What the cat dragged in

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

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.