Monthly Archives: March 2000

A miserable, cantankerous, self-absorbed, attention-demanding, whining bastard

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(Recycled from the House of Love)

God, that was rough.

I’ve been sick — sick as a dog — for the last ten days, and I hated every minute of it. You’d think after fifteen years of wrestling with Iris the Virus and the assorted opportunistic infections that she has brought into my life it’d take more than a bit of a bad cold to bring me down, but no.

I have been lying in a cold sweat, with a fever of 41ºC, deliriously contemplating my own mortality in the not-nice way and not coping with it at all well. I am not what you would call an "easy patient". Sick, I am a miserable, cantankerous, self-absorbed, attention-demanding, whining bastard. How I’ll ever manage when something really nasty strikes me down I do not know. The worst part of it is that, now that Hep Cindy has taken up residence in my liver, I can hardly even swallow an aspirin without having to contemplate the potentially dire consequences it will have on my liver and my long-term survival (or, as the medical researchers so prosaically put it, quot;clinical endpoint".)

Anyhow, I survived, and indeed I have a greater and stronger sense that I am up to the challenge of dealing with the "lifestyle adjustments" that hep C requires. It’s just about the end of March and I can tell you exactly how much alcohol I’ve had this month. A thimbleful of champagne before the Mardi Gras parade, one gin-and-tonic, and two glasses of claret. This from a man who used to have three or four drinks a day until quite recently, and to be quite honest I don’t miss it much. And drugs — yes, well, yes, it was Mardi Gras you know. That is behind us now, at least until Inquisition, a month from now.

So, I can’t drink and I can’t take drugs, that leaves gardening. Brent and I had a busy weekend in the garden, ripping out a lot of last season’s growth and cleaning up for winter, and putting in some winter colour. New Guinea Impatiens, Ixora, Viola, Primula, Flannel flower … should give us a bit of brightness through the gloom. We also put down an artichoke — not sure if that will succeed in a tub but if it does I will be mighty pleased, ‘cos we’re nuts for artichokes in this house — and a valerian, which meets my insatiable urge to grow medicinal herbs I neither need nor have the foggiest idea how to use. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

All of this is, I realise, a bit vague and rambling and less than my usual glamorous self but there is a point. I don’t want to start dispensing homespun wisdom of the type you can stich on a sampler, but there are simple pleasures. I’ve lived the high life and swung from a few chandeliers (well, not chandeliers exactly, but I’ve swung, believe me) and I will continue to do so as long as my weary frame will allow. But that does not mean that these simple joys — an afternoon spent in the garden with the man I love, a home-cooked meal, just one glass of really good claret, the parrots in the treetops, a moment of absolute silence — don’t have every bit as much value and aren’t just as great a thrill, in their way.

MandaTORY sentencing, geddit?

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(Recycled from the House of Love)

England, late 1790s. John Sherwood, and two other unemployed, impoverished men, are caught stealing a sheep to feed their families. They are all found guilty and sentenced to hang. Sherwood’s sentence is later commuted to life transportation to New South Wales; the other two go to the gallows. A few years later, Anne Lane, a young woman, is convicted of the theft of a gown and two children’s frocks. Her sentence: seven years’ transportation.

In Sydney in the early years of the 19th century, Anne serves out her sentence while John eventually receives a conditional pardon. They take up residence (there’s no record they ever married, but that was a luxury of the rich in those days) and live out their days together. Those two ‘hardened criminals’ are my great great great grandparents.

There’s no way of knowing, so far in the future, whether these two were guilty of these offences, but obviously the severity of the sentences was extreme to say the least. But, you know, that was how things were in those far-off, less enlightened days…

Fast-forward a couple of hundred years. Here are some recent sentences handed down against aboriginal teenagers in Australia’s Northern Territory, under the NT’s mandatory sentencing laws:

  • Receiving one bottle of stolen spring water, value $1.00: 28 days imprisonment.
  • Unlawfully entering a takeaway shop and stealing food and beverages to the value of $18.50: 14 days.
  • Stealing four slices of bread and cordial to the value of $2.50: 14 days.

So many years, so few lessons learned. Multinational corporations can destroy the environment, avoid tax and treat their workers barely better than slaves in the quest for profit, and our governments are falling over themselves figuring out ways of locking people up for being poor, black, ignorant, marginalised, hungry or just plain bored. The federal government’s response: to suppress the UN report which points out that laws such as these violate human rights and our international obligations.

China is fast emerging as a greater respecter of human rights than Australia. It is a crime to be poor. The prison industry is expanding at a rate that would make most technology start-ups green with envy, just as the welfare state is being dismantled before our very eyes.

The fascists who are increasingly in control of this country (special mention must be made of the odious Richard Court, Premier of Western Australia, who is musing out loud on the possibility of re-introducing the death penalty, although he hasn’t said so far whether it will apply to sheep rustlers) are no better than the fascists who went before them: the landowners of 18th century England who sent my ancestors to Australia, the slave traders, opium barons, textile merchants, all these capitalists who’d treat their animals with more respect than their fellow humans. It always comes down to profit. If there’s a buck to be made, screw human dignity, civil rights, justice, decency. Property must be protected at all costs.

Welcome to the panopticon. Have a nice day.

How the Grinch stole Mardi Gras

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(Recycled from the House of Love)

December 23, 1970. A little boy sits on his father’s knee. He’s just six years old — old enough to carry a gun in Michigan, but still a child here in the Australia of the early 70s. His father, a stern man, red-faced, white-haired, with eyebrows that seemed to be constructed of steel wool, looks down on his offspring. For a moment nothing is said, while he gathers the courage to tell his son his decision.

Then, he speaks.

"Christmas," he says to the youngster, "is cancelled." The little boy is frozen with horror. Everything that makes his life worthwhile has been snatched away from him in an instant, his entire world is in uproar. The idea that December 25 could come and go without presents, fun, games, and too much food is beyond comprehension.

"All of your brothers and sisters, all your friends at school, everyone up and down our street will be having Christmas but you can stay in your room."

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