More and More

More and more it looks like the holiday was the right thing to do. More and more it looks like there is a price to pay, for those who dared to run completely against the stream. Col was down for a couple of days, well it was only meant to be one but turned into two through unfortunate circumstance; and he just looked haunted and not very well. I was a bit shocked by the whole thing, or disturbed anyway. It is like the arc of other people's lives dissecting your own. The kids weren't pleased to have him around, wanted him gone, particularly now he has lost his teeth in one great humiliation, and appears to them enormously, frighteningly eccentric. He said he was dying and he looked like it. I prodded him awake a couple of times because I thought he had stopped breathing.

Then by accident, when Henrietta was bustling him out the door, he forgot his money and everything else in the morning and waited outside the house in atrocious muggy heat all day for us to come home. You could have rung me, I said, I only work ten minutes away. I don't like to disturb people at work, he said. I didn't have anything much to do, it was a boring day, I remonstrated. But the deed was done. He slept all the next day, until after three o'clock. He just didn't look well, lying there. All the days of outrage and youth are gone. I want to die honourably of an Aids related disease, he said.

Death with the brotherhood. These things had been mirrored in this city a thousand times. He had only seen a few of them, in the weight of the grief, and that had been enough. There are the memorials in the star observer. The last issue a group took out a whole page for the tenth anniversary of the passing of some sunny faced long haired bloke. Most of the ones I had known had died complicated, addled, messy deaths. Secretive and unfortunate. We could telescope back to the good days; lay those over the current skeletons, the brain not working properly. Not everything was fine, but he wasn't going to roll over yet. He said goodbye, and the phones didn't answer after that. He didn't even know if he had made it back; or if he was in hospital; if this was the way it was going to end.

Pressure

There was a lot of pressure in his day to day life; snivelling into the carpet as he shook an editors hand, always wierd with authority figures; talent streaming out the fingers while the head thrombed; moving fast enough to get to work by 7.30am. Col is coming down tomorrow; after having been in hospital when they changed his medication and poisoned him; after he lost his teeth in the surf; completely embarrassing; after life churned out one too many indignities and all that was craven, all that was gone, came back to haunt him.

He remembered his loves; wished he had been more in the present, more there, when youth had stretched into the infinite. Instead of the sad dads of now; playing in the parks on Saturday, clutching themselves in neglected kitchens, living in the back of caravan parks, while the cavalcade of the self-satisfied, of over-paid public servants; of self-serving academics, of useful fools gleamed and laughed in expensive cars and expensive restaurants. None of it was fair. He didn't know why he scuttled away when they came near him; ignoring the opportunity to prove, well, that he was normal; that everything would be alright, that he was one of them.

None of them knew where it would end. The surprising beauty of the harbour; round bends, from cliff tops, in the Opera House precint, it was all part of Sydney he often forgot. He lived in the inner city suburb of Redfern, gentrifying slowly but still very rough around the edges; with the street alcoholics nearby keeping the nights alive; and work near Central, where the street alcoholics sit crowing along the sandstone walls. Got a cigarette? Got a dollar? There were cafes where almost no one went, yet somehow they continued to survive. And out there the city grew more bitter, more stressed; he could feel it, the pressures building up as the trendoids parroted their rosy version of reality while out there thousands of people's dreams were dashed against the wall every day. The Great Carr crash goes the logo in the Sydney Morning Herald at the moment, referring to the disastrous state the previous Premier Bob Carr left the state in. Today he declared, foolishly, like some overblown lying little child incapable of taking criticism, that he was proud to wear the moniker, it was his last great service to the Labor Party, to take the blame for his colleagues. What a ghastly charicature that man has become; while collecting $500,000 a year from Macquarie Bank, the bank which benefited so massively from infrastructure projects while he was Premier. Could it get more blatant? Could the Labor Party get any more corrupt?

Big City Dreaming

Another man in his sixties was found six months after his death in a housing department block called Joseph Banks, named after the settlement's first botanist. On the 15th floor of the towers of despair; or suicide towers as they are sometimes known. His skeleton just sitting at the table. A lot of people around there are off their heads in one way or another. The garbage smells at the front. It's not the place to end your days. Quiet. Reclusive man. Nobody wanted to intrude, to question where he might be.

It was Dossie's funeral today, the kids great grandmother. She helped establish one of the north shore's leading funeral parlours and so her funeral was very nicely done. The Camelia Chapel, large pink and white camelias; no expense spared.

