Drowning In Glue

*



Murals, Redfern.


In the early years the company generated much needed local employment through its extensive building works programs, but suffered many financially crippling delays due to an uncooperative South Sydney Council. When the Fraser Coalition government was elected in 1975, a year later it terminated capital works funding to the project. Without financial assistance the Block descended into disrepair and disorder. By the early 1980s the Aboriginal Housing Company had acquired almost half the properties on the Block and with another change of federal government (Hawke/Keating) came renewed support for Redfern’s Aboriginal community. In 1994 the last house on the Block was finally owned by the Aboriginal Housing Company.

However, by the early 1990s heroin had begun to infiltrate the community and the Block gradually became so violent it was a virtual a no-go zone. Police rarely ventured into the community except in large numbers, and with armour to protect them from flying bricks and petrol bombs during periodic riots.

In 1997, the Aboriginal Housing Company started demolishing some of the houses that had become derelict and were frequented by drug dealers.

The Aboriginal residents of Redfern have come from many different Aboriginal lands and communities, resulting in a significant intra-cultural diversity within this local community. Amid all the trouble it is sometimes easy to forget the Block has housed many honest, kind and hard-working Aboriginal families that have found a new life in Sydney.

http://www.ahc.org.au/

It was fragmented, confused. He was drowning in light. The atmosphere was glue. He couldn't have been more safely rescued, but time and time again he found he didn't know who he was. His infinite longing, that tugging depression that had been so much a part of him, never left. But much else had. He couldn't think clearly, not at all. His encyclopedic mind, his instant grasp of everything, had completely disappeared. He couldn't watch the news as it unfolded around the world. He couldn't map out the streets around him, wherever he was.

And he couldn't dance. He was completely uncertain where he was. He remembered little of the occasions when he had woken up. He was scattered to the four winds, functioning in several different pieces. And profoundly depressed. He had wanted to achieve so much more before he passed on. Why couldn't the implants have gone in earlier, when he was younger, been more successful? He loved the damn thing, it was the only thing that had ever made him feel human, normal, a superior functioning brain, his destiny.

Instead he could hear far off, jeering laughter. He thrashed awake repeatedly. What about work, what about work, have you phoned them, he kept yelling. And once, thrashing, he cried out: what about the kids, what about the kids? Who's looking after them. Although then he remembered: they had long grown and flown. They hadn't even bothered to contact him in months. That's all the thanks you got these days for years of parenting, putting food on the table. The filtered light through the hospital windows gave no clue as to where he was.

For some reason he thought the building was in a large clearing, surrounded by pine forest. He saw, or thought he might have seen, a residual map in his head; as if not all was lost. The friendly nurse was long gone. He thought he could remember her saying she had to leave, something to do with family, or career, or something, it was all blurred. The guards didn't leave, not for a long time, and then finally they left too. He was drugged to the gills. There wasn't any way he was walking out of here.

How long all this lasted he was never sure. He only slowly realised that there were other patients, that he must have been moved to a mental health wing. He had thought they had long been abolished, in the new world where all the old afflictions had been cured, but clearly not.

Finally came to the day, he wanted to stand on his own two feet. He struggled to sit up and swung his feet over the side of the bed. White walls, white floors, glass, it all swirled around him. He went to stand up and fell flat on his face. He struggled to get up and nothing happened. He seemed to have lost all control over his limbs. Finally someone came and found him lying flat down on the floor. He could hear them shouting, and two men, presumably guards, lifting him back on to the bed. He felt a needle going into his thigh. Oblivion embraced him.

It could have lasted weeks, it could have lasted months, but slowly it seemed the drug levels were being reduced. Slowly he found himself sitting up, semi-conscious, more often during the day. Now he found himself being escorted to the toilet; allowed to go into the featureless enclosed cubicle on his own. He tried to think while nature took its course but that was beyond him. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, it was not original but it was the only line he could think of. A cruel impasse. When were the counsellors going to arrive?

He knew that far off the world was turning on its axis. He wanted to talk to his parents, or just to someone who knew him, someone who could offer sympathy, explain what was happening. They had all disappeared, or all died. He wasn't in the same frame as any other functioning human. All that struggle, all that growth, all those social encounters, it had come to nothing. He didn't know anyone on the entire planet, not anymore.

