Tuesday, July 30, 2024

 Swimming Australia – Gina Rinehart’s sheltered workshop

Top-level competition swimming in Australia lately is a gift that keeps on giving.  In May, Swimming Queensland CEO Kevin Hasemann – who admits to never having been inside an art gallery – plus some of Australia’s top swimmers put on their other experts’ caps: as (self-appointed) art critics.  By intervening personally, hoping to persuade the National Gallery of Australia to remove from display two portraits of Gina Rinehart – a mega-donor to Swimming Australia – painted by the celebrated portraitist Vincent Namatjira, the posse not only broke the first law of swimming – stay in your f***ing lane, guys – but left a distinct burning smell as to their credibility as rounded human beings.  As opposed to addict desperados who will do anything – anything – to keep the tens-of-millions of cash flowing in from their Chief Sugar Momma, look-at-me-with-all-my-friends, Regina Nohart.

But while May’s dumpster-bin fire blew itself out after a week or two, a Paris Olympics-eve gaffe by Swimming Australia coach Michael Palfrey is set to be a cataclysmic bushfire; a scorched-earth reckoning that will – or certainly should – decimate the sport’s current administration, and so hopefully allow for a fresh start.  Any such sustainable green-shoots will obviously have to start by sending packing Gina Rinehart and her poisonous, suffocating largesse.

Perhaps I should explain the casual link between Michael Palfrey – now famous for his newly-minted “Korea, Korea, Korea; Oi, Oi, Oi” chant – and Gina Rinehart.  How a very busy (to which point I will return) Swimming Australia coach can have time to “mentor” a top-level Korean swimmer is one mystery – but just how Palfrey could have the motivation to do this is a thing certainly worth pondering.  Two factors apparently are at work here. 

One is, of course, the do-anything – anything – Last Days of the Roman Empire vibe at Swimming Australia.  Blatantly sell-out your own country?  Sure, baby.  And do so without sanction from your bosses, other than unspecified future “consequences”?  Whatev’s, let’s just keep the good-times a’rolling!  And did we mention that we’re busy, busy, busy at the moment, what with the Olympics, an’ all?   Party, party, party; coach, coach, coach!   

The second factor is more nebulous and speculative.  A revealing truth lies within the official explanation as to Palfrey being too busy right now with his important day-job – coaching his charges (at THE OLYMPICs!!!) – to face any immediate employment consequences.  With Palfrey being just one of eight coaches, Swimming Australia is actually hugely over-staffed.  The four or five swimmers on Team Palfrey – a group small and boutique enough, thanks to Gina Rinehart’s money, to allow for about two hours of one-on-one coaching every single day – are accordingly over-coached.  There is probably absolutely nothing more they can learn from Palfrey. 

And this feeling is also presumably mutual.  Palfrey, fed-up with his gilded cage existence in the over-funded sheltered workshop that is Swimming Australia instinctively launched himself to freedom, Willy-like, the only way he could.  He illicitly coached a talented swimmer, not from Australia, who was hungry (!) for some technical swimming advice, and – perhaps most shockingly – apparently did this for free, and in doing so was able to breath the sweet air, if only briefly, that exists outside the toxic, cloying fumes of Gina Rinehart’s aquarium.



Monday, February 26, 2024

 Zachary Rolfe and (jaded) masculinity on trial

 An inquest seemingly almost without end is now finally coming to some kind of end – meaning that the going around in circles, and in particular that one big statement of the obvious, paradoxically repeatedly left unresolved, will soon stop – Phew!  Business as usual, in the male-dominated (at the pointy end) policing of remote Aboriginal communities in the NT will soon – and probably has already – resume/d.

I have only a very small sliver of sympathy for former NT policeman Zachary Rolfe.  My heart goes out to Kumanjayi Walker’s family, and I am hoping that what I write here does not add to their grief, or at least that if it does, some long-term good (= deep cultural change) may come out of this whole sorry business.

So, after that contextual disclaimer, here goes.

Plainly trigger-happy and testosterone-loaded as Rolfe was (and presumably is, and always will be $$), it genuinely baffles me as a man that the inquest needed more than about five minutes to establish this rather obvious fact, and then to move on to less obvious – and surely more important – matters.  Such as whether being trigger-happy and testosterone-loaded is written-in to the position description (reading between the lines, of course) of the immediate/critical response cop role that Rolfe held at the time.  Or put another, more direct way:  after all the key non-Warlpiri/Yapa health workers had been evacuated from Yuendumu that fateful night over (their own) safety concerns, who was going to be on the first plane back into Dodge?  And should history repeat here (and without deep cultural change, it undoubtedly, sadly will), are we really supposed to be satisfied that this next time it will be Anyone But Rolfe – another “random”, another trigger-happy, testosterone-loaded “bad cop” (and then years later, another three million dollars, and counting).

I acknowledge that coroner Elisabeth Armitage presumably also sees – or at least at the start, hoped for – deep cultural change as a beneficial, if formally collateral outcome of the inquest.  But oh, how the wheels have since fallen-off over the last 18 months, and the gendered sledge-hammers been lobbed as slow-but-furious nut-crackers.

Exhibit one here is a text message sent from Zachary Rolfe in March 2019 (about six months before Kumanjayi Walker was fatally shot by Rolfe) to an unknown (but apparently not called before the inquest, possibly because his context evidence may have required another three million dollars to neutralise, by a thousand oblique cuts) recipient:

 “I'm out at Borroloola, a random community on the coast, 'cause they're rioting. But we came up last time they did this and smashed the whole community. So, this time, as soon as we arrived, they started behaving.”

 This text message was tendered to the inquest in September 2022 and then again just recently (in February 2024), for commenting upon by two different witnesses – Sgt Anne Jolley and Sgt Lee Bauwens – which resulting in two strikingly different  narrative streams at the inquest, despite both witnesses working for the NT Police at all material times.  It is too trite to say that the Good Cop was (of course) female, and the Bad Cop (of course) male.   More specifically revealing here is the admonitory tone of, and strangely-chosen “gotcha” word in the recent exchange b/w the (male) Counsel Assisting the Coroner Patrick Coleridge (in September 2022, this role was performed by Peggy Dwyer) and Sgt Lee Bauwens.

“Smashed” was strangely-chosen as a “gotcha” word for two reasons, I think:  because Bauwen’s (notably defensive) contextual explanation of it as not connoting violence rings plain and true (for this man, at least) and also because two other words from the above text message are actually of note, but were let slip through by the inquest, preoccupied as it was with Admonitions of the Most Obvious. 

“Behaved” in its above context, is at very least, violence-adjacent, with Rolfe seemingly bragging about the Aboriginal residents of Borroloola cowering when they heard he was coming back into town (whether they indeed reacted to this news, and if so, then how, of course may be quite a different story, but again, this is a narrative that the inquest passed over). 

Rolfe’s use of “random” also connotes violence in a more abstract way, of the non-particularity of his vector through time and place, aka his crassness and presumption as even a temporary resident of a remote Aboriginal community in the NT.  There is perhaps nowhere in the world less “random” than Borroloola (or Yuendumu) [or conversely, more “random” than Canberra, but I digress].  I can attest to Borroloola's particularity as a whitefella who hasn’t even been anywhere near the place nor knows any of its “inside” stories; but there is a wealth of even whitefella-on-whitefella narrative out there (Hashtag Bill Harney, Roger Jose, Carnegie library), and if you’re bi-cultural, these are only the surface gleanings ....

