No Laughing Matter

Almost the first joke I can remember - the very first one was "I never drink, I never smoke, I never swear. Damn, bloody hell, I left my pipe down at the pub", but I'm only telling you that in the interests of openness and honesty - is the one where someone asks you, 'Which would you prefer: to be executed or burnt at the stake?', and you reply, 'Executed' (or, I presume most people do, on the grounds that it's over quickly) and then the joker says, 'What, you'd prefer a cold chop to a hot steak?', (sound of cymbals, drum roll, et cetera).

When I learned earlier in the week that a group of my fellow citizens were taking legal action to stop the culling of kangaroos in Canberra's various bits of pseudo bush, that joke's cymbals and drum rolls echoed once again in my ears. You see, I walk through one of those bits of so-called bush - (while it lacks houses, it does have a reservoir, a power plant and rangers driving through it in utes on a regular basis, not to mention numerous cyclists, dogs and walkers, which, to my way of looking at things, means that it is really a park, but never mind) - on a daily basis. As a result I've observed that, following a couple of really good seasons, the kangaroo numbers in the area have grown enormously. To give you an idea, here are photographs taken in just the last couple of days:

The place is getting kind of overcrowded, kangaroowise. To make things worse, we're having a pretty dry year this year and food for kangaroos is getting so scarce that many are coming further and further down the hill to forage. Many of them will soon be starving. Indeed, I startled one the other day that was clearly too weak to even run away. We stared at each other for an instant, and I've never seen such a movingly human look of fear, shame and utter sadness in an animal's eyes. I know I sound like I'm anthropomorphising, but I don't think that was quite what I was doing. I'm not sure how to explain it, except to say that perhaps when any creature reaches an extreme state of desperation it comes down to its essence as a living creature, rather than as a member of a species - and at that level all living creatures share a lot in common with their fellows whether they be human, kangaroo, bird or fish.

The strange thing was that what I wished for at that moment was a gun and the knowledge of how to use it. It would, in my view, have been kind to shoot that kangaroo. To kill it, quickly and cleanly, would have been violent, but it was less cruel than letting it limp off to die slowly and alone. And that's what the anti-cullers don't get, I reckon. They think they're being kind when what they're actually being is squeamish. They won't admit that many animals will die, one way or another, because there are too many for the food that's available. Our choice is the cold chop or the hot steak, as it turns out. We can kill them humanely, using experienced shooters who can dispatch them instantly, with one shot, or we can leave them to starve, which means a painful, long drawn-out, miserable kind of death.

They're Messing With Our Minds

I mentioned going to see Barbara, a film set in East Germany, a while back. There was one aspect of seeing it though that I didn't go into then.

I'm referring to the dreadful conversation me and my husband had as we were coming home after the screening. He said, 'I know it's ridiculous, but every time anyone got into one of those awful Ladas, I got distracted with wishing they'd all put their seatbelts on' and I said, 'Oh, me too - plus every time Barbara got on her bike, I kept worrying about the fact that she wasn't wearing a helmet.'

In the film we glimpsed the odd East German slogan - 'Believe in the bright future of your fine socialist nation', that kind of maddening exhortation - and at the time I thought, 'Ugh, how absolutely awful'. Now though I realise that those things weren't too bad really. They must have been annoyingly ubiquitous but at least they were too flat-footed and obvious to be genuinely insidious, whereas the messages we've absorbed from our local government have been much more subtle.

I thought I disapproved of bicycle helmets and all other aspects of the state interfering in how I do things, yet somehow, without billboards or megaphones, I've been silently brainwashed. And heaven knows how many other nanny initiatives I am equally meekly in thrall to, all unawares.

It's no good worrying about it, I decide. Instead, I'll seek comfort in a nourishing glass of gin. But even that's hopeless - my head, it turns out, is awash with messages about moderate drinking and government guidelines - and one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it's only when you get to what the authorities would consider immoderate levels of consumption that the comforting qualities of alcohol kick in.

Filums

The ACT government in its wisdom has allowed a new cinema to be set up in a part of town that has absolutely no restaurants - it is on the bottom of a rather flash multi-storey set of flats, which has been positioned right by a freeway, at just enough distance from the city centre to ensure that the entire area is absolutely dead (apart from the drone from the freeway) in the evening.

