Skipping Stones

This is a picture of William with the kids. They're looking through old copies of the Guinness Book of Records, having a great laugh, the biggest ever person, the biggest feet on a living person, that sort of stuff. William is a Professor of Japanese at the University of Sydney. Not many anglos in Australia speak Japanese, much less teach it. His father was in the Second World War and he grew up with stories of the war; thus, for some odd reason, beginning his fascination.

It's been a long week already; what with all the various ructions that have been going on. It's probably not fair to post them, much as I would sometimes like. These were the long battles; things that would never be written, at least not now; not in the instant living memory of things; not with kids and conflict and a past better forgot. The story over Muslim cartoons keeps on going. Yesterday I spent in a suburb I, and probably 99 per cent of the rest of Sydney, had never heard of; a place called Leonay; named after Leo Buring, a famous Australian wine maker who had vineyards along the edge of the Nepean river, and his wife Nay. Attempts to change the name of the suburb failed. They all acted like they had died and gone to heaven. The centre of the suburb was the golf course. Healthy women in their sixties strode around the golf course, had lunch in the club. They had no idea how lucky they were. The rest of us work; the heat just kept coming at us; the phone kept ringing; there would never be any peace.

Suzy's car ran off the road on her way back to Moree and she made the local Moree champion today; a Moree woman who's car had run off the road at a flyover and ended up on the train tracks. The car was a right off; a brand new car which had irked me, and is now gone anyway. And it looks like the insurance won't be valid; just like the other car we totalled. Thank God the kids weren't in it. They'll turn 14 and 15 in the next few months; and I've got a couple of strapping teenagers on my hand. Parenting For Character; rings the title of the book. A lot of days I just finish work and feel exhausted; but at least I work. The top 40 per cent of the country is supporting the bottom 60 per cent, and the Howard government, a so-called conservative government, has been as assiduous a distributor of wealth away from those who earn it as anybody else. The entire Howard social policy was dreamed up by Centrelink bureaucrats; and the massive incompetence at the top continues to astound me. At my age I've seen them all come and go, the left and the right, and it's impossible to say that one is any worse than the other. They're all absolutely hopeless as far as I'm concerned. I resent paying taxes; so someone else can send their kids to private school, so someone else can afford private health insurance; so someone else can get a first home buyers grant; so someone else can have their rent subsidised and sit round doing nothing while I go to work. Like the rest of the country, I'm absolutely sick of the entire bloody farce. 

Ice

Here's the Australian Federal Police with 46 kilograms of Ice they busted out of a speedboat brought into Australia from Canada. It was the largest ever seizure from Canada and the fifth largest seizure of Ice in the country's history. Two sleeps to Christmas, goes the joke. Overtaking ecstasy as Sydney's most popular party drug. Can be smoked rather than shot, adding to its broad appeal. Felt grimy after I got home, ratty in the head. Can't be in this room anymore, he thought, as he bolted from his chair. Just too much. They loved to parade their wares. Did any of this do anybody any good? Did the war on drugs do anything but keep coppers and lawyers and politicians in power and employment?

You could see them sometimes, the little groups of bewildered junkies; wandering the streets at the hour when everybody else was having their morning coffees. Bewildered, because they weren't used to be up all night; weren't used, in a way, to even being conscious; certainly not to feeling any pain. And there they were, scattered to the four winds; moving from housing department flat to another; the secret codes, the walls that kept them going; encased; not harmless; ratting on each other; but more than that, just ratty in the head. And utterly bewildered.

The flats were a mess. The good times were good. Kilo after kilo. Customs had no previous intelligence. They selected the container because it came up suspicious on a number of indicaters. The story said it was by chance; and they weren't happy. Words I had never written. Words I could never defend. They were there at the Stonewall at 3am, and they were there in the Cross at 6am, and the younger and more financial of them were in every trendy club in town. He missed Richard; who had died years ago now; he had been such a handsome boy; he had been such enormous fun. And he had outlived them all, and would continue to go on outliving them all. The pains were random and insignificant. The stories weren't the ones he had expected but they were all there. The criss crossed alley ways of the news floors; the treacherous talentless little pricks that surfaced in the surf and just kept bobbing. He didn't care anymore. The slip stream was glorious; had been glorious; and all the Ice in the world would never make any difference to that. If only he could go back; if only he could do it all over again. 

Multicultural Tyranny

This is a picture of Kayser Trad, once a spokesman for the Australian Mufti, now more of a self-styled spokesman for the Lebanese community in Australia. The backdrop is Maroubra, which saw some of the tensions spilling over from Cronulla at the end of last year. Once again the whole debate is on, with the Danish embassies burning in the middle east, with the placards declaring that Europe will bow down to the mujahadeen. I remember as a kid, we were fascinated by the local Greek grocer, because he was from somewhere else, had things, like garlic, in his shop, that we weren't used to. That was the Australia of old. Then the bureaucrats came up with multiculturalism and Australia has never been the same since. Its meant to be a measure of progressiveness, how much you embrace multiculturalism. Any hint of disbelief marked you as a neanderthal racist. Any suggest that the immigration policies in this country have been completely insane, have already lead to massive social dislocation and ghettoisation of half the city, are pooh poohed as signs of your unreconstructed, clearly unintelligent self.

Yet in all these suburbs, filled now with women with headscarves and people who barely speak any English at all, who have no allegiance to the country, gangsters and the sons of gangsters, precursors to the mobs who will roam the city's streets, are remnant populations horrified at what their suburbs have become. We're not allowed to say these things. As the Danish have discovered, there's much you're not allowed to say anymore. All day, yet again, talkback was dominated by the muslim debate; talkback of course being one of the only venues where people can say what they really think. Many of us are sick of the hijacking of the entire public discourse for a cause foisted upon an unsuspecting population by left wing intellectuals who will die; unable to sip their chardonnay any longer, in comfortable old age homes with never a regret, never a shiver of self doubt. If in the end the world did not fit their theories; that was the fault of the plebs.

The streets have been burning, the flags, the wild crowds; the placards threatening another 9/11 on the people of Europe, all this, the fascism and the fury, are suddenly startling the complacent, placid view that everyone had of this; that only morons would question the state religion of multiculturalism. Well listen to the static and tell me that it's working; this thing imposed and propagandised with millions upon millions of dollars of public money in a determined will to undermine the mainstream culture; adopted by the half-educated, the useful fools, as Marx called them, the school teachers, the bureaucrats, the journalists. Tell me the genie's not out of the bottle.

