Why the Rodent gets up my Goat

My bespectacled eyes gaze up toward our regal, amber-lit Treasury building, its palm trees still and damp amidst a sheen of freezing chill. Upon the outskirts of a city that hasn’t yet pulled itself out of bed, a tram clacks and rumbles - the only sign of life short of a lone Sri Lankan courier on the other side of Spring st. He’s got baked goods. I want baked goods. He could be from Bangladesh. Possibly India.
It occurs to me that this is not important.

I twist my scarfed-to-the-hilt neck up to my right. At the top of the treasury steps, puncturing the darkness, luminous rays of showbiz light drench a familiar looking political-type in a suit. It appears to be Kev Rudd, cock of the walk, the people’s man, the bloke who would be Prime Minster conducting a live to air interview. I stare up at Rudd’s manboy face and out of the blue am hit with an irrational urge to conduct a Benny Hill style noggin slappin’ and/or wedgie of the atomic persuasion on our would be PM. I ponder how an electorate might warm to Rudd being blinded on national television from to Y-fronts being stretched from the back of his ass to the hair of his chinny chin chin. I refrain. I kinda like Rudd, and in many ways I have no choice but to like him, because ultimately I really, tremendously loathe the alternative.

Since his inception as national leader John Winston Howard has always found himself firmly up my goat, and recently I’ve forced myself to examine exactly why this is. Sometimes it’s all too easy to find yourself adrift in a conditioned state of loathing for this particular rodent. Perhaps it’s to do with a lingering feeling of disappointment from that night in ’96 when PJK’s Zegna-panted rear was turfed from office, replaced by a pragmatic, unconvincing and unlikely goose. Though a young lad of just 12 years, i dug Keating’s charismatic sass, his gall and chutzpah and soft spot for the Arts. Understandably I was duely unimpressed with the stale, regressive alternative, and it’s something I’ve never been able to shake. Howard managed to get away with branding Keating an arrogant elitist for having a greater picture and sense for the truth than him, and this I failed to dig.

For over decade now, a plethora of reasons for me loathing this rodent have amassed and congealed into a thick, hearty anathema for which he shall never be rid. The extinguishing of Native Title, castration of a Reconciliation process and the election-stealing lies about refugee children being thrown into the sea began to sow the seeds of my discontent. Then came the refugee detention camps, Iraq, our unquestioned suckholing of the American establishment and a myopic, ideological drive to embed our once humanitarian beacon of a nation into the United States’ imperialist, warmongering agenda. For using fear to control a populace, for using race to divide, for lying and lying when caught out about it. We may be governed by a government of many but the leader is responsible for setting the measure and tone of a nation. It is here where the man’s true colours have shown. A measure too short, a tone too mono and a colour too white.

For these reasons and more I chose not to atomically wedge Kevin Rudd on national television. I think we're going to need him.

The other alternatives have come and gone throughout the years. Beazley’s one and only moment of glory arrived and went when he ate a whole chicken in Question Time after using it to debunk Howard’s GST proposals. Crean was…Crean. Latham never eased enough squeeze for my taste, though anyone who candidly describes John Howard as an ‘arselicker’ and his cabinet a ‘congaline of suckholes’ deserves a partial credit for audacity. So it comes down to our man Rudd. Cock of the walk, or just a cock? And would voting for a sprightly cock be any better than voting for a fatigued goose?
This self-asserted pundit argues a fervent ‘yes’. And when the day finally arrives, a newly toned and measured country may sigh a fresh breath as the rodent and his congaline are sent packing, dancing back into the white dust-lined annals of history.

High Eight Us

Hiatus.
Spiffo word that one. Say it a few times in a row, say it few more after that, and as the syllables start to roll off your tongue with rabid haste, it just sounds plain weird. However the word hiatus is central to the following confessional.
It has come to my attention through esteemed colleague in literary shadiness, Buckmaster that it has indeed been not one, not two, but THREE long months since my last blog posting. Quite frankly, I was dumbfounded as to this revelation. Where on earth had these three months gone and how had I managed to ferret them away with little to no attention to the continuity of the juicy minutiae of life? I was certain that life had gotten no less juicy - colder perhaps, but still swarming, bulging thick and rife with minutiae of the juiciest blend. It seemed that time had simply gotten away, eluding me as I got comfier and comfier dozing away on my laurels, jamming the time choc full with certain nondescript ferreting. I’d neglected the breakfast and the dog that laid claim to it, and though critically undernourished, it lives. Let it be known that Time as the bringer of death itself has failed to achieve its ultimate expression in this regard. The Death According to Dool? A premature prognosis, surely. The extended, accidental hiatus according to Dool? Quite possibly.