Rolfe perhaps also used “random” in a secondary, and very male, sense – to glumly corroborate, en passant, his relatively unimportant position in the NT Police hierarchy at that time; a man (yet again?) shuffled at short notice from one temporary assignment to the next place, as a (mere) gun for hire.  If so, that’s the terrible beauty and nuance, in a (cracked) nutshell, of what I’ll call Rolfe’s three-million-dollar text message:  one man’s jaded – and to me, simply sad – obliviousness to time and place getting all dressed-up to become Every Woman’s Admonition About That One Thing, spoken on infinite and futile repeat.

 $$ Unless perhaps Rolfe one day might take up the Borroloola Cure – which worked a treat for the runaway Roger Jose.


Friday, January 13, 2023

 George Pell repenteth, at eleventh-hour

The call for sainthood for the late Cardinal George Pell should not be underestimated, or dismissed as premature.

True, some critics, including myself, did deride Pell during his life for some distinctly un-Christian attributes, including: using blackmail and backstabbing to advance his clerical career, lying under oath (repeatedly) to a Royal Commission (1), and, as a closeted gay man, being a hypocritical homophobe.  There is also the matter of his expensive tastes, including flying first-class etc, but despite the “camel through the eye of a needle” Biblical injunction here, I’ve always been wary of protesting too much on this front, aka being a plain jealous bitch.  

Anyhow, and famously, it’s never too late to repent.  And very late repentance – as long as it is accompanied by bucket-loads of humility – appears to hit the sweet-spot for martyrdom, itself seemingly a sure-fire short-cut for sainthood.

At this point, I’m sure that cynics are scoffing at the very possibility of Pell’s late-life humility and repentance – despite the fact of this staring them in the face, albeit somewhat buried in the detail of the news around Pell’s death. 

First, to place things in context:  the Catholic Church is the modern world’s most successful real-estate conglomerate.  Yet in recent weeks, by all accounts, Pell was living in shared digs just outside the Vatican.  That is, not even in the worst apartment in the worst street in the Vatican!  For a (non-Indigenous) Australian – the modern world’s, if not all of history’s, most opiate-of-the-masses real-estate addicts – to shun, as too opulent, even a 3.5m x 3m studio with St Peter’s glimpses is, I think, humility beyond all precedent.  That’s “camping out” – and proud – for you, Paul Keating!

Unkind souls may interject at this stage, while granting that the Catholic Church is generally able to comfortably accommodate its Cardinals within the Vatican, that his move into shared digs outside the walls, apparently only a few weeks ago, may not have been of his own making – quite possibly because of his bloviating against his boss, the Pope, as “Demos” (2).  Possibly so, but even assuming this – and here comes my trump card – Pell turned the other cheek, as it were.  That is, weeks ago and quite possibly for the first time in his life, Pell did not play the wronged (or haughty) princess-bitch by directly or pseudonymously denouncing or sabotaging those behind his real-estate downward-mobility.  Instead, he just took it on the chin, if he didn’t actually choose it.

As a fellow Australian renter, and so real-estate loser, I feel that Pell should be saluted for his immensely modest forbearance here.  Further – although I hope that here I am not getting too far ahead of myself – when the day of his canonization duly arrives, I propose that Saint George Pell be declared the official patron saint of renters (a position which, according to Google, appears to be currently vacant, or at least – as with the usual management of paedophile priests – one of a vague, dubiously-shared responsibility).

Finally, a couple of miracles will of course be required before George Pell can be canonized.  Luckily for his soul, and the rest of the world, I – being such an organised gay man – have war-gamed this already.  I have today started saying my prayers to him, beseeching that I be delivered frometh and forthwith the deep underclass of long-term Australian private renters, and passeth unto that graceful state of a real-estate owner in Australia.  Yes, I know that this will take a miracle – but that’s the point. 

If anyone else is in the same boat, and one day hits the jackpot here (only after also saying prayers to George Pell, of course – we don’t want any cheaters!), please send me a line, and I’ll then contact the Vatican directly with some irrefutable evidence of the requisite two miracles: title-deeds, aka the universal language of the Catholic Church.

(1)  I note that the mainstream media was very shy of pointing out Pell’s lying under oath – perjury – during his lifetime, but it was copiously mentioned in many reports of his death.  Surely it would have been possible, and more tasteful, to have hammered this out – while staying within the legal bounds – while Pell was still alive?   There’s definitely a defamation-law article, if not PhD thesis, on this point. 

(2)   Pell’s pseudonym as "Demos" was always a fig-leaf, as a Google search of {Pell and “explicitly heretical”} reveals – note also the mouthful (and drama-queen) adjective "explicitly" here, itself quite a give-away, but this was prissy Pell before his redemption.

  


Thursday, December 30, 2021

 The domestic violence of being a renter living alone during a pandemic – a 2021 place-holder

 

I remember exactly where I was at noon on Monday 23 March 2020.  The first (and last) national Covid lockdown was just beginning, and I was watching the staff of the swimming pool over the road shutting-up shop from my front window.  Earlier that morning I had thought about having one last swim there, but had decided against it – in the circumstances, there would be too much pressure to make this a good memory.

 

Weeks before that day, with a loose mood of panic in the air, I had had a more concrete insight as to what was soon to become.  Via my newly-acquired habit of reading the letters to the editor in “the Age” – with the walls closing in, their gaucherie and banality was now food for thought – a short letter from a man in his early 70’s (I’m guessing) who lived in Middle Park (if my memory serves me correctly) caught my attention.  By way of background, at the time, someone in the CW government had suggested that, with Covid known to take its main toll out on the old, older Australians might care to limit their movements accordingly.  A plain enough and sensible suggestion (aka “personal responsibility”, to quote the label of its recent re-discovery, almost two years later), you may think (and certainly seemed so to me at the time).  But the baby boomer letter-writer from Middle Park saw the matter quite differently:  “How dare the government tell me to stay at home?” he thundered – and not rhetorically, it would seem.        

 

And so the sorting of the sheep from the goats for Covid lockdown purposes was set in stone for the next 18 months (if you were a Victorian). 

 

There would never again be another official suggestion, until very recently (and very gently), of older Australians limiting their movements.  Lockdowns, which wouldn’t be suggestions of course and although coming in a near-infinite permutations otherwise, would henceforth and strictly always be styled as demographically neutral. 

 

Even though, of course, they disproportionately affected certain groups, including younger people and renters, and hence disproportionately favoured others – including Middle Park retired baby boomers, whose main lockdown imposition probably was having their café catch-ups now held on the footpath, under the guise of waiting-for-takeaways and “exercise” (if you’re doing it holding a coffee-cup, and don’t live in a nursing home, it was and is not exercise – it was a fiction or loophole that you came up with, and a practise that Dan Andrews then predictably took his sledge-hammer to in 2021 with the 5km/2-hour rule – a rule that seemingly mainly kyboshed actual (solo) exercisers in regional Victoria, like me – so thanks a lot, social-club “exercisers” of inner-city Melbourne).