Here's some of the latest coverage from CBS:

Islamic fury over the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad spilled violently into the streets of Afghanistan, where protesters vented their anger against America. Police gunned down at least four people, some as they tried to storm a U.S. military base. Thousands more joined increasingly violent demonstrations across the world, including in Somalia where stampeding protesters killed a teenage boy. For the first time, a small but unruly protest flared up in Iran, where about 200 demonstrators threw stones at the Austrian Embassy, while in Paris, a newspaper which published the caricatures last week, evacuated its office during a bomb scare. The European Union issued stern reminders to 18 Arab and other Muslim countries that they must protect foreign embassies. British Prime Minister Tony Blair also criticized attacks on people of Denmark, where the cartoons were first published, and other Europeans as "completely unacceptable," CBS News radio correspondent Larry Miller reports. "The attacks on the citizens of Denmark and people of the European community were completely unacceptable, as is the behavior of some of the demonstrators in London over the past few days," Blair said in a statement read by his spokesman. "The police shall have our full support in respect of any action they wish to take with respect to upholding the law, so we understand the difficult situation they were facing." Lebanon apologized to Denmark one day after protesters set fire to a building housing the Danish mission in Beirut. The attack "harmed Lebanon's reputation and its civilized image," Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said.

Emotional, He Gasped

The past kept coming back, the nightmare against green, but these things weren't happening now. There were very entertaining nights to be had, there in the slipstream. He said something witty and they laughed, or pretended to laugh, there in the park. There were people who appeared and disappeared and he was uncertain whether they were watching him or not. The group was fast. They laughed. Went and saw Brokeback again. The first time was 10.15am and there were aging gay couples, bald; or one old queen with his Thai boyfriend. The next time I went it was 1.15pm and most girls, straight girls, some with boyfriends in tow.

The week was full of death, a 53 year old taxi driver bashed to death by two 14 year olds. Everyone expressed shock; but people have been writing about the disintegration of the under class for years. There's no more manufacturing, no local shop, no local church, mostly. There's always a Centrelink office and a bottle shop. Everyone said what a lonely man he was, what a miserable life he lived, after the breakdown of his marriage. He worked 12 hour days. Visitors rarely if ever came to the granny flat at the back of the red brick house. A man with a fetid breath relayed how he felt sorry for him. The taxi drivers on the Arthur Street rank at Cabramatta all expressed concern for their own safety; sadness at the man's demise. He had been robbed several times, he had just gone back to work after a stroke, he had lost the use of one arm, he had been through a marriage breakup. He shouldn't have been driving, one man said. It's the department's fault for letting him.

We were so taudry in the slipstream, in corners piled high, wasted; the launch of a thousand pleasures. Their faces told of everything, the Red Bull and Vodka drinks; well kissy kissy. There were other deaths. A 22 month old child was mauled by her family's dingo cross pet; which had come into the house. Animal behaviourists said the baby was probably crying, and this provoked a predatory response in the animal. Her father found her at 4am. It is impossible to imagine; these appalling, private tragedies, linked through the threads of words and work. And there was the arrest of a man in Nelson, New Zealand, on the Janelle Patton case; the frenzied stabbing attack which had rivetted Australia and torn the remote Island of Norfolk apart with suspicion and paranoia. He looked almost normal, twitching in the winds; Norfolk Island was the worst of all the Australian penal colonies; founded in pain and blood and misery and complete brutality. The man is facing extradition proceedings back to Norfolk, where he will be the first person tried for murder on the island in more than a hundred years.

Before The Plague

We danced all night, stumbled from one outrageous scene to the next, called in that instance not just to each otherbutto the universe at large, watching the sunrise over the limpid beauties of the harbour, and were proud, hey destined, there on the dance floor. He never thought he would grow old, or older He never thought there would be an end to the brilliant discoveries, to the turning faces as he walked into a room, to the infinite longing that was all part of the doom laden air. I don't know what you're normally like, the man said, and drunk, as he always was at that hour of the morning in those long lost days, he had a moment of clarity that he could remember all these years later.

The tensions had shifted, between the hunted and the hunter and the boys cruising each other. Sex was so easy, so instant, so fast and if not exactly meaningless so far from being tied to any sense of permanence or commitment or even affection, that now they virtually humped on the dance floor, swivelling their hips, bending over in an endless come on. Even the old ones, and there were so few old ones, they had all been wiped out by the plague, but even the old ones seemed to get all the attention they needed, through walls, through dark corners, in late night grapplings.

The smell of cigarettes permeated his clothes. He was sick of staying home late. He couldn't sleep in the fetid heat which continued to grip the city, which continued to make him sweat. The soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain played in his head, the poignant notes, and everyone he watched seemed multi-layered, as if they were only brief representations of this time and place; and other stories, their entire stories, could be told here. He watched some young queen, hanging out with the trannies, doing his bit on the dance floor and he felt like saying: you will drink for another 20 years. You will become fat and lonely and remember this, perhaps even this night, as your good times. He had always loved them, the multiple postures, the intrigue, the feeling of the infinite washing through the room, the splintered light in the dawn, the collapsing buildings calling him back to a primeval state from whence he had come, from where they had all come. At work, greeted like a long lost friend, he pretended to be normal; but in his head, in his ceaseless searching, in the long restless sleepless nights, he was only just beginning to find any sense of normalicy at all. If only he had been so sane, if only he had stopped to enjoy himself, all those years ago. 

Depth

Sydney was always full of rich colours; the deep greens of the parks, the houses set into the bush, the brilliance of the beaches, the harsh sun blanketting the west. She's rich, Asian, in her 50s, drives a smart car; stake her out. But the description could fit thousands who have colonised the gated or semi-gated communities and wealthy ridges of the north shore; and the chances of finding her were minimal. We reconnoitered, buzzed on a buzzer, appearing once again on CCTV, waited without hope for no response, sat in the car in blistering heat swapping notes on how pointless the job was, the vagaries of our private lives.