Then they put him in the community recovery ward. Suddenly he was surrounded by people who seemed just as disoriented and confused as he was. They sat watching people talking on television screens, or they sat mindlessly on large chairs. Occasionally one of them would shout and want to go outside. It was a classic setting; and now undeniable. He was in a mental hospital. Why hadn't they just killed him? Maybe they just didn't regard him as a threat anymore, maybe they had another design in store for him.

One day he tried to cry, just to see if he was still capable of the emotions behind it. A tiny bit of moisture gathered in the corner of one eye, but that was it. He turned to see if anyone was watching, and caught the eye of a curious nurse at the doorway. He looked away quickly. He could see her talking to someone who looked like a doctor, and then looking back in his direction. But nothing came of it; the doctor appeared busy, and the routine of the wing enveloped him again.

All was not lost, he was assured of that. Or at least that was what his inner voice told him. All is not lost and you will have another life. One door shuts and another opens. Public embarrassment is a fleeting thing. The ones you held dear are gone, but there will be others. There will be human contact again. You might even make new friends. You might even get your implant back. You might even be able to go back to work. All is forgiven, all is not lost. A cruel temptation. He thought through temptation to the surface; and began to look for a way out into the open air.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/mr-rudd-comes-home-mission-accomplished/2008/04/11/1207856829674.html

THE whirlwind world tour of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is drawing to a close. What has he brought home with him that he did not have when he left Australia almost three weeks ago? In reality, plenty of light and not much heat. The last leg of his 18-day trip has been spent in China, arguably the most important stage — in terms of Australia's long-term economic future. And it has been in China that the two tiers of the Rudd way of dealing in the politics of the possible have been most in evidence.

Writing earlier this week on the challenges facing Mr Rudd when he visited Beijing, The Age gave the Prime Minister due credit for not resiling from speaking out on the human rights abuses in Tibet. He has consistently done so on this trip and in Beijing did so to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Mr Rudd has said that while Australia may recognise China's sovereignty over Tibet, it does not condone the suppression of dissent. The Chinese response has been dismissive. Tibet is an internal matter; it is the business of no other nation; now let's talk business. Mr Rudd's comments on Tibet have not been given any air whatsoever in the Chinese media. Thus the principle and the pragmatic are kept in different corrals.

Mr Rudd believes the differing views on Tibet will not impede the relationship. "It is important to embrace the relationship for all the strengths it contains, recognise we can expand it further into the future and recognise as well we can deal in a frank and straightforward way."

Australia's economic relationship with China is worth more than $50 billion.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23525796-662,00.html

KEVIN "24/7" Rudd returns to Australia tomorrow, having shown his manic work ethic to the world.

The jetlagged PM packed in almost 50 high-level meetings and 11 major speeches during his 18 days overseas.

Unlike trips by his predecessor John Howard, there were no visits to Lord's, and he stayed away from Europe's fine galleries favoured by Gough Whitlam.

Instead, Mr Rudd led his wife, at least 11 staff and 21 journalists on one of the most hectic prime ministerial world tours in recent memory.

He met 18 of the world's most powerful leaders -- including US President George W. Bush, Chinese President Hu Jintao, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon.

There were another 30 Cabinet-level or executive meetings, with figures ranging from US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to all three US presidential candidates.

Despite criticism at home of the length of the trip and his failure to visit Japan, Mr Rudd was warmly welcomed in the nations he visited.

In the US, Mr Bush agreed he was another "man of steel".

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=34&objectid=10503697

A Frisson of hope ran through Canberra this week as Prime Minister Helen Clark and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao sealed the West's first Free Trade Agreement with the rising Asian giant in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Only days after Clark's triumph, Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd emerged from a meeting with Wen to announce that the two countries would resume negotiations for their own free trade pact, and that Trade Minister Simon Crean would fly to Beijing next week to get them moving after a long, glacial pause.

"The recently concluded China-New Zealand FTA appears to be a good agreement for those two countries," Crean told a conference in Melbourne on Thursday. "In some areas, such as trade in goods, the outcome will clearly be useful for us in our own negotiations with China."



Murals, Redfern.