I assume the flats come equipped with kitchens as there won't be any alternative source of hot food available nearby - despite the fact that I've read that young apartment dwellers prefer eating out these days. I certainly like to see a film and then have dinner - or have dinner and then see a film. I prefer not to have dinner at my house on these occasions, but to spend the entire evening out. Canberra's town planners, God bless them, are presumably keen for us all to get back into home cooking though - or concerned to lower the break-in rate by chivvying us back into our houses as quickly as possible.

Once again, in this overplanned city, it strikes me that things might have been better had there been no planners to prevent the place from developing higgledy piggledy. Having armies of the pernicious breed seems just to slow everything down and produce the kind of hopeless outcome that is this new cinema, place as far as possible from everything else.

Anyway, the cinema shows lots of 'art house' movies so I am determined to support it. I like 'art house' movies. I wasn't sure if I did, but having this last fortnight been to three movies, I can definitely say that I do.

The first movie we went to was 'The Loneliest Planet'. It was adapted from a short story and concerned a youngish couple, she American, he Spanish-speaking. We were told almost nothing about them, which some in our party found irritating but I found excellent, as I think they were supposed to be emblematic of a certain kind of young Westerner, the kind who become perpetual travellers, only ever stopping to make enough money to set off again. The two in the film were travelling in Georgia and we found them at the beginning preparing to embark on a walk through the Georgian landscape with a guide.

Nothing at all happens - or very little (apparently the trailer urges viewers not to give away the big event, but I'm afraid I missed it). The Georgian scenery is extraordinary and almost makes the film worthwhile on its own.

The point of this kind of endless travelling is revealed as fairly problematic - no-one seems to be really enjoying themselves, no-one really seems to understand what they are seeing. By the end, the couple's endless wandering appeared, to me at least, to be a modern version of the old pastime of going to Bedlam and staring at the inmates. For them, the whole non-Western world seems to represent a kind of zoo whose inmates they peer at. In a bar, they dance with the locals, but all the time smirking at their outlandish foreign ways. A ball flies over a wall they are walking past and they chuck it back, only for it to fly out again. For a few minutes, they join in what they assume is a game with people they don't know and can't see.  The young Spanish speaker, upon being asked about what kind of car he has by the Georgian guide, replies smugly, 'A bicycle.' The guide, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to get his hands on a nice big shiny Western car. The Westerners romanticise the simplicity they find. The natives wish to escape it, on the whole - or at least to grab some of what these young people disdain.

The next movie we went to was 'Barbara', about a dissident female doctor in East Germany in the 1980s. The doctor has been banished to a rural hospital from Berlin. The film is rather beautiful to look at and quietly reveals the banal but grinding nastiness of the old East German regime. This might suggest it is grim or dull, but it isn't; it is gripping and moving and very well worth seeing.

Finally, we went to see Side Effects. It wasn't bad, a nice little thriller, but it all seemed so frantic and flashy and shiny after the first two. Each of them sent me home in a faintly contemplative mood. Something about their slow, thoughtful camera work made me more aware of my surroundings afterwards, so that the act of putting on the kettle or washing a peach took on some peculiar kind of weight. They each in a way had the effect of a Vermeer painting, because in each the camera had lingered on small details, domestic scenes or faces, allowing you to see how each instant of an individual existence can be framed and seen as significant, how each moment has importance.

Side Effects had different intentions. It was all about exciting you and distracting you from reality. I emerged blinking from the theatre, feeling as if I'd been on one of those funfair rides that turn you upside down and whirl you around and then hurl you back to ground with a jolt.

Side Effects probably cost far more to make than Barbara or The Loneliest Planet, it probably involved far more ingenuity to construct than those two, but perhaps it was the kind of ingenuity that Les Murray describes (I think, although I can't find the reference) as 'front brain' rather than 'back brain'.

Up the back, that's where I like to be.