 

For the record, my entire consumption of, and spending on, takeaway food and drink during lockdown was zip.  During what is supposed to be a health emergency, with most travel banned, and with plenty of extra time at home to prepare supermarket food (I also never went to a butcher/baker/specialty-food store), the idea of gourmet, ready-cooked or “fast” food/drink being essential (at least for anyone but a handful of hard-pressed shift-workers) is absurd.  So in a nutshell, welcome to my Covid lockdown nightmare, where just about everything that was open was trivial and eminently forgoable, and most things I’d considered necessary were closed beyond recourse.

 

By “most things”, I actually mean just one main thing – home heating.  Unless you’re a renter, you probably won’t even understand what I’m talking about.  So let me briefly fill you in – rented homes usually have poor heating, and some are actually what could be termed “unheatable”.   My (cheap) rented home at the time, in regional Victoria, was uninsulated (AFAICT) and had large rooms with four-metre high ceilings.  I knew this before I signed the lease and moved in, but I also had a heating plan for winters:  regular swim sessions at the pool over the road would keep my outer extremities in operation, plus I would spend at least a few weeks each winter in the Northern Territory, or somewhere else at least as warm.  But under the pretence of a demographically-neutral lockdown, followed by the inevitable border closures in the wake of the corrupt Unified Security contract-induced second-wave, such “heating” was deemed much too big an expectation, of course.

 

Through April 2020, and with winter bearing down, I did get some swims in.  There was an algae-encrusted fire-dam in a state park out of town that I braved once.  I then remembered that there was a nice spot on the nearest clean-water river, 45km away.  Uncertain whether I was allowed to drive my car legally there for exercise, I rode my bike, timed so I would get to the river at the warmest time of day on the warmest days that autumn.  The river was nonetheless icy to be immersed in, and I would do just a handful of 30-second or so “laps” – punctuated by several-minute thaws on a rock in the sun – before getting on my bike for home.  It was a five-hour or so excursion in total, for about two-minutes total of “pool time”.  But that ratio – of 150 parts white-noise to one-part “real thing” – seems about right to measure the passing of life  in lockdown (my life, anyway) over subsequent months.           

     

Meanwhile, also in April 2020, Richard Pusey infamously drove his Porsche at high-speed along the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne, starting a chain of events in which four police-officers were killed.  He was in a hurry to get home and eat his takeaway sushi, apparently.  Remarkably, I think, the additional illegality of this having been done during Covid lockdown has been left wholly unexplored, as far as I’m aware.   Or perhaps the takeaway-food lockdown-loophole for Porsche-driving property-investors (and so definitely not renters) is even larger than that of the footpath social-club that was legislated for the convenience of inner-city baby boomers, and so Richard Pusey had every right to expect no one and no law get between him and his designer (and heated) home?

 

At the very other – my – end of the lockdown scale, there was – and in many ways, still is – the “car crash” yet to process:  the long, cold, unswimmable winter of 2020 and its grim domestic violence of man vs house, 24/7.


Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Crime and crony capitalism behind the Dan Andrews lockdown veil

There have been three distinct low points for me in the last two weeks, in which the naked bankruptcy of the current governance of Victoria has reached yet another fresh low.

On 1 October 2020, the Age reported what would appear to be serious criminal behaviour by management at Epping Gardens nursing home in northern Melbourne.  If true, this alleged behaviour was unquestionably responsible for the wholesale further spread of Covid-19 inside and outside the nursing home.  Yet the Dan Andrews press conference that morning ignored this gaping and systemic hole in his lockdown framework, and instead blathered on about the usual random idiots Breaking The Rules – as though a half-dozen job-lot of these was infinitely worse than apparent manslaughter by management instruction at Epping Gardens.

Then Victoria’s legal profession earned itself a handy half-million dollars per word, per lawyer.  If I’m not mistaken, no less than three counsel assisting the Coates inquiry into hotel quarantine, summing up in the hours before the hearing adjourned, separately stated that it was a “creeping assumption”, rather than someone’s actual decision, that had led to the employment of untrained and unsupervised (in any meaningful sense, given the stakes) “security guards” to police the hotels – that is, to put the “quarantine” in quarantine.  The same day, it was announced that Victorian government had approved the doubling of the budget for the Coates inquiry, from $3m to $6m.  Paying for a wordy whitewash? Of course there could not have been such a crude deal done, and any apparent connection is just another creeping assumption fading into the beige.

And finally, just yesterday and today, a piquant example of who Dan Andrews considers an “essential worker” – so essential that they have a permit to broach the “ring of steel” between Melbourne and regional Victoria – has emerged.  Sales representative for a tyre company.  Yes, really – because getting the right brand-name in a “modern” font  on an otherwise couldn’t be-more-generic imported product is matter of a life and death, even in a pandemic.  And of course this “essential” sales work couldn’t possibly be done remotely – after all, how can a meal on (I’m assuming) the company expense account possibly be enjoyed while stuck at home, and never mind that a Melbourne resident eating-in at a café in regional Victoria is flagrantly illegal?  But nothing to see here, says Dan Andrews.

Again, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the Teflon-coated sales representative by reading anything into the fact that the Australian tyre industry, which Dan Andrews would not say a word against, currently seems to be a cartel run by hucksters of the same ilk who own most for-profit nursing homes.  As long as you put “creeping assumption” in a nice enough font, the public will continue to buy the toxic charade of Dan Andrews as man acting in their own interest.          

Update 14 Oct 2020

With news of the latest Covid-19 outbreak in Shepparton, it turns out that the sales representative for a tyre company – who the ABC has misleadingly labelled a “truck driver” *, which conveniently covers-up the issue of how he got a work permit to travel to regional Victoria – has been even an even better salesperson/liar than I had given him credit for. 

No doubt Dan Andrews will be “incredibly disappointed”, or somesuch, with the man’s actions, and then go on to say that it’s happened, let’s move on, and we can't change the past.  Bullshit.  

I say it’s high time for the affected citizens of Kilmore (hundreds of who have locked themselves at home, mainly of their own volition, as I understand it), and now Shepparton, to take civil action against the man and his employer (currently unnamed, but that shouldn’t take too much longer to come out) for their economic and other losses, with the damages payout easily running into the millions.  Once these defendants have been bled dry – hopefully bankrupted into oblivion – the Victorian government could also possibly be joined as a defendant, for its negligence in issuing a work permit to such a lowdown spiv and liar.  

 * He was labelled as the sales representative for a tyre company by the mayor of Benalla in the above ABC link.  If he was indeed a “truck driver”, he was an unusually leisurely one – the detour from the Hume Freeway to the Kilmore café is about half an hour just in extra driving time (his eating time was also a quite leisurely 45 minutes).  There are, of course, several roadhouses right on the Hume Freeway between Melbourne and Benalla, all with ample truck-parking, should one just want a quick meal and an easy park.  But no, our “truck driver” not only had all the time in the world but was such a gourmet flog that ordinary roadhouse cuisine plainly wouldn’t do it for him.




