The Crosses We Create

There wasn't anything but reclamation, the streets quiet now; the day gone under flourescent tubes, whsipered conversations. Just stay out of their way, goes the motto. Your life will be better if your paths do not cross. Redfern, too, is quieter, if not stripped of conflict then absent many of the difficult bits of chaos that used to characterise the place, people passed out on the streets, arguments outside the front door. Some of it lingers, in a black humour way. The other day there were three aboriginal women, drunk as skunks, standing at the top of Eveleigh Street, mouthing off at the cops in front of the station opposite. Then Doris, the middle one, just passes out completely. They slap her around, shout in her face, nothing works. Finally they drag her across the street, dump her in front of the cops and shout: "You look after her you white cunts".

But mostly it's quiet now, a stream of clean cut, earnest, sometimes handsome university students stream past the door, ten thousand a day; and people wait to pick up friends in cars. But they're not waiting for what the cars used to wait for. Sophie Delezio got out of hospital today. Yesterday it was two young men who died on the Whistler ski fields in Canada. Tomorrow it could be anything, anything at all. Dead people.

Two years ago I wrote the story which began: "Two fifties, how much is that, 200?" "Four fifties, 200? No it's not." They're about 13. They're dealing heroin but they can't count. They should be in school. But that whole Redfern seems to have washed away now, along with other parts of the city. The kids are going up to Moree tomorrow with their mother and will be back on Monday. Everythinng seems vague and out of phase. One more day and the week is over.

Our Times

I just couldn't be held to account any longer. The days were intermidable. He spat out story after story and the tragedies merged together, the dead person roundsman. The pink and blue coffins of the kids and the parents, the mother who killed them. The crowded Catholic cathedral suddenly silent with the shocking tragedy of it. Not a dry eye. The Catholics do death well. My half brother, 17, my father had a very long breeding cycle, shot himself a year ago; took a rifle out into the orchard at 2am and pulled the trigger.

There wasn't too much mess, the man who owned the property said. I thought your old man was going to have a heart attack. There amongst the macadamia nut trees. Once avacados; and before that passionfruit; way back in the sixties when he bought the 80 acres for $10,000. The old man sold it after he had a heart attack, and it's since doubled in value to more than two million while he lives on their, where their youngest son killed himself. The grieving mother, wrung out with grief, acting in pecular ways; clasping a framed picture of him; flashing it at me over the coffin; see, he even looked like you.

But I hadn't been successful. I had walked along the beach and waited to die from 24 aspirin; but ending up with nothing but a bad stomach. The utter forlorn melancholy of the waves. But it didn't happen, he happened, in the orchard in the early morning, after being on the internet to his friends; who didn't bother to tell their parents. That would be an invasion of privacy. They lived every moment and the gut wrenching tragedy of it all; they would never be the same. Many of the people he dealt with would never be the same again.

Sunset Over Redfern

It's been pouring, more rain in the last 48 hours than in the last five months; dust washed away. Former leader of the Labor Party Mark Latham was in Campbelltown Court today. I am fascinated by him. He was described as a house husband. He went apeshit at a Telie photographer back in January. The figure he cut in court today, grim, gaunt, nobody but paid lawyers for company; going through the process in a tortured way. He had been the great white hope, so to speak, of the Labor Party, after its last Prime Minister, Paul Keating, with his outlandishly aristocratic leanings, led the party up its worst garden path in history. Excuse me Mr Keating, Mr Keating, the academics would cry at endless tax funded conferences; I agree with every word you say.

But Latham was a different story; and for a while struck a chord as a real person in a bullshit game. It's hard to imagine now; history and politics having moved so fast, that Howard had been rattled by Latham, a big man. The room was darkened and he pleaded consent. The previous case was a driving charge. He sat next to a boy with gell in his hair, one of the many troubled young men that frequent the court everyday. Things were crying out for release. Time was clutching him and he knew he had to get by.

They have passed an ordinance or whatever they're called banning drinking in the streets of Redfern, all except for the Block. Which has upset some, saying that just means all the drinkers will go there. But what do you do with a band of street alcoholics, white black or brindle?

Some stories, though humorous, were better not told. We had been warned. We had been marked. They were our merry band, not so merry.

Rain

It's been pouring in Sydney, which is unusual. Sometimes it seemed it would never rain again. What happened to rain soaked summers and winter months when the rain just went on and on and on? Well not lately. Euphoria took over, but before that he couldn't find what he was looking for. Stuck in perpetual traffic, a big city now. And it never rained. St Barnies on Broadway burnt down and finally the heaters were on. Clear skies forever. Well just about.

Things weren't working out exactly.

The house needs organising and I need organising.

From:

http://mlcsmith.blogspot.com/

Sunday, May 28, 2006
Caveat Emptor Lector
I was re-reading an old article on Wired News called Blogs Make the Headlines and am still amazed at what a buffoon one the "experts" in the piece was. Professional media analyst and lecture circuit junkie, Elizabeth Osder had this to say at the end of the article:
"Bloggers are navel-gazers," said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books." She added, "There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting."
She said that some years ago. I wonder if she still has the same, er, opinion? Since she wrote those idiotic words we have seen in the professional media:
News media outlets which endlessly ran sensational news stories like the DC sniper hunt, Lacy Peterson's disappearance, and Michael Jackson's trial.
A journalist who printed a story that endangered a CIA operative and those that she had been in contact with.
Journalists who made up articles.
Journalists who used highly questionable and unverified sources to further personal opinions on matters of national security.
News media outlets which avoided asking the hard questions.
On the other hand, I have read blogs that:
Pulled no punches.
Reported on real & serious issues of interest.
Exposed me to other's thoughts, dreams, and opinions that I wouldn't have encountered anywhere else.
Told what civilian life in Iraq was like in direct and personal terms.
Told what soldiering in Iraq was like, both good and bad.
Reported on other blogs and carefully critiqued claims made in them.
Now blog pressure is leveraging change within media organizations.
No, I don't think journalists everywhere are going to throw down their steno pads, shout "hallelujah," and set fire to their bosses. While the media conglomerates may change a little, I believe the public is going to change even more. That's right, we, the people. My opinion is that the babbling of many blogs is forcing us to grow up, well, grow up a little.
With the blurring of professional with non-professional, accepted source and informal source, research and opinion, we will each have to think a bit harder about choosing whom we will listen to. We will get used to the idea this source is good for this opinion, while that source is better at that. In other words, caveat emptor lector; let the buying reader beware.
Unfortunately, in this rosy future of mine, Elizabeth Osder still can't by a clue from a clue factory on free clue day. I mean, get real, naming your personal website "Untitled Document" is so 1995.

