A sense of place

A sense of place

October 15, 2005

Place is crucial to all Australians. It is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny, argues Hugh Mackay.

ONE OF the silliest ways of trying to put cultural distance between Aborigines and other Australians - particularly those of Anglo-Celtic stock living in the suburbs - is by attributing to indigenous people a mystical sense of place, a special relationship with the land that transcends anything we urban types could comprehend.

It's all rubbish, of course. Not the special relationship bit; that's true enough. What's rubbish is the idea that the sense of place is unique to indigenous people, or even that it's more special, more "spiritual" for them than for us.

Different cultures obviously have different ways of expressing their sense of place; we revere our "tribal grounds" in different ways.

But connection to place is vital to our sense of identity - both personal and communal.

In fact, I suspect that much of the uneasiness, anxiety and moral uncertainty of modern urban societies can be traced to our loss of a strong sense of continuous connection with places that help to define us. Cyberspace, it turns out, is no substitute for the real thing.

So where did we get this weird idea that a relationship to the land is important only in agrarian, nomadic or hunting cultures?

In Australia, the continuing debate about land rights has been part of the problem (and no, this is not a polemic against land rights; on the contrary).

We say "Mabo" and we think "land", and so we should. But many Australians say "indigenous" and think only of land, as if the sense of place is uniquely magical and central in Aboriginal culture.

Perhaps I need only mention the MCG, Flemington, the SCG, the WACA or the Gabba to make the rather obvious point that urban Australia has places of almost mystical significance - places that symbolise deeply embedded cultural values and mark the location of great struggles, great triumphs, great defeats and great outpourings of human emotion.

Sport may not be your thing, and you might think I'm belittling indigenous culture by daring to mention sporting venues in the same breath as Aboriginal sacred sites.

But you'd have to be either prejudiced or blind not to have noticed the profound, if not spiritual, significance of such places as settings for the acting out of ancient and primitive tribal rituals of the battle and the hunt.

If sport doesn't do it for you, think of Gallipoli, Changi or the Kokoda Trail. Think of the Australian War Memorial, or the smaller memorials - parks, plaques, obelisks and halls scattered across Australia, marking the spots where homage is regularly paid to those who made supreme sacrifices on our behalf. Those places matter, their location essential to their role.

Still unconvinced? Revisit your primary school playground, then, or a classroom you once sat in.

The powerful sense of that place - the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it - will stir all kind of emotions in you, positive and negative, not accessible via mere memory.

Those emotions spring from deep wells of half-forgotten longing; reservoirs of an aching simplicity; the momentous nothingness of a child's life lived without any real sense of a past and not much connection with the idea of a future that once yawned in our faces, but has already swirled past us.

Go to the suburb where you grew up (it's probably not very far from where you live now, stamping grounds being what they are) and walk the footpaths, the shops where you strolled and loitered as a teenager; the park where you learned to kick a football, fly a kite or trained your dog to fetch; the backyard where you took your first catch or learned to skip, climb, hide or whistle. Not significant? Go and have a look.

The rush of recognition when we hear songs that supplied the soundtrack to our adolescence and early adulthood is an evocation of place as much as time, because the places matter.

You can see how much they matter when they're torn down or ripped apart. The cinema where you learned about good and evil writ large now a Persian rug shop, forever closing down.

And whatever happened to that corner? Why have they widened the road? Where is the ...

Where is the ... Hey! Where is the house I grew up in? Where is my neighbour's house? Shocking stuff, the removal or disruption of place.

The place where you worked at your first job. The quad at your university, the lawns where you lay in the sun, scarcely daring to believe she was feeling as you were feeling (and usually finding she wasn't). The harbour. The river. The lake. The holiday destination with its beaches, or its mountain tracks. The caravan park, year after year. Go back and feel it. Sense it. Tell me it doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't have to be a primitive, unspoiled place. It doesn't have to be grass and rocks and trees and streams. Ask the people who live in Carnegie if those places mean something more than just spaces to sleep and walk and eat in. They don't have to be charming, trendy, beautiful or even well defined.

"My street" is magic in every nuance, and sometimes the magic lingers: I have two streets like that - one in Sydney, one in Melbourne - where an occasional pilgrimage is both reassuring and gut-churning (that tree, that hedge, that fence, that veranda, those ghosts).

What about the cathedrals, churches, chapels, courts and concert halls - places that have enclosed and inspired some of our most numinous, uplifting, heartbreaking or clarifying moments?

Or the places where we stood and heard terrible news: we know where we were when we heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, or the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre because we were rooted to the spot.

And there are places we never want to go to again, because they contain demons or ghosts we know will catch us if we venture too close. I know of one man who will never, under any circumstances, visit his old school again; another who refuses even to drive down the street where he grew up in a desperately unhappy family.

Why would he: the place is the most powerful of all the symbols of his unhappiness.

Some places contain our personal secrets, but places also create and capture our sense of belonging to a community: indeed, it's arguable if we can hold on to a sense of community without anchoring it to places.

The places where we . . . where the family . . . where our neighbours . . . The places that stood for our emerging sense of ourselves as people who belong somewhere, and don't belong somewhere else.

The sense, as a child, of even the next street being alien, let alone the next suburb. The sense of a relative's house in a distant suburb being like an oasis of familiarity in a desert of strangeness. Tribal grounds? Stamping grounds? Of course; what else?

What's less mystical about any of that than the mystical status of place in indigenous culture? It is neither to detract from that culture, nor to honour it any less, to say that place is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny.

