Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Tribalism

Even though this blog sees me preoccupied by the clash between the city and the country I do know that this isn’t the only site of cultural opposition. ‘Home’ of course is in the eye of the beholder. I was recently reminded that Sydney itself is no homogenous place and that this vast city is just a collection of diverse tribes firmly located in their own neighbourhoods. Recently I left my familiar stomping ground in the city’s East and took a work-related day trip into the badlands of the Western suburbs.

Ah Bankstown…working class Anglo meets Asia-Africa-Lebanon all swirling around in one great big melting pot. I was fascinated on my walk from the station to the Library that morning by almost everyone I saw, everything I overheard and every shop I passed. However my favourite Banky resident was the woman I followed for many blocks that Wednesday morning and whose journey seemed to parallel mine. We crossed the same roads, cut through the same park, turned the same corners and went down the same arcades and because I walked behind her for so long I was able to watch her closely.

I tried to look away, I really did, but became a fixated by the tightness of her jeans, so snug they must have been painted on. Come to think of it now they may have been jean style leggings, but whatever they were they clung to every inch of her arse and thighs re-writing the meaning of ‘tight’. They were also gossamer sheer giving me a clear outline of her g-string and even its colour (orange).

Despite her shaky stilettos she maintained a brisk pace and when she looked around at one stage I got a startling view of her enviable makeup - false eye lashes and blood red lipstick. I do think false eye lashes before lunchtime is something to be in awe of, it’s decadence par excellence. That this amazing outfit was completed by a hijab, the wearing of which is a public sign of her commitment to modesty, was probably the most extraordinary part of it all.

(Of the hijab www.onislam.net explains ‘it is a choice to cover and dignify the body Allah gave you, rather than give in to a culture that teaches women they are to be sex objects who sell their bodies to market beer…hijab is a symbol of our worship and servitude to God. It is a symbol of modesty that is not just about our attire; it extends to our whole demeanor’.)

One of the cleverest short cuts into Sydney’s tribes and tribal mindsets I have ever seen appeared in Tharunka the student publication of my old alma mater, the University of NSW. In 2011 it said it like it is with a map of Sydney’s suburbs according to each of its tribal cultures. You can see it here: http://blogs.abc.net.au/nsw/2011/06/is-this-your-tribal-view-of-sydney.html
To complete this view of Sydney make sure you click through to the next page for a Westies eye view of everyone else. I defy you not to laugh out loud!

And now for something completely different. I’ve recently re-discovered an old favourite, the Catho Hotel, at Catherine Hill Bay and fallen in love with it all over again. Despite some initial scepticism I think the Country Mouse is coming around to its fabulousness too. I first found this classic Australian pub in the mid-1990s when dear friends were living nearby and I had forgotten about it, having no reason to visit Catho again after they moved on.

This former miner’s pub has by some miracle been saved from gentrification despite the miners’ cottages around it now selling for the same price as a two storey absolute waterfront properties. The cottages may be match box sized, but they are authentic – and authentic costs. Proximity to such heritage chic would normally mean the local pub was vulnerable to a makeover of the
glass/polished metal/blonde wood variety, complete with a ModOz bistro serving Asian fusion food, but somehow the Catho has survived unBotoxed with all its wrinkles in place.

The Catho crowd are the same. No weekend warriors here, these denizens are hard-core 24/7. The women have more ink than the Saturday broadsheets, there are lots of patched bikers and the remainder could be, or should be – tattooed and patched that is. A pub brawl would be something to behold, this tough crowd could put on a punch-up of Olympic level strength and endurance. But the Catho’s owners must see them as a dream come true, no-one sits on glasses of iced water all night, this is a hard drinking lot.

As a music venue its pitch perfect for loud and dirty rock and roll. Talking of dirt, it’s that substance and sand which makes up the dance floor, while the stage is primitive and adjacent to it is the band’s green room (or scarily maybe their accommodation) a seen-better-days Viscount caravan whose badge ‘Grand Tourer’ seems wishful at best.

The hard-hitting nature of the place flows through to the bistro, staffed by the Australian first cousins of Seinfeld’s notorious restaurateur the ‘soup Nazi’. The surly kitchen hands are clearly irritated by people who turn up at their counter constantly annoying them with food orders. And like their New York counterpart they insist on a strict manner of behaviour. In case you didn’t pick up the face-to-face icy vibe a sign without a trace of irony spells it out:
If you are grouchy, irritable or just plain mean there will be a $20.00 surcharge just to serve you.