For the sake of pedantic clarity do not be confused into thinking that I have contracted a three month natural fissure, cleft or foramen in a bone or other structure (thanks Dictionary.com). The hiatus that I refer to is this very break in the continuity of the work, series and action – this here dog’s breakfast compendium, this précis gospel on life itself.

For posterity, I declare this accidental hiatus over and hereby enact a new chapter in the life and times of the Doolblog.
A fresh fisting of juice, a smorgasbord of minutiae, a fat fried literary breakfast and a brand new juiced up dog to go with it.

Down on the Corner

Trendies traipse the footpath past cafes, bars and expensive salons. Old Greek men linger, smoking cigarettes in zippered loafers and blue wool slacks, whilst elderly ladies push pleather shopping carts over cobbled gutters. Faded department storefronts speak languidly of consumerism’s past, their interiors now at odds with the reputations of the golden era that spawned their inception.
Smith St is gritty and raw, grimy and real. It is a veritable melting pot of characters and lives, Collingwood’s rich heart and tainted soul.
On the corner of Moor and Smith sit the Aborigines. They lounge with longnecks of VB and Draught, parked at the benches under the leafy trees, each day losing their minds to the drink and repeating it all the next. This corner is their turf. Sitting around, seeing out their sombre days, wasting in numbers, together under that tree.
Washing away their lives with the grog.

One afternoon down at Smith St Safeway Liquor I joined the queue of people waiting to purchase their booze. Directly in front of me a dark frizzy haired woman tipped one of her VB longnecks off the bench, averting a floor smash with a swift last minute catch. The woman made a bit of a commotion. She turned to face me.
“Lucky I caught that one ay?”.
The woman was quite tall, full lipped, roughly middle aged and visibly indigenous. I recognised her from the corner. She got talking to a blonde girl ahead of me, and occasionally glanced behind to include me her chat. She’d been drinking heavily and talked at us with a husky thick voice, but not in a threatening manner and hardly overbearing. The richness and candour in her voice drew me into her words and cradled my attention. She reeled off jive, something about how she’d been here earlier, what her fella was up to, how she needed to get the grog back to her mates on the corner. The blonde girl seemed a little cautious, and the store attendant behind the counter eyed subtly to see where the security guard was. I made some small talk with the woman and she went on to dominate the chat.
“Buried me brother today…gunna drown me sorrows a bit”.
She informed me matter of factly that her brother had been stabbed to death in a backstreet in Preston five days earlier.
With little repose, she presented to me a picture she’d been holding. It was a blown up police photograph of an old grey haired fella sitting cross-legged and handcuffed on a kerb, flanked by two indigenous women and a couple of officers.
“Not a bad shot is it ay?!”, she asked with relative enthusiasm.
She began to sway her head gently from side to side, noting the two ladies in the shot.
“These are me sisters”.
She directed my attention to one of the ladies.
“…Lost her last year”.
She pointed to the older man in handcuffs, parked helplessly in the gutter.
“Lost ‘Im few months ago as well”
I stared into the sadness permeating her deep brown eyes, bagged and welling. She pointed to the other woman in the photo.
“Can’t afford to bloody lose her”, she stated with pity, her tone amazingly measured and more reflective than remorseful.
I was taken aback, transported to another world. I continued staring into her eyes. They were nothing but hazy wells of sadness and sorrow; in looking through them, I saw into her life. It was full of pain and sadness, routine tragedy and the acceptance of misery. The death of her brother was just another ‘fuckin’ one of ‘em dying’. Like the others, she would accept it. And as she had done before, she would drink these longnecks to drown and forget.