It's also fundamental to our sense of morality. Only when we feel connected to others do we seem willing to accept some responsibility for their wellbeing.

The real test of our moral sensitivity is not how nice we are to our friends and family members, but how we treat the people who share the places where we live and work, whether we happen to like them or not. (Funny how we so carefully choose the places where we'll live, but not the people we'll have as neighbours. Did you ever interview the people in the street before you bought a house? No; it was the place that spoke to you.)

Places shape us. Living in a mean little concrete box will take its toll on you, as surely as the design of Parliament House will shape the attitudes and behaviour of the politicians who work in it.

If you're interested in raising the moral tone of a community, look first to the creation of spaces where people can meet, walk, talk, play, eat, drink. (Is the regional shopping mall really the best we can do? Did any community ever find its soul in such a place?)

The places where we discover the magical sense of being connected to a neighbourhood - the pub, the park, the church, the schoolyard, the shops - lodge in our memory.

The "global village", by contrast, is just a hoax perpetrated by the high priests of the IT revolution. Villages, urban or otherwise, need real places to foster the incidental connections - the smiles, the nods - of village life. Falling in love on the net is usually a hoax, too: love needs a place to grow, just as herd animals need a place to graze together. One video screen is much the same as another (a bit like shopping centres and airports), whereas real places are unique. Cyberspace is a clever name, but we must resist the idea that it bears any relation to the other kind.

Our problem is not that we lack the yearning for a sense of place; that yearning is universal. Our problem, especially compared with Aborigines, is that we've often failed to acknowledge the deep need in ourselves.

Aborigines don't have a mortgage on the sense of place, but they could teach the rest of us a thing or two about how to nurture it.

Hugh Mackay is an author and social commentator.

UK Aussies a refined lot

By James Button

Europe Correspondent
London

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/29/1127804608188.html

September 30, 2005

SHE is in her 20s, working as a professional and earning the equivalent of $50,000 to $150,000 a year. Though she plans to return home one day, she has a British husband and is even buying her home. Meet the typical Australian living in Britain.

It's a far cry from the "Bazza McKenzie" and backpacking image of Australians in London.

In a paper given to a London conference yesterday, Adelaide geographer Graeme Hugo cited Australian Immigration Department statistics showing that 46 per cent of Australians who make permanent or long-term departures to Britain are now professionals, while a further 10 per cent are managers and administrators.

Professor Hugo said young Australian women were more likely than men to engage in what he calls "rite-of-passage migration" to Britain.

Two-thirds of people who left Australia for the UK in the past 10 years were aged 20 to 29, and nearly 56 per cent of them were female — a contrast to usual emigration figures, which are dominated by men.

While some educated emigrants may be pulling beers in a London pub, another survey of Australian graduates working in Britain showed that 30 per cent were earning the equivalent of $100,000 or more, and another 33 per cent more than $50,000.

Of the 660 graduates surveyed, two-thirds were married. Of these, a third had an Australian partner, while half had a partner born in the UK. A quarter had married since they left Australia. While 55 per cent planned to return to Australia one day, more than half owned or were buying a home in the UK.

Presented at The Australian Diaspora in Britain since 1901, a conference funded by Monash University's Institute for the Study of Global Movements, Professor Hugo's paper shows profound changes in the movement of people between Australia and Britain in the past 30 years.

While fewer Britons are leaving to live permanently in Australia (the UK share of Australia's overseas-born population is at an all-time low of 25 per cent) since the 1990s there has been a "spectacular increase" in people on working holidays and tourists. After the Japanese, Britons now comprise the largest number of short-term visitors to Australia.

The changes reflect shifts in "global international migration away from settlement migration to increased circularity in flows but also a shift in Australian immigration policy, which for the first time, (has) allowed substantial temporary immigration for work," Professor Hugo said.

Among other changes, in 2001 and 2002, "there were more permanent departures from Australia to the UK" than the other way, reversing a 200-year pattern. While it is unclear how many Australians live in the UK — many are not counted in the census — Professor Hugo cited several estimates of 300,000.

Inside Australia's third world

September 15, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/14/1126377372484.html


What sort of future do they face? Children atop a burnt out car as they play.
Photo: Glenn Campbell

Children begging for food, chronic health problems, overcrowded houses - this is not some basket-case nation but the reality of Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. As world leaders gather in New York to discuss poverty, Lindsay Murdoch looks at the distress in our own backyard.

Tracker Tilmouth points angrily at a tin shanty where 23 Aborigines are living in squalor. "Take a look. That's not only a disgrace. It symbolises what I believe amounts to a form of cultural and social genocide," he says. "This is as bad as anywhere on Earth, right here on Australian soil."

Tilmouth knows more than most about Aboriginal poverty, poor health, high crime, alcoholism and substance abuse. Snatched from relatives living in an Alice Springs creek bed when he could barely walk, Tilmouth has spent most of his life in remote indigenous communities.

New research shows that a population explosion and 30 years of under-funding in education, health and infrastructure has created a social time-bomb in these communities. "I have to speak out now because things are getting worse for people in these communities," says 53-year-old Tilmouth, a former head of the Central Land Council, the peak Aboriginal body in central Australia. "The system delivering services to these places has collapsed. But nobody wants to talk about it. Governments have one last chance to get it right or else they will be dealing with a catastrophe."

Bob Beadman probably knows more about the problems of Aboriginal Australians than any other non-indigenous person.

He also says it is time to speak out to shock Australia about the state of remote indigenous communities.

The former top public servant, who is chairman of the Northern Territory Grants Commission, says that 30 years of policies that bureaucrats considered generous have failed tragically because they ruled Aborigines out of having any effective role in their own lives.