Happy Days

Family photos. Happy days. This is of Sam much younger, at a birthday party with is friend Todd and others out of sight. It's been hanging around on the computer and something told me to put it up; an act of preservation. It was Mardi Gras night the night he was born, and I had to go up from the Women's Hospital to buy chocolate. It was very windy, a lot of rain about. Bedraggled drag queens seemed to gust out of the night, part of the boil and the trouble that was part of profound change. The corridors weren't white. Stories were never linear. You arseholes, someone just shouted outside. They've been quarelling all night up the road. Where are your children, one of them shouted angrily, drunk. I see mine. I know where they are. They're up in Lismore. Yours are in Mount Druit, you f'n blah blah; and on it goes.

Lost moments were for all to recall. There was so much scenery in all the world's dramas. Complex hydration. Refiltering. Gathering strength. Dino has been evicted from Big Brother and some days nothing works at all. He came hallucinating through the back streets. He watched the carp in the park at Elizabeth Bay. He felt the cold in the air and knew nothing could be done about it. The skies boiled and rain swept across the city. In the bars there were a thousand discourses. In house upon house the crunching cold and the damp kept everyone else in side.

In his own melancholic twist of mind it was easy to forget all the good times; as if he missed them before they were gone; as if a doomed destiny had only ever been on hold. Some days were just thought disordered; caffeine induced perhaps. A grinding frustration. It was quiet; boring sometimes; their household routine; but it was comfortable too, cosy even, and at least it had been peaceful for a good while now. Had been.

Useful Futures

This is a picture of my son Sam on a school excursion to Vietnam. Sounds like they had a fantastic time. He reckons lots of kids grow up there knowing how to use guns. My entire generation was affected by the Vietnam War. I got out of being drafted by being at university. Then Gough Whitlam came in and cancelled conscription. I had never wanted to go. Done some stories on Vietnam vets, over time, some disastrous, terminally drunk resolutions; nerves shattered for the rest of life. The only school excursion I remember is going to Long Reef at Collaroy on Sydney's northern beaches. There was infinite life in each of the ponds; the sun glinting beauty as the waves pounded; and even back then, the absolute horror.

Frothing white had always been his vision of absolute terror; never making sense till the story was told of his own father holding him out in the surf to get him used to it as he screamed and screamed and screamed. Thus the myth of the desert arab in his background, why he had never liked the water. Back from the excursion they had to give a speach at school about it. Was it worth it? was the question. Yes, came the mono-syllabic answer, as the school looked on. Silence that wasn't meant to be there. After all that had happened, the train trips, the medieval towns, the night on Howloon Bay. Yes.

Sydney's cold and wet now. There are no other solutions.

The world's biggest story rolls on:

By Michael Georgy
BAGHDAD, June 3 (Reuters) - A military probe that cleared U.S. troops of killing civilians in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi could not have come at a worse time for the new prime minister, who has promised justice for those killed at Haditha.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is battling a widespread public perception that U.S. troops can shoot and kill with impunity and Iraqi leaders are too weak to do anything about it.
Allegations that U.S. Marines massacred some 24 civilians in the town of Haditha and the finding that troops did no wrong in Ishaqi do not help Maliki allay Iraqi suspicions.

Edges

The story came in the first instance from the radio room. There had been a shooting in the main street of Wollongong. None of us knew the main street of Wollongong even though it was the industrial city a hundred kilometes to the south. There was no reason to go there unless you had to. It sounded like there had been a massacre, someone gone crazy, half a dozen dead. Tragedy strikes our noble, working heart, that sort of thing, as innocent people go about their shopping. The quickest way was by helicopter. Sitting near the chief of staff can mean you get caught with every idea that crosses their bewildered minds, or suddenly you can get caught up in things that take your own life in sharp jags across time and space, enveloped in other people's tragedies.

I found myself disengaging from a cab at the airport, the massively expensive helicopter already waiting. Boys and their toys, it was a wonderful world. The tarmac, the plane in the background. Being guided by young men in uniform. Taking off. Last time I had been in a helicopter it had been with the Premier Bob Carr, heading west across the city at enormous speed to a property in the Blue Mountains; power, luxury, intrigue and importance, they were heady combinations for a man predisposed to arrogance. This time there was just the helicopter pilot for company, as we flew down hugging the coast line. I organised the taxi to pick us up; to get us to the scene of tragedy in the quickest possible time. I looked into the secret coves, the sharp cliffs, the massive spreads of vegetation arking down into the sea.

And when we got there. The mall was returning to normality. Only one man had been shot; it wasn't a massacre. The reporters that had also travelled down by road were completely excess to requirement. If it had happened in the western suburbs we wouldn't have paid any attention at all. But because the paper had thrown so many resources at it, the splashing headlines the next day of death in main street covered the front page. We stayed in hotels nearby. We followed every possible angle. There just wasn't that much to it. Someone went beserk, an argument, money and drugs, it was almost always that; and he thought of other times, when he had done the working girls at Port Kembla, with the steel works and Wollongong in the background; a completely forlorn place with the old girls as outraged for fear of the competition as the general public was over the media whipped story of the Labor MP who owned a brothel and had employed an under-age girl.

To here in Shellharbour, still further down the coast, where the money kept coming all the time; new restaurants, new developments, some with inbuilt by the sea side charm. He wished he had the money to invest. We gathered to mark the passing of another day, holy times.

Limpid Days

Even here in Redfern, you can smell the salt air some nights; drifting in from the sea, the string of golden beaches that thread down the coast; the cliffs, the shallows, the rock pools, the fishermen; and little villages along the coast. Except Sydney has spread everywhere now, and what was isolated only 30 years ago are now opening into suburbs, the prices of land and houses spiralling, and old generation made rich, late in life. The absolute beauty of the coastline; strung out not just in dreams but in haunted moments, in long walks, in lonely toilet blocks and surfers shacks, eoncompassed by the ever creeping walls of brick houses; the metallic glint of cars, the squal of kids.

