Crusty’s corner

SINCE my first foray into writing for Tasmanian Times, I can’t say I’ve had much feedback. I don’t know how many hits my overlong article scored and whether anybody actually bothered to read it because it was as foreshadowed, long. I will always maintain that the galloping pace of change in society means that people have a consistently diminishing attention span. The old thirty-second sound bite, so beloved of electronic media has now been reduced to around 10 seconds. To sit and watch the pap served up by commercial TV stations and called news is farcical. How dare they intrude on the steady flow of advertising to pretend to inform us of what is going on in the world or the country?

Only the ABC, given its charter, makes any real attempt to bring news into our homes. ABC-TV news is a pretty slick affair, which I enjoy for national and international news (along with SBS-TV) but I could certainly do without the representative of the dismal science telling us about economics and the stock market. However, we must take the rough with the smooth in such matters and I am perfectly prepared to concede that shareholders may derive some benefit from a nightly, spectral vignette in gray. And to give the ABC some credit, at least they attempt to cover the whole spectrum of Tasmanian events political, criminal, social, and sporting and so on.

In like manner, probably only The Mercury makes a reasonable fist of trying to cover Tasmanian affairs. To visit Launceston and read the Examiner is to suffer an information famine and an obvious but unstated belief that it is really the state capital. The curiously pronounced Advocate reminds me of rustic papers in the US and UK. I don’t want to write about Tasmanian parochialism, only to note its existence, persistence and pestilence. It finds its mark in politics with pork-barreling on a grand scale and the claims made by the three regions for parity and equity is the food and drink of state politics. I have been asked to write about state politics and I don’t want to because so many people do it better.

I would like to hark back to some of the ideas I floated in my first article, especially on civic matters and the notion that generally speaking, Australians are focused on what they can screw out of government, while taking little heed of the reciprocal rights and responsibilities of citizenship. As I wrote this article, I was contemplating the upcoming local government elections. There are a few elections signs around, on roads and fences but nothing like a state or federal election. I know most of the names on the ballot paper and I have spoken to most of them at one time or another. Yet with voting closing on, I have had no personal communication with/from any candidate. Of course, voting for the third tier of government is not compulsory and as a consequence we get what we deserve and I remain to be convinced that any local government body is representative of the people and of the candidates real agenda, we know very little except for the blurb with the voting paper, some newspaper advertisements and a few pamphlets shoved in the letterbox.

There are people who claim that political material is junk mail and that is a sentiment with which I cannot agree. When I letterboxed for candidates at every election, federal, state and local, I ignored the “no junk mail” sign on letterboxes. I can distinctly remember being challenged a few years ago by a couple of irate citizens who asked whether I could read. I rather politely told them that indeed I could and so should they because what I was putting in their letterbox would inform and affect the outcome of state or Council elections. Last week, I roused myself sufficiently to write a letter to the Mercury on the subject but they declined to publish it, which is their right.

My own letterbox had been vandalized the years. It doesn’t matter much what you call the perpetrators but some people appear to get a kick out of ripping the letterbox from its mountings and sometimes bending the mountings. Most attacks coincided with the end of the school year and I know for certain that a few years ago, some of the cream of our better schools literally swarmed through our suburb, making a hell of a racket and trashing letterboxes everywhere. This phenomenon is known in some areas as “wilding.” And with a mob of over 200 drunken youths outside my house, after midnight, it was a most peculiar and disturbing event. Naturally enough, they had to have a focus for mischief and vandalism and the letterboxes took a terrible hit.

Mine was found in the middle of the road when I went out with a torch and if it had been hit by a car, the vehicle would have sustained considerable damage. Consequently, I paid to have a brick letterbox built up with the unusual weather, it’s become a haven for a colony of snails and it doesn’t matter how many times I clean them out and pitch them into the street to provide food for birds, they return en masse and I could not help a wry smile when I found that the last article in the letterbox one day quite recently was for a Green candidate and the snails had virtually eaten most of the surface away leaving me to establish a candidate’s name, more by luck than judgment. Later I was much more amused because it’s not every day that something from the Greens is recycled by the creatures of Mother Nature. It must’ve been printed on biodegradable paper because there wasn’t any such persistent attack on some other quite useless advertising material.

Returning to my theme, everyone should read what candidates stand for and vote accordingly. Not to vote means that you have deliberately removed yourself from the process and there’s no point in bitching to the Council for instance, if you haven’t bothered to vote. If more people took a greater interest in the community and community matters, then we would get better candidates and I regard it as a win-win situation. As it now stands, you can more or less predict who will be elected and I don’t expect any surprises.