Most days I still walk past the corner slightly unsettled and wary. I dislike that I feel this way. There’s normally about fifteen of them, young and old, bound in alcoholic solidarity, a united clan. They belch out yelps to disarrayed mates over the road, all the while imposing an unmistakable presence and shady vibe on the whole street. The trendies and elderly stick out like sore thumbs, and so do i. Through a five minute booze purchase at the local supermarket, I gained an amazingly emotional insight into a world I’ll never have to be in, know, or endure. I felt deeply for the woman, wondered what must go on in her head, wondered how she deals with the ongoing sadness in her life, and the lives of those around her that sit by the corner day after day. I understood then how important it was for them all to stick together, to rock in the same boat, present a united front and get through life with arms linked. All they had was each other, and none of them could afford to lose anyone else. I’ve crossed that street before to avoid the confrontation. I hate that fear could do that to me, and refuse to cross anymore. I don’t fear these people. They are me. I love these people. I hate that they have to be there every day drink away their humanity. I hate the emptiness and sorrow that I saw in that woman’s eyes. I hate that she had to bury her own brother that day and lose another family member and friend to her adverse existence. I hate the hopelessness of the situation.

The Smith Street corner is just a microcosm of a much bigger theme, our collective failure to imagine and empathise on a grand scale, to have a go at sensitively righting some enormous wrongs committed in our past, however frought with emotional difficulty such an undertaking might be, however steep the upward slope. To acknowledge that we are bound together in humanity and do what needs to be done.



"It begins, I think with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask, how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded us all.”

- Paul Keating. Redfern Address 1992

Old Balls and Weddings

I turned a slab the other day and for the first time ever I feet that I’m getting on a bit in this life. I reckon twenty five will probably yield an even deeper sensation of ‘old balls’, but twenty four really does feel a little strange. It’s all good. At 24, you’ve still got license to act like a goose if the opportunity presents itself, a license that in truth, probably doesn’t expire until 30 at least. Maybe the license never expires. Maybe I’ll keep up the goose act well until my dwindling years, when I one day search into the mirror and find that I’ve metamorphosed into one massive wrinkle. A wrinkly old goose with old balls. Bring it on. I’ll still be having fun. Complaining about the temperature of my soup, whacking people in the shins with my walking cane, playing the Benny Hill tune while I repeatedly slap my own balding nut. It’s going to be great.

Coinciding with my slab birthday was the marriage of my good mates Evsy and Rebsy, the second couple in our tight school friendship group that have succumbed to the glory of matrimony. This event contributed in making me feel a little older. Various events have marked this progression over the years. First it was the twenty first parties and the consecutive months of free piss and good times. Then it was an engagement, a bucks nights, the marriage of Bartletts, and now a union of Winstanleys. That’s two of the fellas down…one begs the question as to who might be next.

Anyway, age be buggered. The wedding on Saturday was a truly awesome and rocking day. I worked the 7.30 shift in the morning and could barely contain my excitement at the large day ahead. I suited up, not in the baby blue safari number that would have led to my castration at the whim of the bride, but a suit that normal people would wear. I startled most of the backpackers at work in my uncustomarily dashing threads. The day kicked off well. I sat in the audience and ogled the bridal party as they trundled magnificently down the aisle of the Arts Centre pavilion, all suits and blue dresses, gracing the stage in a frontline of unity. Big Evs beamed as his new bride’s big brown eyes made their way down the red carpet. I’d never seen the man so relaxed. He would explain this later at the reception – how on earth could he be nervous when they loved each other so damn much. I sat and spectated on as another two of my great friends declared with candour their undying love to each other. We all looked on, our little family of friends, and beamed reciprocally at the frontline. Love swelled and permeated the room. I was left with nothing but warmth in my heart and a shiteating grin to boot.

After a warm, succinct ceremony, we took some photos, drank some juice, mocked Wibo’s tie and laughed at Corno’s busted arse shoes. I indulged in the usual sparkling borax with Buckmaster, caught up with the gang, got prepped for a big day. The girls looked a treat. We began to smash piss at Bear Brass, and after a couple of hours of liver priming, made our way through the chilly city streets to the swanky Park Hyatt. Wak dissonant horn harmonies filtered out from megaphones perched near the Yarra and offered an unsettling Tim Burton eeriness. The Park Hyatt was A-grade swank. All polished timber and marble. Beers were offered by men with trays, not to mention little balls of risotto salted to perfection. We found our seats and struggled to go through a single glass of wine without a member of Hyatt staff topping it up with fervour. Wibo would remark how quickly he was getting pissed, and the commencement of random headbutting was a visual cue as to the level of his inebriation. The food was delicious, the plonk plentiful. All the fellas talked shite, everyone mingled and proceeded to have a blast. Table six and table nine formed a ’69 union’ and stuck it up the collective arse of inferior table ten. MC Dipper really made the night a special one, providing the perfect balance of sparkling repartee, ceremonial duty and light humour. Dip made it real, and truly was the master of this ceremony.

