After that confrontation
You left me wringing my cold hands
We shared some information
We might not recover from
And I watch your convictions
Melt like ice cubes in an ocean
You were so poorly cast as a malcontent

You’ve got them all on your side
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter
“I never knew he thought that!”
I heard you say falling out of the van
“Don’t ask for his opinion
They ought to drown him in holy water!”
Will you remember my reply
When your high horse dies?

- Mercer

(Happy voting everyone. Don’t do anything you might later regret.)

Posted in Oz on Friday August 20, 2010. Shoutouts.

I wake at eleven thirty and know, at once, that it is food poisoning. This is followed by the realisation that, in less than six hours, I need to be on a plane. My fare is non-flexible, non-refundable, and on a public-holiday long-weekend, near impossible to rebook. I grit my teeth as the first waves of nausea ripple through me. I will make that plane.

I roll onto the floor and reach for the backpack I have yet to completely unpack, the zips still covered in the tape the disinterested Laotian border guards applied after a cursory search and a half-hearted push for bribes. I feel inside for the battered plastic shopping bag, the one with a grinning number one, muscled Popeye arms giving a dopey double thumbs-up; “Clever shoppen auf Plus.eu.” This is my travel drug collection, and it is both versatile and extensive. I begin to prepare myself three courses in tablet form: a smorgasbord of pills from crisp foil pockets, a chaser of stale water, and the sour metallic taste that comes with the realisation that I will not be sleeping, not tonight.

That night, I discovered that my roommates will be on the same flight, and we plan to pool our resources and share a cab in the morning. When they awake at 5, I am standing in the kitchen, staring at the floor, a fizzing rectangular canister of blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution in my hand. I am sweating and shivering simultaneously.

“Morning”
“Good mor… what happened?”
“Woolies potato salad happened”
“Oh. Oh, right.”
“Food poisoning”
“Oh, Dan.”

The last is phrased so as to communicate three things. These are:

1. You look like shit. Really, all kinds of fucked up. Are you twitching?
2. I asked you to book the taxi last night. Did you book the taxi?
3. Will they let you on the plane? If we travel with you will they let us on the plane?

These are answered are simply:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. In fact, I have been through Canberra airport so many times the past year that the security theatre has sunk into a lower level of consciousness, and is so finely ingrained I don’t have to think as I pull things from the pockets they belong and put them into the pouches they belong. So, while you wrestle with bags, check-in machines and the conga-line of people struggling with their shoe buckles, I will be upstairs, behind the mirrored glass doors of the Qantas Club, kneeling on the floor of one of their pristine toilet cubicles, throwing up blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution.

I spend the rest of the day alternating between bed and floor and enjoying Prochlorperazine tablets. These, although yet to be endorsed by Mike Myers, are nonetheless little, yellow, and very, very strong. When I wake, it is afternoon and I can eat bananas. I can drink tea. I am overjoyed. To celebrate, we head out to buy alcohol.

The rain thumps the windshield in wet slaps, a schoolyard bully with a history of rapid escalation. He’s working his shtick, and the routine fits like a glove, so practiced is he in its execution. He’s balanced in the ebb and flow, and the way he juggles the expectations of this newcomer is in lines set to perfect verse, drummed in iambic pentameter against the tempered glass. Lash. And pause. Then, as if taunted from across the quadrangle, the droplets yield for a second, and there is a suitably dramatic intermission. The wind darts into the wheel arches, then golf-ball-sized lumps of ice begin to slam into the windows.

The sound is of someone throwing rocks into a trash pail. Large rocks, small pail. Outside, my partner in crime scrambles to pull shut the door of the garage. The rain is so heavy all I can see is the odd limb jerking spasmodically, a shadow puppet silhouette behind a wall of water. On the news that night, there are pictures of cars with ragged holes in the windows, houses stippled with damage from clouds sheeting mortar-fire from above, shrapnel of ice from the sky.