They went up the mountain and barely came down. Looking at the high altitude treks on Project Himalaya. Thirty days. $US2000. In the long days, in the long ways, in the mystery caverns, when a chronological order to cascades of experience, all these things would help. All is not cosy in Stephen's household. Long awkward silences. I need a bolt hole, between work and home; just to take a minute to himself. Is that such a bad thing? So he went and walked out and thought: you could cut the air with a knife.

Location, location; there in the heart of poofterville; as they called it themselves. I always imagined I would live here, he said, swishing a hand; and I watched on. The world was so straight now. He saw them pasty faced in the morning waiting to score, Thursday payday, pension day; white faced and puffy, furtive, moving fast, skinny, frantic. And he walked past in an ironed shirt and new pants, a tie and a new jumper. You looking at something mate? One of them snarled. You're not Sox, are you? I asked. No, he said. Sorry, you look like someone I used to know, I said. Those long lost furtive days in the back of Newtown. Those nights when their fragile despair descended into intoxicating patterns. Not all was lost; but much had drifted away.

A Break In The Traffic

A break in the traffic, he thought, in the cold winter mornings. The stories have all been about death defying mountaineers on the side of Mount Everest; in incredibly beautiful far-off places; Lincoln Hall who survived the night at 8600 metres and was found half undressed the next day after being left for dead. Sue Fear, Australia's top female mountaineer, feared dead in a crevasse on Mount Manaslu. Extremes, in far off places; under flourescent lights, in front of computer screens; talking to people in remote places; a man in the Hudson Valley, connecting automatically from his office phone in New York. A man at Advanced Base Camp on the side of Everest. Offices in Khatmandu. People everywhere.

The time wasn't right, was never right. He didn't know why he did things he did. There weren't pertinent crises. The river hadn't run dry. He wasn't up to anything, but some days it was just quiet, too quiet. The colours were extraordinary. He couldn't hide that fact.

In his dreams he had always gone back to the mountains above Rishikesh, the ancient hashish soaked sadhu route which took in Badrinath, the ancient, powerful temples, and Hemkundt, the holy place of the Sieks. And the Valley of the flowers. And the hidden, secret, astonishingly beautiful villages. He always thought he would return there; even die there. Always circling beyond the next turn; to the next exquisite view. Each day was unique. He forgot them quickly.

Sad to say, here's an article I related to:

MXS, Edition 1 - SYD TUE 16 MAY 2006, Page 008 Stuck at work and careering nowhere - WELCOME TO MIDDLESCENCE

If you hate the boss, feel bored and frustrated at work and want a new start but dare not try, you are not alone.

According to a study you suffer from middlescence a malaise similar to adolescence that affects grown-ups.Researchers in the US gave the name to the negative feelings which descend on millions of workers aged from 35 to 54. Rather like being a teenager, being a middlescent is a frustrating, confusing and exasperating experience. They find themselves leaving work feeling ``burned out, bottlenecked and bored''. Asked their opinions about their jobs, those in the 35-54 age group are the least likely to describe their office as ``congenial and fun''.

They are more dissatisfied with their managers than other age groups and have little confidence in senior executives. One in five look for an escape route but 85 per cent know a career change is difficult. Huge financial pressures, such as mortgages and school fees, mean they are unable to quit for a different lifestyle or less well-paid job. They usually work long hours, typically putting in at least 50 hours a week. ``Many mid-career employees are working more, enjoying it less and looking for alternatives,'' the report published by Harvard Business Review says.

The report suggests a sabbatical can help staff rejuvenate. It also suggests giving middlescents a new job in the same company, asking them to mentor younger staff and sending them on training courses.

Counter Terrorism

You're a pack of fucking parasites, he declared, relentlessly angry, with nowhere to vent, smug faced bureaucrats behind counters, the greatest of outrages hidden behind walls of sweet reason. Pointy hats. Nowhere to go. Irritable, restless and discontent; the voices; the hidden quests; the great losses. Smug, they hid their bastardry behind a display of good manners. He truly hated the lot of them.

The counter-terrorism exercises on the harbour have ended now; something like 4,000 people have died in an earthquake in Indonesia, Dili has erupted into chaos; mountaineer Lincoln Hall has been brought back down Mount Everest from a near death experience. Chaos consumed his heart. It just wasn't right, all the longing, for chaos and introversion and intoxicated dreams.

They weren't there for him; faces from such a long time ago. His own hair had gone grey. Trevor had his 50th down the road at the art gallery. The cold sank in early; doors closing tightly, heaters on. Of all the beauty that he saw, none of it was his. Life was finite. Solutions rare. He related to almost no one. The gut longing that ruled him; and longing for what he did not know; those moments of lucidity in the night; the georgeous beauty in floating spots of time; these were things that no one would understand. Everyone wanted to record their history. And in the end, history rolled right over the top of them. Say goodbye little one; ant flick in a fraction of time; gone. I could have loved you, I could have loved you all; we could have been together forever. It was not to be.

Portals and Pontoons

Portals and pontoons, here on the edge of infinity; the city draped around the harbour, surprising views. Out west the courts were clogged with a disaster parade. Anyone who thinks it's all working should be forced to spend the day at Campbelltown Local Court, or Liverpool, or Parramatta. There were teenage sons and their scrappy, rough edged, upset mothers; the boys showing all the bravado and embarrasment of their age. But at the end of the day they were there with their mums. Groups that you sometimes see around here; diversified out into the housing in the west. And what did it prove? Why involve these people in a court case; it was just impossible, pointless. And the days rolled on.

Conflict has enveloped Dili and East Timor again. Australia is sending 1300 troops. We were talking about it; waiting outside the courtroom for the family to finish their briefing with the police. You could tell when, inside earlier, as the daily traffic of the court, the agreed ajournments, the partial briefs, the surly clients. Can't I have this heard today? You will need to speak to your solicitor. A parade of polite, diminished, often rather ordinary looking men appearing via video link, from Parklea, Long Bay. Have a good day ma'am, one said to the magistrate; behaviour the female magistrate was determined to ignore.