We just want to be a normal part of Australia
with all the services and opportunities that
are available to the rest of you."
LEON MELPI, elder.

"We are now on the rocks," he says. "We need to fundamentally set a new course and abandon the old tiller settings. People need to be shocked. They need to be moved from their tacit acceptance that everything is okay. A huge task confronts the nation and particularly Aborigines themselves."

Beadman says that people need to abandon political correctness and tackle the taboos associated with indigenous communities such as child molestation, family violence and poor diet and personal hygiene. "Only when the dirty linen is put out for the wash will it be washed," he says.

But Beadman says that above everything, Aborigines need to be reengaged so that momentum for change comes from them. "They have been encouraged to think ... that government would prefer them to be paid to sit down rather than to work," he says.


Children outside a dilapidated house.
Photo:Glenn Campbell

"Billions of dollars have been thrown at this problem and we still have a deteriorating outcome."

University lecturer Steve Sunk has decided to expose what is happening in remote indigenous communities where he has worked for the past eight years in the hope that community elders will get the same help that is available to other Australians.

He has written to the Northern Territory's Chief Minister, Clare Martin, to tell of children in these communities who are starving and begging for food from teachers.

Appealing for urgent government action, including protection and daily meals, the Charles Darwin university lecturer says that children are being raped and "there is a lot of molesting and incest going on with the kids and it's too disgusting to mention the facts".

"They (children) are sleeping on concrete floors, they don't have the luxury of a mattress even to share with a camp dog," Sunk says in the previously unpublished letter. "Kids have sores all over which are not healing up because of lack of proper food."

Research by the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research reveals that fertility rates in 1300 remote indigenous communities are so high that the present total population of about 100,000 could double in 20 to 25 years.

John Taylor, a senior fellow at the centre, believes that unlike the rest of rural Australia, where economies are shrinking and populations declining, the "clock is ticking for remote indigenous communities".

Speaking in Wadeye - the largest remote community, 420 kilometres south-west of Darwin, where he is updating his earlier research - Taylor warns that unless there is an immediate major response from governments, the cost of attempting to fix the inevitable social dysfunction in the future will be enormous.

He says the communities have remained largely out of sight of mainstream Australia, which for years "managed to avert its glance".

But as the communities become increasingly accessible and open to the outside world "Australia cannot afford to avoid them any more."

The problems confronting Wadeye, a former Catholic mission with a population of about 2100, are similar to those of other remote communities.

An average of 17 people live in each sweltering, graffiti-covered house such as the one that Tilmouth pointed out. Almost half the population is under 15, most of the teenagers cannot speak English, infant mortality is four times the national average and life expectancy is 20 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians. Up to 80 per cent of the prisoners in Northern Territory jails are indigenous and many of them are from remote communities.

The administrators and elders in almost all the remote communities complain of a lack of basic services that are available to other Australians.

Many of the communities look like Third-World refugee camps. There are no banks, high schools, libraries, bitumen roads, child-care centres, restaurants, old people's homes or even privately owned service stations, milk bars or hardware stores - the sort of facilities you would see in a town of similar size elsewhere in Australia.

While thousands of well-paid public servants from federal and NT departments work on indigenous matters in air-conditioned offices in Darwin and Alice Springs, administrators in remote communities complain that their pleas for help mostly go unanswered.

Ngukurr, a community at the edge of Arnhem Land, asked for eight months for help on chronic petrol sniffing among teenagers. One social worker with expertise in the problem arrived for one day.

Wadeye, which has a new, invigorated governing body based on centuries- old traditions, has declared that enough is enough. It is planning to sue the NT Government for years of neglect of its children's education.

According to a report written by Taylor, the community receives less than half the education funding for each child compared with the average for the rest of the Territory.

But remote communities lower the average and Taylor says that a direct comparison between Wadeye and Darwin is likely to be many times worse.

The revelations about the state of life in remote communities come amid signs that a bold experiment by the Howard Government to trial a "whole of government" approach to delivering services to 10 indigenous communities, including Wadeye, is faltering.

In early August, federal Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson was taken aback when she was told during a visit to Wadeye that community elders were close to quitting the second stage of the Council of Australian Governments trial.

Patterson, whose department leads the trial in Wadeye, was not aware that the community was missing help from government departments because it was wrongly believed it was getting all the help it needed from COAG.

A report written in August by Wadeye's Thamarrurr council told COAG that the trial was "placing unsustainable pressure on council members and staff and on council resources". The report suggested that the trial had caused the community to chase its tail. "We have come across our own tracks many times," the report said. "Our people ask ‘how can this be?' "

Of $1.3 million allocated to another COAG trial in the Far-East Kimberley region of Western Australia, only $327,000 was spent on Aboriginal people and programs over two-and-a-half years.

The rest of the money was spent on salaries, travel and other related administrative expenses of the Department of Transport and Regional Services, which administers the program.

Tilmouth described COAG as a Band-Aid solution and a waste of time. "There are so many meetings that they have to hold more meetings to discuss the problem of so many meetings," he said.

As the Howard Government pushes Shared Responsibility Agreements it has negotiated directly with communities such as Wadeye, Aboriginal leaders and administrators in central and northern Australia are questioning how much of federal funds that are sent to the NT Government to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage actually reaches communities.

Norman Fry, the chief executive officer of the Northern Land Council, the peak indigenous organisation in northern Australia, says that spending on indigenous health, housing and other programs by the NT Government remains a "deep, dark secret" that his organisation wants investigated.

