Conversations on the St Kilda Tram

“I was hoping to come round on Christmas Day”, Frank said. His face a collage of hope and trepidation. “Maybe on Christmas night. I know he’ll be there. I could sleep on the couch. I just want to play with the kids and the toys I got them. …… I know it’s awkward but it’s Christmas”.

Mobile phone calls on trams are never private, but Frank was doing his best. He looked out towards the Christmas Tree on Federation Square and it’s incongruous snow and reindeers seemed to catch in his voice. “You know I love them and they love me. But it’s up you. I know you’ve moved on”.

Across the aisle, the three Irish girls were tired and emotional. They had landed a job in the same City centre café and were fulfilling the stereotype of all backpackers by getting pissed in the afternoon. By their accents I could tell that they came from different parts of Ireland and had probably met on a beach in Queensland while getting drunk on sun and cheap ecstasy tablets. Friendships are made and lost with the speed of sunsets on the great year out. They laughed and joked about English boys they had met on their travels and about the scary Italian chap who liked to stand naked on the balcony of their St Kilda backpackers lodge.

They talked about Christmas and how great it was to spend it in the heat. “I’m heading to Sydney for Christmas” Deirdre said as though she was talking about the weather. To Grainne however, it was like lightning had struck. “I thought you were spending it with me in Melbourne” she said and the mood changed like a blanket dipped in ice had been thrown across it.

The next 10 minutes was a tennis match of half-hearted explanations and manufactured hurt. “But I told you I was going to be in Melbourne.” “You said you have loads of friends here so I assumed you wouldn’t miss me. You’re always talking about how many friends you have.” Grainne wasn’t going to let it go however. She summoned up some tears and thrust her chest out for one last valedictory speech. “I know we only met two months ago but we’ve done so much cool stuff together and I really felt that we’d become best friends. And you want to spend Christmas with your best friend”.

Deirdre surveyed the tears and emotional blackmail and decided she wasn’t going to pay up. “My best friends are in Ireland. You’re just people I’ve met traveling.”

With that, she opened a Pandora’s box that could never be closed again. They sat in silence, save for the occasional whimper from Grainne. Traveling by its nature is transient and the friendships made follow suit. Like shooting stars they fizzle brightly before dying. Email addresses and phone numbers are exchanged but everybody knows it’s a game. No one will ever make contact. You share buses, white water rafts, helicopter rides and your last bottle of VB in a Byron Bay bar at 4am. But the friendships you make are born of the moment, fuelled by the intensity of your hyper ventilated life. When you return to the dull drip of normality, those friendships seem incongruous and other worldly.

This is the great unspoken rule of traveling to which all backpackers buy in. Except Grainne it seems. She was determined to maximise the guilt. “I’m going to be on my own now on Christmas Day”.

“No you’re not”, said Deirdre, “You pick up more strays than the dog pound. And most of them look like they should be in the dog pound too”. Her initial embarrassment had turned to indignation at the idea that somebody she’d met only two months ago would be trying to make her guilty about where she spends Christmas.

Christmas Day in the Southern Hemisphere is different because of the weather, but in most other respects it is the same. Nobody wants to spend it alone, even the independent backpackers. The brave souls who wander the Milford Track or Cradle Mountain will still try and find a kindred spirit to share a beer and a BBQ on Christmas Day and mythologise about previous December days back home when the snow glistened on every tree top and happy strangers called out “Merry Christmas” while struggling home under the weight of cheerily wrapped parcels. In Sydney, the council provides penned off sections of Bondi Beach so that young Europeans can mix with their own nationality and get happily drunk without having to worry about the English ruining the party. They’ll call home and tactfully ignore the fact that they’ve traveled half way round the world to spend Christmas in a cage with hundreds of their countrymen.

Grainne will no doubt be sorted out. Frank was not so lucky. He held the phone to his ear and listened patiently to the list of reasons why his Christmas would not be a merry one. His eyes glazed up and he struggled to control his voice. “But it’s Christmas”, he said, like a small boy who wanted to stay up late for the Toy Show. And a small boy is what he had become, unable to cope with the realities of adult situations. He hung up without saying goodbye and turned to look at the gathering dusk.

There are thousands of tourists in Australia at this time of year and they will spend Christmas with fellow travelers and short term acquaintances. They have chosen to come here, to spend Christmas away from their families. They’ll go to the beach on the 25th and maybe have a swim, if they can stay sober long enough. But for many people who live here, the choice of whether or not they spend Christmas with the people they love is not theirs to make.