Breaking News

I've been reading the papers again. Not for the first time I'm baffled by the antics of my local government:

The use of the word 'attracting' strikes me as slightly ill-chosen there, but more worrying is what exactly those 225 litres are being collected for. I do hope there is no mad plan for a centennial artwork which will use them as an essential ingredient.

Meanwhile, in the national papers, things continue to be all over the place .

Priorities (Warning this Post Contains Utter Small Town Parochialism)

I remember a friend coming back from Moscow after

My Taxes at Work

Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory had a local government foisted upon it, despite, when asked to vote to decide whether it wanted one, responding with a resounding 'No'*

Since receiving the gift of our own local government, we have had plenty of opportunities to recognise how right we were to say, 'No', but Saturday's Canberra Times unveiled possibly the most vivid demonstration of our good sense yet:

The only silver lining to this nuttiness is the effect the news may have on the attractive, non-criminal classes. Possibly, on learning that tattoos are so eagerly sought among the inmates of penal institutions, they may reconsider their own aspirations to have their bodies covered in indelible daubings. Instead of defacing themselves, they will seek other avenues of pleasure, such as helping their elderly parents to do the washing up.

Actually, now I think about it further, perhaps I should support Ms Gallagher's initiative, for, if it does result in non-criminals eschewing tattoos, tattoos may soon become exclusive to the occupants - or former occupants - of jails. This could, in fact, turn out to be an extremely good thing: in the future, thanks to the ACT Labor Government,  it will become extremely easy to work out exactly who is who.

*   Here's the history, from Wikipedia: "In 1978, the Australia Capital Territory voted at a referendum on whether the ACT should be granted self-government. Voters were given the choice of becoming a self-governing territory, a local government or continuing with the Legislative Assembly being an advisory body to the Department of the Capital Territory. 63.75% voted to continue with the then current arrangement.[3] Despite the outcome of the referendum, the Parliament of Australia passed the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act in 1988 and the ACT became a self-governing territory in 1989."

Wimbledon Here We Come

Also on the first Saturday of spring, Canberra's throngs of aspiring tennis stars got busy at the local tennis club:

Unlike other capital cities around the world, if you stand in Canberra's suburban streets, you often get the impression that you are in a ghost city. During the Reagan years, when the idea of the neutron bomb was first taking off, I remember cycling home about 11. 30 p.m across the Commonwealth Bridge after seeing a film in 'Civic', and wondering if they'd let one of the things off. Then, down on the lawns near the National Library, I saw a huge crowd of galahs playing in the arc of a sprinkler. They took off as I passed by, a huge cloud of grey and pink rising into the air.

Canberra has got bigger and a bit busier since then, although it is still virtually impossible, if you go into 'Civic' on a Saturday night, to find anywhere to eat, apart from in the great noisy caverns in the big new shopping centre they've built there. In any case, most activity after ten o'clock is now focussed around the bus interchange, which the government in its wisdom has chosen to situate right in the middle of the few nice old buildings in the area. Sadly, what goes on usually involves drunkenness, violence and drugs.

During daylight hours, walking still seems to be considered an odd activity in Canberra, unless it is conducted along bush tracks. Cycling has become more fashionable than it was when I first arrived - but to be credible you need to invest in lycra.

(Here is a typical Canberran cyclist):

The only place you will ever see crowds is in the city's increasingly numerous shopping malls. I read somewhere that shopping malls are the new cathedrals. If that is so, the people who pack the so-called food courts within these new cathedrals are presumably taking some form of sacrament as they cheerily munch through whatever it is their polystyrene or cardboard containers hold. 

(On a positive note, I suppose I have to admit that it is usually pretty easy to find a parking space in Canberra.)

All Abuzz

Continuing the theme of the excitement of life in Australia's capital city, here is a picture of my local bowling club on the first Saturday morning of spring. As you can see, it was all go down there:

Stop the Bagging

After yesterday's post, showing old promotional material for Canberra, I've had a few hurt conversations with fellow members of the ACT gulag. 'Why are you such a knocker, Z', they say, 'why can't you just stop bagging Canberra? It's a lovely place to live, so easy and beautiful, why would you want to complain?'