Going out in this to buy bitters, mixers, and those little cherries that taste like everything your grandmother ever baked, is mental. I’m grinning as we aquaplane over roads that look like rivers and even though I don’t drink, the payoff is a night of new faces and new ideas, and tiny pieces of candy scattered across a suburban driveway from the belly of a shattered pinata.

The next day, an inch thick carpet of leaves covers Melbourne. The cartoon fat kid drawn in the condensation masking the inside of the train window defrosts from the inside out, revealing a tapestry of sheeting rain outside, outlined by a chubby double chin. Shops struggle to outdo each other’s flood signs, and while there are a few “CLOSED DUE TO FLOOD DAMAGE,” I also spot a “Water, MAAAATE” and a “Closed, slight water issues. (ie. TOO MUCH!)” Inside, a huge pedestal fan is balanced on its side on the floor, blowing against a stain on the carpet that is far too large for the fan to have any reasonable chance of influencing.

I step into North Face and emerge fifteen minutes later with a jacket that will sit in place of the one stolen that night in Berlin, when we sat in the gloom of a squat bar under a disused railway bridge, and downed shots of Jäger amidst the yellowing propaganda, all angled lines, shades of grey, and futura on everything. The Aussies we had met were there, and we played up our challenge, shambling around with arms akimbo, poor facsimiles of bears on hind legs. We ran home through the snow-lined streets, me in a t-shirt, pale skin turned peppermint blue with the cold.

The pockets are in familiar places, the right places, and muscle-memory is at play as I reach for the zip that fastens on the right. It is like meeting an old friend after an absence of years, time dripping away, and shared experiences of the then settling comfortably together with the now. I quite like this pocket metaphor, and I wonder if it will stand up to being applied to a person. Who is not a garment, does not have pockets, nor a zip that fastens on the right. The metaphor is retracted and we hug under the row of clocks, amidst the shirtless teenagers in enormous, see-through plastic bags, then climb three flights of stairs and sit sipping steaming cocktails from a teapot, on the roof, in the rain.

Melbourne, you are completely fucking bonkers, but I think I’m starting to love you.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday March 10, 2010. Shoutouts.

She remembers swimming here as a child, her brothers splashing and taunting her from the deeper water as she stood at the end of the jetty and held her nose. Remembers bombie competitions from that same jetty, before they put up the signs about amoebic meningitis. A cartoon man holding his nose, tornado above his head, and the warning in thick red letters stating simply, “Don’t risk it. You could die.” So holidays from the lakeside, then, half a blackened and rusted 44-gallon drum as a barbeque, Coles sausages spitting fat, and the ever present smell of burnt onions. Before the kiosk with postcards, keyrings and souvenir stubby holders. Before the kitschy tourist train. Before the gate.

Tonight, the gate across the pitted and dusty single-lane gravel road is pulled closed, secured with a looped chain and a brand new padlock that gleams dully in the moonlight. It’s close to full, the moon, and it shines through the huddled gums that line the lake, casting dancing shadows onto the water. The sound of the frogs chainsawing at each other carries clearly from the bulrushes at the other end of the lake to where she is standing.

Other than the frogs, it’s a quiet night. The train that runs along the shore finished its final run hours ago, the charter-bus-driven tourists have headed back to the big city, and the single-room cafeteria closed for the night. She inspects her shoes, the mud clumped across the toes and shoelaces dragging in the soft silt where the water dries up and the eucalypts’ roots twist and tangle as they reach down toward the lake. The lock is at her feet, and she thinks that the mud will probably jam the mechanism.

“Hah! You drag me all the way out here and expect me to grok this? What am I, a naturalist? Davey Attenborough’s secret love-child? Jen, I’m a fucking arts major, all I’m supposed to do is smoke pot and read Kerouac. You can’t expected me to get this. It’s outside my limits. Officially beyond the scope of my curricula.”