The kids featured prominently in the photographic presentation of her life; music, flowers, expensive cotton. She was a tough old bird, that's all I can say. Moving speaches from the son and grandchildren. Not religious, she wasn't a religious person.

Clammy heat, here in the summer. The days passing with no rewind mechanism. The Opera House precincts another world entirely, the different languages of the tourists; the expensive restaurants piled on top of each other. In the car on the way back from the job the others joked: we don't know our neighbours, I'm a recluse, the only time I talk to them is to tell them not to make so much noise. We're all going to die like that, a skeleton at a table. We all laughed.

A Clash of Cultures

Always on the border of great events. This was the memorial service for Kerry Bullmore Packer, Australia's richest man for as long as anyone could remember. A woman rolled down the tinted window of a brand new grey Audi and said to the demonstrators in plummy tones: "We don't want you here."

Just before she was arrested protestor Louise O'Shea, 25, describedKerry Packer as a ``fat scum bag''. ``Stick it to the idiots who thinkKerry Packer was worth mourning,'' she told a small crowd at theentrance to the Opera House. ``He died, that is one thing in hisfavour.''Police then moved in and removed the protestors microphone and sound system, claiming inappropriate language. In an efficient crackdown, police, including two officers on horseback, arrested eight of the protestors from a group calling itself the Kerry Packer Dis-memorial Collective, made up primarily of people fromthe Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Alternative.

Two women and six men were retained in police custody for several hours. They werecharged with offences including resisting arrest, failing to complywith police directions and hindering police. The group claimed the closing down of the protest was an attack on free speach. As a stream of expensive Mercedes, BMWs and Audis dropped off theirpassengers, the group waved placards such as ``Kerry Packer Lived OffOthers and Gave Us Nothing'', ``State Funerals 4 All Not Just TheRich'' and ``Tax Cheat Packer Dead At Last''.

One protestor, Duroyan Fertl, a 27-year-old law student, said he was offended that Prime Minister John Howard was using taxpayers money toprovide a memorial service for ``an individual who dedicated his life to exploiting other people, and avoiding tax, legally or illegally.The police response was over the top.''Before her arrest Louise O'Shea described the public funding of theservice as an ``atrocity''.

``Packer is getting a state fundedmemorial while Howard is attacking the working conditions of the verypeople who worked to create Kerry Packer's fortune,'' she said.

Comedy artist Marcel Cameron, 31, from the Socialist Alliance, said Packer was a modern day Ned Kelly. ``He stole from the poor to give tothe rich,'' he said.

They also said Howard wassending a message to all Australians glorifying the extravagantlifestyle of the corporate rich and promoting an unfair and unequalAustralian society.

Organiser Peter McGregor said he was offended by the idea that KerryPacker was a great Australian and that public money was being spent ona media extravaganza for the richest man in Australia. ``His life wasnot one I admired,'' he said. ``If Kerry Packer was a great AustralianI feel like burning the flag. The arrests were appalling. The guy dida lot in his life, he was a very capable capitalist, but I am anti-capitalist. We don't see him as a hero.

The protestors received almost no sympathy from passers by, with a number labelling their behaviour as disgusting.

Northcott

This is the public housing estate of Northcott in Surry Hills, just near where I work. Sometimes I would just go and stare at it, I'm not sure why, like a centrifugal force, misery piled on misery, the heroin deals being conducted at lightning speed at its base while the cop cars cruised the block and the mentally ill stared from their balconies or kitchen windows. Shortly after you would see them, they all looked like they had been out of jail for five minutes, dashing urgently along upstairs corridors; because nothing on earth was more important than getting inside into the privacy of someone's flat.

Northcott, said to be the largest public housing complex in the southern hemisphere, has just made the news again, because a man's body was found inside, in a flat with the door open. It had been there six months, through the stinking heat of a Sydney summer; and nobody had even bothered to check where the smell was coming from or why the door was open 24/7. The 62 year old was from Eastern Europe and police have been unable to locate any living relatives.

Alerted by the Northcott story and the mounting uncollected mail, some postal workers at Umima up north decided to check on the welfare of a 79-year-old woman. The police found her skeleton, and she too had been in her home dead for six months.

While the social workers parrot on about community.