You’ve been warned. So bring your own packed lunch, order a Jack Daniels and coke and kick back in the beer garden. All together now...“ROCK AND ROLL!!”





Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Highway to Hell

How hot is hot?

The Country Mouse and I have an ongoing debate every summer, one which is never resolved and merely reappears again and again when the mercury climbs and I start seeing a ‘3’ in front of the temperature forecast. The CM grew up in the country; I grew up on the coast and this defines our notion of heat.

After he kept declaring “It’s not hot” day after day despite the fact that the bitumen was almost melting, I pinned him down to put a figure on ‘hot’. He volunteered that for him 38 degrees is hot and 40 degrees is very hot. Me? 30 degrees is hot and 40 degrees is a temperature not fit for human habitation.

On one recent notorious Tuesday a strange heat alliance meant that the Lower Hunter Valley and Sydney both simultaneously experienced a 43 degree day. The different reactions of the citizens say it all. I was with my urban compatriots in Sydney where the news cycle was dominated by one story – The Heat.

The City Mice wailed and the city media warned ‘Don’t go outside, take shelter, lock up your pets, tend to the elderly – or you will all die’. Shopping centres and cinemas overflowed with the hot, frightened citizens of Sin City. As I joined the exodus into the heavenly cool of Hoyts a woman next to me in the queue confided “This is my third movie today”. When I asked what she was going to see next she said she didn’t know and didn’t care, all she just wanted was to be safe from The Heat.

Meanwhile at the Country Mouse house the rural residents proved they were made of sterner stuff. After months of negotiations our solar electricity was finally installed - yes on that same Torture Tuesday when the mercury reached 43. When I queried whether it was wise for the installers to clamber over the roof handling glass panels in those temperatures the CM scoffed – he would provide cold drinking water for them, what more could they want?

Despite my frantic plea, “Cold water, they’ll be beyond cold water - they could die up there!”, the solar panels went up without a hitch and the installers even knocked back the offer of a cooling drink. They make ‘em tough in the country.

And from temperature hell to angelic news (don’t you love the segue?) I’m still feeling gutted at the news which hit just before writing this post. The Angels front man, (he will always be The Angels front man to me, despite the band’s multiple line-up changes) the enigmatic Doc Neeson, is in hospital being treated for an aggressive brain tumour. The news is bad, bad, all bad, with the cancerous tumour described as a ‘four’ on a scale of one to four. The only (slightly) good news is that this has caused the bitter divisions between some of the former Angels and Doc to finally have been put aside.

The Angels are in my Australian musical pantheon. In the late 1970s, like many an awe-struck girl, I had a huge crush on the tortured poetic Doc who with his Irish lilt and artistic sensibility didn’t seem to live on the same planet as other rock and roll singers. If you ever saw the Angels play live Doc didn’t just sing, he was possessed; for a great insight into why this was so the profile ‘The demons in the Angel’ written by Stephanie Woods in the Good Weekend magazine, Sydney Morning Herald on 25 June last year is worth a look.

So tonight I’ve got tears for my favourite Angel. Doc here’s to you, take a long line and fight on: ‘this is it folks…over the top’.




Sunday, January 6, 2013

A few of my favourite things

I thought I’d start the New Year with an ultra positive post – what I love. Most of all this is the handsome Country Mouse (of course) but I’m currently also going warm and fuzzy over a few other things.

Waves and wireless
This summer Bondi Beach becomes the first beach in Australia to offer free Wi-Fi. Stunning! Listen up Newcastle City Council – let’s make one of our beaches the second.

Roitfeld rocks
My fashion hero, Carine Roitfeld, took the book on ‘mature dressing’ and ripped it up. Forget comfy shoes and elastic-waist pants, this feisty 58 y.o. French vixen breaks every rule for so-called ‘mid-age’ fashion. She wears stilettos, she wears black next to her face, and she still looks like a rock chick. Carine is two years older than me, so I kind of feel she’s lighting the path ahead for me – the one less travelled that is. Carine - lead on!