She knew they hired canoes out here, knew where they kept them, but didn’t think it would be so easy to gently force the lock and walk one down to the waterside. Thought that in this day and age there would be someone, anyone, to stop them. She realised, then, that she’d been in the city too long. Worrying about alarms and home-security. 24 hour call-out. She’d even been to the hardware store the week before, a whole aisle dedicated to tiny white signs explaining in meticulous detail why you shouldn’t jump the fence to burgle this house. Her house. It still thrilled her to say that.

But there were moments when she knew, felt in her bones, that this wasn’t it, that it wasn’t right. The city destroyed people. Ate them up and spat them out as latte sipping clones, fixating on whether Mulberry burst or Teal tension would suit the feature wall better. So she stood in that cavernous, fluoro-lit hall, looking at chrome fixtures and knew she’d need to get out again, and get out soon. No little white sign for her: “Beware: bored and irritable country girl. Exhibits symptoms of cabin fever when contained. Bites when threatened.”

Now. Now, the alcohol beat a fiery tattoo in her veins and Leigh pranced up and down the shore, skipping stones and dancing a strange little jig, hand on stomach and elbow outstretched. He seemed genuinely excited. City boy in the country. Styled hair and fashionable shoes so wildly out of place she wanted to laugh at him. Walk up and smack him one in the stomach and call him pissweak. Instead, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and yelled, “Oi, Leigh, quit fucking around and help me with this for a second, willya.”

They ease the boat into the water. A flat, stubby nose and no keel ensures that it rocks wildly with every tiny movement and she overcompensates at first, leaning it heavily to the right and eliciting a squawk from her passenger in the back. She knows he’ll make jokes when they’re out there, knows how uncomfortable he’ll feel but, bugger it, he’s inflicted enough trivia nights and weekend brunches on her. Still laughed at her enunciation. Her clothes. She grins as she thinks how he’d take it if she took him back up north. The old country. Home.

Her brothers would eat him alive. Mirrored shades and knowledge of Plath, Burrows, and The Unicorns hold no social currency in the Territory, red dust working its way into everything, dog in the back, rifle on the floor. Spotties for the roos and tinnies for later. No Mojitos. No Mid-strength. Metrosexual as foreign as Molvania. She’d do that later though. Force him out of the city, and out of his comfort zone. For now, this was good. Drunk and floating in a stolen canoe, in a lake they said should have dried up years ago.

She leans back on the paddle and they coast to a slow halt, blurry stars reflected in the ripples and the brown water silver in the moonlight. He laughs then, a short bark that echoes off the water, “Fuck, if they catch us now, we’re so fucking fucked.”
“Eloquent, Leigh. Eloquent. Sure it’s F.A. you’re taking and not Law?”
“If your honour would please, the plaintiff was forced, under duress…”
“Duress? That’s what it’s called, is it? Running back to the car to get the extra bottle.”
“Well, I was clearly not in command of my faculties.”
“Yelling at me as to whether ma’am would prefer the salt and vinegar, or the cheese and onion.”
“Faculties.”
“Going back again for the glasses.”
“I shall cry piracy on the high-seas. Taken at cork-screw point and forced aboard by a fearsome she-pirate.”
“I’d say more muddied, brown and rapidly lowering seas. And I think the word is corsair.”
“Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves”
“If that’s yours, I will spot you the rest of the salt and vinegar, pour you a glass, and row you home.”
“Bill. Always Bill S. He of the Globe and the funny pants”

She leans back then, against his chest, and looks up at the stars. Pollux and Castor draw parallel lines in the rippling surface of the lake, lines that trace the silver-grey trunks of the gums and point out over the scrub. This is a compass bearing away from white pickets, wheatgrass, and ‘skinny with one, cheers’ and it soars upwards and out, to where there is nothing but clear and open air between here and the desert. But not yet. Not while the frogs are singing opera and the moon sits above, fat and contented.

“Leigh, how do you feel about amoebic meningitis?”
“What, I, what?”
“Hold your nose.”

And she rocks to her right, hard.

Posted in Textism on Sunday January 24, 2010. Shoutouts.