I had regarded my own childhood on the far northern beaches as a nightmare against green, unfair though that may be. The silence of the house morphed into the screach of the cicadas outside. The belt snaked out and the scars that left would remain for decades. It might not be fair, but these were the memories that spilled down the decades, more than the happy times down the deadend mucking around was the growing horror of growing up; the impervious horror of a father who was always angry, always the enemy; who barely spoke to me, the embarrassment that I was.

In later years, when I was better known and other tragedies made him keen to appear normal, he would try different tacts. It didn't matter. In his own life he tried to stick to different principles; and when he betrayed them chaos ensured. It wasn't right, what happened, he knew that now; the desolation as he walked away from the house, leaving home. They couldn't even drop him to the bus stop. And that was that. He was on his own. He always would be. 

The Rich Are Different

This is the scene outside Kerry Packer's house in December. Kerry was the richest man in Australia. He made a million dollars a day every day for the last year of his life. Not that it was enough to keep him alive. Or in some respects even happy. I remember once having to go and stake him out outside the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital; being driven there by a jolly, beaming little Bangladeshi taxi driver who was delighted and grateful to be alive; while the country's richest man lay in his expensive hospital suite and at that moment might have given anything to exchange places with someone who was beaming, happy and poor.

I always knew that one day I would find myself staked out in the leafy, bat swooping elegance of Bellevue Hill, outside Packer's residence. The dreams would come thick and fast and I knew that tied up with these dreadful, inconsequential stories, were the dictates of one's own fate, the falling leaves, the swooping birds; muffled by time, muffled in dreams, with other voices, other intelligences, barely out of conscious reach.

I had always been envious of the rich; a negative trait, I know. Their lives seemed so substantial, in contrast to our own whispy ways. The stolid mansions around the Packer's compound, the flash cars, their substantial lives and substantial trust funds; I just felt, I don't know why, that these things were rightfully mine; that as time passed life would bless me with substantial fortune. Such of course was not to be. One foul wind would sweep all the evidence of his life away; the trail of words, the computer, the television, even the kids; it had taken years to get on a sound footing and it could all be thrown away so easily; an arsehole at work, a terrible mistake. The surveillance.

He had locked in his memory the location of the house, in a part of Sydney, just behind Scotts College, where every square inch was worth a gold mine, the Packers owned a compound stretching from one street up the hill right to the other side, with long driveways that led down to their private mansion passed other guest houses that they also owned. People came and went all day in a lifestyle that was beyond almost everybody; the funeral man, the flower man, the fish monger, the milkman, the laundry man; the staff, the gardeners, the security, the rottweiller dogs that would have cheerfullly mauled us alive. In those muffled dreams; when he knew he would be here; the turning points came and went on a dying fall, the heavy air cascading down the tree trunks, the wealthy queens in the neighbouring houses, the sycophants who mooned around the rich, who hung, watching the bored and restless and media because they had nothing else to do; in the end he had always known he would be standing here one day. 

Benevolence

The city could be kind, but he didn't feel that. He felt locked up and barely able to cope, barely able to apply the mask for one more day. This is a view of Coogee Beach at night. The city has been full of celebration, centred around Australia Day and the long hot summer. People were returning to work, putting back on the grim masks. Prosperity lodged in small sections of the population. He didn't know how to deal with many of the present situations.

The kids are back in Sydney but still with Suzy till the beginning of the school term. They've grown even in the month they've been away. I shouldn't have trapped myself but I did. Calls went back and forth and he just sat on the couch. He didn't want to move, didn't want to be bothered, didn't want to face it all again.

Outside there were the rich colours of the city, the gusts of heat, the strangers in the street. Voices called but his was not one of them. Marginal voices called him back to the centre. Saw Brokeback Mountain yesterday with Joyce and Stephen. Gay cowboys. It wasn't anything like what I expected, having more contemporary reference, bringing us closer to the present day, telling a story which could have been told hundreds of thousands of different times in a thousand different ways, early loves that spill down the decades. We all loved it. I have to go back to work tonight after four weeks off. He still wanted his bolt hole, he still wanted to escape. Summer still gripped the city in a fetid heat. There wasn't anything else he could do but survive another round. 

Redfern

This is a picture of Redfern, where we live. It has a reputation as one of the most troubled areas of Sydney, but things have been a lot tidier since the police moved into the TNT towers next to the station and can train their cameras across all the trouble spots. It has discouraged activity; and the strife has migrated to Waterloo. I came to live in Redfern without intent, shocked by the scenes that used to greet us, the absolute chaos and criminality. It's been tidy, or at least much tidier, for going on two years now. Once common, you no longer hear women crying hysterically in the streets after their bags have been snatched, . The people waiting in cars are waiting for friends, not anything else. We haven't had to call the ambulance for anyone passed out in the street. Redfern is thought to have character. It is said to be the most left wing precinct in the country. Probably right. The conservatives haven't got a chance, no matter how parlous the state of the Labor Party.

Redfern is completely different to the places I have been in recent weeks. See more cars in a minute than we saw all week.

There are social obligations which you really should have fulfilled, calls to the positive side of life, instead he got stuck with a desperately lonely woman in a house and in a room and he couldn't work out how to leave. She begged him to stay. He made the dash. She didn't look happy and he couldn't care less. The city was full of the desperately lonely. They could cannibalise you with ease. Absolutely eat out every last bit of personal freedom, enchain you with a coating of co-dependence so thick it was impossible to breathe, and have you squirming in the long heat of clammy nights, utterly unfulfilled. Never more alone than lying next to someone. It was time to stop toying with the dead, living with the myths of good times - utterly squandered.

NEWSWATCH:

Hamas have won the election in Palestine, and the commentary and implications are fascinating.

GAZA (Reuters) - Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Saturday rejected international calls for the Islamic militant group to disarm and renounce violence to prevent cuts to international aid for the Palestinian Authority.
"This aid can not be a sword over the heads of the Palestinian people and will not be material to blackmail our people, to blackmail Hamas and the resistance. It is rejected," Haniyeh told Reuters in an interview in the Gaza Strip.
He added that Hamas, sworn to Israel's destruction, was committed to keeping its arms and resisting Israeli occupation.
Haniyeh was speaking after the United States threatened to cut back its $234 million in aid earmarked for the Palestinians this year because Hamas was expected to form a new Palestinian government.
"They've got to get rid of that arm of their party which is armed and violence and secondly, they've got to get rid of that part of their platform that says they want to destroy Israel," U.S. President George W. Bush said in an interview with CBS news. 