She is not only a stunning style maven, but also displays a healthy dose of scepticism for her chosen milieu, the fashion industry. Who else, after being Editor of Paris Vogue for a decade where she was famous for her smouldering eye make-up, declares she spends no more than five minutes creating her signature smoky eyes “I like it when makeup looks like you have more important things to do than to look at yourself”?

Stylish fuel
The Coles Express petrol station on Frenchmans Road, Clovelly must be one of the most genteel in Sydney. Not only is it scrupulously clean it provides moistened towlettes so that one can wipe one’s fingers and not have any nasty petrol odour on a fresh manicure. Classy!
 
Blogs I love
My two favourite blogs of 2012 were both based on a tight sense of place. One is Sydney based, the other set in Newcastle.

Mark MacLean’s blog Hamilton North is everything I love. It displays an intense local focus that really brings a blog alive and then goes on to tick all the boxes: quirky, unpredictable and idiosyncratic.

Its basis is simple: Mark walks his dog Jambo daily along the drain-like Styx Creek which is, of course, in Hamilton North. Their adventures have been self-published in a tiny, delightful book, A Year Down the Drain, which you can order from his website.

I felt in love with this blog because it flooded me with nearly forgotten memories of roaming for hours across Sydney’s Inner West in the 1980s and 1990s with my dog Arrow. In those days I was in my 20s and my dog was a cross-Kelpie, so combined we had a potent energy cocktail: my youth and her part working breed genes. On our exploratory roaming we would find culverts, hidden drains, abandoned factories and unnamed stone-paved lanes and old rights-of-way. We pushed past lots of ‘Do Not Enter’ signs, just going where we wanted to go and as the seasons changed and years went by we just kept walking. We found magic in the grottiest parts of the Inner West just as a Darlinghurst blogger did in the Inner East.

My Darling Darlinghurst was created by Violet Tingle who surely has the most delicious and aromatic name in the blogosphere. She is in love with a suburb, Darlinghurst, and welcomes you to her blog with: ‘I'm so glad you found my love letter to the suburb I call home. I hope my Darlinghurst blog will inspire you to visit. Or if you are from the neighbourhood but were forced to leave for whatever reason and are now homesick, I hope my little blog can provide you with some small comfort on the cold nights away’.

Her ability to look past Darlo’s human tragedy and urban grime to find wonder in the tiniest detail, kindness and humanity in the tough residents and the extraordinary in the ordinary makes this blog like a letter from a friend. Being a history tragic I also look forward to her posts on Darlo’s heritage and the beautiful black and white photos she finds in the City of Sydney Archives collection.  

An early Christmas miracle
Our feathered fowls continue to delight us with their antics and on 14 December we had our first 4-egg day, meaning that we are now in full 100% egg production. I am sure this is delighting the Country Mouse who looks at the chooks like a true economic rationalist with a sceptical “These chooks are going to be a long-time paying for themselves”.
 
That we still have four chooks, rather than three, is due in no small measure to a miracle last December. It all centered on Dixie, once the smallest and meekest of the chickens, who stunned us by her audacious flight over the fence into the land of ‘Next Door’ - home of the terrorist terrier.

She must have twigged at some stage that she was named after those gutsy musical chicks; maybe she even had Wide Open Spaces on high rotation after hours in the chook pen. Unfortunately she seems to have been inspired by the chorus ‘She needs wide open spaces/Room to make her big mistakes/She needs new faces/ She knows the highest stakes’.  

While the Country Mouse was distracted on an international phone call she struck out, ‘to find a dream and a life of her own’. Over the fence she went. Onto the lawn next door. And up the back steps. And into the house. Mrs Next Door was in the kitchen when Dixie calmly strutted past. I’ll be forever grateful that she quickly scooped up the terrier before a violent end and a bundle of feathers was all that we had to remind us of our once docile bird.

Dixie was duly returned home by one of the twinnies, an 11 y.o. brother and sister duo, who despite all their high-tech gadgetry and abundant toys are absolutely fixated on our chickens and visit them daily. They are so fierce in their devotion that the Country Mouse has had to devise a roster system to stop them physically fighting each other to get to the laying boxes to see who will be the first to discover the day’s bounty of fresh eggs. Their excitement at finding an egg, while their bikes and iPads are thrown discarded on our lawn, is a thing to behold. Who would have thought?