I take off my shoes to better enjoy the spring grass, and hang the washing slowly. The sun beats down, I think it’s going to hit thirty today, and Sam Beam warbles from my nearby bedroom window as I stoop between the basket and the line. After I’ve finished working my way around the hills-hoist, I notice that I’ve created a wavy pattern in the long grass. Kaleidoscopic trails of domestic duty. I have a caffeine headache. I am happy.

Having had to duck into the office, it’s later than usual when I load the iPod, wind down the windows, and head to the markets. I’m going to buy all the necessities for that recipe I’ve been meaning to try for ages, to see if I can find some Alpha Pale Ale, and to find something for the headache. I’m yet to make a decision as to who makes the best coffee down here, and have settled on a vaguely scientific method of research which involves working my way, coffee by coffee, clockwise around the entire market, until I hit on a winner.

Today, this lands me in front of the delicatessen, where a cute girl yells numbers from a window dispensing a bewildering variety of Saturday morning beverages, “ristretto, short mac, and a skinny flat-white. Number 45 please.” The girls sitting behind me are discussing the relative merits of tramp stamps and gluten-free chocolate brownies, two topics I had not previously made the connection between. I guess it’s obvious, when you think about it. I sip my coffee and wade through the testament of Gideon Mack until the sun begins to erode my patch of shade.

On my way back to the car, I notice a cart selling churros. In truth, the smell turns my head before I spot it: the sweet, punchy aroma of pastry in the deep fryer, the softer notes of cinnamon, the burnt tang of fresh caramel. As I wander up, the owner, a large French man wearing a threadbare Wallabies cap, is arguing with a Brazilian student as to the relative merits of churros in South, Central and North America. When the Brazilian suggests that perhaps South American ones are the best, because they contain fillings, and are larger, he becomes visible upset, pacing up and down behind his cart as he gesticulates in refute, stopping only to adjust the sticks of pastry as they float to the surface of the bubbling oil.

A three word summary of his argument would be as follows. One, tradition. Two, texture. Three, simplicity. He delivers his parting shot to the Brazilian as he hands me my bounty, a crisp, golden-brown pastry coated in cinnamon and smeared with thick dollops of dulce de leche. I stop and bliss out for a while, until a car beeps at me and I realise I’m standing in the middle of the road with caramel syrup dripping off my face. I decide I need to get home before I finish the remainder, or I’ll find myself walking back with the intent of buying out his whole stock. I manage to make it to the car without a relapse, and head home.

My housemate comes into the kitchen as I’m stacking cans and announces she’s bought new clothes pegs. That they’re in the cupboard near the laundry. That I can use as many as I want.

I’m telling you, if you can get excited by the little things, the big things are easy.

Posted in Gastros on Saturday October 31, 2009. Shoutouts.

It’s not just desert out there in the middle. When I drove from Perth to Canberra last year, I stuck the camera out the window for the first minute on the road each morning. This is the result:

Posted in Oz on Sunday October 25, 2009. Shoutouts.

As I’ve been riding home the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that someone has been getting creative with paste-ups, a black marker, and the local road-safety signs. Some that have made me giggle are: “Please take care. Don’t pee”, “Peeing is deadly” and my personal favourite, “DRIVE N SEX. U B NEXT.”

Posted in Oz on Thursday October 22, 2009. Shoutouts.

There is lightning on the horizon as we begin our approach, and each flash lights the tumultuous clouds from within as they roll toward the harbour. It’s been a jumpy ride so far, the propellers on the tiny Dash-8 they use on Canberra to Sydney runs whining as we jostle and bump our way through the pre-storm turbulence. I watch the lights of boats below and wonder whether they’re heading out into the storm, or returning home.