But when the right one came on they glared like they thought their glares would make a difference, the death stare. The pontless crimes. The pointless victims. Sometimes men. Sometimes women. And in the rows, in the elaborate your honours and my learned friends; and crap. A personality bypass. A moral bypass. These were the people ruling our lives; with all the compassion and depth of their class, their caste. Now I keep thinking I would like to go to Thailand for six weeks; and if Thailand why not Spain with the kids. Just not enough money to complete the dreams. We had tried so hard and in the end he was angry at the amorality of it all. The crowds crushed in the streets; hurrying because it was winter and got dark early; and he recognised not a single face. Not one would care whether he lived or died; and his mark on the city disappeared without trace.

Self Referencing Behaviour

This is a picture of me taking pictures for this blog. It still amazes me that someone like me, in their fifties, not terrifically technically literate, with a cheap mobile phone, can make a website and put all sorts of crap up; all for nothing but an internet connection. Here on the edge of The Information Age. The jagged mad things he felt inside, they never jelled with the face he saw; so ordinary despite the voices so loud in his head.

I never expected to be this old. I still can't get used to it.

Cindy Sheahan, the US mother who's son died in Iraq, flew into Sydney yesterday. There was a presser nearby Lady Macquarie's Chair. I arrived early and wandered around the foreshore. It was freezing cold and I've had the flu. I bought a coffee at the takeaway van. There were busloads of Japanese, 500 altogether a driver told me. It was hard to get near the stone chair; there were so many of them, photographing each other as they took turns to sit in it; the wintry harbour behind. Cindy was nice. I learnt there were worse things than dying, she said. I learnt I was stronger than I thought I was. I'm sure her son would be enormously proud of her. An immoral and illegal war, she declared, brought out here by the doctors against the war mob, speaking at several functions in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Hard to argue with a mum who's lost her son. American casualties have topped 2400, not to mention the rest.

IRAQ WATCH

From the Hindustan Times:

A college student, a police officer, a shop owner, two street vendors and a taxi driver became the latest victims of drive-by shootings in Iraq on Wednesday.
The bodies of eight people who apparently had been kidnapped and tortured by death squads also were found in Baghdad and another area.
US forces also killed seven insurgents in two operations outside the capital, and a bomb set fire to an oil pipeline south of Baghdad, officials said.
Al-Maliki was scheduled later today to meet in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone with the prime minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch supporter of Bush.
Rasmussen and his defence minister, Soeren Gade, began their visit to Iraq on Tuesday by visiting the 530 Danish troops based near Basra, a southern city.
Rasmussen is the second world leader to visit Iraq since al-Maliki and his new government of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds was sworn in on Saturday.

Homeless

The city was always a torrent, of lives turning in and out, the accumulation of grotesque amounts of money. For him, the intoxicated destiny had always been a different one. In the end, there was no one left to appreciate the story. Those he shared his life with had gone. Echoes only, faces at press conferences, old mates turned press secretaries. Do you realise, that was 17 years ago now? asked Alex, now a press secretary for one of the state's leading ministers; referring to a time when we had been strung to the nines and up to no good whatsoever.

I had a dream. again, of being homeless in Sydney, tossed by my own misadventures and own stupidity on to the streets in a city where it was virtually impossible to find comfortable lodgings at reasonable prices. The kids were grown up and gone now but he still worked on at the paper. But somehow, mirroring his own past, he had left the comfortable apartment overlooking the bay, the bridge, the city, and was forced to wander as the cold set in. He walked past the huddle of junkies in the Cross, avoiding this time, not flirting with scoring, not wanting to check out who was ripping off who. He knew he'd be ripped off. The warmth, the purpose, the dereliction, the intoxication that they offered was not for him this time; he needed to save his money for a room.

He walked down the streets that had been so familiar to him as a youth, down Rushcutters Bay, towards a small private hotel he'd picked out the previous day. He decided to take a short cut through a crumbling mansion turned into a boarding house, thought maybe he should be staying here instead, with its brisk white sheets; open doors; old people smells; but instead he cut downstairs through the laundry and out the back; into a strange tropical Ballard world with vines dripping from the trees and steep hills behind. There wasn't any city anymore; the endless stream of traffic on bitjumen, his own sickness and sadness; it was all gone and he was entirely lost. The private hotel was gone, the mansion was gone; the junkies were gone and once again he knew for sure: there was no way out; and no way back; and the fleeting friends he had gained after decades of working in the same place; they too were long gone. He knew he would reach this point. If the currency hadn't collapsed, he could have got on a plane and fled to a more embracing clime.

Strands

This is a picture of Susan in her alcove apartment behind Oxford Street. She's just bought the newsagency building down the street and although she's lived here before is about to become more a part of Redfern again. Her brother is Trevor Davies. I met her at a charity function two or three or four years ago; I with permanent reporter's pad. God knows why we were covering it. The charity had decided this year they would go for domestic violence as a fund raising focus, and there were two enormous women there giving the speil about battered women.

They had a whole retinue of supporters from some centre down south. They must have all travelled up in a bus. They just all seemed enormous. The two on centre stage would have liked to fence all men off into a paddock in central Australia. I wanted to ask the stirrer question, if men are really more violent than women why are lesbians more violent than heterosexuals; just to watch them implode, but instead I walked away from the crowd and the columns of the old buildings and said to the trees, these people do more harm than good and thought about things I'd much rather be doing.

What was that? someone asked, and I thought oh God, I'm in for it now. But that was Susan. She gave me a lift into town in her clapped out old red car. She introduced me to the cafe A Little On The Side, where I sometimes have coffee or breakfast and read the papers. And time passes; the fault in the slip of no account, of no reasoning, of no blame, when nothing connected and there was no sense in the disconnection. Our gang, the lost gang, had been so strung out, all that time ago in London, and now he stood on the other side of the earth. Susan's brother is Trevor Davies, who's what you might call a commissioning editor for the South Sydney Herald; a funded local paper with impeccable left wing credentials.

