts, and with a heavy emphasis on student work, and also a lot of what they call ‘digital memories’: fragments of life-history composed around heavily-edited video and rostrum camera. Nevertheless, it’s no problem to spend two hours in there. Of the student work, I like Gordon Monro’s Dissonant Particles, a very scientific take on tone/image correspondence, Emma-Kate Groghan’s Desire, a terrorist noir, and Marieke Walsh’s Mary, with 50s early amateur colour film edited together with 16mm, then painted over and distressed.

In the archive section they have a selection of material from Frank and John Straford, amateur film makers of the 1950s, whose slightly inept cartoons and nano-scifi dramas are made up for with some later-narrated colour footage of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (the limitations of 9.5mm kodachrome and telephoto lenses means pole-vaulting is all that gets shown in any detail) and a rambling but beautifully-hued travelogue of a holiday in the North.

Bush

An early start: Elizabeth arrives at 7am to pick me up while it’s still cool (though all-too-rapidly getting warmer) and drive the hour or so north to Narrabeen where we pick up Eric (a Southender who moved to Australia in the 1950s), and then head north further still to Ku-Ring-Gai National Park, a sprawling area of bush that runs up the west side of Pittwater, preserved as bush since the late nineteenth century.

The park is riddled with wide tracks, compacted rubble over sandstone, kept clear not for walkers like us, but as fire breaks and for firefighters to make their way through the dense and scrubby vegetation. There are not only eucalypts, but other dark and straggly bushes, among which the gum trees stand tall and crooked. Some are blackened by recent forest fires and are beginning to grow their leaves out again in bunches. The ‘scribble gums’ look exactly as if they have been scribbled on in wormy brown felt pen against their white bark. The landscape is the driest I have ever seen: no slugs or snails, only ants; even where a gum tree has been injured and its dark ruby sab exposed to the air, though it glistens it’s already hard and crystallised. As the air heats up, and even the 8km trek to Soldiers’ Point feels like a weary labour, the smell of the bush starts to rise from the trees: minty, dry and peculiarly smoky.

Thanks to Eric’s experienced bushwalking eagle-eyes we even spot some wildlife. On a gum, a goanna, a lizard three or four feet long, has frozen, its long and variegated tail blending in with the dark-and-light bark, so you can hardly see where it ends. The reflex action of a wallaby is also to freeze when it sees you, invariably before you see it, where its dark outline and stubby ears could easily be just another part of the bush. As you approach it it remains still, until you get too close and then it bounds away. I’m reassured that any spiders I see in webs will be harmless: the redbacks and funnel webs hide under wood and stone in wrapped-up webs. Strung across the track we do see a spider and her web, with a row of bundled-up flies strung out like an eight-course banquet.

Aboriginal rock drawings are hard to decipher in the overhead sun, but the shapes of wallabies and fish, and stylised men and women (groin protruberance for a man, breast protruberances for a woman, and both for a hermaphrodite) are distinguishable with the help of the guide plaques. The rock plateau where they’re carved is the highest point for some distance around: this must have been a very special place.

At West Head at the top of the park, you can see across to Barrenjoey lighthouse on the other head, north of Palm Beach, which is at the northern end of what’s called the ‘insular peninsula’. Running along the eastern edge of Pittwater and narrow enough in parts for ocean and harbour beaches to be in view of each other, it’s much wealthier than the Shire to the south, but just as white and white-bread. At Palm Beach we avoid the jetskiers and walk along the strand with our feet just in the water and watch seaplanes depart and arrive, ferrying passengers to and from $300 lunch packages, surely not as perfect a day out as a day in the bush. 

 

Bars

She barely knows me, apart from a couple of meetings back in London, but Saskia agrees to meet me after work and take me to the Opera Bar which edges the harbour below the mighty shells of the Opera House itself. It’s Friday night and it’s rammed: the view and the sunset are beautiful, but perhaps so many people are here for some kind of wake for tax cheat Packer? We find seats, and a cushion even, right on the edge of the water, and drink white wine at a rate that’s usual for London and for me, but apparently not here, as I spend the night rapidly becoming convinced that by prevailing local standards I’m an unredeemable alcoholic.