I notice three boats in a row, lights blinking in sequence: red, white, red, white. It’s very hard to get a sense of perspective in the dark and I can’t tell which of the boats is closest. Then there’s another flash of lightning and the red light I’m watching reveals itself to be the tail section of another plane, silhouetted for a second against the ocean. We bank to the right and drop down over the headland, and it’s staggering how quickly we close the distance. What was a beating red light against the blackness is now a plane in full form. I can make out windows against the fuselage, and the shapes of people behind them. We can’t be more than a few hundred metres apart.

My heart jumps involuntarily into my throat and I look around at the other passengers to judge their reaction. It’s impossible to know if this is normal, but I fly a lot, and I’ve never seen anything like it before. People seem calm, engrossed with blackberries, piles of documents, disposable container of crackers and cheese, and I think I’m the only one looking out the window. Behind me, a business suited couple continue their conversation about digital radio.

Another shudder of turbulence jumps us to the right, and we’re closer still, mirror planes in reflection as gear unlock and lower in flawless synchronisation. Our wing and theirs signalling each other: red, white, red, white. I watch their wheels smoke and spin as they touch the tarmac and a second later am pressed backward into my seat as ours do the same.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Sydney, where the local time is 9:32 pm. While we are on the ground, we do want you to remain completely safe, so please do not move around the cabin until we have come to a complete stop at the terminal gate. Please also be careful when opening the overhead lockers because, as we all know, shift happens.”

Posted in Travel on Sunday August 2, 2009. Shoutouts.

Five things that Perth gets, that Canberra does not:

• Beer Gardens. Real beer gardens with open spaces, comfy seats, greenery, and music. Creatures also fits into this category.
• Public Transport. I use Google Transit to find the best route from place to place, say Mt Lawley to Freo. I pay with the card in my wallet, the one linked to my bank account, and that lets me get on and off as many buses, trains or even ferries as I need and calculates the cheapest possible fare you’d pay for the connection, then deducts 25%. I don’t have to think about when the next bus is, or whether I can make a connection, or if I have enough coins for a fare. I just ride. Once I’m in the city I can take any of the free, frequent CAT services to zip around. A lot of the time it’s as quick as driving, particularly for longer distances with a train connection.
• Sunsets. A thousand words.
• Coffee. It’s pretty hard to get a bad cup of coffee in Mt Lawley, Subiaco or Fremantle, or countless other suburbs with a big coffee culture presence. Even the city has a burgeoning collection of edgy coffee joints and to put it simply, places that don’t do coffee well go out of business very quickly. Oh, and drive through espresso, genius.
• Drinking on Sunday. The Sunday session is an institution. Whether it’s in one of the aforementioned beer gardens, looking over the beach, or just at the local pub, Sunday afternoon is time to head down to the pub. It helps that all the bottle shops are closed. A pint and a pizza for $10, you can’t beat that.

Five things that Canberra gets, that Perth does not:

• Cocktail Bars. With bartenders that understand cocktails. With cocktails that taste like cocktails. With music that suits cocktails. Canberra has three superb cocktail bars and host of others that can knock together a decent drink. All open late, all are reasonably priced, all can make you a negroni worth waiting for.
• Supermarkets. If I want to go grocery shopping at 10pm on a Tuesday evening, I can. When I lived in the city, and didn’t have my car here, I did this a lot. In fact, I think 80% of my food shopping would be done in hours where the shops are closed in Perth.
• Autumn. A thousand words.
• Tea: I have never seen such a bewildering variety of the green and black stuff until I moved here. Stores stock aisles of near identical boxes of white elderflower and mink dusk infused chai-masala herbal full leaf tea. The Canberra Centre even has two speciality retailers that just sell tea. That’s it, floor to ceiling, tea.
• Drinking on Thursday. Two big universities in town, both of which have Friday off, mean Thursday night is an insane student free-for-all. If you want two-dollar drinks, atrocious music, and stumbling home at four in the morning, Canberra has you covered.

Posted in Oz on Saturday May 23, 2009. Shoutouts.

