Thor's Australian Spaces

In spite of waddling locals with voices like swamp frogs and the tattooed pub denizens, Australia is not such a bad place. Life is almost too easy, and the facilities are wonderful. It is a pity that it is so damned expensive. I could almost, but not quite, break even on the money front. By living frugally, I could gently sink into Australian poverty for a little time, while dreaming of heading off, perhaps, to live like a king on my pension in some low-cost corner of the world.

Stranded at yet another celestial bus stop on life’s journey, I pondered on how to save cash. The solution was familiar: split the rent in a share house with some characters allotted by fate. This time it was three women and an apprentice upholsterer. When I moved in, the lady owner had messages to her god stuck all over the walls, so I had to decontaminate my room of holy spirits immediately. She was not a bad old stick, and one day suddenly fell head over heels in love with a plumber, who decided to take her around the world. Continue reading →

Mutton wrapped up as lamb, make a silk purse from a sow’s ear … there are plenty of idioms about ugliness wanting to be something else. Wishing Cinderella style, any number of unlucky maidens are celebrated in fairytales for a midnight transformations, though sometimes they have to kiss a frog. Now as one of the world’s certified uglies, the man-brand, I should have flocked together long ago with some of those unblessed ladies. If truth be told though I’ve never been able to get hot and flustered about barnyard animals, cane toads, or mountains of human flesh (of either gender). Yup, it’s unreasonable and politically incorrect, but there you go. In unexpected corners of the Ark Earth I strike up marvellous conversations, meet heroines and villains, revel in the human drama with every imaginable mishapen kind of critter, but when it comes to the hot flame of romance, the visuals can stir and quench one’s heart in ways that defy reason. In vain my mother, despairing at my failure to be decently married by a proper age, pleaded that all cats are grey in the dark.

These observations come from sitting on the concourse at Central Railway Station, Brisbane, a bum-parking spot I’ve come to know well after missing yet another hourly train by thirty seconds for the umteenth time. The late evening exhibition at Central is something to behold. Here is the mating parade, Australian style. These are not middle-aged mums on forlorn weekend magazine diets, or the waddling mountains of flesh a generation older. No, it’s twenty-one year old chickens heading off to their compulsory mosh pits of binge drinking and bad music. They come wrapped like sushi rolls in fragile wisps of cloth that stop two centimetres below their crotches, with the top lopped off for a generous bulge of tit cleavage. Shoals of them teeter past on stilettos. I should be vibrating like a tuning fork, but it’s limp sausage time, worse, repulsion. I’m sure they all love their cats and even make their beds sometimes, but these girls are FAT, fat as in an overfed, self-indulgent animal-population-out-of-control herd. The genes that forever bar us from movie star good looks, me or them, come with a throw of the cosmic dice, but the gluttony and sloth that grows slobs is all our own making. Maybe the wistful eye of blokes like me is not so new either. With his uncanny knack for catching the soul of the Ark Earth in a resonant phrase or two, Rudyard Kipling said it all in 1890 in Mandalay:

I am sick o’ wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and —
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

I live on a quiet street. The traffic might be three cars a day. Outside of my window now though, a huge white truck has just arrived. It must be worth as least $150,000. Three hefty men climb down from the cab. One folds his arm and watches. One picks up a rake from the back of the truck, and one picks up a scoop. I’m a bit mystified because this is the kind of street that has nicely trimmed lawns, definitely a short-back-and-sides street where people tidily roll out their council bin once a week and dust their letter boxes. The swat team in their fluorescent jackets has seen something though that eluded my careless gaze. In the gutter is a small collection of leaves. Heck, there must be twenty leaves. So the man with the rake swats the leaves into the scoop man’s scoop, and the scoop man solemnly tips the leaves into the back of the truck. The supervisor unfolds his arms and they climb back into their monster truck. The machinery rumbles off with an enormous roar, enough power to generate electricity for a small town.

Thursday night, bus from a Brisbane suburb. The passengers are overwhelmingly 20 somethings going into town for a night out. The largest proportion are ethnic Indian and Chinese. Just inside the door, two transport police are being officious, checking everyone. Halfway into the journey an old Aboriginal man staggers onto the bus. He is very, very drunk, can hardly stand up. He takes maybe five minutes to find a fare in his rags. He smells like a brewery. This character lurches down the aisle uttering incoherent threats to everyone in general, the only connective word being fuck… fuck… fuck. The transport cops look appalled and conflicted. What should they do? At the next stop they suddenly discover that they both have an urgent need to be on another bus.

Nice to hear from you Kang. Quite a surprise. What’s paying for your bibimbap nowadays? Sentimental for old times? That’s not allowed until you have killed all your enemies, stolen the kingdom, and retreated with twenty concubines into luxurious degeneration.

Me? I’m in critter shock, trying to work out where a place called Australia went. Yeah, I know, you want to say that it never existed except in my imagination… Whatever. Stuff around here in Australia is strange. In the twelve years that I was away something has happened to my head, or to the natives, or both. Members of the species under 30, male or female, are now mostly covered from head to toe (and apparently on more private parts too) with amazingly ugly tattoos. To harmonize with this, uh, branding, every orifice in their body is punctured with silver studs, punched through the skin, and no doubt receiving coded messages from another planet. Today I saw one of these beings with a bar-code tattooed on her arm. I suppose that makes it easier at the cosmic checkout where they are bought as pets. Meanwhile the elders of the original tribe, fed on a pure diet of sugar and pain killers, drift about like enormous balloons, and make grunting sounds that sound for all the world like swamp frogs. I speak here of my ethnic forebears, the Anglos.

The streets are now also populated with huge numbers of celestial citizens pretending to be Chinese students, while the government, apparently in fear that they will wake up one morning to find Beijing’s blood red banner flying on the Prime Minister’s limousine, has now admitted an equal number of Indians (almost invisible here twelve years ago) to work in the 7/11 shops when they are not coding math to keep the country running, Original Australians of course all gave up maths in junior high school, when they had learned enough to fill out a lotto ticket. I guess the devious hidden master plan is that the Chinese and the Indians can fight each other to the death while the Anglo Aussies get on with drinking beer.