It was so long ago that decision, to live by the typewriter no matter what, thousands of bylines and thousands of stories ago. And Trevor wasn't paying. Good will only went so far. He did a few stories on things he wanted to air and they had a falling out; repaired but not to the extent of provding copy. There was always a vacuum surrounding some people. He feared not for what lay ahead; he feared only greatness. Thus was the grandiosity of the alcoholic. And in the process good people were left behind. And craven silences ate into the heart of everything.

Humph

THERE'S an expression which has developed amongst Sydney hacks: ``This is so bad I'd rather be at a Humpherson press conference.''

You see, NSW Shadow Minister for Emergency Services Andrew Humpherson is notorious for his halting delivery and his repetitive answers. True to form, last week Humpherson put out a press release giving the Iemma government a serve for using the beginning of three day counter-terrorism exercises on Sydney Harbour as a public relations exercise rather than tackling the real issues of what to do if indeed there is an attack.

The problem was, the exercise was jointly launched by NSW Premier Morris Iemma and the Federal government's Justice Minister Chris Ellison. In the obligatory press conference in wintery conditions in the park at the back of NSW Parliament House, the only thing the media wanted to know was if Humpherson was condemning the Commonwealth for being involved in a stunt.

Asked the same question about 55 different ways, Humpherson was forced to claim that Morris Iemma's involvement was a stunt, Ellison's involvement was just the Feds doing their job. He flushed bright red and laughed in an embarrassed way when asked if he expected a call from Ellison later in the day.

``What we have said is very clear,'' Humpherson declared to an amused media pack.

Plush Carpets

Caught staring at the floor; the city soaked with rain, for once. The World's Fastest Indian finishes this week, thought would try and see it. They were embracing he didn't know what, ripping aside the vail. That would be the mergence beyond the mainstream. He was still ragged at the edges. An accumulation of wealth would be nice. It's been mother's day in Australia. The kids turn into saints around their grandmother, who was strict with them when they were a bit wild. They got the message. Jigsaws and houses; went and watched the sunset at Shellharbour, the pale full moon. Took Marie to a meeting; skinny from MS and in a wheelchair. They didn't ask her to share, mongrels. You wouldn't want to rely on that mob for support.

She was embarrassed at the social difficulty of it all, having told them in her brighter moments what she thought of them all. These people were difficult. Everyone he knew was difficult. Suddenly they all talk about retirement, to cozy productive down sized old ages when they could finally, after all these years of duty, be happy. Trouble was he had front loaded the good times and it was a bit hard to catch up; spiralling real estate prices and magnificently squandered opportunities ensuring no immediate exit point.

These things were said to us and we didn't know why. Ciphers. The static was intense, even way out here on the edge of the vast Pacific; where the city felt like it could be washed away by a tidal wave at any moment, as Jan Morris once commented; the land left to resume its primitive and eternal status. The vast age of the continent hypnotised them. They could be curled up inside and see the koalas in the trees. They could be frightened to the four winds and in the distance see a gumtree in the wind. Even here, next to the harbour and the sometimes astonishing wealth. The resident band of brothers and visitors and street alcoholics that normally gather just up the road with occasionally raucus consequences have been disrupted by civil works around the station. It is no doubt deliberate. We want to be true, free, courageous; in the passing.

From:
www.crossedwires.blogspot.com

"Just remember this - all agents defect...and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill. And a writer…a writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is…he files a report on it."

Enhanced Euphoria

This is the time when all the balances come right, full moon and suddenly, euphoric, God seems to be in the fabric of things. It never last for long, spliced in between headaches and grinding head plates, anxiety and grim preoccupations. I can tell when you're thinking about something, dad, says Henrietta. And later: you know how you have goals when you're young, do you have goals when you're old like you? Some days I'm just glad to get through the week, I say, at night in parks walking the dog; maybe you should work four days; you would be less exhausted.

Yes, I say; and time stands still and then passes. In our day, the oddessy took you elsewhere; not to towns south of the border but to Penang, Bangkok, India of course. In Europe there was London, and there was Amsterdam, and there was always most gorgeously, Madrid, which he loved for some reason above all cities. They weren't meant to be a hive mind, but the millions of stories that spilled out every day fascinated him; and he remained, sometimes, privileged to watch in a technological age which brought them things none of his predecessors had ever seen.

If they died in ignominy it was a silence and detachment from family that seemed characteristic of the age. Or at least of the city. Or at least of them, scattered out as we had been along a truly distant shore. Their imaginations were European, often enough, but the location was a different matter all over again. He'd done all that, sat in rooms and circled into alcoholism and addiction; in the wild days when it was all just part of everything and Penang had been a place to be; perched on the barstools in the top floor disco; the view of the city spread out beneath them, settling in for a long and steady drink. Hey Johnnie, you want something? They would ask as he stumbled back to the cheap, atmospheric Chinese hotel. He almost always wanted something.

Wednesday

Just went to see Mission Impossible Three with the kids. It's a school night but I just didn't feel like sitting at home. Action packed. Tom's not very popular in Australia because of the scientology thing, and because he dumped "our" Nicole. She was our success story and nobody was going to muck with that. The film was very loud, the kids close. You could watch other people's lives on the net now. Young junkies dying in foreign climes; middle class American tourists exploring the Great Barrier Reef, mentally ill women wandering the United States in their campervans.

This was the day after the budget and the miners emerging. The great churn of our money which passes for governance; when we'd all be better off if they just left us to spend our own money. Services I never wanted and will never use. But I'm about $25 a week better off, allegedly, and that might pay for the rising cost of petrol; and everything else with it. I relate, he wanted to say across the wires, I know where you're at. Not all junkies die young. Some wander in and out of rehabs and go to meetings or just go dry when they've had enough, usually precipitated by some crisis, and they end up growing old when they never wanted to grow old.

These things were left for us, then, at the end of the line; when it was just another day at work and when getting plastered to the four winds just wasn't feasible anymore. But God it got boring some days. Some days he just wanted to merge into the walls at 3am like he used to, and ride the tide of late night bars and wild friends. Before the silence set in. Euphoric recall alive and well. When so much chaos and gloom had enveloped someone, there was no way back to a normal life. All there was; all he had ever been, was painted out in arcs of light amongst people he did not know. And would never know, now that it was too late.