I haven’t previously had much opportunity to indulge in that wonderful piece of mobile street theatre: the rant of the Australian taxi-driver. Despite the variance in the subject matter, which broaches such diverse topics as immigration, petrol prices and indigenous affairs, it is generally of a similar structure. It begins with a light tap on the accelerator as the driver veers just that little bit too much to the right as he jets around a driver going less than a hundred kilometres an hour. As he overtakes on the right, he’ll snort and glare across at the driver of the other car. This is the key moment in deciding the thematic content of the rant.

If our taxi’s commander-in-chief spots that the other driver is non-Caucasian the argument is likely to be about immigration and how Australia’s skilled migration policy is flooding the country with low-skilled workers who are nothing but a burden on the hard-working Australian taxpayer. If the other driver is white, the commentary will invariably focus on why the public servants that flood the streets of Canberra after taking long morning teas, cigarette breaks and extended lunches are nothing but a burden on the hard-working Australian taxpayer. Aboriginals, well, they’re desperate for welfare payments and nothing but a burden on the hard-working Australian taxpayer.

At this stage, I sit quietly in the back seat and choke on my tongue, being careful to remember not to pass out. You see, I wouldn’t want to have to go to hospital, as this would be a tax on our national healthcare system. This could then be construed as the behaviour of a dole-bludger, someone who is nothing but a burden on the hard-working Australian taxpayer.

Today, however, I got an entirely more targeted rant. You see, today was the Olympic torch relay and much to the organisers surprise rather than the expected mass of pro-Tibetan rabble rousers they were faced with a sea of red flags lining the course. Thousands upon thousands of flag waving Chinese supporters that had been bussed in from around the country, presumably by the Chinese consulate. Everywhere you looked there were the same mass-produced white and red shirts, and the same flags draped over shoulders. The pro-Tibetans didn’t stand a chance.

This particular taxi driver had spent the afternoon ferrying Chinese students back and forth between city and the airport and he had cooked up his own little timeline of how the world would end. “It will start with petrol prices,” he said, “the crude will go up, and they won’t be able to regulate it. A national watchdog, that won’t do anything, mate, you’ll see. Once it hits a buck eighty, two bucks, that’s when we’ll see it. This whole relay thing is reminiscent of 1936. That’s when this started, this torch relay thing, parading around the world, it’s not about sport, mate, nah, it’s about politics. Show the rest of the world your might and power. Show us what you’re capable. And don’t think they won’t use it, mate, don’t think that for a second. 1936, that’s what’s it’s like and that was the fuckin’ nazis. Set a golden fuckin’ example didn’t they. You know what they did with every country they ran the torch through? They invaded it, mate, invaded it and burnt it to the ground five years later. It’s the next four years that are going to determine the future of this country, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

I grunt in as non-committal a fashion as I can manage, and then quietly choke on my tongue. Breathe, Dan, remember to breathe.

Chinese students aside, I will admit that my favourite taxi driver comment came a few weeks earlier, on a run back to the city between presentations. The taxi driver this time was a pock-marked 60 year-old with a beer gut and a copy of auto-trader sitting next to him on the front seat. We pulled up at a set of traffic lights and a somewhat chubby teenager pedalled past on her bike. The driver raised his eyebrows as she wobbled over the curb, before exclaiming, “Jeez, get a load of that girl on the bike. She’s solidly put together, she is. I reckon a couple of her would roll you over in a scrum.”

A scrum otherwise populated by hard-working Australian taxpayers, no doubt.

Posted in Oz on Sunday November 2, 2008. Shoutouts [1].

“Do you think it’s like this as a matter of course? Do you think people wake up, roll over, and say things like that spontaneously? Or do you think it takes an army of pale underlings, in a room without windows, digging at an archived picture of the underbelly of the internet for whatever scraps of dirt they can mobilise against us? Do you think that this idea of us is really relevant here, or have we become part of the greater whole, the greater good, the one big happy family, like, like we’re skipping the stages of familiarly and swapping racist jokes straight after we meet?”

“I think, you think, too much.”

Posted in Oz on Sunday September 7, 2008. Shoutouts.