I hope Frank gets to spend some time with his kids this Christmas and that those drunken Irish girls realise that there are far more important things to cry about than which temporary friend you share your turkey with.

A Day at the Races

Melbournians treat horse racing the way Irish people treat weddings. As an excuse to dress up, get drunk, debauch with the opposite sex and pay a passing and somewhat disinterested look at the advertised events.

This is a City which declares a Bank Holiday on the day of a certain Horse Race and where the locals can tell you the life story of Phar Lap (a nag from the 1930’s that was a bit special) quicker than they can name the Victorian Premier. But it seems this fascination is less with the equine side of things than with the social opportunities that Horse Racing provides.

The Spring Carnival is a kind of rights of passage event in Melbourne. It’s when the winter clothes are packed away and the sunglasses and fake tans come out. For the rest of the summer, the race meetings provide the perfect opportunity to get some wear out of that $1,000 frock you bought for the carnival. The clothes worn to race meetings in Australia are another link to weddings. Slim fit frocks with spaghetti straps and built in cleavage are de rigueur for the ladies, along with ludicrously high heeled shoes and hats for those over 25. The gents wear stylish suits in the Armani style and shoes that are so shiny you could use them to start a small fire with the aid of the sun and some dry twigs.

At the start of the day, this cortege looks like a picture postcard, but it soon becomes clear that the clothing is completely inappropriate. First to go are the Ladies shoes. High heels are a crazy form of footwear to start with. When you down 16 glasses of bubbly and spend the day in a large field, they become instruments of torture. So it’s not uncommon to see young ladies parading round in their bare feet while clutching an expensive pair of Italian made Gucci shoes. Gents jackets and ties are the next to go, particularly when the mercury hits 40c and the wind decides to take a holiday. Add in copious amounts of alcohol and what starts as a fashion parade ends up like a St Patrick’s Day parade. A lot of drunken people in ridiculous clothes.

The Melbourne Cup attracts 120,000 people to Flemington racetrack. Saturday’s meeting at Caulfield was an altogether more modest affair, but the best traditions of Australian racing were nevertheless on show. Most of the punters were part of group, celebrating a hen night, bucks night (the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of our much more manly “Stag” night) or 21st birthday. The popularity of racing to these people is that it provides ample facilities for large groups to drink al fresco and at the same provides the pretence that you are actually there for something apart from the drinking. Generally, these are the only people not dressed in party frocks and suits and are more likely to be found in an Elvis outfit or “Mankini” (as promoted by Borat). Whether Borat intentionally invented a costume that encourages one testical to hang forlornly from the side is unclear, but this certainly seems to be the result.

Most people cast a half-interested eye at the nags as they thunder by every 40 minutes or so but it quickly becomes apartment that the gap between races is less about getting horses and jockeys ready than providing just the right amount of time to collect winnings, place new bet, relieve your bladder of the extortionate pressure you are putting it under and buy yourself another beer at one of the 25 bars on course. Then you return to the paddock to watch the race on a large screen. Occasionally for the last ten seconds or so, you might actually redirect your eyes to the real horses as they charge by. By this is entirely optional. Many people are happy to go to the races and never see a horse at all. In much the same way as people are happy to go to a wedding and never see the bride and groom. If you bump into them on the way to the bar, you would no doubt say hello and crack a witty comment about when is the baby due. But if you don’t see them all day, then no sweat.

Which is a shame at the races actually, because the horses are actually magnificent. They are genetic mutants of course, being inbred from a French donkey in the 18th century, but as genetic mutants go, they are not bad ones. And they just go to prove that God has no monopoly on beauty. Its seems that every Australian horse is a fantastic chestnut colour and it must be a point of honour to groom their coats so they look like school boys on their First Communion Day. But the real beauty of these magnificence beasts is best felt when they thunder past you on the home straight, necks stretched towards the finish and muscles aching against the jockeys whip. There in that blaze of equine sweat and thundering hooves is the true mystery of racing and the mastery of sport.

But by then most people are gazing at the screen or heading back to the bar. The meeting ends as the sun starts to set behind the grandstand and the winners and losers join the merry and simply drunk in the short walk to the station. Melbourne is the most accessible city in the world. Trams will deliver you directly to the beach, the two biggest sports stadiums are situated next to the two biggest train stations and race courses are served by trains and buses that can whip you back into the City quicker than you can place a reverse double.

On a nice sunny day, its hard to beat a day at races, especially when you pick the winner of the last race and go home with your pocket bulging with your $50 profit.