Monday, May 11, 2020


Long criminal record? Why not become an Australian mortgage broker today – and join a lucrative industry soon to be even more glamorised in new feature film!

Judging by Richard Pusey’s long criminal record, including jail time in 2008, there appears to be few, if any, industry standards as to becoming – or continuing as – a self-employed mortgage broker.  Richard Pusey apparently ran his own mortgage broking business, Switch Now Home Loans, until about July 2019. 

Why he left it then is unclear, but just today his lawyer, as part of making a case for Pusey’s bail, claimed that Pusey had “stable work” [same URL] – I’m guessing still as a mortgage broker of some sort. 

But in any event – and even prior to Pusey’s raft of charges arising from the Eastern Freeway tragedy (which are, of course, yet to be heard by a court) – there is enough of a Pusey rap-sheet to damn Australia’s mortgage broking industry for its acceptance of the serial criminal Pusey within their ranks, and particularly for their apparent deafening silence, in recent weeks, over Pusey’s association with their industry. 

Hey guys, exactly what crimes – if any – might cause someone to lose their credentials as a mortgage broker?  Or are such matters usually not dealt with by “public auction”, but are negotiable by “private sale”, at the right price?

One outcome of the Eastern Freeway tragedy is that there is now absolutely no need for an Australian version or adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho” (and sorry screenwriters, if you’ve been working on or shopping a fictional such script around). 

I suggest that “Australian Psycho” (as documentary or as thinly-disguised fiction) has already just about written itself. Richard Pusey’s life and career just needs a bit more detail – including as to his mortgage broker and (apparently) Australian Federal Police mates – but I assume that these requisite supporting characters (and enablers) will come out in the court case.


Friday, August 23, 2019


Pauline Hanson climbs down on Uluru

In Aboriginal Australia, the story’s perhaps never over until there’s a moral, or at least a laugh to it, and so the fact that Pauline Hanson has had to back-down, literally, on her (yet to be) televised stunt to climb Uluru should come as no surprise. 

I can’t speak for the elders who gave her “permission” to do the climb, just before she actually tried to do it, but it appears to me that they played her to perfection, in assessing the high-likelihood that she would back-down, so proving them right about their amply-telegraphed decision to close the climb permanently, from October 2019 (in opposition to which, of course, was the originating and political purpose of Hanson’s stunt).  As well as admiring the elders’ shrewdness and perceptiveness here, I find it hilarious (as well as thought-provoking) that her “permission” was all part of the practical joke played on her – and so also on a large cross-section of white Australia.    

As for the media figure who compared closing the Uluru climb to closing Bondi Beach, fair call, mate.  We flock to Uluru because it is iconic as well, and also because – of course – it has a proverbial lifeguard tower, staffed by deeply-tanned Anangu, who volunteer their time to see that (hopefully) no harm comes to the many often-clueless peeps who get into a spot of bother on the climb.  That is, we like to “swim between the flags, sort of” on dry-land, as well – to first get “their” permission, and then proceed jauntily to take little or no responsibility for our own actions, as many of us are, quite foreseeably, sucked out by the “rip”.

So it is indeed a sad day, folks, when the Anangu volunteer “lifeguards” say that they are closing their tower of safety for good, and probably one-day even removing the “flags” (viz safety chains) from white Australia’s carefree (and in case you’ve forgotten, ICONIC) playground.   After almost sixty years of being reckless and irresponsible tools – and then/yet (mostly) living to tell the tale – how dare they spoil our lame, flocking feats with an act of closure, especially when the sound of closure (and here a big thanks to their new kartiya friend Pauline H!) is the distinct and humbling sound of them laughing at us?



Disclosure:  Paul Watson has done “the climb”; see here for the context.


Wednesday, July 03, 2019


Nose-picking and the Bible – Important public service announcement

Last night I had a visitation from St Paul – yes, that Biblical New Testament one (and my namesake).  As you might expect, he’s been following closely the Israel Folau controversy, which has motivated him to pass on, via me, some very important information about getting into Heaven. 

In summary, St Paul’s list of Things Which Preclude You From Heaven – as famously paraphrased by Israel Folau on Twitter – urgently needs another behaviour added to the No Go list (of homosexuality, drunkenness, etc):  nose-picking. 

Here, St Paul was at pains to explain why he’d left nose-picking OFF the list nearly 2,000 years ago.  Sure, it was – then and now – disgusting, especially when one saw others doing it in public.  But, St Paul went on to say, he had indulged in a bit of it (when no one was looking, of course) throughout his life, and so couldn’t bring himself to be a hypocrite by adding it to the No Go list.  Plus, as he thought 2,000 years ago, it wasn’t exactly a big deal.

BIG MISTAKE, St Paul stressed to me last night.  He found out soon after he died that Heaven has FINGER-SCANNERS at its gates, SO SENSITIVE THAT THEY CAN DETECT EVEN ONE SINGLE INCIDENT OF NOSE-PICKING, however many decades and hand-washes have passed in the meantime.  Of course, when St Paul passed through the scanner, the Booger-Meter (to use its technical name) lit up bright red – and God, standing by the side, turned the same colour when he told St Paul how disappointed he (God) was in St Paul’s behaviour. 

Fortunately for St Paul – who couldn’t help but notice God’s (immaculately clean) finger hovering over the switch that flicks the trapdoor down to Hell – God informed him that, due to St Paul’s otherwise impressively reformed character, he (God) would, on this occasion only, sentence him to 2,000 years in Purgatory/Limbo, after which his status would be reviewed. 

And just yesterday, you’ll be pleased to hear, St Paul was duly received into Heaven, which also allowed him, finally, the free Wi-Fi required to send his 3D holographic avatar with its life-changing message down to me last night.

So overall you can see it was a CLOSE CALL for St Paul, folks.  And most importantly, now that the message is out, he wants you to know that God from now on has a ZERO TOLERANCE FOR NOSE-PICKERS.  If you fail the Booger-Meter scan at Heaven’s gates – for any picking whatsoever done after you have heard the news of this Biblical revision – when your time comes, God will just flick open the trapdoor down to Hell; no if’s, but’s or second-chances.

So it’s my job to get the word of this out.  But folks, I can’t do this alone.  We need to set up a crowdfunding website to pay for a big publicity campaign.  Because in these days of Political Correctness Gone Mad, we can’t even trust school-teachers not to be nose-pickers themselves.  Therefore, we need to get the message out direct to the kiddies.  I’m thinking of giant billboards placed at the entrance to every school in the world, saying “In Public or Private, Nose-pickers Go Straight to Hell” – that should make the kiddies think twice before they besmirch their fingers.  And NO Politically Correct BULLY should be permitted to suggest anything to the contrary whatsoever.  

So time to get your wallets out, peeps.  Remember, Every Booger Is Sacred (we could even crowdfund a song along these lines).  Some other handy mottos to keep you on the straight and narrow from now on are:  Clean Fingers Equal Clean Souls, and A Chaste Finger Would Never Defile Your Nose (or Booger-Tabernacle, as St Paul prefers to call it).  




Tuesday, February 26, 2019


“Only a madman …” George Pell outed as gay man

A perspective seemingly missing from the big media splash around George Pell today is that, having been convicted of molesting two teenage boys, he is presumptively a gay man.