Adriana and her boyfriend Scott come and pick us up and we bomb through the Rocks where the “Lebbos used to dragrace their ‘fully sick’ cars”, towards Darling Harbour, and the bars along King Street Wharf, where a comedy of dresscode errors ensues: while Scott parks the car we go to the Cargo Bar but can’t get in because I’m wearing shorts; while the door are off duty we sneak into the Pontoon but when Scott turns up he can’t get in because he’s wearing thongs (of the toe-cleavage rather than arse-cleavage variety); but it’s OK because Scott knows the guys on the door at Cargo and we can get in despite being underdressed; meanwhile I’ve texted Vanessa to ask her to bring some chinos of mine from her place, and I become aware that you’re never fully prepared in Sydney unless you are carrying/wearing three different types of legwear: shorts and trunks and jeans. In any case, it’s all the young and the beautiful, wearing t-shirts over their bikinis and listening to too-loud, not-too-good music. Vanessa’s friend Jennifer pays a visit to the ladies to scare some straight girls.

Over in King’s Cross it’s a different scene entirely. Kebab shops, sex shops, sleazy clubs and not-so-sleazy clubs, backpackers with guitars and bright lights. Scott’s on the door at Lady Luck’s and we escape the $20 entrance to get red velvet and low seats, a proper dancefloor and something musically a bit more tasteful in the soul/funk area. There might have been some C-listers in, but I wouldn’t have recognised them. The evening ends very well when Adriana generously takes me all the way back to Petersham via a drive-thru McDonald’s caramel sundae, yum.

Back in Newtown, things are a little more relaxed, and a bit more gay: a mixture of upmarket bookshops and tradestores, coffeeshops and hotels (ie large bars), Thai restaurants and pie shops. It’s in the slightly-irrepressibly-shabby, Stoke Newington mode, with perhaps even a little more emphasis on faddy health-food shops. On my very first day I get royally bollocked for having a cocoa in Gloria Jean’s (How was I to know? It looked friendly! It looked cool! There was a rainbow flag outside!), which is not only a chain, but a chain owned by an evangelical church — they’re very supportive of their small businesses on King Street. Zanzi-bar is a bit more lively, and the Thai food in ThaiLand is gorgeous. You can still smoke inside, in designated areas, but not for much longer. Disappointingly, the legendary Bank Hotel is closed and boarded up for redevelopment.

Beaches

Crenelated along all its edges with shallow yellow crescents, it’s like they built Sydney here so that the beaches would be local. They really are city beaches: there’s a long way to go before reaching the redneck hinterland of the Shire’s Cronulla, the other side of Botany Bay. The city goes right up to the water, then it’s playtime.

Freaked out a little by the heat and oppressive concrete of Circular Quay, the QE2 watchers waiting for Cunard’s flagship to set sail from its mooring right next to the harbour bridge, and tax cheat Kerry Packer’s memorial service taking place in the Sydney Opera House, I get the ferry half an hour across the bay to Manly, a rather more genteel place, and home to the first surf lifesaving club. On the beach, reactions are firstly fear of inadvertent voyeurism in every direction I look, and secondly the feeling that I am far too fat and ugly to ever live in this city. Wandering round Cabbage Tree Bay towards the North Head it gets a little quieter at Shelly beach (so-called because, er, the sand is full of shells, sharp on naked feet) and I dip my shins in the waters of the pacific, lapping gently towards the rocks. Northwards, a seemingly endless fractal repetition of yellow crescents fades into the distance. Back at Manly, the lifeguards are loudhailing the entire beach, warning that a flotilla of bluebottles is being blown in, and advising all bathers to leave the water: “There is no cure for this. It will hurt for half an hour”.

Eastwards and south of the harbour, for the westies they may be, but the southern beaches have softer sand. With Vanessa and Kerry I walk from Bronte to Bondi: in the park behind Bronte a very inexpert game of volleyball is going on, there are little wooden gazebos, and what Vanessa assures me are coin-operated barbies. It’s Saturday, but there’s a suburban Sunday afternoon atmosphere of people out to play for the weekend without any of the attendant shadow of depression I feel in England. A hovering flock of gulls just beyond the railings is explained when we see a man below throwing chunks of bread up into the sky. We pass Tamarama (also known as Glamorama, but I’m not yet fine-tuned enough to distinguish one group of bronzed beach bunnies from another), which is narrow and at an angle to the surf; the shape of a tight croissant rather than a new moon, and more for swimming than surfing. When we round the corner, there’s Bondi: the Bondi, but from here it just looks like another beach.