Another aspect of civic behavior concerns civility of the act of being polite to another person. It doesn’t matter whether you know a person but as someone I love very much, sadly deceased, once said: “good manners don’t cost money.” That’s why I like Christmas in Hobart. Instead of scowling or looking away, people actually smile at one another and while they might not walk around saying “Merry Christmas” to all and sundry as in a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, for a while there appears to be a warmth – a truce or interlude in the ongoing struggle for existence day by day throughout the rest of the year. How I would like that spirit to continue because Tasmanians are the most generous of Australians while at the same time being the poorest in economic terms. The ABC giving tree and similar projects are truly remarkable and the charitable organizations that benefit from the efforts of volunteers are able to ensure that no one need have a miserable time during the festive season.

We are constantly told that Tasmanians are work-shy, bludgers and the most dependent on what we used to refer to as Social Security but to our eternal shame has allowed politicians to rename welfare in a highly derogatory fashion. I happen to believe that Tasmanians are not work-shy and that you can’t generalize from statistics. I know far too many hard-working people who still struggle to make ends meet. I sometimes think it is unfortunate but in the New Testament we are told that the poor are always with us and that is true. But there are degrees of poverty and some choose to live outside the system. I once knew of someone who lived in a concrete drain-pipe. It was out of the way, obviously surplus to needs and by the time he’d finished, it was weatherproof and provided the newspapers were dry, he said with a smile that he was always warm. I never knew his name but I always spoke to him and occasionally we shared a round of ale. It was obvious that he had been reasonably well-educated because he was certainly literate and articulate. I never asked why he lived the way he chose. I suppose to bowdlerize a corny line from a long gone TV series, “there’s a million stories on the naked streets” and this was one of them.

In England I was familiar with tramps, a term that has a totally different connotation in the US. These were men who roamed the countryside picking up a little work here and there, begging if necessary and more often than not sleeping in haystacks, stooks or barns, according to the season. Living on a farm, I never ceased to be surprised at how warm a barn could be even in the depths of winter, with snow on the ground. Haystacks were more fun for us kids and I treasure a rural upbringing. Of itself, farm labor is hard work for all concerned and the kids all had to chip in with various chores, according to their ability. In the harvest season, I went with the farmer’s shooting party and carried a stick which had income from a tree with a misshapen joint – like a great knob and a hook. As the harvester chugged around the wheat and barley fields, out would come rabbits and the shotguns would fire. My job was to carry the carcasses back to the farmhouse hanging on my stick. One day, an unfortunate rabbit came past me and I swung and connected, killing it outright: I still don’t know who was the most surprised on that day but the rabbit went into the pot and was very tasty.

I came a long way from the rural background to being a world traveler and I have seen sights that I never want to see again. Like the cardboard city under a railway bridge adjacent to the river Thames in London. Populated by the down and outs of Thatcherite Britain, with the stink of unwashed bodies, bodily waste, marijuana smoke and cheap cider – anything to get you there, wherever that might be. It was a sad and slashing indictment of the UK and the so-called welfare state. I’ve seen worse in the US but never stopped to take a closer look because it was dangerous territory. I’m certainly never guilty of cowardice but the sheer hostility on some faces sent me the message.

What I’m getting to finally is a belief that all our political parties should adopt a common policy to ensure that there is a roof over the head of someone at night; a bed to sleep in and dinner and breakfast. Not to provide for the dispossessed is a crime against humanity and a great shame on us all. We pay enough in taxes and surely, the task is not insurmountable. In Melbourne, the missions to the streets and lanes continues I believe but as one politician said to me, something along the lines of the poor are really quite well off – they have TVs, cell phones and always seem to be able to afford fast foods: perhaps so but I would like some of our politicians to live on what is paid to the poorest and see how they exist without any external support whatsoever for one year. I could say the same of senior public servants especially the fascistic bureaucrats of Centrelink. No one, but no one, waxes fat on the disability pension or unemployment benefits and this is supposed to be a rich country. I’ve done it tough in my time and at one stage, I wondered where I was going to eat and sleep next but that was during a lean time and I was never out of work, merely without anywhere to live. I landed on my feet; too many these days do not deserve derision and contempt but compassion and a helping hand.

In conclusion, at this time of year and with a state election in prospect, I would dearly like to see a re-growth of our community links; concern for our fellow man (and don’t hit me with the PC stick) and for those who read to make that extra effort to connect, to show kindness and remember that there but for the grace of God go you. And while you’re at it, think carefully about what you want Tasmania to be in years to come. Not a colony becoming a museum piece but a vibrant, welcoming and attractive state. This is a theme that I wish to develop in my next piece.

PS And a special thanks to Dr Peter Henning for finding the Brecht quote where I failed most miserably.