A homophobic and self-loathing gay man, I stress.  The former adjective has long and abundantly been on the public record.  Re the latter adjective, now is surely the time for some sweeping, top-down changes to address the toxic consequences of the presence of so many self-loathing gay men serving in the Catholic Church:  such clergy are inclined to rape boys in the closet, figuratively, if not also literally.  A secondary but still notable point is that clergy who have sex with adult men – so breaking their vows of celibacy, but not the law (in most countries) – can be, and have been, blackmailed by clergy paedophiles, so protecting the paedophile (and blackmailer) from criminal prosecution.

These very points were made only a few days ago, in media coverage of a new book by Frederic Martel, In the closet of the Vatican.

It seems, however, that the Catholic Church is going to fight, kick and scream against the only – and admittedly bracing – remedy to its homophobia within: an end to clerical celibacy, especially per same-sex relationships (I note that one of the primary drivers for instituting clerical celibacy about 1,500 years ago was to prevent the children of clergy inheriting wealth that would otherwise flow to the Catholic Church; the issue of such children arises usually, of course, from heterosexual relationships).

The Catholic Church’s recalcitrance here was very recently shown by its defrocking/laicisation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, mainly (I understand), for relationships with young adult men; seminarians, specifically.  I am not going to defend McCarrick's molesting of junior staff in his workplace, but any system that ranks such a crime as equal to, if not worse than molesting children is sick – sick to its core.  Yet that is seemingly the Vatican’s take-home message about McCarrick (who, I note, has also been accused of molesting children).

The bottom-line is that McCarrick had, for the most part, a somewhat healthier (but of course still illegal) conception of, and outlet for, his sexuality than George Pell – think a gay Harvey Weinstein-type sleazebag, a mogul in swishing robes. 

Uniting George Pell with McCarrick, however, is their adhesion to the Catholic Church code of silence around its homophobia within and the rape of boys.  Unless and until it comes out of the closet itself, the Church will always continue to shelter clergy paedophiles.             


Update 2 March 2019 – some thoughts on George Pell’s pending appeal

Since everyone and anyone in George Pell’s cheer-squad have already weighed-in to the rock-solidness of his acquittal in the wake of his pending appeal (to be heard in mid-2019, I’m guessing), let me make a case for the respondents here.

Commentary that has pointed out the unusualness of Pell’s conviction – based on the uncorroborated testimony of one man – is not without foundation.  However, this is not an ordinary case of one man’s word against another. 

Pell chose not to give evidence in court in his own defence, which of course was his right, and no adverse inference should be drawn from this. 

But Pell also chose (he was not compelled) to give an almost one-hour videotaped interview to Victorian police at a Rome airport hotel, which was apparently played in full to the jury during his trial in late 2018, and excerpts from which were broadcast a day or so after news of his convection became public.

This videotape was presumably adduced by Pell’s defence.  If so, this was a serious tactical error, although in fairness to Robert Richter QC et al (whose bills to Pell and his backers would amount to many millions of dollars), there wasn’t much else to work with.

Here, Richter’s line that “Only a madman [would risk his entire career for a quick sexual thrill]” is laughably easy to disprove.  This is all the more true for high-flying males such as Pell.  While, as recently has been pointed out, the rules of engagement for public disclosure of trysts between  adults changed noticeably between JFK’s time in the early 1960s (when everyone kept schtum) and the 1988 US presidential campaign, Pell was on notice of this sea-change.  The career danger didn’t stop Bill Clinton from thinking with his d*ck when it came to his dealings with Monica Lewinsky in 1995-1996, so in this sense Pell, who doubled-down on the danger-factor by doing it with children, was actually, in 1996, a rather typical high-flying man of his time, rather than a “madman”.  

Going back to the videotaped interview, from the public excerpts I’ve seen, I would guess that this weighed heavily for the jury as a factor for convicting Pell.  God knows what is in its other 50 minutes or so, but in these excerpts, Pell is so shrill – so woodenly ­shrill – that his repeated denials ooze inauthenticity.  He seemingly soon runs out of adjectives that are synonyms of “madness” (in its particular nuance here), and – aware that simply repeating the m-word will get him nowhere – thus can only flounder in loose cliché. 

Pell’s body-language in the excerpts also confirms the impression of a man who has only just that moment found out that his big-guns, hitherto always infallible, have just run out of ammunition mid-discharge.  I do hope that the full videotape becomes public, so that it can be pored over, Zapruder-style, for its gleamings on Pell’s state of mind at the time, in all its glorious, flaccid micro-aggression.

In summary, as far as the jury probably was concerned, this wasn’t a case of one man’s word against another – courtesy of the videotaped interview, Pell’s every adjective was ample corroboration for proving the prosecution’s case beyond reasonable doubt.
   
In all this, today’s unsurprising news is that Pell has now dumped Robert Richter for his appeal, in favour of Bret Walker SC.  No doubt Pell is hoping either that a stiff new broom for the appeal will adumbrate some fresh synonyms for “madness”, or (more likely) that his new main-man will exploit a small technical loophole that will squeeze Pell through the eye of a needle and into a sort of freedom.  If he is freed, I trust that the evidence Pell has given several times under oath in recent years, as to his complete lack of participation in widespread cover-ups of the activities of other paedophile clergy, is comprehensively reviewed – with an eye to charging Pell with perjury (if nothing else).  I have closely studied the relevant testimonies here, and it suffices to say for now that Pell’s form in the Rome videotaped interview, while a career-best, was not a career-first.
            


Thursday, December 27, 2018


What did the Berndts have to hide?

So asked Jan Mayman in a story on 16 December 2018 about the 30-year posthumous embargo placed in 1993 by the will of Catherine Berndt (8 May 1918 – 8 May 1994), on the unpublished writings of herself and her husband, and fellow anthropologist Ronald Berndt (1916-1990).  

Mayman’s article is sceptical overall, and bluntly dismisses one possible explanation of why the Berndts wanted to hide posthumously for 30 years, that it was only to avoid future criticism of their research.  However, Mayman takes at face value the proffered alternative explanation by their literary executor and UWA Adjunct Professor John Stanton (1950 –) that the 30-year embargo was because of the Berndts’ “deep and abiding distrust of government of all political colours”, as “innately hostile” to the interests of Aborigines.

That may be so – certainly Mayman, apparently channelling Stanton, cites in support of this distrust the 1980 (red-herring) Noonkanbah dispute (a time when the Berndts were still in their prime, and lobbied against the WA government of the day) and the post-Mabo failure-by-a-thousand-cuts of legislated native title (a fiasco which, coincidentally, started to play-out just before Catherine Berndt’s death).  That the Berndts therefore chose 2024 as a date by when governments would have got their act together on this front seems implausible, however – certainly in 2018.  Even during, if late in, her lifetime, Catherine Berndt surely would have drunk, with the rest of us, the Paul Keating Kultural Kool-Aid – the potency of which peaked when the then PM made his celebrated Redfern Park speech on 10 December 1992 – and then, before she died, surmised that either:

(a)    the Keating Summer would reach new heights as GenX took over the reins from the mid-1990s, in which case the 30-year embargo would seem small-minded and unnecessary, or     

(b)   the Keating Summer would crash and burn soon enough, in which case a 30-year embargo was an estimation of the length of the consequent Great Leap Backward, aka the Menzies-and-baby-boomer cultural overhang (which started, of course, on 2 March 1996, almost exactly 30 years after Menzies left office).