I saw Bruce one day; his hagard, expressive face, pale, sick still, although I hadn't seen him since the late seventies, early eighties. I didn't rush to say hello; I didn't rush at all. I never understood the derelction to which they sank, the grotty rooms, the eternal waiting. Bereft over the departure of the latest boyfriend, overwhelmed by the angst of it all, whatever drove him, Bruce was the bloke who shot up fly spray and was never the same again.

I didn't follow him, not exactly, but I saw him later, outside Northcott, and it all fitted into place. He had that look of someone scuttling from their cave on the housing estates to the Centrelink office and back, desperate to be outside for as short a time as possible; desperate for money when there would never be enough; another life ruined while the politicians congratulated themselves on driving up the price of heroin to a point where people like Bruce resorted to all sorts of cheap pills and concoctions, all sorts of crime and dereliction; all to get a few moment's peace before the withdrawals and the depression set in again.

Artists Of The Floating World

This is James on the dam wall at Warragamba. We barely made it. These were the moments, here in the drowned valleys that surrounded Sydney, the water at one of its lowest levels; recovering from crisis to concern. Water was a problem for the government. The $1.3 billion desalination plant had gone down like a lead balloon. Once more Iemma was wrestling with the Carr legacy. It had all come floating down these valleys, the city that had always needed more water than it could get. The problems that were flowing down towards the Labour state government after a decade in power. Iemma was next to Scully, looking as buffed as ever, gleaming almost.

Years of low rainfall had done their work, with the treeline well exposed all up the drowned valley; the concrete walls sweeping impossibly way down. Had to do a story once on the so-called yhetti which had been spotted on a number of occasions in the area around the dam. There were always people who had gone wild in the hills, since convict days.

After the presser and the huddle of politicians and the waiting cars, the local members, the water bureaucrats, the press secretary, after they left we went up to the Warragamba shops and had a pie and a drink in the shade, opposite the school, in green where it looked like nothing could go wrong. One day the rant just went into overdrive, he gave everybody the benefit of his views; till he calmed down and wished he hadn't even gone out the door that day. He could lapse into the slipstream at any moment. Saw Memoirs of a Geisha, which I liked but I'm easily pleased. The geisha is not a concubine. They are living works of art. They are the artists of the floating world. Apparently if you've read the book you're not going to like it so much. The kids great grandmother Dossy has died at the age of 90 and the funeral is on Tuesday. She was a tough old bird. Not sure she liked me very much but I never held that against her.

The Unhappiest Place In Australia

It's official, Sydney is the unhappiest place in Australia, according to a recent survey. They wrote the cannon, now they have to sing the tune; but it comes as no surprise that Sydney is the most distressed, stressed miserable and unhappy place in the country. Everyone comments how much worse it has got; a snakepit of snarling yuppies who all think they deserve to have made so much money on property; legions mortgaged to the hilt; rotten jobs, rotten traffic. It's barely worth going anywhere anymore; we get home and lock the door and just tell the whole world to get lost. In the muffled entrance to the Packer compound pictured above, the staff come and go; but for the rest of Sydney, just surviving has become a struggle.

Here's from the ABC: "Western Australians are fairly grumpy; those in inner Sydney are the most disgruntled of all, but the residents of one of the poorest areas of Queensland are the happiest Australians.These are some of the results of a survey by a Deakin University Professor which compares the well-being of people in Australia's 150 federal electorates.The Queensland seat of Wide Bay, one of the nation's poorest electorates, has come out on top, and at the bottom is the inner Sydney seat of Grayndler."

The news that Sydney is the unhappiest place in Australia comes as no surprise to to many of us who have lived here and are older than about 25, as no one seems to be anymore. The glittering city is no more, except for the very rich. For some of us the city was a bohemian paradise, Amsterdam by the sea, beacon of excitement, promising fantastic career opportunities and a great social life: a non-stop party against a backdrop of beautiful beaches and friendlylocals. Now most of us spend our days dreaming how to escape.

Sydney is a very difficult town to live in. Ourpoliticians just don't understand how deep the anger is out there. In their chauffer-driven limousines and on their outlandishly highsalaries they have no idea how impossible life has become for ordinaryworking people. If you've got a couple of kids, you're on an average wage and you've got the typical hefty Sydney mortgage, then your life has become hopelessly dispiriting. You can't afford to go out. You can't possiblyafford to stop working, to take time for yourself. When I see all those tollways, where people are basically paying to sit in traffic jams every morning, I'm amazed there aren't more incidents of road rage. The anger out there is very deep."

