Why does X keep coming back?

It was a large and widely attended retirement party at work: the new retiree had worked there almost 40 years. As the door opened again I registered the arrival of X, who had retired a little over a year ago, when I had transferred in. And also registered my flash of annoyance. I know she'd worked in that room for 20 years or more, know she was responsible for all the stately, decades-old plants, and that I love the plants. I know that. It's just that she's been here at least once every two months since she retired. She doesn't work here...What does she want?

And now I register my mother's not entirely put-on horror at my father, who retired from the plant he'd worked at for 30 years or more, and who “never darkened the door again.” I understand that, don't even think to question it. As far as I'd thought about it at all, I assumed that, as I resemble my father in many ways, this was just one more of them.

And so I came to think about the times I have gone back to former workplaces. One large building, I remember: when I went back to sub there a couple of months after transferring out, I realized I'd forgotten my habit of putting on mental body-armour as I traversed lobby. (The lobby is huge; it always evokes the word traverse.) When I returned there on a short-term exchange a few years later, I found it... Hard to describe. I did leave early, twice, not caring whether I was found out or fired: the first time I was internally screaming, the second I was about to burst into tears. To this day I don't know what happened to my mind or soul those late Tuesday afternoons, that I was ready to gamble everything we have and everything the job keeps in existence, in order to get out now.

Other places I have returned to, temporarily, for one necessity or another... have invariably seemed smaller, darker, dingier than when I was there; essentially & ineluctably external.

I have always worked by absolute necessity. I had to earn a living. I've never worked anywhere I would have chosen to, have always struck the best deal that seemed available to me. When I walk back into a place I've worked in, it always subliminally presents itself to me as a cave which I have to stoop to re-enter. Though my sense of my internal self is pretty much amoeba-shaped, I have always had to edit myself/become someone else to fit work. And so I think my experience of revenance is this: I'm no longer willing to shrink to enter that particular darkness, fit that particular Procrustean bed.

But my mother's employment... During the Great Depression she worked as a milliner in the only millinery shop still open in the city. The girls were laid off before public holidays and re-hired the day after. They were unionized, but the union had been bought off; my mother saw the coins go into the inspector's hand every time he visited.

My mother ran a table of 40 girls; each girl had to make 6 hats a day. My mother was to initial the note each girl wrote, declaring that she had completed 6 hats. She and the girls laughed all day long, my mother always said. They got together once a year for lunch for well over 30 years afterwards. My mother quoted them often, talked about the things they did, the warden-like nature of the assistant-like manager(ess), and the meanness and hypocrisy of the owner. The daily matter of the 240 hats was handled by one girl, an expert forger, writing the notes, my mother initialling them. The hats went into storage, the notes went to the warden-like woman. The totals were never checked, and so this went on for years, until my mother married my father and so was legally forced to leave.

And so my mother never did try to re-enter her former workplace; if not forbidden by law it would have been so unusual as to be suspicious. And she liked working, had great native intelligence and shrewdness, liked running the table. Though she would really have preferred to be a hairdresser, her work never sounded as though it had crimped or crippled her.

I have no idea what my father thought of his job; though he was a man of great fundamental decency, I have no idea, any more than anyone else in my family, what my father actually thought about anything.

So now I come to look at it after all these many years, I can see why X might want to return to the room I'm in now.

Me, 5:30 p.m. on my last day (if I haven't already said bugger it and buggered off early), I'll be gone for good and all.

Callou, callay!

Callou, callay!
The galleys, the galleys
for White Concrete Day!

And the first chapter of Swimming with Heraclitus, "Stephen and the Others," has just been published, here.

Zvonko Busic - cross-posted from Gobshite Quarterly

when auden spoke of a mean & low decade, he had no idea of the resonance of those words...

our hearts & minds go out to gobshite quarterly contributor julie bušić ‡, whose husband zvonko bušić passed away at the beginning of this month. he was given a state funeral, as indeed he was a fierce advocate for croatian independence.

labeled a terrorist in this country, & sentenced to 30 yrs, often in solitary confinement, in this country.

he was sentenced in 1976, & tho eligible for parole in 1979, served significantly more than his sentence, thanks to the vindictiveness of the reagan administration, & shrubya 1's & shrubya 2's cabals—this despite petitions & protestations from the croatian ambassador to the united states, prison staff retirees, & prison chaplain.

‡) her memoir of her experiences, lovers & madmen, was also made into a documentary film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp6pqS1-VMU 

The New York Times article is here.

Circling Federation Square

I came upon Federation Square before I was aware of it.

