Living on a Prayer

Opposition leader Kevin Rudd spent a drunken night in a strip club four years ago. Who cares? Well apparently everyone does. This story made in onto television and newspaper headlines for a fourth day in a row today. I found this suprising, coming as I do from a country where the "private life is private" doctrine has been firmly entrenched. Modern Britain is a place where accusations of cocaine abuse (still undenied) can't stop David Cameron becoming Tory Party leader, and where repeated infidelity has done nothing to hamper Boris Johnson's mayoral ambitions. The Brits, the conservative old prudes are now extremely liberal and forgiving. Easy going, larrikin Australia, by contrast is twitching its sour-faced puritan nose up in disgust at a minor indescretion.

But t'was not always so. Twenty years ago the mysterious loss of former-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's trousers (apparently after being drugged by a prostitute) was met with light amusement rather than disgust, and around the same time Prime Minister Bob Hawke admitted that his legendary beer intake probably did more for his popularity than any policy. The transformation between then and now is bizzare, and just goes to show how succesful John Howard's terminally reactionary agenda has been. This once amusing and wayward nation is now a hundred times more serious and conservative than Mother England. Yet the oddest thing is that this is not how Australia perceives itself. I'll never forget the drunken Aussie backpacker who, telling me about my own country, declared "the British are very conservative people". Presumably he also thought that the Australians were not very conservative, but it was his country which had just re-elected a man whose main leadership goal is to drag the nation back to 1956. And even not the real 1956 (far too many interesting characters and union upstarts there) but the 1956 which exists only in the head of disheveled old scroats like John Howard. It is Australia that hangs the Union Flag over all and sundry (albeit counterpointed with the southern cross) to remind people that this is first and foremost an Anglo-Saxon country, so mind your mouth. It is Australia whose memorial day has mutated from a national day of mourning and remembrance into a jingoistic carnival of nationalism and militarism. ANZAC day now has more in common with the parades at Red Square than the ceremony at Whitehall. The whole idea of Australian identity has become overwhelmingly serious.

John Howard has taken traditional, decent Australian values like mateship and "a fair go" away from their exuberant and genuine origins in the labour movement and reinstated them within a morbid and indulgent fetishisation of Gallipoli and the ANZAC myth. In doing so he has destroyed their real meaning and removed them of any contemporary resonance. Mateship and a fair go ought to, for instance, mean opposing unfair industrial relations but now we are told that it means supporting them, because that's what the ANZACs would've done, kept their heads down and got the job done, not sat around complaining.

The conservative assault on Australian history is positively Stalinesque. The diggers were a bunch of scared young men who died because a foreign king told them to go to war, but now we have superimposed over this images of chisel-jawed Aussie blokes who died for "freedom". Does that include the freedom to turn back immigrants? What ought to be a parable showing the folly of war and slavish, weak governments (the Australian establishment betrayed the diggers at least as much as British generals did) becomes a story glorifying military conquest and nationalism, all whilst comfortably maintaining a foreign monarch as head of state. Self-reflection went out of the windows years back leaving only a blinkered machismo and a faint whiff of cheap sentiment. The coalition would probably put a rose-tint on the flag if suggesting changes to the flag didn't identify one as a communist, immigrant-loving pooftah.

I want to see the old Australia come back, and not the fake, quaint, imagined old Australia but the real old Australia. The Australia that built the modernist buildings that so impressed me on arrival, the Australia on show at the Eureka Stockade rebellion, the Australia of the Whitlam era, driven by hope and self-belief, not by fear and mistrust. It is not too late to turn back the tide of pathetic, arrogant, narcicistic, greedy, xenophobic hatred that has been stoked up for the past years, but it all hinges on the election. A defeat for Howard would be a tiny ray of light. Another victory would be the final nail in the coffin.

Creating The Emperor

My new job is of questionable veridicality. On the one hand it is almost certainly real, but then I float through my days in a technopiate haze and stumble out at the end of the day a little unsure.

On the average day I enter my state of the art workplace through the security system (to keep out undesirables presumably) before whizzing up to the 21st floor and taking my seat in this glacial tower. I then undertake my two jobs, which are;

- Cross referencing people's scanned identity documents with the details on their scanned application forms looking for anomalies and scanning errors.

- Checking other verifiers flagged scanning errors and deciding whether they were right or not (meanwhile someone does the same with mine)

This sort of job is as menial as it sounds and consequently I spend a lot of time gazing out across the city, thinking of ways to improve it, like an admin Le Courbusier. Conversation is kept to a minimum so I often listen to ambient electronica whilst working, adding to the general sense of cyber-unreality.