A Long and Happy Life

Today there were the miners emerging and the budget; and nothing much else would make it. I had a tour of the Channel Ten news room. There were always rooms, cameramen setting up. Today is unusual, he said, we're not usually going live. There were screens everywhere. Concise events. Events like this; the miners emerging with a triumphant wave; the industry gossip, who was bidding how much; or other endless pressers, pictured, where they went crashing through, cameramen setting up, familiar faces, the restless waiting, at the behest of important men. Howard was the master of the art. He emerged unscathed from almost every press conference. He conducted himself in his own style. We hurled questions and we left.

Live a long and happy life, the voice said, as unknown pains ran through him and the voice of consciousness never gave him rest. The walks, the meetings, the meditation practices, the socialising, all these things died on the wind so easily. There was a strange fishy smell, sick. He could feel things in the ether, but the trick of every day was getting through the hours of work.

There was the Sophie Delezio story of course; where the poor kid got hit by a car a second time; just terrible; is her spirit trying to escape, people whispered to each other; in the midst of an outpouring of sympathy, the terrible details of the five year olds injuries. And then today, a stabbing murder in an illegal brothel in Yagoona called The Purple Rain Cafe. Yagoona was always a desert of the human spirit. You'd stab yourself to death if you lived out here, we joked, "rent me" the signs in the shuttered windows pleaded; heavy purple drapes; there wasn't a coffee machine in there; the police searched the neighbouring area; including the roofs; Vietnamese; nobody saw anything; nobody knew anything; they couldn't even establish his real identity. Purple rain, purple rain. The traffic never stopped as the man bled on to the pavement.

Looking Back

Looking back always meant looking into chaos, a slipstream where the pleasures were isolated in the cold. The aridity had set in now, the result of years of introversion. Live a long and happy life, they said, waiting outside people's houses, looking into darkness, skating on thin ice. There was warmth, in the tasks and the business and survival in a hectic city, but too often he settled quietly into the gloom and didn't know where it was coming from.

Craig had his 40th on the weekend and the music pumped through the neighbourhood. The wind is gusting today and the heaters have been hauled out and turned on as winter finally hits. There were moments when everything went well; when he wasn't turned inward, when achievements were made. He crawled through all the darkness and he could find no content. He laughed at things he shouldn't have laughed at and was never satisifed.

Richard Carleton has died at the age of 63 while on assignment. The Age: Veteran Nine Network reporter Richard Carleton has died after suffering a suspected heart attack at Tasmania's Beaconsfield Gold Mine. Carleton goes out asking the hard questions. Carleton dies on the front line. A life less ordinary. He asked his last question, characteristically aggressive and uncompromising, but already red in the face; about how management could justify sending miners into such unsafe conditions - the fate of two miners trapped underground for almost a fortnight has gripped the attention of the nation; but is clearly driving the television crews mad as they run out of things to report. I'm going back to the summer days.


Here's some notes we cobbled together when Col was down last week for a talk he's giving on "Positive Sexuality" at a workshop.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t got any teeth right now, it’s because I lost them in the surf in February. It’s absurd. It’s even been funny. My face changed. It’s been a journey within itself, because having been sick for a while, I learnt very quickly to just hold my head high and face the world right in the eye.

Just surviving on a disability support pension I have had to negotiate through the public health system, the Hunter regional health service. I haven’t had the resources to just go and get a new set of choppers. You have to learn to live with poverty, but you still want to look your best. Let’s face it girls, we’re all princesses on a expedition to becoming dowager duchesses.

I just want to tell some of my story.

I became HIV positive in 1992. I remember the exact night. I had met a man through an ad in Brisbane’s gay rag called Pride. He came to my office where I was interviewing men who had sex with men for a health research project.

I heard him arrive, dressed in black leather astride a black motor bike. To me he looked so horny and engaging – had my knight in shining armour had arrived. I went down and opened the main door answered his call. He took off his helmet. He had a brood smile and eyes screaming out for a sexual encounter.

He was ready for action. After we introduced ourselves and as I tried to vainly introduce the project I found myself listening to his Yorkshire accent and found myself willing to have sex on the floor with him then and there.

We cleaned up and went out to eat. Two hours later we had sex again in my motel room at Nobby’s Beach on the Gold Coast. You could hear the passing traffic on one side and the sound of the surf crashing on the beach on the other. We had another shot of speed each.

We were both as horny as the universe. He had a taut muscular body with a tattoo of a black panther on his right shoulder. The sex was terrific, absolutely terrific.


I became much more adventurous than usual, willing and accepting. We used condoms but we had an accident. One slipped off. It was too late to stop.

I didn’t feel bad after it was over. In fact I was glowing. I trusted him. I felt safe and secure entwined with his body. Those were the days my friends, we thought they’d never end. I also knew that the virus had entered my body. He had told me he was HIV. We had negotiated safe sex. We did what you were meant to do. This was a subject I had taught in class. We practised what I considered safe sex.

A week later I developed bronchitis like condition; one of the classic symptoms. I went to a doctor before the window period and my first result was negative. I knew that I had become infected so I waited a further six weeks and retested.

The day I got my results, as part of work had I travelled to Brisbane for a meeting with corrective services and the health department about HIV and Hep C provision prevention within the jails.

The head of the aids medical unit came up to me and gave me a big hug. He said he knew it was me from the south coast who had recently tested and knowing the result he further said to me that he would do everything within his power to take care of me. That was reassuring.

I kept seeing Howard for the next three years before he died of a golden staph infection picked up in a hospital. We kept having sex. He was as horny as ever. I didn’t hate him, God no. I accepted that my becoming positive was fifty per cent my responsibility. We were like soul brothers. All we did was get out of it and go to bed and have hours and hours of sex. Hours and hours.

I had been working in HIV and Hep C prevention since the mid 1980s as a health promotions officer. Quite often my projects were specifically targeted to at risk groups. Over the years I had an accumulation of loss and grief due to the many people I had known both socially and professionally who had become positive and died before combination therapy came in. They were unsung heroes a lot of these guys, the way they died.

Over the three years Howard and I, as well as being sexual partners, had a relationship not just based on sex but highlighting the beauty of intimacy. The year Howard died I had buried my father on my birthday and travelled north to present a eulogy for a guy I had known since his late teenage years. On seeing Howard I said to him, don’t you die, because I feel couldn’t handle it.