Australia Day

Australia Day was celebrated with particular fervor this year; a reaction in no small degree to the "race" or "multicultural" riots at Cronulla in December. Here was the moment to say we are proud; a political statement. People wore the flag stencilled onto their faces. Cascades of fireworks. Television images marked with a particular, rediscoverd enthusiasm. The harbour, underneath the bridge, was chopped up with wakes from hundreds of pleasure craft. The ferries tooted, barbecues were held on every point of land overlooking the water. Even the desultory, normally struggling community events in a thousand tiny towns were packed out around the country. It was no longer gauche to be nationalistic. Once being proud to be Australian was out of fashion indeed. This year the Australian of the Year awards, which went to a Scottish medico who developed a vaccine for cervical cancer, was braodcast live, the annoncement of a winner awaited with heightened interest.



Aboriginals burnt the Australian flag in a park in Brisbane, thereby igniting another talkback flare. It was not against the law to burn the flag, and Prime Minsiter John Howard bought into the debate, saying he did not agree with making the destruction of the flag a crime; he might not agree with the actions, but it was a political statement. We took everything of yours and thought you should be happy. He wanted a drink. He always wanted a drink. They celebrated in a wild youth he could no longer even approximate. He saw their bodies, their faces, in the street, diamonds tugging at his own isolation, the yearning for the infinite, for company, which would see him taken from the ward.



Once again there was trouble in Redfern and I could not make it home; ending up sleeping at Dots. I drove home after a night at Stephens and I could see from a distance there was trouble of some kind. There were three ambulances lined up along the side of Redfern Station, and dozens of riot police were crossing the road, heading towards the Block, as I pulled up at the lights. The whole street was blocked off, and as I passed the thicket of police cars and turned the corner, I could see they had blocked off the streets descending from the Block, preventing escape. I couldn't see what the source of the action was; but I assumed it was all a combination of alcohol and resentment and looking for a fight; after a day of rhetoric about the injustice of their situation; the party moved from Redfern Oval to the Block.



The ABC reported: Two men have been charged after a disturbance at Redfern in Sydney's inner-west late last night. Police were called to a fight on the corner of Eveleigh and Lawson Streets just after 11pm AEDT.

Officers say when they tried to intervene, a crowd threw bottles and other objects at them. Two men have been charged, one with assaulting police and resisting arrest, and the other with hindering police. Police are advising motorists to stay away from the area."



Wasn't any doubt about being back in Sydney. We had driven and driven and driven, a 30 hour against all advice non-stop drive from Streaky Bay in South Australia. These were the sort of trips which really required a four-wheel drive. Unlike the trip over, where we loitered or were impaled in claustrophobic $65 a night hotel rooms where the sheets were clean and the walls made of concrete bricks, this time we were determined to get back. We stopped in Wilcannia at midnight, the car immediately surrounded by the aboriginal kids who roam the streets at all hours of the day and night. We were looking for somewhere, anywhere, that was open, midnight and we'd been driving since before dawn and there was another 900 kilometres to go. Mister, you got a cigarette? I ransacked Col's tobacco and handed them a wad. They seemed very pleased, untrheatening. They pointed the way to the Wilcannia Golf Club. You got any Yandi, they asked, using the aboriginal word for smoking dope. No, I said, thought you guys were supposed to have that sort of thing. They laughed, the teenage boys, the knocked off girls, the kids under ten. No, they said, and pointed again to the Golf Club.



They didn't have any coffee, there wasn't a garage open for another 200 kilometres, they watched the tennis from the early days of the Australian Open on a large screen and wondered - why is the dance floor covered with water. Then he realised, it was the water dripping from the airconditioning, which rarely went off; the condensation pooling on to the old wooden floor and the three tables of the bored and desperate. Imagine growing up here!?



While the streets had never been more alive, while people steretched out to each other, Sydney was a shock and his own head drove him crazy.



But here he was at the end of his four weeks holiday; with no choice but to go back to work. He didn't have the money or the resources to do his own

Sea Change. He tried to develop a quiet, humble, silent resolution, as the numbers clicked into place.



Here's a few samples of Australia Day media coverage:



Brisbane Courier Mail: From surf to turf, a day to remember: "The Queen's Baton Relay hitched its wagon to a string of spectacular Australia Day events across Sydney yesterday.

The best was saved for last when champion surfer Layne Beachley landed on a surf boat at South Cronulla.

Drenched by bone-jarring waves going out at North Cronulla, Beachley ran up the beach high-fiving youngsters lining her path while nipper lifesavers massed behind.

"It's one of the most remarkable experiences I have ever had," Beachley told 5000 people on the foreshore.



Spirit of Australia Day declared the headline in the Maitland Mercury: "Regardless of their ages, the estimated 4000 people who gathered in Maitland Park to celebrate Australia Day on Thursday were all young and free. The patriotism of the city's residents was in full force as they flocked to the annual celebrations and activities hosted by Maitland �City Council. They carried Australian flags, wore flags on hats and boasted Aussie tattoos on their faces."



Nine MSN said: "Two stabbings were reported, more than nine tonnes of alcohol was seized and almost 90 arrests were made during Perth's key Australia Day celebration. But West Australian police have hailed their operation at the Skyworks fireworks display as a success. With 400,000 people watching the show on the banks of the Swan River on Thursday, some disruptive behaviour was expected, police Assistant Commissioner John McRoberts said."

Driving: The Australian Form of Meditation

We took one last look along the freezing cliffs, we organised the rental house and we left things as tidy as we could. Things moved in ways we could never have imagined. We were healthier, more relaxed; while I kept thinking better times lay ahead. And if they didn't, if there was no bolt hole, no way to escape the creeping forces that were overwhelming us, no way to get to the magical financial figures which would allow him freedom and courage, no way to thoroughly adorn, or augment, the story of our lives; then there were the crowded streets of Calcutta and the insane milieu of all the world's desperates, gathering in the same places. Once it was Goa, once it was Amsterdam, once it was everywhere we chose to plop ourselves, reflected images in train windows, fragments of books, scattered hope and manufactured outrage. It worked when you're young; not now. Now he just tried to dredge enough guts to face another day.