Well, it isn't the setting, which is undeniably beautiful, (and, yes, it is great to be able to walk into the bush within 10 minutes and, while I couldn't quite call it great, given that, when you reach it, there is not much there, it is convenient to be able to walk 15 minutes in the other direction and be in the centre of town).

However, a glance at the notices, each and every one of them published by the ridiculous local government (which, even though it presides over a population of only 360,000 people, is, I gather, proposing to spend $490 million to construct an extra building to house all the teeming hordes of people it needs to work in its tin-pot parliament, which has the grand title of ACT Legislative Assembly, complete with Hansard et cetera), at my local library, gives a pretty good indication of 'what's not to like':

 1) Do they imagine I'm going to save them all up for Christmas and press them, 'gift-wrapped',  into a close relative's hand?

2) 'Open them during the day and close them at night'? Thanks for that, I might have got it the wrong way round. I mean really - those of us who can afford curtains don't need this advice; those who are still struggling with too large a mortgage will have to continue with the current tacked up blanket arrangement - only now they'll probably feel guilty about it as well.

3) Thanks, mum, for reminding me, because I'm just an infantile moron:

4) I think the sign reading 40 should be an adequate lesson, plus all the other signs all around schools, plus the fact you are taught about this when you learn to drive, but probably the ACT Government, if only it had a bit more of our money, would like to force us all onto a one-day training programme on this as well (interesting that the poster, which reads, 'School's back', is on display, even though it is in fact the school holidays here right now).

5) Since when did women become some kind of semi-disabled minority who need special grants before they can manage fronting up to the local supermarket and saying, 'I've been at home for a while with the kids, but is there any possibility of a job?'

6) So you are already late for a meeting, you rush into a cafe to buy a cup of coffee quickly and you're supposed to be like some boy scout, with mug in hand, or alternatively an eco-warrior, stopping in the middle of your already frenzied life to argue the merits of polystyrene over paper. Do these people have any idea what it is like trying to work, look after children et cetera et cetera?

7) Are you telling me that you've made it more complicated, that there are odd new little rules you've brought in to add to my anxiety? Are you implying I'd hurl all my children into the boot, if you didn't remind me about the booster seat? I'm insulted now (actually I was already)

(and when you say, 'children must stay in a restraint until the age of 7 years', have you ever tried getting them into bed still strapped into their booster seat? It's not as easy as it sounds.)

8) What, there's nowhere in my life that you won't intrude? I don't want a home water audit, free or not - and what am I supposed to do when I've got it anyway? Worry about the fact that I can't actually afford to instal the correct equipment - or that my landlord's not interested. Look, please, just go away.

9) Oh, and the best for last - this to me is clearly well-meant, but has anyone really thought it through? I mean, as a result of this decision, instead of reusing each plastic bag, (most of which are very flimsy these days and claim to be made from recycled bags themselves and also to be biodegradable, although I have no idea how true this is), first to cover left overs in the fridge and then to line the rubbish bin, I will for the first time in my life be buying clingfilm and rubbish bags; in other words I will be paying to buy plastic products that I will only use once, whereas before I was reusing the bags I got at the shop several times.

To add to the madness, plastic bags will still be available at the supermarket, if you want to pay for them; however, they will be much more durable, long-lasting - and therefore less degradable - ones:

I know that I am scatter brained enough to continue to forget to bring my own bags to the shop and so I will end up buying these ones, thus generating the production dozens of bags of a  far more environmentally damaging variety than the old ones, all in the name of what?

And one last whinge - what does it cost to produce all these absurd directives? People write them, they have meetings about them, designers do mock-ups, more meetings, recommendations, approvals, quotes from printers, large quantities of paper, on and on it goes.

Why I Came to Canberra

Yes, I admit it. It was mainly Ian - shy or not, who could resist that lovely blonde hair (and there were rumours he'd soon be a Clerk Class 11).

What I find specially baffling about these pictures is that I know from the text that I must have been here then - there's a mention of Woden Plaza and I can remember the excitement (yes, it was a big event - we went from school in the lunch hour, just to have a look) of its opening. Yet, I don't recall people looking quite as ludicrous as this mob. Perhaps they were all locked up in their offices, while by that time I led my life almost exclusively in the enchanted glades of the ANU.