The circular room was decked out Bollywood style. Behind ornate archways and flower laden pillars, the bridal party sat at the head of the round polished dancefloor like royalty. We shook our clackers in the Bollywood vein, but i struggled to keep up and probably looked more like i was doing the nutbush. In red satin gown and pointy, light tan slippers, Big Evs looked like the Sultan of Brunei. Rebs, adorned with bling and glamorous in matching red was his Queen. We rocked out to Bollywood dancing, we drank litres of booze, the night seemed like it would never end. Bruno Grollo was there.
Whitey and I liberated a bottled of black label from the bridal table and shared it around. Memories towards the end became more fleeting, more difficult to encode into long term memory. But it was undeniably a magnificent and wonderful night. I was inspired by the love that Evs and Rebs were sharing, the dedication that they’d made to each other, this huge decision they’d made to be united forever.

We kicked on and lapped up the extra hour thanks to daylight savings windback and after waking up in a strange bed at a random, unfamiliar house at roughly 4.30am, I slapped my two-tone shoes on blistered, squished feet, thrilled to find that I was only a few streets away from my house.

Another marriage down, another milestone, and another marker of our progression through life. Next it’ll be the thirtieths, the increasing conception of little tackers, the cycle of life accelerating, and all the joys that come with it. Congratulations Evs and Rebs, I can’t contain my tremendous happiness for you both. Thanks for an awesome night. And sorry for pinching your black label.

Facial Hair and Waterfights

I was fossicking around my hoard of personal effects and computer files the other day and came across a whole bunch of old shite.
Anyway, i thought you cats might like to take a trip down my memory lane.
The year is 2005, i'm living in the laundrette, the overseas trip is still a vague pipedream, and life is swell...


19/10/05

Some would say that twenty-two is no age to be complaining about.
Despite the increasing sense that the weeks appear to be slipping by at Spaceball-esque ‘ludicrous’ speed, there is much to be happy about in the newfound clearing of early twenties country. The mindless years of incapacitated brain function and non-stop wasted naivety have begun to trail off into nostalgia terrain just as life becomes a little less hazy, and finally after all these years of patience you manage to grow some decent bloody facial hair. That’s all I ever wanted back in year twelve, some thumpin-ass sideburns like my mates Chode and Dipper, and that jock named Dogga who got recruited to play senior school football because he resembled the combination of (a) a 25 year old brick shithouse, and (b) Sasquatch. Alas, my coming of age years were spent with dismal attempts at any sort of facial styling, burdened with a smooth baby-arse face and subsequently very little visible masculinity. But now I’m 22, and there’s scratchy, unkempt, crazy hair all over the shop. I am man, and you best hear me roar!

You’d think I’d be happy about all this, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just a little bit too little too late, that the novelty has worn off. Four years down the track, I really couldn’t give a rats clacker about the state of my hirsuite-ness, especially considering I never really shaved my sideburns once the first side patches of hair became visible, and now that they’ve grown out a bit they look like an Advanced Hair transplant from my pubic region. Sideburns - no, ‘Mingeburns’ - perhaps, or maybe ‘Sidepubes’ – there really isn’t much ‘burnin’ going on at all - hardly the lush, rugged rockstar strips I’d craved all those years ago. The hair dream was not as I’d dreamed but rather a whole lot of hassle for very little return – hair that could have been brought to my attention and probably cherished four years ago, but is now just a forlorn mish-mash of half assed goatee and Sideminge.
A bit of an anti-climax.

Still, I shouldn’t complain - at least I fared better in pubescent development than Tom, my Grandfather, who’s diminutive stature throughout high school caused him to be perpetually donned ‘the Mouse’. Although, I should add that puberty finally hit him with gusto at the age of eighteen, shooting him up 3 feet and prompting his chums to elevate his nickname to ‘Mouse King’. A rags to riches story if ever I’d heard one - in a swift few months of pubic fury my ‘pappy was a monarch. Thankfully, I was no mouse, nor any sort of mouse royalty – mine was a relatively smooth, hiccup free transformation, granted, more akin to the mouse extremity than the Sasquatch.

