Black Saturday Anniversary

One Year On, Everything but the Photos.

We thought the photos were burnt too. The last thing my brother-in-law did was pitch the Chinese laundry bag, with the Albums bundled inside, out onto the middle of the lawn, hoping against hope they would survive outside. They knew at that moment nothing would inside. The flames were licking across the ceiling and the house was filling with fumes from the insulation bats. The dogs were yelping and shitting on the floor. Having bravely wet towels and hosed walls the girls were now under blankets, screaming, wetting themselves. They wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.

As suffocation took hold, they put palm to glass to gauge the temperature outside. They could now go outside without blistering, so they left their home and everything in it - except Lucy had crawled over and grabbed her teddy. The two Dogs, Chaz and Cooch, tore out the open door, ripping their leads from the girls’ hands.

We finally picked up my sister Angie, her Husband Drew, their girls Lucy 12 and Grace 11, from the Diamond Creek emergency centre at midnight. In the hours between they had survived and in the days that followed they found it was a miracle. 12 of their neighbours had died in St Andrews. They had gone down to the road because it was the only thing around them not on fire. As they walked they had drenched themselves under a blanket until their petrol pump ran out of line. And they had wandered silent and awed up the road through the black apocalypse.

The CFA truck shouldn’t have been there. It had crossed the line they could defend. As the soles of their boots bubbled and warped they saw the flashing lights and the family materialized out of the smoke. The gallant CFA bathed their eyes, hydrated them and tended Grace’s burnt hand. My sister’s saviours then cut them up the road to St Andrews. They covered them with a blanket so they didn't see the dead motorcyclist who had rode panicked back and forth past their gate, hemmed in by fallen trees. They had tried to get his attention and give him shelter but he didn't hear them over the unholy din. His wife was waiting at the St Andrews pub until midnight saying,’ he'll be here, he'll be here’.

From the truck Drew called me on one of the fire-fighter’s phones. He was euphoric. Together they had fought off four fire fronts. They had watched the air tumbling in ignited balls against their window panes. They had got out.

At the emergency centre they took a seat among the people soon to think themselves lucky, still under stiffened ashen blankets, coughing and cowed. They were each handed a survival card that could fasten to their bodies. They unfolded through four stages: 'Walking Wounded', 'Priority One', 'Priority Two', and ‘Dead’. Lucy unfolded her card next to me and looked up from under the ember burn on her eyelid and pronounced with adolescent drollery, 'Well, that's helpful'.

What Drew didn’t know when he heaved that bag out onto the lawn was that Angie had taken all of the photos out of the Albums inside and put them in a metal box. Just to be sure. He found out after they got the call two days later that Chaz had been found sitting waiting next to the bag on the only patch of lawn that was green.

They spent a few months tripping over each other in the barn/camper trailer combination at our parents and then bought a lovely home in Wattleglen. There Angie is back to standing on the teak table top meticulously picking the caterpillars off the hop vine. Her legendary nurturance of all the living things around her is starting to show. The Geese found alive in a yard strewn with dead chooks and ducks, are now followed by little Ping, Ming, Sing, Ling and Ding. The chook who lost her toe doesn’t seem too fussed. The only remaining section of fence from what is now ‘the property’ is installed, and Chaz has a new companion, a puppy he pretends he’s pulling the other end of sticks with. Cooch was never found. Angie sleeps, badly at night and like a car crash during the day. As the insulation of shock wore off the girls became jumpy and preoccupied with where the pets are. Their world is no longer safe. Their new home and garden feel hollow. They are torn between knowing how lucky they are and not feeling at home.

We christened their new home by having Christmas there. It is starting to house a store of memories too. But all year I had thought about the photos. When all is lost it seems critical to have accurate memories, for the girls to have their childhood returned and see themselves in the rasberry patch and among the trees. Surely they need something more to hold in their hands beyond the four unmelted letters from the office furniture in the shed that had spelt ‘Reception’ and now read C-O-P-E.

I’d also taken photos out of those albums when Angie had a 40th birthday 6 months before Black Saturday. I’d scanned the best ones and put on a slide show. Then I’d given her the disk.

So when another sister called from Queensland and said she had all of them, including reels of shots she took of the family at what was their beloved ‘Loralie’, I was overjoyed. I would give them to her as a surprise.

They came in a package today. I’ve just regained my composure. I had eagerly opened the disk and clicked through. There is the 1858 original homestead whose history they had felt custodians of. Angie in a tiara and bare feet feeding the goats. The girls sitting on top of the hills’ hoist. Angie in Drew’s shirt and rolled up pants moving the lawn. Gracie hoisting a shovel longer than her from the wheelbarrow of gravel while Angie looks on, smiling, perched on the stone wall they built. My vision started swimming. My throat wrung. My heart didn’t quite fit in its cavity. Is this how my sister feels all the time?