As to the first hypothesis, needless to say, it didn’t happen.  But of more note, and whether or not Catherine Berndt foresaw this eventuality, it would be patently unfair to label Catherine Berndt (or her husband) as small-minded – which is a topic I shall return to shortly.

As to the second hypothesis, with five-and-a-bit years still on the clock before 2024, I hope that Catherine Berndt’s implicit optimism that the Great Leap Backward would have finished its run within 30 years may yet be proved correct – but this is also a topic I shall return to shortly

In any event, Mayman’s main point is that five-and-a-bit years are a probably too long a wait for at least one man, 81 y.o. Vince Copley.   

The Ngadjuri elder’s moral right for the 30-year embargo to be waived, so allowing him to access in his lifetime Berndt notebook material relating to his late grandfather Barney Waria (1873-1948) could hardly be more compelling.  That there is arguably a corresponding legal right also is put here (penultimate URL), although not by Mayman, as is the fact that the embargo has been waived on two previous occasions, by court order.  

Mayman aside, the real reason, I think, that UWA and its Berndt Museum/archive are being so intransigent in this case is that the label “Pandora’s Box” probably understates the toxicity of the contents.  As noted, the Berndts, in their day, were nothing if not broad-minded.  One axis of this was the probably unparalleled geographic and socio-economic diversity of their field-work, including New Guinea and a pan-Australia cocktail of downtown Adelaide, Vestey cattle-stations in north-western Australia and Arnhem Land (amongst other places).  

While apart from a brief sojourn at Hermannsburg in 1944, they bypassed Central Australia in their Indigenous field-work, the Berndts nonetheless absorbed, probably mainly via TGHS Strehlow, some of its most sacred aspects.  From work published by the Berndts in their lifetimes, it seems plain that they had little or no appreciation of the ethics of dealing with restricted/secret material, from Central Australia (the area that I am mostly familiar with) and before the 1980s, at least.  Prior to the 1980s, the word “sacred” was used by them as a seeming titillation.  While the Berndts’ offence here is hardly unique, they deserve particular ignominy because their 30-year embargo compares so strikingly with the clear (if unwritten) embargoes they knew, or should have known, they were breaking regarding textual and photographic depiction of restricted/secret material from Central Australia.       

By 1982, and with John Stanton now on-board, the Berndts were notably more circumspect regarding Central Australian material – the reproductions from there in the trio’s book “Australian Aboriginal Art – a Visual Perspective” are confined to some semi-attributed crayon drawings collected at Hermannsburg in 1944 and three Papunya dot-paintings from 1976, 1977 and 1978, two of which were bought from an art-gallery in Perth.   

The copyright declaration over that book’s reproduced visual material is a fudge, however.  In lieu of seeking permission and paying royalties to the artists, on page 6 there is a “dedicat[ion]” to the artists in tandem with an assurance that their foregone royalties will accrue to a fund used to purchase further works by Aboriginal artists for the Berndt Museum (then titled the UWA Anthropological Research Museum).  Seven years later, Stanton used a similar formulation (just without the dedication bit) in his Kimberley-specific book “Painting the Country” (1989).  In fairness to the trio here, it was not until the early 1990s – that Keating Summer, again – that copyright generally began to be attributed to Aboriginal artists by the tomes reproducing their work.  Prior to this the siphoning of royalties was whitewashed in a number of creative ways.  Apart from the Berndt/Stanton dedication-and-worthy-whitefella-fund model – which CP Mountford had pioneered with his “The Art of Albert Namatjira” in 1944 – there was the popular copyright nullius approach, in which copyright was only asserted in the text (which was by non-Aboriginal author/s), such as in Jennifer Isaacs, “Australian Aboriginal Paintings” (1989).     

Lastly, and back to the Berndt Museum/archive’s toxic contents and the Berndts avuncular broad-mindedness (except when it came to keeping the secrets of, and paying royalties to, Aboriginal Australians) is a second-axis; as well as their geographical promiscuity, the childless couple were promiscuous in the ordinary sense.  In their New Guinea field-work (most probably in 1951-1953), they dropped their anthropological gaze – and pants – when researching sexual behaviour, and joined in the festivities.  Further, this appears to be an open secret in anthropological circles (to which I’m not privy).  My source for these twin facts is Peter Ryan “Final Proof” (2010) p 91, which, while not naming the Berndts, leaves them hanging rather awkwardly as (AFAICT) the only possible pairing of eligible Australian anthropologists (Ryan also doesn't name the anthropologist-author whose book, with its salacious detail about the Berndts, he declined to publish).

So the real reason behind Catherine Berndt’s embargo probably had nothing to do with the Keating Summer (and its denouement of many a stillborn career among my generation).  Rather, it relates to the Menzies-and-baby-boomer Dreamtime Mark 1 (1949-1966) – before it was the long overhang of recent decades, and when John Stanton was just a wee lad.  Sex in the early 1950s was a general embarrassment at best, and so Catherine Berndt presumably thought, when making her will in 1993, that what the Berndts did in New Guinea back then had to be suppressed until a time when settler Australia hopefully had the maturity to handle the anthropological gaze being inverted, or zoomed-in on our own (white) backsides.

And, strangely enough, 2024 seems to be about on-track for this cultural turning point, from snicker to sober.  Which is not to say that, in the meantime, Vince Copley should have to wait a moment longer for access to the Berndt Museum/archive – his “royalties” are already and embarrassingly overdue.


Monday, December 17, 2018


Ramsay Centre announces – finally – it has secured a mistress . . .

. . . and the next step, in due course, will be a blushing bride from within the G8.

Yes, that’s the bottom-line from today’s announcement.  The non-sandstone University of Wollongong is – of course – happy to take the cash for breaking the drought, and keep schtum.  Meanwhile the Ramsay Centre, well aware that if, shock horror, it was seen to be marrying beneath itself, people would talk, emphasises that this is only a preliminary, and definitely not a monogamous, arrangement.

The secrecy in the lead-up to the deal being inked is all class, too – a charming early window into the behavioural expectations upon the mistress from now on.  If UoW wants academic freedom, then first and foremost, it needs to behave!

I would like to think that if the estate of some dead billionaire came knocking at the doors of the main state galleries, offering buckets of cash for them to administer an art prize with one stipulation – it had to be a traditional Australian landscape of gum trees and livestock – the said main galleries would laugh off the approach as “Nice try, but we’re not:  (i) your April Fool, or (ii) that desperate".

It will be interesting to see who will be the academics who staff this joke.  But even more interesting, I think, will be who the scholarship students are – and will be, in a few years’ time.  If I was a bright young thing looking to start uni in 2020, I’d play along, firstly to land the scholarship and then, and most importantly, to get a comprehensive inside story of the course over the next year or more.  Then voila, when the time was right, I’d have one of the juiciest (and, in the present climate, best paid!) stories of investigative journalism in Australian history, all ready to roll.  