He says the truth about Aboriginal funding "must be exposed so that the true causes of dysfunction in remote communities may be addressed".

Northern Land Council chairman John Daly told the National Indigenous Times last month that "every indicator and every report points to serious concerns with the Northern Territory Government's expenditure of monies targeted for Aboriginal disadvantage".

Indigenous leaders point to reports that just over $1.5 billion of the $4 billion of the GST revenue expected to be collected in NSW and Victoria in 2005-06 will go to the NT Government to meet the needs of Territory Aborigines.

They say that $1.5 billion is more than the entire national budget of the now-dismantled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. They point out that while ATSIC's taxpayer funds were spent primarily on work-for-the-dole and infrastructure maintenance programs, the NT Government is responsible for education, health and infrastructure.

Indigenous leaders in the Territory regard education as the most important priority and want to see an exact account of where the money is being spent.

Taylor says that on any school day, only a quarter of children of school age in remote communities actually sit down behind a desk. But the NT Government continues to receive 100 per cent federal funding for these children's education.

The delivery of health services is also one of the main areas of concern. The NT receives about $115 million from the Federal Government for Aboriginal health.

Territory indigenous leaders strongly believe that, following the demise of ATSIC, the Howard Government should establish powerful regional authorities that would receive and distribute Commonwealth funds for disadvantaged Aborigines.

Both the Darwin-based Northern Land Council and the Alice Springsbased Central Land Council have told Canberra that they believe it would be more efficient for federal funding not to be sent first to mainstream government departments and agencies.


Beadman, a former head of the NT Office of Aboriginal Development who has written a report on the future of Aboriginal youth for the Menzies Research Centre, says the establishment of strong regional authorities would be a "better co-ordinating mechanism for state and territory-level funding and federal funding".

Leon Melpi, a respected elder of Wadeye, is fed up with bureaucrats coming to the community with pieces of paper to discuss one solution or another. "They should stay away and do their business and not come back until they have a final solution," he says.

"All I will say is that we want to deal directly with the people who actually make the decisions that affect us. We want to cut out the middle man."

In the meantime, Melpi is planning to build an ecologically friendly motel on his land above a magnificent, white sand beach that few non-indigenous people have ever stepped foot on.

"We just want to be a normal part of Australia with all the services and opportunities that are available to the rest of you," he says.

Topping the kitsch list

Topping the kitsch list
August 19, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/topping-the-kitsch-list/2005/08/18/1123958136462.html

Fiona Scott-Norman analyses why actors bother to release albums.

Different things bring joy to different people. Some folks are elated by the advent of spring, others by the birth of a new child, still others are exultant if they score a free baseball cap from the back of a Fox Black Thunder.

For me, the most recent fast-track to joy town was the discovery that William Shatner and Russell Crowe have released new albums. I know: it doesn't get much better than that.

Crowe's downloadable solo album of original folk tunes is called My Hand, My Heart, and it is a significant release for two reasons.

One, because it raises the important question: which other body part did Russ have his hand on?

And, two, it is a welcome addition to the always irresistible world of kitsch musical recordings, the collecting of which can quickly burgeon into an addiction.

There are as many gloriously dubious musical releases as there are angels bootscooting on the head of a pin.

There are child stars (hello Nikki! Could be worse. At least you were born too late for Young Talent Time), religious albums featuring grim-faced and unlovely Christian families on their covers (most of these releases, disturbingly, originated in Waco, Texas), and there's also a small, seething pit of out-and-out megalomaniacal wrongness - Charles Manson and Imelda Marcos spring to mind.

Yes, they both have albums, eponymously named. Manson's is as ghastly an effort as you'd expect from a deranged killer, and Imelda, disappointingly, let slip through her elegant, thieving fingers the opportunity to claim These Boots Are Made for Walking as her signature tune.

The grand pooh-bah of them all, of course, is William Shatner. His transfixing 1968 recording The Transformed Man immediately achieved - and retains to this day - cult kitsch status, which is why a new album from him, 36 years later - titled Has Been - is so intriguing.

The Transformed Man came out at the height of Shatner's fame as Star Trek's Captain Kirk and was a hysterical, self-absorbed, psychedelic, sincere, spoken-word experiment, with Shatner talking his way through the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It is unlistenable without the appropriate medication and therein lies its charm.

Russell Crowe, having already released several albums with the uncomfortably named and now defunct Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, was also already a card-carrying member of the collectable kitsch celebrity subset: Actors Who Are Convinced They Are Serious Artistes/Rock Stars.

It's an exclusive club in which Crowe and Shatner rub shoulders with fellow serious not-so-young insects Eddie Murphy, Don Johnson, Craig McLachlan, Bruce Willis and even Tony Barber.

The paradox that traps all of these actors in a vortex of torment is that the fame that gives them the platform to launch a music career makes it essentially impossible for anyone to take them seriously.

Tony Barber, despite releasing many albums, has never broken out as a singer and overcome his image as Australia's perky quizmaster.

The others - especially Murphy, Crowe and Johnson - are all earnest singer/songwriters but hopelessly associated with the devalued currency of the celebrity album, where anyone with a spot of fame whacks out an album to cash in.

John Travolta, for example, released an album at 22 on the back of Welcome Back Kotter; other hit-and-run celeb offerings came from Cameron Daddo, Scott Baio (aka Chachi from Happy Days), Pia Zadora, Twiggy, Dennis Waterman, Leonard Nimoy, Torvill and Dean, John Laws, Don Lane, Bernard King (Pot of Gold) and Abigail (No. 96 and the first woman to get her breasts out on Australian television).