Show Business for Ugly People

So Johnny Howard is gone. And few will lament his passing. Australia has its fair share of selfish people who only care about tax reductions and keeping immigrants out, but even they lost interest in poor old Johnny. He had been Prime Minister for 11 years, as has Ireland’s Bertie Ahern. But he shares more than longevity with Ireland’s esteemed leader. Both follow a right wing philosophy dressed in liberal popularism. But politics these days is about style as much as substance and Johnny had about as much style as a Village People tribute band.

While Bertie pretends that he likes everyone from Trade Unions to George Bush (when in fact he likes no one except the five guys he goes for a beer with), Johnny pretends he likes no one, when in fact he is in love with George Bush.

Mr. Howard now joins his chums from the War on Terror in the dustbin of history. Tony Blair is sitting in a dark room somewhere practicing his Catherine Tate impression; Silvio Berlusconi is playing at being a Football Manager and investigating revolutionary hair replacement technology. Mr Anzar is busy lobbying the Spanish Socialist Government to award posthumous medals to dead Felangist torturers and George Bush himself is enduring the longest last dance in politics as the American Constitution does to him what the rest of the world would have liked to have done long ago.

Soon the horsemen of the apocalypse who plunged the World into a never ending middle eastern war will be gone. But it is not for the blood of thousands of Iraqis they have fallen. Consumerism has been their downfall. The Western World has surfed an economic boom for the past twenty years, built on cheap Chinese products and the never-ending thirst of American and European consumers. You would think that the politicians who brought this wealth would be cosseted by a thankful public. But in the same way that we grow tired of our two year old car and replace our plasma TV screens like we replace light bulbs, we grow tired of politicians. Johnny Howard lost the election because people were bored. The Neo cons have created a generation of dull minded consumers with a low attention span. They shouldn’t be surprised when this attention span covers politics as well.

As an Accountant, I tend look for the credit to every debit. This sounds remarkably unsexy, so in public at least, I prefer to call it the search for the Ying and Yang of life. Our leaders would have us believe that the boom of the last 20 years is a virtuous cycle of growth and more growth. The credit of course can be found in the sweat shops of Asia and the constant need for oil to fuel the furnace of Capitalism. Getting at this oil is of course why Iraq and Iran are so often in the news.

The other yang in the cycle of western consumerism is of course the Environment. Fossil fuels are being burned like there is no tomorrow (which of course there may well not be) as a consumer based boom needs oil as it’s core ingredient. The rest of the world’s limited resources are being consumed in the ravenous feast of greed. Australia is a perfect microcosm of this. Western Australia is now essentially one big mine where the holes are been dug so deep I expect an Aussie bloke with a helmet and sweaty armpits to shortly burrow through the floor of my Dad’s living room in Ireland.

In Tasmania, they plan to harvest all the trees and convert them into Big Mac cartons or something similarly hideous, while in South Australia they are domestically farming kangaroos, which is just wrong on so many levels.

But none of this caused a flicker in Australia’s recent election. The Green Party’s vote was static and unspectacular. They have hoovered up all the vegetarians and tree huggers but struggle to break through to the masses. I guess if Social Democracy is not able to convince people to look beyond their wallet for the sake of helping the old and the sick, then the Greens are going to struggle to make a selfish electorate pay more taxes to support something as intangible as the environment.

Politics has been dumbed down to the extent that elections are now just a case of swapping one group of dull civil servants for another. While I’m pleased to be finally living under a Labour Government after years of selling Socialist Newspapers and joining the incongruously named “Accountants for a Labour Victory”, I have to admit that it won’t make much difference. You couldn’t fit a red rose petal between the policies of Kevin Rudd (what other countries in the world would elect a “Kevin” as their leader?) and the outgoing Liberals. I guess we lefties just have to hope that the new regime will manage Capitalism with a slightly kinder face.

There was a time when people burned cars after elections. When they marched on public buildings and threatened to raise them to the ground. When tractors and buses arrived from the country for mass protests on public squares under the gaze of nervous riot police. When corrupt politicians and their even more corrupt wives were put up against a wall and shot. Now we just buy the Sunday Newspapers to cast a cold and disinterested eye over the election results before quickly moving to the Sport.

Nobody cares anymore. Except Johnny Howard of course. He can now go for his morning walk around Circular Quay without anyone bothering him. Even the Chasers comedy team who used to disrupt his morning walk by dressing up as Osama Bin Laden will lose interest.

Politics used to be real, vital and exciting. But sometime around the End of History, it became just another branch of reality TV. A chance to vote on something meaningless without having to pay premium telephone charges. Now it’s just show business for ugly people.