Survival can be a cruel blessing. I still feel she was wronged by 13 years of drought that the CSIRO now calls climate change, and the hottest day on record. We might explain the first spark with fallen power lines or arson, but they doesn’t explain what happened next. I am awed and cowed by what else our weather, that once seemed a daily banality, might bring us.

When I tell Angie I don’t know how to give her back the photos, my brave sister reminds me how much crueler it is for those who have neither the photos nor the people in them.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Age, on the first anniversary of Black Saturday. Parts of it come from an earlier piece on this blog.

The Cronulla Cape is a White Shroud

Out in the park there is an unscooped dog poo with a tiny Australian flag toothpicked into it. This delicately placed little icon has given me nationalist yearnings. ‘That’s the spirit’ I find myself thinking.

I have only just recovered from all that fatuous flag waving by white Australians on Australia Day. That’s right. They were all white people. Every. Last. One I saw. The media was of course, at pains to show Australians of non-Anglo descent under the Cronulla Cape. They embodied Multinationalism, and our media is inclusive. Good on ‘em.

But it wasn’t representative.

I took a broad survey looking behind the windscreens of every flag-bearing hearse, I mean car, from here to Angelsea, and noting all the beach flag paraphernalia on the way. How well our navy blue goes with alabaster, freckled and scorched complexions.

I took another survey at the Big Day Out, the year the organizers created a furor by requesting patrons be sensitive to multiculturalism and leave the flag at home. Implicitly they were saying what I’m saying. Only white Australians swathe themselves in our flag. And everyone but them knows it.

They were of course roundly accused of denying people’s freedom of expression, and that old chestnut of inanity, of ‘political correctness’.

Tell me someone, anyone, how isn’t it political to swathe yourself in your national flag? Isn’t it being correct to one of the most overt expressions of political allegiance?

But just to be sure I pretended to be a journo and ‘interviewed’ a number of these sprightly young nationalists. Everywhere one looked that Southern Cross had fluttered down from the national mast, and shrouded more parts of the body politic than ever imagined by our fallen servicemen. Given that flags are generally used as shrouds it certainly is a revival.

So I stood tippy-toed within a stand of young men, who explained they hadn’t taken the flag off since Australia Day and had been sleeping with them. I ventured to ask, did they prefer them on top, and they said, rather quixotically, ‘well, you have to get by somehow’ and made oblique references to inflatables. They must’ve meant boxing Kangaroos.

‘Oz Pride!’ another group explained and said that for them Australia was ‘this’ – that is, getting shickered and shouldering swaying girls to the Violent Femmes. Fine. I’m up for that kind of nationalism. But then they said that wearing the flag was about ‘mates’ and when I asked did they leave their Chinese, Aboriginal and Indian mates at home, they replied, by way of explanation, ‘We’re from Tasmania’.

And it seems tattooed Australian flags are becoming so popular one parlour alone is tattooing 12 ‘Aussie Swasis’ a week.

None of this helped me solve the mystery of this epidermal barr in our flag-waving habits. So being an egghead I leafed through some books with big words.

Nationalism it seems is a cultural artefact, and these nations we belong to so fervently, are imagined communities. And the problem with nations is when we confuse them with race. We invent these nations in our heads, and reinvent them everytime we wave the flag. So if predominantly white people in Australia wave our flag what kind of a nation are they inventing? They are inventing a nation that, like Pauline Hanson, confuses being Australian with Being White.

But I think their intentions are honorable. I don’t think they’re noticed their flag-waving comrades are overwhelmingly white, and most of them would be non-plussed and even delighted to see Australians of non-Anglo descent waving the flag. Because any expression of inclusion can invent a community of deep and genuine comraderie.

But the thing is, they’re not. So why has white flag-waving resurged right in the era of globalization? Right at the time we have shored up our borders to refugees and a strong anti-immigration sentiment is seeping through our parliament, in reaction to the biggest intake in our history?

I blame Howard – though I say that a lot even when I burn the toast. But Howard had never quite shaken off the cloak of white Australia. He grew up with it, it was part of the community he’d imagined as a child and I suspect he wanted to reinvent it as Prime Minister. And this flag-waving generation are Howard’s. They are his invention.

We’ve got a bit of a thing about racial homogeneity I’m afraid. It runs deep. Aside from trying to ‘breed out the colour’ by removing ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal kids from their communities, the central policy platform of our country from 1901 until 1973 was the immigration restriction act, better known as White Australia. It was, our first Prime Minister said, a ‘declaration of a racial identity’. But whiteness isn’t a racial identity is it? Whiteness isn’t a colour, and isn’t race only attributable to people of colour?