Like every other Sydneysider I resent paying taxes to prop up hapless bureaucracies and smug politicians. I'm in my fifties and I still work every day. But allaround me I see people who are getting paid to sit on their backsides, who get public housing and transport subsidies, free medical care. Round here they even get free lunches at the local church. But becauseI work and stand on my own two feet I get absolutely nothing. It is no surprise that two 14-year-oldgirls allegedly killed a disabled taxi driver earlier this month. No one cares about anyone else anymore. I know it's atouchy subject, but the government has deliberately promoted the transformation of the city I used to love into ethnic ghettoes. Cronulla was a good example of what we can expect in the future as aresult of these policies.

Nothing works anymore, testament to decades of bureaucratic and political incompetence. Local councils are invariably a farce. ,Just getting around Sydney is so unpleasant; the trains are appalling, the traffic unbearable.

Loops and Sparkles

This is a picture of our Lord Mayor Clover Moore, generally regarded as one of the city's greater fruit loops. She is seen as a truly hopeless mayor. Here she is being ushered down the steps of the Sydney Town Hall at the beginning of proceedings to launch the annual Chinese New Year march, part of a fortnight's celebrations to mark the event; one of the biggest outside of Hong Kong and China. Despite her impeccable left wing credentials, shortly after this picture was taken she is settled into the back of that ultimate symbol of Sydney capitalism, a black Mercedes Benz convertable. Mercedes were one of the sponsors, although car owners of the city have absolutely nothing to thank Clover for.She would be better off as mayor of Byron Bay, an upmarket hippy slash alternative haven 1000 kilometres to the north, than as Mayor of a city like Sydney. She is also, controversially, the member for Bligh, supposedly filling both roles. She is better suited as a representative for Bligh, an electorate with huge amounts of public housing, the gay capital of Australia, and with minority problems in enough array to keep any PC guardian happy for years. She wears these atrocious chokers which are meant to be some older woman fashion statement; and are just ridiculous. Once I thought she had courage and flair and sympathy for all the wild boys of Sydney; now I think nothing of the kind.

The debate on multiculturalism continues to run apace; in newspapers, on talkback. Three Labor MPs in Queensland have broken rank with the left and with the Queensland state government, questioning in an extremely well written piece why millions of dollars of public money are being poured into a policy which undermines the mainstream culture and destroys the cohesion of the broader community. Which is creating the very prejudice, narrow mindedness and violence which it was meant to eradicate. Typical of this disgusting bureaucratic public service class were all the sneers at the old Australia, the Australia a generation of soldiers had been foolish enough to fight for, and die for. It's about time these questions were asked; and asked baldly, risking the usual Stalinesque denunciation by the luvvies of racism against anybody who dares to disagree with them. We are plagued with the half-educated; the Useful Fools; so many utterly incapable of thinking outside the square; parroting their first year university courses. I can remember the excitement in anthropology when it was decreed that all cultures were equally valid; a revalation, supposedly, when we had always believed that our own Western culture was the pinnacle of civilisation.

But the endless claptrap of tolerance had in itself become a tyranny. The people were excluded from the debate, because the so-called elites had entirely marshalled the public discourse; particularly in print and at the ABC where they were most comfortable. He was irritated by all of them. The week had passed at last and he couldn't have been more relieved. Col was supposed to show up today and didn't; and his phones were off. I half suspected; as he had said he was going to pay me back some of the money the holiday had cost. I should of known, well I half-suspected; and if I was in this state; if the world had been that cruel; if my own dissolution had reached such an advanced stage; if I had lost my teeth in the surf and was too embarrassed to go outside; maybe I would have done the same. The quiet reserves that could have been ours, the Amsterdam cafes; the world that we had embraced with such gusto; the memories of John Bygate and Lyn Hapgood and Richard Trevaskis and people no one else but us would even remember; we would make the dash in secret and yes, forget to pay a bill, even to an old friend. His craven heart was happier now; a shift; he didn't know why. Perhaps it was just the kids being back and things settling down; after a prolonged hand-over of chaos; watching a train wreck disappearing over the horizon. He didn't care; he wouldn't care; he uttered sympathetic noises and wished he could reverse the progress of time. Swiftly, he became more accomplished; did the jobs quickly, batted the balls back across the court so fast they could barely be seen. And if survival was not a victory, to him it felt exactly that.

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.