King and Abigail at least had their tongues firmly in their cheeks; King's A Man of Style is as camp as all get out, and following from her hit cover of Serge Gainsbourg's Je t'aime - on which she simulated an orgasm - Abigail released an album so stuffed with double entendres that Benny Hill would have suggested toning it down.

Understandably, the general public, when confronted with an album from Don Johnson at the height of his pink-jacketed and designer-stubbled Miami Vice fame, was not going to put him in the same creative basket as, say, Madonna or Bowie, even though the songs were original and he'd collaborated with Tom Petty.

Ditto Willis and his blues album The Return of Bruno on the back of the Moonlighting TV series. Ditto Captain Kirk of Star Trek releasing The Transformed Man, and Russell Crowe releasing My Hand, My Heart off assaulting a hotel employee with a telephone.

As Crowe attempts to reinvent himself as a sensitive, guitar strumming, folk balladeer, writing songs about cane cutters, his wife and deaths in the family, it may cross his mind that it's difficult to get the credibility you crave when you present in public as an antisocial wingnut.

What must be especially galling for Crowe is that the more seriously he takes himself, the greater the credibility gap, and the more ridiculous he becomes - and Crowe takes himself and his music very, very seriously.

When he first flagged the existence of My Hand, My Heart he invited a journalist into his home and spent 4 hours explaining his songs. That's not an interview, that's a hostage situation.

You can approximate the experience for yourself by visiting http://www.myhandmyheart.com. Crowe explains the history of every song, every thought, in extravagant, almost compulsive, detail; gives you three different potential over-designed CD covers to vote for (one made of wood, another an oil painting of Russ); and displays quotes from Billy Bragg and Sting praising Crowe's songwriting.

A fan site contains a blog from Crowe complaining that he's misunderstood, but to be fair, it's not for want of him explaining.

It's not Crowe's music (an unremarkable but pleasant and sincere folk album) that places My Hand, My Heart on the kitsch list; it's Crowe.

In stark contrast, Has Been lifts William Shatner entirely out of the abject company of Crowe et al.

Collaborating with Ben Folds, Joe Jackson, Henry Rollins and a kick-arse choir, Shatner has created a genuinely great album; funny, compelling, moving, sophisticated and self-aware.

His cover of Pulp's Common People has been getting justified airplay, and the entire project emanates wisdom and fun.

The secret is actually quite simple - after 36 years, Shatner learned to stop taking himself seriously.

Dealing with the X factor

Dealing with the X factor
July 30, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/dealing-with-the-x-factor/2005/07/29/1122144004015.html

Douglas Coupland is still haunted by the extraordinary impact of his first book. Before his visit to Melbourne, he speaks to Ben Naparstek.

Douglas Coupland recently chewed up several of his novels with his molars. He then sculpted hornets' nests from the mush. For the Vancouver writer and visual artist, who feels closer to art society than the literati, the exercise made for an intellectually satisfying meal.

"For years I've been thinking, 'What is a book materially? When does the book stop being a book and become a sculpture? Or is a book a sculpture in itself?', " says the writer credited with introducing the term generation X into the popular lexicon with his 1991 novel of the same name.

Coupland fell into writing almost by accident, while living in Hawaii after graduating from art school. A magazine editor in Vancouver, amused by one of Coupland's postcards, asked him to write an article.

At first, journalism was merely a side gig to shore up his income as an artist. Then he began writing a regular comic strip, Generation X, for a corporate magazine. It attracted the attention of a New York publisher, who commissioned Coupland to write a lifestyle handbook for his age cohort.

Coupland produced a novel instead but the title, illustrations and vernacular glossary planned for the original non-fiction book remained. Published when Coupland was 29, Generation X portrays three disaffected 20-something "slackers" who withdraw to a desert bungalow in California. They shun the society controlled by rich baby boomers, hogging the spoils while consigning their offspring to low-paying "McJobs".

Coupland claimed, however innocently, that he only wanted to tell a story. Despite his protests that generation X referred to a particular mind-state rather than his generation, the book was hijacked by social anthropologists and advertising agencies, casting Coupland as the ring bearer of the prematurely jaded generation.

As Coupland reached rock star status, the inevitable false rumours started circulating; he was said to live in Scotland, store letters in a vault and collect meteorites. Thirteen books on, it's understandable that he should bridle at being asked about the X phenomenon. "Good God! It's 2005."

Yet, despite his attempts to distance himself from the spokesman-for-a-generation mantle, his novels continued to tap into the anxieties of post-baby boomers, while remaining pocked with up-to-the-minute schlock-culture references.

Coupland suffered a critical backlash with his next books, Shampoo Planet and Life after God, where he was seen as failing to move beyond the cool phrase-making, lists and aphorisms of his debut. "My 15 minutes of fame ended somewhere around 1993."

His image was rehabilitated with his 1995 novel Microserfs, a satire of computer programming apparatchiks that The New Statesman called "the first great work of cyber-realism".

Coupland's latest novel Eleanor Rigby is possibly his most autobiographical work. It is narrated by Liz Dunn, an overweight 42-year-old cubicle worker, who sleepwalks through life with no passions or aspirations, and lives alone without friends, lovers or pets.

The novel stems from the loneliness that dogged Coupland throughout his 20s. He thought he needed to swallow more Prozac. Only in retrospect did he identify his malaise as loneliness - an affliction without a drug cure. Coupland thinks that the Canadian high school curriculum should introduce a new subject: Loneliness 101.