I began to wonder as I began to pass these very asymmetrical glass shapes, windows, walls, if I had wandered into it. (How I could have just wandered into it, how it could have simply resembled … slate-grey … shops?) As I walked on to the end of the building and found the open space on the west side of the complex which led around to the river, I realized that Federation Square really was what I had come upon: the architectural wonder I'd read about on the net, four or five storeys high, asymmetrically designed in ways not possible until the twenty-first century. I was standing on, over, above, the old Jolimont railway yards.

This open space made no sense to me. The Advertiser sound-shell on the southern bank of the Torrens was my model for public event space – grassy slope shaped like an amphitheatre, the slope all but imperceptible as you stepped onto it, steeper further in, designed to tip the sightlines onto the stage; and the gentle coloured fountain in the river, lit by sequenced, rotating, water-diffused spotlights, the colours deepening as the daylight faded.

This area had no shape, no focus, no real seating; it was hung with huge flat screens, the antithesis of communal gathering, an eating area and handicraft stalls. I turned and went back the way I had come, into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (successor to the State Film Centre, two doors down from a high-end jeweller), but had no money for the special exhibits. The seating for the short-display documentaries – museum benches – was designed to move us on; the instructions for running the films were incomprehensible. I went to the Ladies' Room, steep and deep to get to, the temperature dropped a lot – and found the dark slate and dark paint décor in narrow passageways very like entering a grave.

Increasingly angry / dismayed / disheartened, I saw another way to the river, past the lozenges of the east glass wall. Facing the river, south, I found the paving stones from the Kimberleys underfoot, every shade of red from shell-tinged beige to burgundy and maroon. Directly across the river the Rowing Club's boatshed stood, a pale, pale yellow. I suddenly wanted to be there, next to plain wood and simple lines and unpretentious dimensions.

I turned to my right and continued my circumnavigation.

On Federation Square's western side, across St. Kilda Road from the Flinders Street station, I came to that odd communal space again; walking into it suddenly, my mind preoccupied with understanding the overall layout, I registered, found myself blinking and in the act of forgetting a fugitive silver flash. Beyond a cascading brain event I shouldn't have seen a silver flash. I turned back and found I'd just stepped past a row of lightweight cardboard face-masks, some of the current Australian cricket team, mounted on the short metal posts meant to separate the food-cart area from the more Forum-like area. The cricketers were due to appear at that very spot in a few days. The flash had been underlying metal of a post glinting through the eyehole, a hungry, malign, metal god.

I recognized the kids in their 20s who were working on this publicity stunt: they work in Portland for every company staging a free film preview with quizzes, t-shirts, prizes. They're all all a-buzz, on short-term contract and a second's notice; they all want to break into one part or another of the entertainment-publicity complex; they all function on high-octane fear. I was appalled to see this kind of hyperinsecurity here; Oz had been one of the most highly unionized countries in the First World.

Walking into this space again was the last of my circle. Looking east, into its continuation, the Forum-like space was surrounded by buildings, sinister blocks of black topped by satellite dishes and microwave towers. One red lantern stood at one black window, declaring a Chinese restaurant. That seemed to be its only window. I could imagine it: interior, lacquered, stifling.

By then I'd had enough. I walked across the road and took a photo of the complex from the Young & Jackson's corner. It was the noon light, I suppose; the whole thing looked, not like concrete, but like sagging cardboard.

But it was the holes that got to me, nagged at me – the strange holes in the concrete façade of Federation Square, in the sagging skin, the fabric, the outer protective layer. The odd holes. The deliberate, constructed, odd … holes.

Holes in the banknotes. When the same friend took me to the bank to cash a traveller's cheque they gave me pieces of paper with holes in them. Plastic-filled holes, to be sure, but things with gashes in their fabric nonetheless. To prevent counterfeiting, the friend said; the new designs being so complex they're easily mimicked (the shape of the hole in the $5 note a flying bird within a superimposed circle, the design inside the circle a eucalypt flower and leaves). There were holes in the currency, in a thing where you need the appearance and reality of solidity banknotes being national PR documents, even more than postage stamps.

Holes in the facades of many of the buildings around Federation Square, in Flinders Street and Little Collins Street. They were surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired, I suppose – how much repair could all those recent-looking buildings need? – but looking in the meantime like rotting financial structures, and at their feet the overtopped and bandaged churches, the modern-looking but uncomfortable seats, the idea of public amenity.

Holes in the social fabric. A disproportionate number of poor, for a rich country… Even in 1981 the estimation for people needing government subsidy for something or other was close to 30%.... and now, just as in the U.S., a man asleep or unconscious at the foot of one of the great office towers in Queen Street is both noticed and ignored, is deftly stepped around; at his knee the puddled lake of a pale, Caucasian hand.

Hole in the ozone layer. At its most extensive stretching over Uruguay and southern Victoria. The sky is rotting, Wm. Gibson mordantly observed at Powell's, in 2000.