One of the plus points though is that no-one keeps track of my work rate any longer, and I am free to net surf for quite ridiculous amounts of time (hence the now regular updates here). I seem to have landed a George Costanza role.

Anyhow, during this morning's shift I came up with an idea for a new type of condom called 'The Emperor'.


- It will be manufactured in purple, the colour of the Roman emperors, which will make it a more visually attractive. The company will use the profits of condom sales in the west to finance the distribution of Emperor condoms in Africa along with a sexual education anti-AIDS programme to counter anti-contraception propaganda by Christian groups.

- In the African context the purple will also represent the democratisation of protected sex, since this once most elite of colours will be available to the world's poorest people.

- The packet will have a symbol of Imperial Rome on, the Colosseum or whatever, to represent Rome's pre-catholic past and set the product aside from catholic intervention in Africa on sexual issues.

- Finally, Bono and Bob Geldof will not be allowed to endorse the product.

But to whom does one go with a product like this? And does Bono have your legs broken if you don't polish his halo?

I don't know but I shall try and find out or lose my kneecaps trying!

A Blessing in Disguise

There is a general lament in Britain about the lack of housing affordability, but having now witnessed a country where property is still (just about) affordable to younger people I hope Britain stays as it is. Knowing that you have little hope of being able to buy a house has turned people to regard their youth as a great fin-de-siecle rort of resigned abandonment. There is something of the raw liberation of Wiemar about this decadence before the deluge, albeit on a more innocuous level.

In Australia by contrast, as soon as the teenage years are over the Australian dream of a plot of land enters the brain and as the years pass it grows and grows, rotting away any joie de vivre like a personality cancer. Money and mortgages are all anyone ever thinks about. They claw after more and more cash with a deranged obsession, like grotesque characters from a second rate parody of Thatcherism, forcing themselves to work with the flu and always finding reason to stay back (Australia works more unpaid overtime than anyone else). Of course however much you have there's always someone on more to bitch about, and so every pay rise saps away a little more humanity and replaces it with envy and hatred. Gradually life become measured out entirely in payment installments and how much you are earning, or, more crucially, how much you aren't.

I am not suggesting that money is a bad thing per se, my upbringing was not affluent enough to allow that indulgence, but to place it at the centre of one's whole being is truly sick. If you have money it should be enjoyed frivilously, not fetished. The fixation of some people here could not be any more perverse if they tried to fuck an ATM.

On the plus side I just read a tabloid scare story about house prices going higher than ever, so maybe there is still hope. Throw away your 1950s dreams Australia, the party is just beginning...

A City in Need of Cruz Control

I am sick of seeing Penelope Cruz's face, but not in the same way that I'm sick of seeing Jeremy Clarkson's face (I'm afraid he is popular in Australia too). No, there's a difference between my annoyance at her luminous good looks and my distaste at his denim-chaffed mug, which resembles a battered old dustbin overflowing with discarded pubic hair. Hating Clarkson's face is almost enjoyable.

There's something a bit like being at the pantomime when watching him decide which cars are cool and uncool (has he looked at himself in the mirror lately? Clarkson labeling something 'uncool' is a little like Adolf Eichmann calling something 'immoral') or moaning about how he's being persecuted by speed cameras when his only crime was to deliberately break a law designed to save lives. Poor old Jez, even Adolf Eichmann would think speed cameras were going too far surely? Clarkson plays the pathetic, declining middle aged prick with such unapologising aplomb it's quite amusing. With Penelope my anger is much more unsatisfying.

What riles me up is that her profile seems to have emerged all over Melbourne in the past few weeks unannounced, on various bus stops and bill boards and it is now almost impossible to go five minutes in town without having her cast a seductive, eyelash-heavy pout at you. The problem with this? Everything else is dismal by comparison. Ordinary people are ugly at the best of times, but now I feel as though I am walking amongst some troglodyte race of nuclear survivors. And it's not just other people I apply my rule to. A glance at the bathroom mirror reveals only a hideous mutant; and once he moves out of of the way I can see myself, which is almost as bad.

Please, oh gods of Melbourne remove lady Penelope and her impossibly high ubermensch standards and let us be human again! Nothing could please me more. Nothing, apart from Jeremy Clarkson being knocked down by a speeding car and the driver escaping because all the speed cameras have been vandalised. Even Adolf Eichmann would have to laugh at that.