‘The position of speaking as a white person is one that white people never acknowledge and this is part of the condition and power of whiteness’, says Richard Dyer. Part of what made it impossible to have this argument with my kids in the car down to Angelsea is that they couldn’t see that only white people were flag-waving. Even if they are, they sensibly said, they’re not stopping everybody else waving flags are they?

So the question has to asked, do non-Anglo descent Australians feel uncomfortable waving the flag? Since it seems they do then why don’t white Australians notice? More importantly, has this even been a part of whites feeling more comfortable waving the flag?

Dyer has an answer to this. He says ‘whiteness needs to be made strange’ and strange to itself. The ways that whiteness is triumphal, narcissistic and, given our history, amnesiac, needs to be exposed.

A flag in dog poo is very strange, but it’s also irreverent and mocking of staid and unexamined expressions of an older, exclusive Australia. That’s the spirit.

This Donna ain't Mobile

Everyday I am faced with the same disbelief when forced to explain my aberrant position in contemporary society. ‘You must be the only one’, a journalist once guffawed. ‘You’re kidding me’, new acquaintances marvel. But Doctors’ receptionists, who I have come to believe, are a very particular kind of women, they just pause their poised fingers over the keyboard, and reluctantly tab over to the next contact details window looking perplexed by the unaccustomed blank in my Personal Information.

I do not have a mobile – do I need to even specify phone? Perhaps it’s more important to clarify, I am not an animal.

A friend described me to a German about to meet me and included this apparently extraordinary fact in her characterization. ‘I have to meet this person’, he enthused, as I if she had gained special permission from the Powerhouse Museum to exhibit me privately.

People frequently want to know how I ‘survive without one’. I don’t mean to be contrary but I generally respond by asking how everyone else survives with one.

I mean I do see their utility. It isn’t enough to arrive on time anymore. Once must confirm that one is on one’s way somewhere else, and then coming in 10 minutes with the cat because they got the only appointment for the abyss under it’s eye, and they’ve had him for 17 years and can’t think what life would be life without him and it should only cost $75, and if you get there first just order me a skinny-late … puff pant … too.

I have come to understand there is a new etiquette with appointments. First you agree on Dench’s at 9.30, then you confirm Mixed Business at 10am, then you check on whether it was 10 or 10.30 and then, while waiting for the Green Man, you let your rendevous, who hasn’t arrived yet either, know that you’re running 3 minutes late. I just turn up where we first agreed, and luckily Dench’s do very yummy ricotta hotcakes, because my rendevous has no alternative but to be there since they can’t tell me otherwise. I call that efficient communication.

I hate the phone. Ask anyone who calls me up for a chat, ‘Yes!’ I prompt in a decidedly State-Your- Business manner. That old adage, ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say, say nothing’, applies with all the spades at the Crown Casino to me. When I signed up to the Do Not Call Register I looked everywhere for the ‘That goes for everyone’ button. I hardly needed to register. I must’ve been black banned by telephonists with scorched ears all over the sub-continent long ago.

This also means I don’t tweet, text or remote email. My kiddies have to explain what Soz, ppl and fotcl mean. I did get one once. I made the same friend cross over a late pizzeria date, I think because I didn’t get her message to be somewhere else, and then made my Mum, with her 4 baby bladder, wait cross-kneed out on in the park because I forgot she was coming and went to the Zoo. Too many car-pooling Mummies had pleaded with me to get one. I gave in.

I went to Crazy Larry’s or whatever and walked out with a free phone feeling like a thief and uncomfortably anticipating the billing regime. Once I got a Sim Card, thankfully not from a relative leaving for Glasgow airport, I was happily paddling in the Big Pond.

From then on not only did the fecking thing ring while I was wiping small children’s bums, but also while I was mediating their backseat disputes and unjamming their fingers after snibbing the ever-lasting whirring windows while fending off flying grapes and trying to remember whether red means go, all to hear that they’re on their way too with much the same cacophony emanating from their backseat.

I’m afraid it went the way of all 697 pairs of sunglasses once in my possession. I sometimes think modern hell is being consigned to the pile of waste you have generated over your lifetime. My phone is somewhere in there with the chewed Barrett’s Sherbet Fountain packets and Uncle Scrooge Comics. So long everyone I just about to meet in 4 minutes instead of 3 because I had to brake especially for the cop car with a speed camera pointing out the front window and Dench’s aren’t doing ricotta hotcakes today so let’s meet at that place that used to be called the Tinpot even though their hot chocolates are decidedly tepid and blather, blather until you inadvertently run up a pole in a paroxysm of Blankety-Blank dejavu.