I was reading Leviathan: the anauthorised biography of Sydney. I came to the realisation that part of the problem, my problem, was that I regarded my environment as entirely toxic. Not just the dry, bleaching, air conditioned offices, the all pervading ennui, the sad fates and the high staff turnover, but the grey streets themselves, the pollution ridden air, our drunk brethren on the corner, not just the political environment, which was simplistic, from the Stalinist left marked as progressive; holding the high moral ground to themselves; destroyed by a class who did not go to work, who lived off everybody elses sweat; not just the snarling yuppies and the undeserving rich and the conservatives who all thought their positions were due to their own hard and deserving work; but the fabric of things themselves.

For the underclasses at least, Sydney had never been an easy city. Always the bible of the middle classes; now the bible of the bourgeoise left and the progressive, green, doctor's wives, the Sydney Morning Herald, where I would work 130 years later, had warned in the 1850s, as Buckingham records, that the denizens of the dark would only emerge to rob bullock drivers and country folk "like certain loathsome reptiles", their sort "only come out at night from these dark recesses".

"Ask them a question in the daytime, and reptile-like, they hiss at you, unaccustomed to sympathy of any kind, they conclude your only object is to mock them in their misery. They feel....that society has cast them from its bosom to perish in dirt and dishonour... As they are not respected by society, so they have ceased to respect themselves - careless of life, and heedless of death, they sink into the grave leaving nothing behind them but a vicious example."

The alarm went at 5am and we organised ourselves in the dark; preparing for a 30 hour drive towards a city I no longer loved.

Reaching the End

We sat on the verandah and didn't want to leave. Everyone we talked about was dead. Well not everyone, but a lot of them. We were amongst the last traces of living memory for these people. Billy Paton. The dancer from Hair that everyone fancied and who we had all got to know. He was beautiful, I said, and Col agreed; and I asked, discretely, were you around for the funeral? No, I was in Brisbane, he said. I don't know where I was, I said, maybe overseas. One minute he was there and the next he wasn't. The same sadness illuminated many of our conversations. They were all gone, the people we had thought were such fun, were the centre of everything. Instead there were robust farmers and young explorers and families everywhere; and we sat perched as if in a great eirie; not just remote in location but remote in time.

There somewhere on the white beach the pain, strangulation and confusion of Sydney disappeared; and I gathered, or tried to gather, the energy to do it all again. Status had not come my way. I never got promoted. They were nice when they needed something, an extra shift, a hole to fill, something to be written in a hurry. But that was it. I complained about the treachery of news rooms and people said no, that's not news rooms, that's offices. They're all the same, absolutely treacherous. Someone will rise to the top but many won't. The old blokes know where the furniture is, and that's about it. They won't be treated with respect; they're never treated with respect. Even now, I look around at the reporters older than myself and not one of them is happy, not one of them is treated well. They show up and survive and that's about it; elderly forms and a faded cynicism; still hoping to find decency in the day to day struggle and instead finding nothing of the kind.

Sometimes I wonder why they continue to show up; and the answer of course is the same; money. To work to live. The fundamental flaws inside us keep us down in the muck. But it didn't matter, here on the beach I struggled to find the resources inside to face it all again; the daily struggle and the daily rubbish. Camped outside people's houses. Regurgitating press releases. Trying to keep quiet and doing nothing of the kind. Coming to be regarded as a character; because it was the last refuge against failure. Billy had been a wonderful person and all we saw, or all Col saw, I didn't see anything, was a notice in the Star Observer, Sydney's gay rag. I knew he had moved back to his parents; I had visited him there once. But he had been healthy then, and nobody knew much about Aids in those days. Instead I had only heard through the grape vine; he's gone, she's gone. We collected our melancholy pasts; and here in the future, not one of the bright young things, with their multiple degrees and multiple enthusiasms, could even imagine the lives we had lived. Neither imagine, nor care, as we settled into silence.

Trial Pictures

This is the rocks at Port Labatt, looking down from the lookout. This is the only permanent colony of sea lions on the Australian mainland, and you can stand watching them for hours; as the young frolic in the icy cold pools, the huge males protect their harems and fat mums laze about in the cold. It's exceptionally beautiful, and the sea lions are fascinating to watch. It was about 15 minutes away from where we were staying.

There weren't other things, other reasons, I felt sweaty in the night and there was the constant fear that the plague had reached here, that we, who were going to live forever, would instead be shortened and the life that we had welcomed, that we had known would always be ours, from the special voices in childhood to the sense of destiny as an adult, to the moments when you came for me and said, I love you, how rare it had been across the decades, from the time when we had sat on bar stools and batted them away, and had been, basically, with all the empathy of youth and the lure of looks, had been everywhere, staring down at the sea lions and thinking, this is special, if cold, with the wind whipping across the lookout and the pair of us wrapped in ungainly blankets as we looked down in the early morning light in astonishment at what was basically a National Geographic movie taking place before our eyes.

We didn't look young anymore, although we could remember how much we had taken it for granted. We didn't have any grand hopes for the future, because the future was now and Col was sick, coughing as the wind whipped off the sea. The area was all national park now, roped off, because some of the locals had once gone around shooting the sea lions, for no reason that anyone could explain, and here, I just wanted to escape everything my life had become; being at work early, being told what to do by people 20 years my junior, people who wouldn't know a story if it sat on their face, of dredging the coal mine to write another story about some subject he couldn't have cared less about; years passing without a pay rise, without a friendly word from the hierarchy who inhabited their fear laden shelves; and with it, the humiliation of age. Your best times are past. The golden age is gone. The daily humiliations are all part of it. Anyone tried to tell me how tough their life was; and I just said, I'm over 50 and I've got two kids to look after and I'm at work by 7.30 in the morning and you spineless whingers have no idea what you're talking about. Yet I paid taxes to support them. And the wind whipped off the sea, and I didn't, really didn't, want to go back to the life I had fled. I didn't want to go back to my own craven mind in a city full of strangers. Nor did I want to face the consequences of a life poorly lived, or more precisely poorly planned; so in the end we stood and stared at the sea lions far below us; and finally said: is it time for tea and toast? Bundled ourselves back into our beat up old car, and headed back to the verandah we could have happily inhabited for the rest of our days.