"If they told us in school that there was this weird thing you were going to experience the moment you turn 20, that would have been a great service. It might be just a North American thing but you always have to smile for the camera and give it your best. Negative emotions, or inevitable emotions, never get discussed."

Coupland believes that most protagonists automatically become synonymous with the latest Hollywood pin-up in the reader's imagination. With the obese Liz, Coupland forecloses that possibility.

"We really do have these generic, interchangeable hero and heroine characters in our head. You have to work really, really hard to combat the tendency to default back to that generic narrator."

It occurred to Coupland, while working on Eleanor Rigby, that he was writing to his younger self.
"I used to operate under the belief that everyone has as good a chance as anyone else. Now, at a ridiculously late age, I realise that looks, family and education wildly skew people's lives. I figured out how and why the world works quite late in the game. I wish I hadn't been as clueless as I was."

As with his previous novel Hey Nostradamus!, there's an ambiguous religious undertow to Eleanor Rigby. Hey Nostradamus! was partly narrated by the ghost of a victim of a Columbine-style school shooting, whose body is found next to a binder on which she has scrawled: "God is nowhere/God is now here."

In Eleanor Rigby, the heroine's long-estranged, now terminally ill son, re-enters her life as a Christ-like figure to nudge her towards redemption. While he has apocalyptic visions of items dropping from the sky, there's never any question that they're illness-related hallucinations.
So is Coupland religious? "That's one of those questions where if you answer in the affirmative it means you're not. I like to think of myself as being religious, but it's something you really have to work at, or else you stop being it very quickly."

Coupland's trademark offhand prose, sitcom-like repartee and outlandish chance events remain in force in his last two books. Yet there's also a compassionate, moralistic voice that was absent from his earlier, surface-obsessed works. He shrugs off the suggestion that he has been gradually reaching for more spiritual themes, promising that his forthcoming novel, jPod, will turn that idea on its head. "I wanted to do something which is flat-out funny, that has no other scheme in mind."

Still, he struggles to recognise himself in the younger writer who said: "Writing that sets out to prove something isn't really writing - it's a kind of lobbying."

Coupland credits art, rather than literature, with influencing his style. "I approach the creation of words from a visual standpoint. The way I look at the literary world is that there's no modern art there.

"Quality is based on how well you draw a feather, as opposed to generating new forms. In the art world, popular culture, high culture, middlebrow culture, no culture - nature, science and mathematics - morphed together in the '60s. Thinking about where you can get ideas, and how you can use them, is the opposite of rigid."

He's an unapologetic connoisseur of plastic surgery makeover faux-reality television programs, joking that if Extreme Makeover and The Swan were submitted as art films to the Venice Biennale two decades ago, they would have won the Prix d'Or.

For his first five books, Coupland carried around notebooks, recording detailed observations that formed the basis of his novels. "I was putting myself through my own personal journalism school." This might account for why reviews of his early books sometimes characterised him as a jumped-up journalist, more interested in fad-spotting than character or plot. Eventually he realised that newspaper and magazine editors were mostly excerpting passages from novels
that he wrote spontaneously rather than from notes. He hasn't used notes since.

Coupland only recently started working with an editor. When he switched publishers for his 2000 novel Miss Wyoming, his new editor issued him a 15-page memorandum, criticising the manuscript for mawkishness. She even likened it to Patch Adams.

"When I read the old books, I think, 'For god's sake, why didn't anyone ever edit you?' If I was lucky, they got spellchecked. I'm not some sort of freakish exception. Editing has become about acquisition rather than editing."

Coupland rarely tours, but is looking forward to visiting Melbourne for the Writers' Festival because, he says, "everyone tells me it's almost identical to Vancouver". Coupland signs off his emails: "Cheers from the Other Melbourne." He did his last major publicity jaunt in 1995 - a three-month trip through Europe that triggered a severe breakdown. On return to Vancouver, he suffered what felt like an epileptic seizure. "I felt my DNA disintegrating. It was terrifying."

He spent the following year in what he likens to a waking coma, too crippled by depression and agoraphobia to write or leave his house. "There's only so much travel I can do before I become a madman, but I didn't know that then. Now I say no to practically everything."

Coupland is still stalked by the ghost of the washout he once feared he might become. "When you went to art school in Vancouver - the middle of nowhere back then - you made certain assumptions about the way your life was possibly going to go. If I'd ended up in a methadone clinic, I wouldn't have been surprised. I'm always aware of the spectre of what might have been."

Douglas Coupland will be a guest at next month's Age Melbourne Writers' Festival. Eleanor Rigby is published by HarperCollins.

Gonzo, not forgotten

Gonzo, not forgotten

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/gonzo-not-forgotten/2005/07/23/1121539189130.html

Rich Tosches
Aspen, Colorado

July 24, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson's memorial service will be as unusual and dramatic as the writer's life.
In just a few weeks a cannon will roar a few kilometres down the road from this Mecca of Mink, a cannon that sits atop a bizarre 47-metre metal sculpture of a fist. The big gun will launch half of the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson hundreds of metres into the air above his rustic Woody Creek home.

Thompson's wife and his only child will keep the other half of the author's ashes. They sent the rest to a Hollywood explosives expert who packed them into a mortar shell, above a layer of gunpowder.

His memorial service, like his life, will be very loud.

And if the weather charts hold true, the wind will blow from the west or north-west as usual and carry the whacky journalist from his backyard into the majestic White River National Forest to spend eternity in peace and harmony.