How gratifying then, the latest findings about the safety of mobile phone use, notably funded by a mobile phone industry body. It seems that this worldwide experiment is inconclusive about the increased incidence of brain tumours. ‘Phew’ 6 billion minus-one people must’ve said down their phones to whoever was listening.

I’m afraid I couldn’t take part in the study. I was disqualified for never having wiped either my cheek or my fingerprints off an iphone down my trouser leg. But my relief was still tangible. I didn’t much fancy having to beget the entire human race from my rather fallible gene pool having traversed the remoter regions of the globe looking for a mate who also survived the Great Mobile Tumour Extinction.

The West should face off with itself on the Burka Ban

I have a travel tip for young women. There are places where a Burqa makes a lot of sense. Working in Lisbon in 1987 meant running a daily gauntlet of sexual harassment. So persistent was the abuse I ended up stashing food scraps in my bag to deflect men. Judging by the money thrust under my nose accompanied by flicking tongues being young, Western and alone on the streets was tantamount to being a prostitute.

It never occurred to me then to wear a Burqa. But if it did I would’ve stuck to my ‘feminist principles’. I had a right to walk the streets, any streets at any time, in a bikini if I saw fit. It was up to men to change their behaviour and I was not responsible for their failure to keep a civil tongue in their mouths.

When I returned to Melbourne I copped as much street level abuse only without the tongue gesticulating. Big trucks blasted their horns as I sat reading quietly in bus stops. Carloads of curb-cruisers bawled out, ‘show us your tits’. When I remonstrated with them I was warned, ‘you want a smack in the face as well!’

Nice. These peckerheads made agrophobia seem a sanctuary. Little did I know then that this invasive scrutiny would soon dissolve by the simple device of pushing a pram. A mother’s exile from cultural invisibility often coincides with that baffling hinterland of femininity, from 40-ish years, when all that wearisome street surveillance slips behind an unarticulated veil.

Did I mention the veil and Western women’s public visibility in the same breath? Surely not. Women of the West have been ‘reclaiming the night’ through rallies and rape reform for generations. Unchaperoned street presence meant liberation in the late-nineteenth century. The pinnacle of dress reform was wearing a bikini and a tampon while prancing unbridled over warm sand. The idea that we assert our identities and our civic freedoms by our public visibility runs very deep.

The Burqa is indeed an affront to this historically engrained sensibility. It has been likened to an effacement of identity. Notably, less is said about the responsibility Muslim women purportedly lumber for male arousal by covering their skin, hair and faces. It is literally the idea of being veiled that bothers us most, and not from scrutiny, sexual harassment and hostility, but from a show of public presence which for us equates with democratic participation not to mention sexual autonomy.

By the 1960s however, feminists mounted their own backlash against a kind of commercially co-opted exposure, flogging everything from sanitary pads to perfume, and increasingly limited to young, blonde, slender, tall and sexually available women. Feminists dumped their bras into a bin outside the 1969 Miss America competition in Atlantic City. In many ways the anti-porn movement was a logical response to visibility purely on men’s terms, particularly when it was associated with the eroticisation of rape.

We face off with the Burqa under a veil of inextricably tangled emotions. We like to assert that we express Who We Are with make-up, wrinkle softeners and botox. It’s unlikely we’ll ever see any grace in being understated with Pussycat Dolls filling our screens. Geez, all their routines are missing is a speculum.

Of course what isn’t being admitted, what’s in fact veiled, is that we are facing off with difference - ethnic and religious. We haven’t bothered to ask Muslim women what the Burqa means to them, because we’ve fallen into an entrenched colonial habit of thinking ‘less civilised’ women are oppressed and need us to liberate them, this time with spectacular arrogance, by banning them from having any choice.

What if Muslim women look at Western women’s made up faces and see gender oppression? What if they see plastic surgery as an effacement of identity? What if they see wearing the Burqa as a means to deflect the behaviour of drunken drongos and louts, without having to carry smelly food scraps? Maybe showing their faces has become a display of intimacy, trust and love that means Being At Home? And what if Western women are beholden, nay deeply attached, to traditions that in their origin were patently oppressive? Doesn’t the monogamy that once secured patrilineal property inheritance now define romantic love? Whose daft idea was that? Talk about getting bilked by gender regimes!

The condemning of the Burqa is another round in our habitual failure of imagination when facing off with difference. If we listened respectfully we’d find a wealth of Muslim women who assert their identities unequivocally, with their voices. Needless to say wearing the Burqa is under constant discussion.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Age, 16 May 2010