The allegedly porous border (imitation is the sincerest form), the hole that was no hole, was a distraction, a constructed displacement-activity and -anxiety.

The hole that didn't exist was there to disguise the holes that did, that were and are being gouged in the social, economic, and ethical structures of the country and the earth's protective skin. This hole stood in place of the rest just as banning smoking in or near all public property had come to stand in place of reducing pollution.

The hole that still doesn’t exist deflects public attention from real and urgent and desperate problems; it forestalls agitation and protest; it makes legislation not drafted by and for vast and interlocking vested interests, all but impossible.

Poor fellow, my country.

The Howard Fridge Magnet

It’s hard to know where to begin, talking about this image and this object.

My ur-memory of being born in Adelaide – lying on the front lawn, perhaps 14 months old, under the measureless blue sky.

Every sense I had of Australia was founded on measurelessness. It was vast: deserts, distances, summer temperatures and lack of water, thinness of population. It was extreme in all respects; it was that shape on the map of the world on my first, cylindrical pencil-case, at my first school, far from the rest of the world. It was where we lived.

Australia was an abstraction, but a physical one.

In some ways that was our sense of ourselves – that lack of definition. There were stockmen, stations, deserts, mines, schools (Schools of Mines) and the unmentioned uncomfort of the Aborigines. There was work and the weekend, cricket, tennis, picnics. There was not-being-England-or-Europe-or-America. There were rain and sun and roads, church, school, going to town and going to the bay. At Victor Harbor we watched the Southern Ocean smash on the State’s granite edge. The word un-Australian did not exist. There was no Australian English parallel to the linguistic foundation of HUAC. (If it had existed we would’ve seized it for the rich lexicon of schoolyard abuse. It would’ve applied to every migrant in sight.)

And yet, around 1996-1997, around the time John Howard first took office, I began to see it on the net. At first I was full of bewildered laughter. Then I supposed it signalled a new move on the remaining threads of Aboriginal existence – all that 40,000 year old rock art vandalizing the mining-leases.

It was quite clear , even from this distance, that Australian meant wrapped in the flag xenophobia, detention centres, and conditions of detention that didn’t border on torture but 747’d into it, visa, sunglasses, beer and bubbly and baggage, bent on a bloody good time.

Detention Centres: on the edge of the Nullarbor, on Christmas Island. Iron-roofed, concrete sheds at Woomera, wooden huts on Christmas Island – families separated, huge suicide / attempted suicide / self-mutilation rates… Afghanis, Hazzara, Iraquis, Iranians fleeing the wars “our side” had started / funded / taken over, too poor or paperless to fly in unmolested, were attempting to arrive in leaky boats from Indonesia.

The Federal Government’s response was to move the Australian territorial line, so that anyone arriving on a speck of rock northwest of Western Australia would not have arrived on Australian soil and therefore been entitled to protection under several treaties we were proud to have signed in the late 1940s, but would have arrived nowhere – paperless, stateless, detainable. The problem, from two elections’ worth of Australian POV, was neither the wars we buggered around on the edge of nor our foreign policy, but the (Indonesian) fishermen who sailed the boats.

Which sometimes sank.

On the eve of the 2001 Federal election one of them did. The Australian Navy ship on hand reported that the adults had thrown the children overboard (in an effort to compel the Australian Navy to rescue them). That interpretation was wrong, was almost immediately revised by the navy, and the correction sent to the Prime Minister’s office. But the original report was broadcast and re-broadcast as news, propaganda for the Howard government. It may have won him his 3rd term.

The image of refugees throwing their children overboard was the very definition of un-Australian.

In sympathy with al-Qaeda and in revenge for Australia’s part in the independence of East Timor, the Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiah mounted two suicide-bomb attacks on tourists at Kuta Beach, on Bali, in October, 2002. Eighty-eight Australians were killed, among others: in Australia the catch-cry against the people-smugglers, and the smuggled people – all of them un-Australian – was now terrorism. Terrorism was undeniable, graphic and vivid, and undeniably aimed at us, and people-smuggling was the risk of terrorism. There were so many refugees being intercepted, and there was enough opposition to having detention centres on Australian soil that the 3rd Howard Government devised “The Pacific Solution” – bare bleached rock enclosures on Nauru, which was strong-armed into taking detainees, and paid to. Nauru had nothing to export once we’d mined it to the sea-line for superphosphate.

The detainees waited until their cases could be heard. There were astonishingly few Australian speakers of the required languages. The one or two who had been released and tried to return to Afghanistan disappeared completely on the Afghani border or thereabouts, very likely killed by the forces they had been fleeing. Several Australian citizens – women, generally – of Philipino or other non-Caucasian extraction were seized and “deported” to Manila or wherever the Minister of Defence thought they’d come from.