In the short term, until there's a good cleansing rain, he might spend some time in the thick hair of a bewildered elk that might still smell the scotch in Thompson's ashes.

Thompson, whom the BBC called "an unflinching and acerbic chronicler of US counterculture", was riddled with disease and confined to a wheelchair when he shot himself in the head at his home on February 20. He was 67.

The cannon-blast of his ashes through his trademark gonzo fist will mark the six-month anniversary of his death. It will be part of a private service because his widow, Anita, does not want it to be like a circus. This means, presumably, that when he is blasted from the cannon, there won't be a net.

Thompson became famous with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a 1972 work that the New York Times Book Review called "the best book on the dope decade".

Here is what Thompson wrote in that book — just on the first page — about a trip with a lawyer friend from Los Angeles to Nevada: "The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

He wrote 14 similar books. The Curse of Lono in 1983 and Songs of the Doomed in 1990 still have legions of followers, mostly in the waiting rooms of methadone clinics.

Then he killed himself and now they're going to fire the brilliant, funny, politically incorrect scribe's ashes out of a cannon in his backyard, three kilometres from the Woody Creek Tavern where he often sat, his right hand seemingly glued to a glass of Chivas Regal.

Among those invited to Thompson's last blast is Bob Braudis, sheriff of Pitkin County.
Sitting in his office in Aspen, Braudis talked about the man who was, for 35 years, his best friend.

"It will start, I think, as a solemn memorial service and funeral, and eventually become a celebration of Hunter's life," said Braudis, 60, a big man with really bad knees from too many years of attack skiing.

He came to Aspen from Boston in the mid-1960s, a ski bum reporting to duty, and met Thompson in 1970 in a local bar. They shook hands. The next thing Braudis knew, he was drunk, and the two men became inseparable.

In a few weeks, he will stand in the same yard where, for more than three decades, the two friends drank, talked and laughed.

"I think of Hunter as a clown and a jester, and a polo star and a man with a good conscience," Braudis said.

"When he talked about the cannon and his ashes he was serious with a smirk. But Hunter was always serious with a smirk."

And when the cannon goes off, Hunter S. Thompson will vanish on the wind into the national forest.

The wind could gust from the south-east towards the neighbouring town of Basalt and its many open-air-patio restaurants, which makes for the reasonable chance that a tourist could get an extra topping on their pizza.

- Denver Post

What'sa matter you, hey?

What'sa matter you, hey?

http://theage.com.au/news/music/whats-a-matter-you-hey/2005/07/23/1121539192279.html

By Clay Lucas
July 24, 2005


This month marks 25 years since North Carlton musician Joe Dolce recorded Shaddap You Face. Was it just a catchy song or a serious contribution to multicultural Australia?

What'sa matta you, hey!
Gotta no respect, whatta you think you do,
Why you looka so sad?
It's-a not so bad, it's-a nice-a place,
Ah, shaddap you face!

Since May, European mobile phone company Connex has been blanketing Romanian television and radio with ads for its slick new 3G mobile service.

And what catchy little jingle has the phone company employed to flog its wares? For reasons perhaps best understood by Romanian marketers, it is using Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face, the 1980 megahit that sold 4 million copies and topped the charts in Australia, the UK and 11 other countries.

It remains Australia's highest selling single.

Many Australians would recall Dolce's song as even more teeth-grindingly irritating than the tune it replaced as Australia's best selling single — singer and ad man Mike Brady's Up There Cazaly.

But is there more to Shaddap You Face than an annoying pop ditty that only served to egg on Dolce, three years later, to record You Toucha My Car I Breaka You Face?

Shirley Strachan, the late Skyhooks front man, didn't think so when in 1981 he told Dolce he pitied him because his only hit was a novelty song.

"It wasn't a hit. It was a phenomenon," Dolce remembers telling Strachan. "Better to have one phenomenon than 10 piddly little hits."

When Dolce's song came out in 1980, it was an instant singalong classic. But at least one music critic thought it was the phenomenon Dolce had described.

"Shaddap You Face summed up the change in Australia when multiculturalism displaced the derogatory label 'New Australian', when colourful Immigration Minister Al Grassby regularly graced the national stage, and SBS was about to take to the air," music journalist Craig Mathieson wrote in a 2001 attack on the Australian Performing Rights Association. The association's list of the 10 best Australian songs of the past 75 years did not include Dolce's. And as cheesy as Shaddap You Face was, Mathieson argued in an opinion piece for The Age, it was too important to Australian pop history to leave out.

"It's not a perverse critical gambit to suggest including (in that list) what your memory probably places as a novelty song of the late 1970s," wrote Mathieson. "It caught a social current, and gave voice to it in about three minutes."

Everything a good pop song should be. And perhaps the reason Dolce so staunchly defends Shaddap You Face as a great folk track.

Versions of the song have been recorded by a remarkable 37 acts, in 15 different languages (including three in Spanish, two in German, two in French and an Icelandic version). Proof, Dolce says, that it bridges cultures.

And it has been covered in many different genres, from early British dance outfit EMF to US rapper KRS-One. "No one called it a novelty song when he covered it," quips 58-year-old Dolce from his North Carlton home.

If you look past the original recording's ham-Italian accent and limp comedic mandolins, the song speaks of a migrant teenager's battle with his domineering mother, of the new society the family had found itself in, and the struggle of their working-class life.

"People snigger at Shaddap You Face, but it still earns us a lot of money, even today," says Mike Brady, who released the song on his record label Full Moon Records (established with earnings from Up There Cazaly).

Brady also believes the song played a part in the emergence of new attitudes to multiculturalism. "Ethnic Australians finally felt comfortable enough to laugh at themselves."