White Out

This is the beach at Scealey Bay. From our verandah the beach circled in a white arc in front of us, and there was no sign of any entrance into the bay. I never reached the end of the beach, although I would determinedly try to walk a little bit further each day. Little waders, that spend about four months here before heading off back to Siberia. As you walk along the beach they scatter before you. I thought they would be picking the sand dry, but certain parts of the beach, if you dig up the sand, it is just cram packed with shells. There's no shortage of food for the waders, who lay their eggs in the shallows in the sand and are a miracle of survival. There wasn't much to celebrate difference, to ever be accepted. A flag flew from one of the houses at the back, though everyone pretended not to know what the flag meant. It meant, I guess, that this was the hippy, or alternative element, here in the middle of nowhere.

The long white beach still had whole sea shells on it, something you never see on Sydney's beaches. The Christmas he somehow longed for was away in impulses he could never have imagined. We watched, we waited, we tried. The heat gusted across the verandah. A car crawled by. We remembered people we hadn't thought about in years, or was it decades. Or with whom we had no one to compare notes. Lyn was a character, we said, and laughed, that she was. But she had overdosed pregnant and left a son we had all adopted in our own way; who then went back to his father. There weren't any happy endings, none.

Have you really been to Cambodia, I asked one blonde haired bearded bloke wearing a t-shirt from Asia. Yes, he replied, and proceeded to regale us with tales of girls on each arm and wild wild times. You number one, you velly handsome man, I said, and we all laughed. You've been there! he said. Yes, I said, and remembered when all these things seemed like a miracle of exploration; not, as now, memories to be flicked through in the heat. The sky merged with the sea and there was no nicer place to be. Dread the day to leave. Dread the day to return to normal life. White Out. White Widow White Out. Indecipherable codes came down the years, and we longed for our own sea change, our place on the coast, our own comfortable retirement. Blasted. Plastered. Our hopes of a comfortable tomorrow washed away in the heat. Col rolled another cigarette on the verandah and I asked if he was ever going to give up smoking. He looked at me as if I was mad; or as if for him it was simply too late and I should understand that. The beach stretched forever and all we knew was that we were comfortable here, we wanted to come back, the sky, the salt, the sea, wasn't there a way to make it ours, to make it last for ever?

Before The Fall

We finally, after a massive drive which saw us pass through the Riverina, cross the Murray, roam around Port Augusta for the afternoon, watch half the street get arrested for public disturbance, stay overnight at Wirrundi, Polish My Bar declared the t-shirt of one handsome young local, back, no doubt, here in the middle of nowhere, for university holidays. We ended in Streaky Bay and thought immediately, we've driven all this way for this! Everything was booked out for the holiday season, surprise, surprise, the caravan park booked solid, holiday houses let. But the beauties of the place unfolded rapidly, where the desert meets the sea. Families fished off the jetty at all hours. We finally rented a house at Scealey Bay, pronounced Scaley Bay for eight nights and here it was we finally came to rest.

The tennis was on the TV, the pre-cursors to the Australian Open. Every Australian summer was characterised by tennis on the televsion, the battle of personalities, the game play. Col only ventured off the verandah and down to the beach once, but I tried to get down most days. There were no local shops, pub or post office. The locals I met all thought they had died and gone to heaven. There was a battle between the pro and anti-development lobbies. The farmer, who's 34,000 acres surrounded the bay, had put a significant number of blocks up for sale, ranging between $66,000 to $135,000. They were all waiting for it to go ahead. Couldn't be stopped they said. Nothing of what Australia had become had reached here. Before snarling yuppies and grasping welfare lobbyists had curdled public debate. Before the trendies took over. Before everything had gone to theory and the arseholes took over. A purer time, was there ever such a time?

They pulled into tiny places and said: imagine growing up here. A blonde, pudgy, slightly effeminite boy sat outside Hungry Jacks in Broken Hill. Imagine growing up here if you were even slightly different. It would be like Australia in the 50s all over again. That time which had come to represent horrific conformity, but also a simpler, better time, when a day's work was the decent thing. Before the culture had descended into market speak and how to handle your success seminars, the grey audi of last year out and the black back in. Instead, here, where there was no local shop and people left their cars unlocked. Here where the view across the bay changed constantly as the light of the day passed, and we watched transfixed at the end of our days.

Derelict, Dying, On Holidays

My friend was not well, and I didn't realise, until we decided to drive 2400 kilometres to the Eyre Peninsula, just how not well. I knew that he was HIV positive, that he had Aids. He had thought that he was dying; in 2004. He told me that was the year when he thought his time was up. Now, once again, he had thought he was on the way out and had come to say goodbye. His first kidney had been whipped out with cancer and when he re-emerged; he was waiting for the test results on the second; with the fear that it, too, was cancerous. Instead, when the results came, it was only cysts.

So this was good news, a reprieve. That's the world you enter, when all the news is bad. His doctors had warned him that the hepatitis C would kill him before the HIV, so he was about to go on a treatment which would keep him sick for 48 weeks. All of this, from the days when our party was the best party in town; when he was a daring character in the great adventure of the emerging gay world. When everyone was utterly out of it and he would be sitting perched up in bed, about 18 or 19 then, with Philip Macarthy next to him; all of it such an hilarious outrage.

Tucked up there in those semi-derelict houses with spectacular views of Sydney. There in the late sixties and early seventies, we were just kids, I was barely 16, Philip just had this absolutely wild streak; drove like a lunatic, drank like a lunatic, fucked, from all the evidence, like a lunatic. He's dead now. Aids. John Bygate. Dead now. Brain hemorrhage Harry Godolphin. Dead now. Lung cancer. Most of the cast are dead now. Col was still going. Only the good die young, he said, and laughed as we drove through the night. I was in the company of someone exactly my own age.

I was warned, you are taking on responsibility for a complex medical problem. These guys are hard work. It's a long way from a hospital or a doctor. I didn't pay any attention, I just wanted out of town. Money that was meant to materialise from his relatives never did and on the day we left he said on the phone from Newcastle that it hadn't happened, he'd catch up with me when I got back. Let's just go, I'll cover you till the money comes, I said, and so he came down and we organised and were off, about ten in the evening. At times I thought, am I so lonely I'm paying for someone elses company. Or in this great experience, a kindness offered. Adam, Craig's brother from New Zealand, agreed to keep an eye on the house and use it as he saw fit. As it turned out he didn't do much but watch a bit of television.