At this stage Howard had a porta-catheter that was attached to his heart. His good looks and personality and spirit were still as gorgeous as the day I met him. We continued to have clandestine sexual encounters, his place, my place, all over the Gold Coast.


Unfortunately, he had become infected with golden staph. He died within three days of diagnosis. On the morning of his death I was preparing to visit him in hospital and I had just finished ironing my clothes when the phone rang. I was devastated. We had discussed dying. One of his issues about that was becoming very emaciated. The golden staph stopped that from happening because it was so quick.

He was my soul brother to me. I hadn’t known that sort of intimacy with anyone else since my first lover in my teenage years, who himself had died of AIDS in the 1990s.

In those days being gay and being publicly gay was a bold statement which carried with it a certain ridicule - it required courage.

Months after my diagnosis there was a Worlds Day. I was nominated for an award for my work in the field. As part of my speech of acceptance I told the audience of a hundred or more health professionals, government ministers and high level public servants that I had become HIV positive. You could hear a pin drop. It was a very public coming out. I had done that because I had always been very public about my sexuality.

Coming out publicly about my HIV status was much more difficult and had a greater impact than coming out as a poofter, but to be true to my views on social justice principles it had to be done.

Howard’s death affected me greatly. I decided to leave employment and travelled overseas; a kind of purging. During this time my urge, my desire, my lustfulness, had completely diminished. I didn’t feel safe. I was overly concerned about having sex, partly for fear of infecting others.

After Howard’s funeral I attended a loss and grief workshop held in a seminary in Brisbane. I found that basically I needed the touch and feel of other humans who I trusted and who I knew cared for me. . . ,

The next serious relationship I had was with another HIV positive man, so there was nothing to negotiate in terms of safe or unsafe sex. I had in fact been having a casual but intense relationship with Patrick for many years; which finally developed into a very good friendship.

On returning to Australia after travelling overseas I moved back to Brisbane and became involved in management committees of both the Queensland Aids Council and Queensland Positive People. This absorbed much of my time and energy. I knew that I was becoming increasingly tired and often exhausted. I had scans, MRIS, ultra-scans, life became a round of doctors surgeries and hospitals.

I lost my libido. I just didn’t want sex anymore, partly no doubt due to the medication I was on. This is a really common experience amongst positive men who are taking anti-depressants on top of their HIV medication. Your desire for intimacy becomes high, your desire for sex low. I had never been a full-on beat or backroom queen, but now my interest was non-existent.

It wasn’t that I felt ugly or diseased because of my HIV status, it was simply a physical thing.

I thought I was going to die in 2003, after diagnosis of kidney cancer. The kidney was removed; I moved to the country with an old friend, nursing myself and waiting to die.

But then slowly I developed a great sense of hope that I was in fact going to live. The depression and I grief that I felt over having lost so many friends, lovers and people that I cared about lifted.

A lot of my generation are dead. One of the reasons I am still alive is that before I was diagnosed with kidney cancer I went on to combination therapy, which built up my immune system. I had the cancerous kidney removed and the day of release from hospital I packed my bags and headed to Sydney.

For me positive sexuality involves so much more than just the sexual act itself. I’ve developed a stronger sense of myself, I enjoy the intimacy between people I have met since I moved back to the east coast; and I have met somebody who I immediately identified with; with whom I have developed an intimate and close friendship. As part of my journey I have discovered that positive sexuality is more than just about cocks and butts. It’s about spending that most precious commodity of all, time, time with another human soul.

Looking Forward

This is the view from the airport after dropping off Sam on his way to a fortnight's school excursion in Vietnam. Sounds a fantastic thing to do. Most of the best moments of my life were travelling, and there hasn't been enough of it the past ten years. Before the kids were born, before life took a giant detour forever, I decided to work for a year to save enough money to keep moving and I'm still working all this time later. He alternated between feeling sad sick and lonely and almost loopily happy, optimistic, the stream of good times in the air and the fabric of things.

The city had evolved away from him. Now was not the time for talking. The people he had cared about, the times he had cared about, were long gone. Each day a fresh layer of crystalline ice was coated across the city's social circles; and the bars transformed, and the ones that had died, everyone was too young to remember them. But he had been sent, or left, to watch.

The artistry sometimes failed. Good stories were overlooked. Fear tightened in the corridors. Time scaped out. His skin crawled. There was no way out. But the sun shone on the bells of yellow flowers at the back door, and the light played up across the walls. And he was not in crisis. For that, small mercies.

Down The Track

This is one end of Oxford Street late at night after a storm. I used to live around here and always be stumbling home late. Now there are herds of parading queens dashing up and down late at night. Tough competition. Toned. Perfectly dressed. They were only crazy souls that he knew, out. You know what this is, Peter'd say, rubbing his empty fingers in front of my face, the smallest joint in the world, rolled just for you. And he'd laugh. Nothing was for free, not even now. The success story from London came by, and couldn't believe we were still here in these same old bars, drunk, of course. Years later some of them would show up in meetings looking so stunned. Everything they had ever done was a water course to a different consciousness. And the success story made him feel even smaller and more disconsolate than he had been already, despite a catalogue of minor successes and curious adventures.

It was then that the aching tide of everything he had done, and everything he had thrown away, came home. He was always meant to be the consciouness, the observer, in the stained yellow froth on the stream of things. Corrosive because it never stayed still. The village had been lost. Blair had an English accent now; owned a number of properties around London, was in real estate; had really done very well. SS strained to remember the bars they had drunk in so long ago; the characters that had been around then. He remembered when Blair had been just another boy hanging around the cross, getting drunk as best he could. He'd gone off to England and come back parading an English boyfriend, blonde, cute. Blair talked of his job and his successes and his love for Tony, who really was very good looking. He had stayed at their beautiful house once, in London once, years after that but still a long long time ago. They were both doing very well in the real estate game, wore suits as they went off to work.