This much I gathered from reading The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, from Australian blogs and emails from friends.

I sat at the screen and saw.

Everything I’d ever been told about Australia was wrong – a lie, a fantasy – and always had been. According to promoted social reality, if we hadn’t always been (invasions, convict prisons, Aboriginal massacres), in the meantime we had become more generous, more equal, more open, less cruel than the rest of history.

Post-war immigrants had never had the easy time the newsreels made out, but once we had given homes to the homeless after World War II. And now we were locking refugees up in barbed-wire camps in the desert, keeping them indefinitely, driving them to self-mutilation and suicide.

They can’t be trusted, put them somewhere, lock them up. The catch-cry of the twentieth century coming from Australian throats, re-electing that government again and again. That this victimization could be the path to domestic political power –

Even the dry yellow-brown hills were lies. We weren’t better than or different from anyone else: if any evil could be conceived, we could conceive it.

The hills lurched and paled and retreated, turned to paper. They’d never happened to me, moving past the window as we drove, throwing the road and the car around their heavy masses, above and past the gullies that created the evening winds, or that stood in the near distance, through the window at school. They’d happened to someone else.

And now, in Oregon, if I went to move off the chair in front of the computer, I moved slowly; I didn’t know how to trust what my eyes told me about the relationship of my feet to the ground.

==

In 2005 QANTAS had an astonishing deal, which meant I could go home and see the family and friends I’d hardly seen in twenty years. One of the friends saved me the Howard fridge magnet. “Bloody government,” she said. “It’ll take decades to re-civilize the place.”

And now I’m looking at it, and it’s hard to know how to even think about this image and this object.

The image is the first thing that catches your eye. A young woman is glancing and smiling happily at another young woman, a policewoman. Their smiles and body language suggest that they share something, have something in common, agree on something. Conversation with the police is friendly, non-threatening, cozy, two girls chatting.

After seeing the image the eye takes in the next-largest element, the headline.

First there’s the sickly condescension – Let’s. It’s a word used to suggest agreement between a child and its parents’ wishes, mediated through that odious near-child representative, the prefect. For all the allegedly friendly chat in the photo, we (the public, the citizens) aren’t really adults. We … need to be managed, need to be persuaded, need to be told.

Let’s look out – a coercive suggestion (join the commonly-established agreement) and do something you didn’t have the acumen to see for yourself. You need to be told.

– for Australia. Which must be too young to look out for itself, because we’re not confessing to naivete or witlessness as a country (are we?). We’re certainly not confessing to fascism and its spin and spawn.

So, looking out for Australia is like / becomes young women getting together to look “out for” (keep in mind and act in the interests of) the younger/less powerful/less aware/less.

Australia is undefined, except as explicitly Caucasian, female, unarmed, unthreatening, concerned with nurture and care, implicitly wanting to protect and be protected.

This use of a policewoman is a complete subversion of the progress towards equality Australian women made over the previous 30 years.

This use of a policewoman is a device to present the capture and imprisonment under conditions of torture look like maternal care.

This use of a policewoman is a device to present a cheerful-looking young woman as just herself, and not the false face of mining magnates & associated interests.

Two girls having a chat. Detention camps disguised and justified.

Even while it’s utterly racist, duplicitous, injurious to its victims and insulting to its readership, the Howard fridge-magnet is also absurd. (Is that what makes it Australian? That ineradicable amateurism?) The block back-grounded in blue gives the phone number for a translation service for reporting suspicious activity if you don’t speak English well... But you need to read English well enough to make your way through this slab of 8-point Ariel, the longest block of prose on the page.

Of course, that could be the point.

I go on staring.

Someone designed this object. Someone wrote the copy. Someone, one of us, an Australian, went to work one day, was told to make this by another Australian, and did.

==

The detention centres still exist (in the desert) (offshore). We’re used to them.

==

Officially.

Throughout the stretch of Howard governments (1996-2007), Australian human rights groups investigated, documented, made representations to the government and to at least one independent Senate enquiry. (I wrote letters; vapid paragraphs on ornate letterhead came in reply.) Amnesty International investigated. Refugee prisoners – because that’s what they are – go on hunger strikes.

The Gillard government has reintroduced “the Pacific solution” because there’s likely to be a Federal election before the end of 2013, and locking up refugees “still plays well in Middle Australia.”

Well there it is: an Australian middle America to go with un-American un-Australia.

The friend who gave me the fridge magnet is right. It will take decades to re-civilize the place, if we ever do. Our governments, both flavours, are neo-Georgian: they’ve gone back to running prisons for the demonized and criminalized poor, and enabling the global and gobalized rich.