We ended up staying the night at an old friend of mine's house in the Blue Mountains. Her only downside is she works at the Child Support Agency, an organisation I, like most separated blokes, particularly dislike. We avoid the topic. For she's a lovely person. We were hauled across the coals for beliefs that hadn't even happened yet. We met at Macquarie University in the seventies, and slept together once; all those years ago. Everyone slept with everyone in those days. Well, not exactly, but in those giant share houses everything was a discovery. The sounds that passed through the house in the early hours. The unexpected appearance of unexpected people in your bed late at night. There were always secrets, the mantra exploration, not just a right but a duty.

We stayed the night not realising how tired I was, after having planned to drive through the night. Downed three strong coffees and promptly went to sleep. We had no idea, really, just how far it was. I grew accustomed to your company. Never too old for a madcap roadtrip. We stopped for a cigarette on the edge of cliffs overlooking a giant valley. We drove and we drove and we drove. Streaky Bay was the location for a film Storm Boy from the 1970s so maybe it had somehow lodged from way back then, way back when.

We drove through the gusting heat until it felt like the car would melt. We stopped at Carcoar, which I've always liked, the third oldest settled township in NSW. I did a story once on the corner cafe when it was up for sale; an absolute bargain at something like $135,000. If I'd had the money I would have bought it myself. The story sparked a mini real estate boom I was told years later, with most of the main street changing hands.
We drove through to Hay; an area I was once told was regarded as bad luck by the aborigines. Thus it always seemed to be. As a hitch hiker I always got stuck there. Concrete motels in the baking heat. But in those days, who could afford a room?

We lodged in Mildura and stayed there for a couple of days; both of us down with some sort of stomach virus.

I read Lady Killers by Martina Cole; which Peter had given me. I disposed of it later. Having it bouncing around in the back of the car seemed to mark me out as some sort of wierdo. Almost none of the characters had any redeeming features nut she tells a good story.

It was all a chimera. It could all fall apart so easily. He needed to reign himself in. His head was just all over the shop.

In the middle of the night you talk about everything.

He remembers the exact day that he got the virus.

It was March 22, 1992, some date like that; and he was with his soul mate Howard and the condom burst. You'd have to be unlucky to catch one off just like that. Everyone around him freaked out but he, in the centre of the shock, was impervious. Howard was mortified. But three years later he was dead. Leaving Col distraught, surviving. He spent 20 years or so in Brisbane; with Howard, with others; but Howard was the one. Now they're all gone, lovers past, and he lives on, the party boy. Returning to Newcastle to be close to his family, as his health worsens. He was a very good party boy, great company, always extremely funny, maybe as he says himself not so much handsome as interesting. And now here, in this strangest, most misshapen of futures, barely missing an emu, kangaroos standing noble in the early light, a goat coming from nowhere, the rabbits coming back in large numbers but this generation smart enough to stay out of the headlights. Never too old for a road trip. I wonder if these will be the last wild animals I see, he muttered to himself one bracing, beautiful morning.

Hitting The Road

I've got four weeks off from tomorrow and can't wait to get out of town. I feel devestated and worn out and just want to escape. I called in sick today, and for tomorrow, some stomach bug has laid me low. It's horrible. They're not very happy about it. I want to return bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready for a good 2006. Now, I just don't feel very together at all. Troubled dreams, throwing everything away; all the work and courage. I just can't wait to hit the road.

Still heading for Streaky Bay. I think it's about a 1500 k drive, maybe 1700. Spectacular views of churned up water, which is literally streaky.

Here's what one tourist site, travelmate.com.au, has to say about it:
"The first recorded European to set eyes on Streaky Bay was the Dutch explorer Peter Nuyts whose ship Gulden Zeepard passed off-shore in 1627, but it was left to Matthew Flinders to inscribe the name on a map in 1802. He named the Eyre Peninsula bay for the discoloured water which he assumed to be caused by the outflow of a large river but which scientists later sheeted home to an oil oozing from seaweed. The town has played an important role as a port and commercial centre for a wool and wheat producing hinterland and, increasingly in modern times, as a major fish producer and coastal resort. The commercial fishing bounty is based on King George whiting, crayfish, abalone and shark, with profitable side catches of salmon, snapper, garfish, snook, tommy ruff, trevally, squid, crabs and scallops. The town’s first building, Hospital Cottage (1864), is now a private residence." 

And Then There Was

With one kid always comes the other. They were like twins when they were small, but now as teenagers tend to squabble a bit. I guess like a lot of parents I'm a bit taken aback to suddenly be the father of teenagers, a 13 year old girl and 14 year old boy. An entirely different prospect to being the parent of doting children. My musical taste is considered so far backward as to be a public embarrassment. Any attempt to control the car radio is futile. This is Henrietta. She has just finshed Year Seven at Saint Scholastica's. She wants to be a doctor. You have to get very good marks to be a doctor, I keep telling her, but she seems determined enough.

Except she just got a D in English, which has surprised everybody as she loves reading and always has her head in a book, unlike her brother. He point blank refuses to read fiction. I read stories to them every night when they were younger, but it didn't seem to make any difference. There was always the excitement of Harry Potter. And when they were younger, the three trolls that lived under a bridge.

Both kids are up in Moree for Christmas and sound like they're having a good time; although it's very hot. Sydney is very quiet; you can leave the front door open and there's no sound of traffic. Apart from drunken arguments in the early hours of the morning the locals are quiet. Most shops are shut. All that violence; the dramatic scenes; and the anglos copped a fair bit of the blame as the commentariat went into a heightened fit of self-flagellation. There was poor behaviour on both sides, the rampaging gangs, the smashed cars. The lovies came out in force but the lovies weren't going to solve this one. We still remained shocked, on edge; trying to sweep things under the carpet because no one knew what to make of it all. All those wonderful myths about Ausrtralia being a successful multi-cultural country just went flying out the window, like a lot of pseudo-religions created by bureaucracies and elites who did nothing but pour scorn on the general population.

My old mate Colin is down overnight and plans are in full swing to head to Streaky Bay in South Australia the minute my last shift is over.

Reading Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, a sweeping sci-fi epic full of genetically and mechanically enhanced humans and magnificent scenes in Chasm City, the poisonous yellow boil of the planet outside the canopy. Have to be at Myers very early in the morning to do a story on the post-Christmas sales. You have to get that initial rush. A subject not dear to my heart. We are thinking of setting up a small publishing company through the Dads On The Air program. There's only one way forward; up and out. Expansion. Intellectual depth. The gravitas of the book form. Studying a Microsoft Word course. Ceaseless plans to do a million things, instead he smokes too many cigarettes and drinks too much coffee and just can't wait for the year to be over, to return to a purified, blessed state.