Mobster in My Pocket

Those who know me best would attest to my gross negligence of phone credit. I almost always am out of it and use is sparingly when available. This behavioural pattern grew out of financial hardship, but has continued to languish even though I am able to afford phone credit, in much the same way that war rationing survivors still get every scrap out of their beef joints, even though they could easily buy another. This is not to be sneered at, there is a lot to be said for frugality. Interestingly I read at weekend that Ian McKellan still thrills at a bargain even though he now has tons of cash. Some habits are hard to shake.

Anyhow, this reluctance to spend phone credit took a shake upon my registering an Australian phone and checking my balance. I was informed by the robo-operator that "Your current balance is $35.76. You must top up before 12th March 2007 or your service will be suspended." "What??" I cried at poor Shira, who must be so sick of shouldering the injustices of her nation "does that mean even if I still have credit they'll take it away??". "Yes", she answered meekly, knowing that an outraged kick-off was sure to follow. And it did. But I shan't bore you with details, all you need know is that I did not recharge out of principal and now have no credit as usual.

All of this was annoying, merely annoying, until tyhis morning, when it became sinister. I received a text message whilst at my desk and reached to see who was popping in my inbox. It was Optus, the subject of my embargo. "This is Optus" the message said "you must recharge your credit by the due date or all phone services will be cancelled." Christ! The fuckers are laying it on the line. Pay up or else. There has been Melbourne mafia violence in the news lately, but via text message? Orange were happy to leave me for a year without topping up, safe in the knowledge that other Orange users were ringing and texting me. But this lot are not happy with that. It's 'Give us your cash or you'll be incommunicado sunshine!'

I have one month to decide my next move. And I feel a fight coming on...

Dreaming of Ithaca

One of the main advantages of being an expat is that the homeland exists as a land of mental perfection, far removed from the day to day reality. Britain in Australia is certainly better than Britain in Britain. With this in mind I have started to pine for various things from home including:

The BBC
Snooker on telly
Decaying seaside towns
Cox's Orange Pippins
English Countryside (what would a life-long city dweller know about this?? It is a pastoral ideal I know, but still it's there)
Puddings with custard in cold weather
Ale in old men pubs
The Thames
Free Museums


But then a visit to the BBC website shows me the faces of Russell Brand and Graham Norton and my dream-world Blighty collapses into second-rate actuality.

Curse you reality for being so poor!!

The Sweetness of The Mourning Jew

April is the cruelest month, or is it?

It has been rather kind to me, allowing us to finally settle into a house after being bitch-slapped left, right and centre by February and March. That is largely the cause of my prolonged silence.

Native Britishers would not believe the rigmarole necessary to apply for a house in this city. Viewings of properties often host up to 50 people, who must then fill out an application which resembles that for a job more closely than a house. You must give a personal statement, personal references (we needed nine for this house) and wage slips to confirm your affluence. Getting a car in the Soviet Union would have involved less red tape than this, and unpleasant as Russian civil servants might be I'd wager they had nothing on the grotesque smugness of a Real Estate Salesperson. My only hope is that after death they're all condemned to some kind of eternal Glengarry Glenross hell-fire.

If you were wondering, there is in this entry no Mourning Jew as referred to in the title, 'twas merely a pun I thought of and enjoyed! There is a wisecracking Jew and an anti-Semite though, being Groucho Marx and T S Eliot. I recently read Groucho's letter to Gummo about when he dined at Eliot's house. They had three things in common, he reported; a love of cigars, a love of cats and a habit of constantly punning. But while Groucho apparently tried to suppress his urge to make puns at every opportunity, he reports that Eliot was unashamed, even proud, of his. And why not?! I despise those who relegate the pun to a cringeworthy device. In the right hands it is a thing of wonder, as demonstrated by Mr Marx himself. And besides, what's good enough for a founding father of modernism is good enough for anyone.

Returning to more everyday affairs I must report the only down-side to our new location, we are forced to cram onto Melbourne's over-burdened train system. Things here are really reaching dire straits, with the government buying back trains it sold off 12 months ago to try and alleviate the pains of the severely antiquated system. Not that this is helping. This morning we were forced to let two trains go by since we could not physically fit on them. One man had had enough and let rip at the station attendant. "This isn't fucking good enough!" he spat out, articulating the rage of an entire city. The attendant, although it wasn't his fault, sensed this, and in his heart he knew the man was right. All he could do was stand, simpering like a little boy.

And this is how the blog ends,
And this is how the blog ends,
And this is how the blog ends,

Not with a bang but with a simper.