Many others, of course, just saw it as a chance to laugh at migrants.

Dolce himself believes his song was the start of a rising tide of tolerance in Australia — that ethnic minorities could finally be accepted, and that humour was a way to shimmy them through the door of acceptance, rather than a dour-faced political correctness. His song is as unlikely a place as any to pick up the rich vein of ethnic humour that ran through 20th century Australia.

It began with John O'Grady's 1957 book They're A Weird Mob (written under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), and continued through Wogs Out of Work and Mary Coustas' Effie, to present-day comedians Fat Pizza, Hung Le and Tahir Bilgic.

Dolce himself is an interesting study in multiculturalism. Born in Ohio to an Italian-American family, he came to Australia in 1978 with his Australian first wife, after almost a decade trying to forge a career in the American music scene.

What he found in Melbourne horrified him.

"Back home, to be an Italian entertainer was something to be proud of. In America, Frank Sinatra was the benchmark," says Dolce.

Here, there was barely a mark. There were no Italian entertainers, and people from southern Europe were roundly derided as "wogs" and "dagoes". And they weren't terms of affection.

"In those days, the word wog was like the word c---," says Dolce. "If you said it, you said it low."
He first performed Shaddap You Face at a talent night in 1979 at the long-gone Marijuana House in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

He had recently visited his childhood home in Ohio, and heard phrases his Calabrian and Sicilian grandparents had muttered to him as a child: "What's the matter you?" and "Eh, shaddap". He incorporated them into a song about Italians in Australia, and played the song as the character Giuseppe.

"At the end of the night, I'd sing Shaddap You Face, pass the hat around, and make about $20," says Dolce.

Though it was comedy, Dolce also used the performance to confront racism.

"Giuseppe would get audiences to talk about their idea of a 'wog'. At first, everyone would be silent and embarrassed. Then, with a bit of coaxing, they would eventually start pulling out these foul, repugnant terms for a 'wog'." After a while, everyone would pick up the absurdity of what Dolce was doing and laugh at themselves. "It was kind of like group therapy."

ON JULY 3, 1980, Dolce rented one of Mike Brady's studios and recorded the song. He took it to Mushroom and Festival Records, who laughed him out of the building. He took it back to Brady.

By November, it was atop the Australian charts.

By the end of 1980, even Elton John had recognised Shaddap You Face's selling power. John had heard the song while touring here, and had his manager approach Dolce with the idea of buying the rights for the UK market.

After Dolce knocked them back, John's group immediately contracted Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Fawlty Towers) to cover the track, perhaps in the hope the Australian's lack of knowledge of the European market would allow them to release a slightly altered version (Manuel was to be from a Spanish family).

But Dolce was no bumpkin from the boondocks: an immediate injunction with a British court stopped the release of Sachs' version, and a judgement in Dolce's favour forced the recall of all copies of that version.

But the song stands as evidence of multicultural Australia's new-found ability to laugh at its own ethnic stereotypes, says Dolce. "Australians laugh at Crocodile Dundee," he says. "Barry Humphries magnifies Australian characters. Italians make fun of their characters in the same way."

Once the humour is accepted, so is the minority group, says Dolce. "If you can't really laugh about something, it's still marginalised."

He cites the Koran as a contemporary example. "You can't make jokes about it because you'll be killed. You can't mess with Allah."

Today, much of Dolce's time is taken up writing new material and performing a stage show called Difficult Women with partner Lin Van Hek.

If ever he sings Shaddap You Face it's in an Aboriginal dialect. In the song, he tells the story of a Dreamtime teenager being scolded by his mother. "Noone recognises what I'm doing when I perform it till a few minutes through, because I'm starting off on the basis that, because it's an Aboriginal song, it's a serious song."

Milestones
Name Joe Dolce

Age 57

Lives North Carlton

Born Painesville, Ohio

Famous for Shaddap You Face, which sold 350,000 copies in Australia, knocking off 1979's Up There Cazaly as Australia's best-ever selling single. Cazaly had only recently overtaken Slim Dusty's Pub With No Beer.

First Australian single 1978, Boat People, a protest tune about Australia's shabby treatment of Vietnamese refugees. The song flopped.

Last recording 2003, One Iraqi Child, a protest song about war in Iraq.

Website joedolce.net.au

London Hurts

London hurts

You seem to have missed one of the most telling examples of online reactions (Defiance on the web, July 11).

Livejournal.com is not a "community forum for London", but a host for web journals for people round the world.

One well-meaning American decided to start a "London hurts" community to allow people in other countries to share their thoughts: hence the slogan "Today, I'm a Londoner and today I hurt".

But this was abruptly derailed when the community was discovered by actual Londoners, who proceeded to mercilessly satirise it with a succession of spoof images such as "Today, I am a Londoner, and I got a day off". – Clare Sainsbury, London (The Guardian)

PostSecret

PostSecret

14 July 05
Carol T Chung

Frank Warren initially started this as an interactive art piece.
PostSecret (http://www.coolhunting.com/linkout/?http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) is a blog in which people anonymously submit their secrets on handmade 4 x 6 inch postcards via snail mail.

Although some of the submissions are very humorous, others are very sad and some politically incorrect. Not only does the work evoke strong sentiments or even memories from the audience, but it also provides an outlet for those that feel the need to free themselves from their secrets.

New secrets are posted every Sunday.

Bathroom Diaries

At www.thebathroomdiaries.com you'll find more than 8,000 reviews of public toilets in more than 100 countries