"Heath is, and always will be, an Australian. He adored his home. His last two weeks with us over Christmas in Perth were just bliss. Heath did not become an actor for the fame or fortune. He loved his craft and he loved helping his friends. He loved chess and skateboarding too. My image of Heath in New York is him with his skateboard, a canvas bag and his beanie. That was Heath to me."
Kim Ledger, Heath's father.
Australia took a different step; a wave of confidence, almost excitement, gripped the country with a new Prime Minister. Partly it was just astonishment, a holding of the breath, a hope that nothing would stuff up, surprise that they hadn't made total fools of themselves. They took the reins as if it had only been a mistake, an historic accident, that they hadn't been holding them all the time. But the cracks began early. The sight of Rudd handing the NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher, widely hated and regarded as a total incompetent overlooking a rundown system her government had neglected for more than ten years, handing her with that pert superior little mouth and the fuck you glasses, a cheque for $50 million. That was it for me. $50 million of our hard earnt taxes, to use a cliche; talk about rewarding someone for their incompetence. Hopeless. Hapless. Long may they rot.
I used to see them driving by, ordinary people in their flash cars, and envy them so much their ordinary, healthy lives, while my own addiction plagued frame, glued together with pain and sickness, fundamentally sick from a tortured longing for oblivion, all these things were free to us, the giofts of suffering, not the triumphant pressure is a gift but the opposite end of the misery spectrum, the gift of desperation to change our unchannelled, unfocussed psyches, to capture the lives of others we so desperately wanted, to possess the clean clothes and fresh white underclothes, to smell not like a man who hadn't washed for days; although surely it was oinly yesterday he had braved a bath, immersed rapidly aging flesh into soup white like fear water; down with the fag flag cry the crackpots; and all that in a moment, as the handsome driver flashed a smile at his girlfriend, hidden in the car's resources and of no interest except as a prop. It was him I was interested in, he I envied. I wanted to be just like him, wrapped in a $60,000 young man's car, unaddicted, uncomplicated, full of a lust for life.
Instead, of course, he had become the creeping shadow dependent on the energy of successful people just to survive. We draped ourselves in the lives of others so easily; whether it be in a book, or a movie, or on the street. Or as in this case, just someone driving by. He had become the Uriah Heep of the late 20th century; someone who couldn't stay warm except at someone elses hearth; someone who found it alarmingly easy to excise himself from the occassion; and report things as if he had never been there, never been a participant. He was ideally suited to his trade, he thought, because in the end he wasn't there; and what had been there had atrophied, that naked scared little rabbit creature hiding behind the seven shields. The moves were disastrous, the times weren't right. He had no choice but to keep on going, one leaden foot before the next, a comfort to no one, a stranger to all. It wasn't just a matter of a "stranger in a strange land"; it was a receded depth march into the shadows; a total retreat of self, an abnegation of everyting possible. It's a nice day if you like that sort of thing; that common saying, the glass half empty or half full. It was always half empty; in the most despairing of ways. He couldn't laugh about it yet. Too much of his life had been wasted feeling miserable; convinced he had been born defective and there was no way to recover. Or remedy the faults. Transform the diseased psyche.
And then one day, suddenly, the world changed from evil glue, the substance of things no longer echoed with some wierd psychic gloom; and he heard the thought most clearly: what a beautiful day. If only it had happened earlier in his life; if only so much time hadn't been wasted in doom filled rooms. If only he had been a better example, and all his friends hadn't died. But here in the present, in the chirpy, cheerful, otpimistic beauty of the day, he couldn't help but smile. He had been reborn; and the new version was cohered into a single whole; and most astonishing of all, the new version was happy. He had never been happy, never wanted to be happy; nice day if you like that sort of thing; happiness was something for morons and lobotomy patients; not for a supposedly tortured intellect like him. But there it was, the frothy exultation over nothing in particular but the fact he was still standing; a single coherent whole, happy!!
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/inquiries-cant-hide-flaws/2008/01/24/1201157559963.html
SMH
Andrew Clennell State Political Editor
THE Iemma Government is now officially in crisis.
There are special commissions of inquiry into both NSW Health and the Department of Community Services.
There is no confidence in either of the ministers running these portfolios, Reba Meagher and Kevin Greene, and Morris Iemma's tenure, not only as Premier but in his former role as health minister, is now under scrutiny.
This comes after the Tcard debacle, the constant announcement of reviews instead of action in key portfolio areas, continuing doubts about whether the crucial sale of the electricity industry will go ahead amid union opposition, continuing problems in transport, and the fallout over the Gibson-Koperberg affair.
Staff turnover in ministerial offices is high as aides flee to the Rudd Government in Canberra or jobs in the corporate sector, such is the dissatisfaction with the Government led by a man with a reputation as a ditherer.
For months last year in the wake of the Jana Horska affair at Royal North Shore Hospital, Meagher and Iemma trotted out the smug line in Parliament that there was a body that could look after the problems in the health system - the Health Care Complaints Commission.
There was no need for a more broad-ranging inquiry, they said.
Then they set up a bodgie inquiry into problems at the hospital headed by the Government-friendly Christian Democrat MP Fred Nile, who made sure the inquiry did not run too long. How silly those tactics look now.
It took one man - the deputy NSW coroner, Carl Milovanovich - to blow all of that out of the water with one sentence yesterday. When he delivered the words "It may be timely that the Department of Health and/or the responsible minister consider a full and open inquiry into the delivery of health services in NSW", the Government had been dragged kicking and screaming to an open inquiry by a 58-year-old who has obviously heard too much about the hospital system in his six years as a coroner.
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