BEACHWATCH: 26/12/2005.

Adelaide Advertiser:

FEARS of violence at Sydney's Cronulla beach did not eventuate yesterday as a heavy police presence kept any trouble-makers at bay. But beachgoer numbers were down, despite the perfect weather for families to head there for Christmas Day. The beach and nearby streets were the setting for violent mobs brawling in racist clashes on December 11.
While all was quiet, locals said people were still to afraid to return..

ABC:

Tourism Australia says travel warnings advising tourists not to visit Sydney beaches have had no noticeable effect on the industry.
The Cronulla riots have prompted Britain, Canada and Indonesia to issue the advisories, which warn of the possibility of racist violence.

It's Christmas Day

Christmas Day is all about family, so here's a picture of my son Sammy. In this picture he's just on his way to the school camp last week. In all these years I've never been able to convince him to go to a school camp, he just never wanted to go. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for him I never liked school camp myself, so never pushed him. It was all about being picked on by the tough kids. The absolute horror of growing into manhood. The showers at Narrabeen; where there are all the facilities for all the schools; where my family used to go water skiing. Where us obnoxious little kids could do a round of the lake on a single ski and not so much as get wet, we were so good at the beach starts and the elegant finishes.

But this year was different. The Duke of Edinburgh Award involves planning and executing a school trip, and this has kept the boys occupied and excited for the past two months. He was so well organised, never seen anything like it. His science teacher Mr Smith is a handsome sunny bloke who's just great with the boys. They all love him because he's funny and gets them out of the classroom. They were away for three days, then Sam went up to Todd's for a couple of days before the school holidays set in, so he had a great time for a week.

Now he's gone up to be with his mother for the school holidays, as per our custody arrangements. It's all pretty simple, they live with me during the school term and her during the holidays, and it seems to be working out fine for the moment. Not that it's always been peaceful, but we don't want to dwell on that.

The city was very quiet today; almost no cars about. Hot, too, with the fire fighters predicting bad bush fires. I rang Koperburg, the head of the Rural Bush Fire Service the other day, and he was back on to me within minutes. Utterly quoteable. Old timers like me like old timers like him because he knows what he's doing, he's not frightened of the media, he's always happy to talk and he's always good for a quote; and he doesn't treat you like the enemy, or a management issue. Nor does he treat basic information as some secret resource to be dolled out in tiny fragments.

I've got four more shifts and then the month of January off. Can't wait. Looking at going to Streaky Bay in South Australia with Colin, or that's the plan at the moment. Had today off, but very quiet. Went down to Michael's for a late lunch and stuffed myself, didn't realise how hungry I was or how much I was eating. Emerging from caves for brief social interactions. Embarrassing. He's such a good cook. But with many of the old gang suffering various illnesses, the raging days are over.

Both kids are now up with their mom. I'm glad she's dealing with all the Christmas stuff, I was never very good at it. Sitting in a celebration with no cause to celebrate. My mother converted to a fundamnetalist Christian sect while we were growing up. We could har the sound of the American preacher in the early hours of the morning, when she liked to listen to what she regarded as God's representatives. We were meant to be fortunate with the knowledge that had been passed to us; here, far from the holy lands and far from the earth's main powers.

I was about 10 and my next brother down about eight when our family stopped celebrating Christmas. It was a pagan ceremony; the reindeer, the white man in the red suit, the piles of food, the gifts. On the road to excess lay the palace of wisdom goes the old saying; but was it really true?

We became the only kids on the street who didn't get Christmas presents, and we hung around with the other kids at the deadend, the beloved deadend, checking out all the things they had got; rubbing in our own deprivation. Christmas was always an awkward time; hard to get into the swing of things, particularly when you don't drink. So the kids are away in the heat in Moree, where it's up in the 40s, and we all wished each other merry christmas on the phone; in what has finally become a civilised and cooperative situation.


IRAQ WATCH:

It took a long time to get to 2000 dead American soldiers, but it seems to have hardly taken any time at all to get to 2100.

Here's some of what Reuters has to report:

By Lesley Wroughton
MOSUL, Iraq, Dec 25 (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left Iraq on Christmas Eve confident that his cautious strategy to hand over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces -- a critical component for eventually declaring victory - was working so far.
The unannounced two-day visit ending on Saturday, which followed stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan, was considered a "stock-taking mission" that had been planned for months with the intention of capitalizing on Iraq's relatively peaceful Dec. 15 parliamentary election.
In public pronouncements and private meetings, Rumsfeld showed he clearly believes that the Iraq war has entered a new phase in which the U.S. role is shifting from occupier to supporter of Iraqi forces assuming control of their nation's security.
He was careful to avoid any prediction or timetable for a U.S. withdrawal. Asked by a soldier how he would define victory, Rumsfeld calmly replied: "a situation where the political process is successful, where security forces are sufficiently competent to take over the security responsibilities."

The M7 Opening

This is Prime Minister John Howard with NSW Premier Morris Iemma and all the various M7 dignatories and operators. There were beams all round. It was Australia's first major clover like complex "engineering masterpiece". We're getting used to talking billions of dollars of infrastructure now. But it just keeps getting more and more costly to get around your own city; as if it was a luxury rather than a working necessity. Howard was still chipper and as upbeat as I have ever seen him.

The times will suit me, Howard once said, and perhaps it is a case that time has suited him. Unflagging courtesy. He gave his speach with professional aplomb, but with it now a grandfatherly twist. The M7, 40 kilometres of which were being opened up in one swoop, was an example of what could be achieved when Australians worked together, public private, bosses and workers. It was coming up Christmas and what was needed was a steady hand at the keel. Arrests and charges continue over the riots. We could see across the ribbons of roads to the flat hot plains, the colour draining in the heat with each minute that passed. He railed against injustice, but couldn't see the perpetrator. The Prime Minister remained in very good form. You should never leave yourself vulnerable.

Eight hundred extra police on the beaches this.year. There was absolutely no source of comfort in it. Christmas Eve. The kids are away now, visiting their mum in the Moree.