Monday, July 09, 2018




                                                              “Black Elvis” (Gnarnayarrahe Waitairie)




                                                              Uncle Jack Charles, with Jason Tamiru on clapsticks



Was lucky to be in Melbourne on Saturday for a rusted-on winter treat.  On a cold and grey day with a howling south-westerly wind, I was expecting the courtyard between ACCA and the Malthouse Theatre to be a wind-tunnel or vortex.   As it turned out, the afternoon’s festivities “Dhumba Narbethong” – an outdoor program to complement the “A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness” exhibition indoors at ACCA – met the weather halfway, as aided by, the impressive South Face of ACCA, aka the Colossus of Rust, corralling the wind into a merely bracing northerly.   

Without sun or shadow, the monumental architecture of ACCA and the adjacent red tollway tunnel smokestack receded into a matte background and utilitarian shelter for a stage.  On “stage” – a campfire in the round but with a tacit backstage quadrant to the north-east – were some remarkable performances.  Songs and stories that were intimate and relaxed – but on another level, commanded a vortex to infinity, up and through that edge in the sky between the blue-and-white wisps and the giant slate-grey sheets held mesmerisingly at bay.  The fourth wall as sheer matte-ness, and a glimpse of the monumental form of one attenuated moment.


Wednesday, May 02, 2018


Notes on the origin of  “b**ng”

The pejorative term “b**ng” for Indigenous Australians is generally thought to be a peculiarly Australian offshoot of the ultra-respectful “bung”, an Indonesian/Malaysian word literally translated as older brother.

Until the other day, I hadn’t thought about the word’s origins.  I had long assumed that Australia’s equivalent to America’s n-word – although a case can be made that Australia’s word rather trumps America’s in the offensiveness stakes # – was home-grown and of unknown provenance.  After recently coming across a 1954 account of the word “b**ng” being coined by a posh Pom visiting Alice Springs in August 1924, I looked up Wikipedia and then realised that the real story has become overlooked or forgotten, in favour of a peculiarly Australian bullshit one.  In short, the adaptation of “bung” theory is fanciful, illogical and conveniently benign.

The real origin of “b**ng” is set out in an article by Malcolm Ellis, “From Alice to Albert”, Bulletin 17 March 1954 pp 22-23, with the addition of some background context (not about the b-word specifically) from his 1927 book The Long Lead. 

Passing through Alice Springs in August 1924, on the return leg of “the first complete double-crossing of [Australia] by motor-car from Sydney to Darwin and back” Ellis – and his co-expeditionaries Francis Birtles and JL Simpson, of the Bean motor-car company – spent a few days there (this trip was – unusually for the time – neither a race nor a scientific or other extravaganza). 

Coincidentally, soon after Ellis’ arrival from the north, Lord Stradbroke (1862-1947) and his party made a grand entrance into Alice Springs, by motor-car from the south.  Also known as the Earl of Stradbroke, he lived mainly in the UK, but had a five-year stint in Australia as Governor of Victoria 24 Feb 1921 to 7 April 1926.   
    
To further welcome Lord Stradbroke, a major Indigenous ceremony took place that August 1924 night (on then-vacant land that, in 1954, was occupied by the “Inland Mission radio-centre”), one that – in the manner of a grand such occasion – was still seemingly fresh in Malcolm Ellis’ mind 30 years later.  But there was also something niggling Malcolm Ellis’ mind in 1954:  a casually uttered snipe by Lord Stradbroke that day in 1924, when he passed by The Bungalow.  

In 1924, The Bungalow was (and had been since 1914) a collection of dilapidated sheds behind the Stuart Arms Hotel in downtown Alice Springs (which at the time had only six white residents), which functioned as a home for “half caste” children.  Recoiling at the sight of its inhabitants, Lord Stradbroke coined it “The B**ng” – a word which then stuck, and spread.

What happened next is important to the nuances of how the b-word evolved.  Firstly, Lord Stradbroke was right to recoil at the squalid conditions in which The Bungalow’s inhabitants then lived.  Indeed, after his return to Sydney in 1924, Malcolm Ellis wrote an influential, nationally-syndicated article which exposed these conditions and four years later led to the Bungalow’s relocation, in better premises ##.  But for Lord Stradbroke, the squalid built environment of “The B**ng” and its location in the backyard of a pub was synonymous with its human cargo.  There was nothing else to say about or hope for them: b**ngs they would always remain.  Whatever else was going on inside Lord Stradbroke's head that day, given the ceremony that night, he deserves nomination, I think, as a candidate for history's Least Honourable Guest of Honour ever.

That a passing cheap-shot from an English overlord has since been so effortlessly laundered of its provenance and enthusiastically absorbed – complete with false, benign paternity – into the lowest rung of the Australian vernacular is an intriguing window into the colonial insecurity and inhumanity that lies shallowly beneath white Australia.
          
# See the last line of the Alex Buzo play, “Norm and Ahmed”

## Stuart Traynor, Alice Springs:  from singing wire to iconic outback town (2016) pp 236-239, 288. 


Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Now, for the plebiscite on the definition of bullying

Readers of this blog may be aware that I am a gay man, who has long – and consistently, albeit not recently – advocated the case against gay marriage.   A few months ago, however, I changed my mind.  Six weeks ago, I voted yes, with some reservations.  The most interesting part of my journey here, I think, is how the “No” case has so successfully changed my opinion on this issue over recent months – and how, just this morning, a ridiculous op-ed from a “No”-case proponent has convinced me to cast aside my remaining reservations. 

So take a bow, Margaret Court and Professor Patrick Parkinson (among others) – through your hysterical invocation of the “No”-case proponents as being bullied victims of the gay lobby, you have showed up the flimsy foundations of your stance, and so – obviously unintentionally – swung my vote, at least, to a “Yes”.  You have allowed what seems to be some kind of deep-seated personal insecurity (to put it kindly) to morph into a pseudo-objective opinion on something that is (to put it politely) none of your business.  Oh, and also perverted the meaning of the word “bullying”, and its English language cognates.

In today’s op-ed, Professor Parkinson zeroes in on the case of a man apparently sacked from his job in England for expressing in public a very mild opposition to gay marriage. I suspect that there is more to this case than Professor Parkinson grants – but it would be impossible for me to drill down from afar into the objective truth here, so let’s take the case study at face value.  The International Gay Lobby has ruthlessly crushed this poor man, Professor Parkinson seems to imply.  And possibly also countless others?  If so, great swathes of these “bullied victims” are palpably silent.  Perhaps Professor Parkinson’s implication is that they are mostly too afraid to talk.

Gosh, poor dears.  As a gay man, I presumably must have had little lived experience of bullying.  Losing one’s job because of sexuality must be under Professor Parkinson’s logic, a still rarer thing than being bullied for being a “no”-case proponent.  Funnily enough, though, the former has happened to me – as a law lecturer, albeit quite a while ago. (Conversely and more recently, my earlier “no”-case public views, did not attract any criticism that I would call out as unduly harsh).  Perhaps I should be your next international cause celebre/meme, eh Professor Parkinson?