But the boyfriend had died and this time back in Australia Blair was on his own. He'd liked Tony, it was all so free, off to the bath house? They always seemed to be having group sex with the most handsome of men, there in that highly renovated refuge. All the sheets were clean, and new. Things like that impressed him as the height of domestic order. You're not coming? No. Eternally shy. One way to escape the plague. Forever Young goes one of the best selling video clip at the moment, a curious rehash of the past. The Rolling Stones have just been through Sydney and Melbourne for one-night stadium shows. I remember going to see them in about 1971. They were a tiny dot in the distance. But it was part of history none the less. Work is eternal. There are many different projects could keep me busy. Random acts of kindness are increasingly isolated.

IRAQ WATCH:

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/5a258fae-cc1c-11da-a7bf-0000779e2340.html

Bush battles to save Rumsfeld
By Demetri Sevastopuloin Washington
Published: April 15 2006 03:00 Last updated: April 15 2006 03:00
President George W. Bush yesterday issued a vigorous defence of Donald Rumsfeld, his embattled defence secretary.
The president's statement was in an effort to help overcome a growing insurgency among the ranks of retired generals who have faulted Mr Rumsfeld's handling of the war in Iraq.
"Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period," Mr Bush said. "He has my full support."
Mr Bush was responding to a growing chorus of criticism from retired generals, including field commanders who have served during the war in Iraq, calling for Mr Rumsfeld to step down.
In the past month, six retired generals have taken the rare step of publicly criticising the defence secretary over the Iraq war, which has claimed the lives of 2,364 American troops...

It's A Long Way

It's a long way down the track, here the harbour bridge in the distance from Taronga Park zoo. Snow leopard cubs were making their first outing to the public, the most beautiful of all the cats. I used to go there more regularly when the kids were younger and I was more likely to do animal stories. The trained birds. The snakes. The seals. The pandas. Something rare was always being born, transported or brought back from extinction.

Now: my 15-year-old son is off in Vietnam on a school excursion for 14 days. How exciting. Wish I was going. Landing in Ho Chi Minh City; travelling to Hanoi. Today is day two: "Mekong Delta exploration". How fantastic. They are also spending several days at a home-stay in a regional city, sleeping out on a boat on Halong Bay and departing from Hanoi. My daughter turned 14 yesterday and is up in Moree for a couple of weeks. The house is very quiet without them.

The Iraq war continues in the distance. Now they're talking about bombing Iran. It just seems so impossible. John Howard made his appearance before the Cole inquiry into the Australian Wheat Board kickback scandal. Nothing will stick. Master of the art. He was crept up inside trying to make things homey, catching up. The middle distance was very quiet.


IRAQ WATCH:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14337216.htm


A look at U.S. military deaths in Iraq
Associated Press
As of Thursday, April 13, 2006, at least 2,368 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 1,853 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.
The AP count is four higher than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Thursday at 10 a.m. EDT.
The British military has reported 103 deaths; Italy, 27; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 17; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Slovakia, Denmark three; El Salvador, Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, two each; and Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, one death each.
---
The latest deaths reported by the military:
__ A soldier was killed Thursday when his vehicle was struck by a roadside explosive southwest of Baghdad.
_ A Marine was killed Wednesday near Baghdad.
---
The latest identifications reported by the military:
_ Marine Lance Cpl. Eric A. Palmisano, 27, Florence, Wis.; killed April 2 when a truck rolled over in a flash flood in Anbar province; assigned to 1st Transportation Support Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
_ Army Spc. Shawn R. Creighton, 21, Windsor, N.C.; killed Saturday when his vehicle hit a roadside explosive in Rawah; assigned to the 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
_ Army Spc. Kenneth D. Hess, 26, Asheville, N.C.; killed Tuesday during a suicide bomber attack in Rawah; assigned to the 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
_ Army Cpl. Joseph A. Blanco, 25, Bloomington, Calif.; Army Pfc. James F. Costello III, 27, St. Louis; Army Pfc. George R. Roehl Jr., 21, Manchester, N.H.; killed Tuesday by a roadside explosive and small arms fire in Taji; assigned to the 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas:

Looking Forward Looking Back

Looking forward, looking back, it's a long way down the track, went the song, heard everywhere when Slim Dusty died back in 2003. In all the crystaline beauty of the city, the wealth that coated its inner arms, the endless streams of expensive women in their dark silver Audis, the Lexus with a dent, goodness me, even the P-platers driving expensive cars; the refined beauty of the latest BMWs and Mercedes; a $350,000 car swept past; they waited. There was always a wait. He kept crawling and crawling and couldn't wait to escape. The time held itself so very still. The populations gathered in the crystalline spaces.

These were the blues and the greens of the harbour, the endless stream of morning joggers on the foreshores; dogs everywhere in the afternoon after work; the narrow clefts that were public land fully exploited by the locals with health on their mind. The colours just didn't make sense, just didn't synch. The wealth was always there; in the boats, in the size of the houses, in the beauty of the vehicles. Lush, where things hadn't gone wrong in the same way that he knew them. Here, in the midst of everything.

If one could only look forward. If the depth of talent could be harnessed. If things were going the way they should go. He was sardonic, overly so, and cringed in regret as the hours passed. Frank Sartor, former Lord Mayor of Sydney and minister in the Iemma government, got married today in an old stone church in Darling Point. It was a long way down the track, here for the country boy. The endless stream of astonishingly expensive cars flowed on the roads outside. He was 54, she was 35. They looked very happy together. For such a ruthless power player, it was an intimate wedding; no senior politicians at all, no celebrities. "Very proud, very very happy," he said. There hadn't been a single cloud in the sky for days. The air was cold, clear. The sandstone caught the chill of the late autumn. Done and dusted, he said, as they got back into the car. They did, indeed, look very happy together.

In the Wind

These weren't times for being out. Sad, sick and lonely, when the phone didn't ring anymore. There was a party of university students two doors down, they've been up all night, somebody's birthday, and the sun is now bouncing on the balcony as they continue to laugh. Once it had been thus for everything he had been involved in, the party that trailed across the globe. I last saw you in Penang, he said to a drag queen in a Berlin bar, and she pawed all over him like a long lost friend. These things were always happening to him. He was always out.

There's God in the wind, he heard a voice say, he wasn't quite dotty yet. Star Treck videos and warm blankets. The chill of autumn had already come. He didn't know how things fell so quickly, how the veneer rubbed off and his own craven stupidities blighted the dazzling world. So many things burrowed down into the quiet.

There was no alternative but a brave face.