But of course I jest here – my experience of life-changing discrimination here is no different to the lot of many millions of other LGTBI+ people in the first-world.  And outside the first-world, of course, things are far worse.  I count myself lucky for never been in serious fear of my life because of my sexuality, but there have been many unpleasant incidents over three decades, including being spat at in an outdoor café in central Melbourne, in broad daylight, two years ago, by a ~18 y.o. boy/man – whose ethnic appearance placed him as coming from what from today can euphemistically be called the “No” suburbs.  I was apparently guilty of wearing a too-tight T-shirt – hence his spit (in my eye) and his yell of “Faggot!” to go with it.  Again, far too everyday an experience to bother going to the police about; and the café staff just shrugged when I told them what had just happened (in case they hadn’t seen it for themselves).      

In conclusion, go back to your sad lives in your nice (and no-doubt “Yes”-voting) suburbs, Margaret Court and Professor Parkinson (and the rest of you).  Even after the big news today about the “Yes” case winning the plebiscite, you can sleep assured tonight that homophobia is alive and kicking (and spitting) in the non-Anglo (and especially) non-Anglo and poor suburbs. 


As ever, the rich get the poor to do their dirty work for them.  Ruling-class Anglo homophobes who seemingly have conscripted an informal army of non-Anglos, and especially their youth, to be their storm troopers for policing public morality (and T-shirt sizing) is just the latest twist to the tale.


Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Real estate bubbles, tree changers and cultural “negative gearing”

If the peak of the US stock-market bubble of the 1920s was the time when hotel bell-boys everywhere were overheard exchanging stock-market hot-tips, then the equivalent moment in Australian real estate will be when the word “investment” (in connection with it) is drained of all nuance.  That is, anyone who has bought anything at any price – lemon or not – has made, or is on their way to making, a killing.  Oh wait, that’s already happened, at least in Melbourne and Sydney – and if the party there is over, no one appears to be getting out in a hurry – yet.   But contra to Andrew P Street, Melbourne and Sydney are just the visible tip of a nation-deep iceberg, on which several generations of renters are foundering.  And on their   our  shoulders rests  disproportionately  a huge trove of cultural (as opposed to monetary) capital.

Back in money-land, there’s a name for everyone’s-a-winner “investment” that requires no special skill, timing or luck:  Ponzi scheme.  Of course, not quite everyone is a winner – (we) renters are the perceived suckers – and at the other end, not all “winners” are equal:  the earlier one has bought real estate, the bigger one’s winnings, usually. 

It is a shame, I think, that renters (here, not including me) tend to accept their individual lots, as one of the mandatory suckers, rather than collectively assert their market (or voting) power to its fullest potential (that said, for a certain strata of renters, including me, it is already “game on”; see below).  Renters may not be a necessary ingredient for every flip-for-capital-gain – and the more than trifling number of vacant investment properties attests to this – but if every, or even many, investment properties were vacant, the prospects for capital gain would evaporate.  Of course, everyone needs a roof over their heads, so limiting renters’ effective choice in withdrawing from this market. 

There is more than one way to skin a cat here, however – and I believe that a chunk of we lumpen-renters are one our way to conspiring to send a powerful market signal, even if this has been done perhaps unconsciously and involves what I’ll call the econo-cultural (as opposed to monetary) sphere.  This phrase is not a neologism, but I’m using it here in specific counterpoint to the phrase “culture industries” et al – which, if not oxymoronic, fails to account for (and here to invoke the same parlance) creative consumption – that is, where and how people like me spend their time dreaming, gleaning and fossicking.

Living well outside of the big smoke/s for the main reason of (much) cheaper rent (plus I didn’t have a job in Melbourne to detain me), I have spent three years in a box seat to take the national econo-cultural temperature.  As I presaged above, there are ripples to urban real-estate inflation that are felt well outside the commuter belts of Melbourne and Sydney.  Big-city (or even second-string) property-owners whose careers or life-stage allow it thus cash-in and sell-up, to go shopping with their hard-currency bonanza in regional locations where lived was lived in, and so real-estate was traditionally bought and sold for, trusty “pesos”.  This domestic “migration”, driven by real-estate arbitrage, tends to be mono-cultural, and is a potent – and perhaps under-appreciated – factor in spreading the cheer (or misery, if you’re a renter) of the urban real-estate boom far and wide.  And in turn, a definitely under-appreciated cultural phenomenon – and not in a good way.

The net econo-cultural upshot in 2017 is that property prices in all but the direst of dire country towns are actually quite expensive, thereby preventing, for at least the last decade, cultural rejuvenation by artist/intellectual types attracted by the local “peso” economy and social matrix (and moving there with only pesos in their pockets).

Artist/intellectual types who rent are thus pretty much stuck in their present real-estate rut, urban or regional, with no better alternative.  Fitzroy/Darlinghurst garrets are long gone, of course, for committed bohemians wanting to culturally invest in their locale, but more recently, so are grungy outer suburbs and even white-bread country towns. 

If you’ve ever wondered why Australian intellectual life itself has been stuck in a mediocre rut for at least the past decade, you now have the answer – there is no “fringe” to escape to any more, and thus no liquidity in the cultural and consumption mix.   There is only urban vapidity and cupidity – a monoculture of greed that trumps, with spades, the much-vaunted big-city multi-culture, both at home and away.  In the cities, hyper-consumption converges and finds its own level as teenage gangs invade ordinary suburban homes to steal trophy cars for a ride to nowhere – an even more sliced-and-diced undercutting of Uber at its own algorithmic game, if you like.

Meanwhile, in the regions, a different sort of invasion and consumption convergence is happening.  A vanguard of (Anglo-Celtic Australian) culture-deaf, real-estate arbitrageurs – as opposed to refugees, like me – slowly spread across the nation like a cane-toad swarm.   Though self-fancied and styled as “tree changers”, they are on a mission to re-invent their new locales and environments.  But rather than resulting in a heady – and not always comfortable, it must be noted – admixture of bohemia with old-school country, these newcomers come to conquer, not to settle. 

“Tree changers” need, and bring, sophisticated weaponry to achieve this, of course – with their killer advantage, one to which about nine out of every ten old-timer locals will swoon or reluctantly succumb, being the middlebrow “urban” café.  Believe it or not, these are still new enough in many country towns, and the locals so hitherto unaccustomed to pure consumption for its own sake, that a newly opened café, complete with brown interior tonings, in one’s town achieves a social revolution – changing the town’s ~150 year-old social fabric almost overnight to an all-encompassing, gimlet-eyed (and anti-social) dollars-and-cents ledger.  That is, into a matrix the “tree changers” can effortlessly and comfortably assimilate – not least because they spored and sooled it.              

There is some hope here, however – what I like to think of as a form of cultural “negative gearing”; a collective action by boho renters.  Taking a leaf out of the property investor playbook, we selectively keep vacant some of our cultural properties, and so starve the market of stock.  This can work wherever you live. The aim, of course, is to accumulate private cultural capital in the long-term.  As we quietly do this, the hyper-consumption economy will eventually burn itself out – with one urban home invasion too many, and no country towns left to colonise with middlebrow cafés.  When that day comes, culture, sweet culture, will be the most valuable roof above all our heads, and floor beneath your – and not mine – humbled lives.   


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