Its one thing to finally feel like a hairy man after all this time, another thing to realise that you aren’t getting any younger, that your rate of hair growth seems to be permutating in direct correlation with the increased responsibilities of ‘adulthood’.
So it was refreshing last Sunday on the first really hot day before summer, to take a mental vacation back into the mindset of a sweaty thirteen year old, and pelt a large group of neighbourhood pre-pubescents with an commanding artillery of waterbombs. All it took was one bomb to smack the side of one kid’s head before the street below our second story balcony was littered with thirty random ten-year-olds, eager to be hit next and retaliate in turn. The bombs flew back and forth for a good three hours, and our mate Dodgy Rogers hooked up a catapult system that proved demoralising for the pre-pube army. Ahh it was great.
For half a day my mates and I felt like kids again, reliving the carefree era when jumping through the front yard sprinkler and declaring war with water were the orders of the day, and shaving your face was still a good seven years off.

Eventually, the cheap water balloons from the local two dollar shop ‘Crazy Price Everything’ became scant, and Suzy the old Greek lady across the road started yelling “you bloody kids, bloody” and began throwing small rocks at our opposition in a bid to deter them from her water supply. The kids were right to be afraid of Suzy, because she ain’t no dreamboat, she’s hairier than me, and frankly, water bombs are funny and rocks just hurt a whole lot. Surrender was inevitable.

The battle was won, albeit through an extraneous Greek ally, but the war had only just begun, and this was comforting to know. For, as long as the water bombs keep being pelted, and youthful reminiscence comes back every now and again to pay a visit, no amount of facial hair will ever let me forget how to have fun like I did when I was a kid, nor force me to take the rigours of adulthood too seriously - not even if I get to be as hairy as Suzy.

Sir Dick and I

It was Me and Dick. Dick and me. Side by side, roaming the streets. What on earth were the odds? It was a phenomenal coincidence. Surely an act of fate. Two vectors intersected with perfect harmony at this exact juncture, this precise culmination of events. Me and Dick. Dick and Me.

I ogled the clock with weary nonchalance and a hint of spite. I’d never been held back at work this late on an evening shift. I finished up and my feet carried me homeward, lethargically strolling down Swanston St past hoards of boozed-up revellers and armies of scantily clad mutton barely dressed as lamb. Drifting through the Friday night city buzz and balmy Melbourne breeze my eye glanced the Town Hall clocktower complete with its illuminated golden aura…It captured me, for some reason more so on this night than any other, compelling me to abandon my customary route along Flinders Lane and instead head across towards Collins St.
I stationed at the lights, a lone bloke amid the giggling, gossiping cheap perfume, waited for the little green man to do his thing, and crossed the street.

Outside a swanky Collins St bar I noticed the blonde Englishman. He stood with his back to me. The rich, smarmy accent was unmistakably British, his demeanour undeniably uptown. I overheard his request for directions to the Sofitel to random locals who were close to useless, bereft of any concept of direction. Lucky for him I work at a hostel where helping out the common geezer is par for the course. I’d been doing it all night at work. What’s one more lost pom?, I thought to myself.

“Sofitel’s up this way mate, I’ll walk you there”.

‘Blonde English’ took heed of my assistance and strolled alongside. As I continued to trundle uphill with this chap I was increasingly perturbed by the frequent attention passers-by were granting us. Out of nowhere came pointing and gasps, wide-eyed amazement, cars slowing down, blocking hook-turn traffic. It became a circus. What the hell was going on? Was my fly undone? I turned to glance at the Englishman. It clicked. He looked familiar. A smooth, cheesy grin of chunky white teeth. A stocky build, bold and self-assured, clad in a jeans and sportcoat combo that screamed ‘money’. The circus had nothing to do with my fly. The only exposed dick at that moment was him.
I’d collected Sir Richard Branson.

So there we were, ambling up Collins St…Sir Dick and me. Me and Sir Dick. He proved to be a pretty friendly bloke old Branson. Shorter than I’d imagined. We mused about life, his family, the tennis, and our plans for tommorow. I was rostered on at work. He was off to Fiji and China.
He seemed relatively interested in my hostel front desk exploits, or at least feigned interest well. I was introduced to a local girl he’d met at the swanky bar. Her name was Stephanie. Now it was Dick, Steph and I, two locals, one multibillionaire playboy entrepreneur - three strangers strolling through the night, chatting away amid the hoopla and howls of excitement that followed Dick like rats to a pied piper. Deflecting ubiquitous female attention with a skybound, waving arm and a glint of orthodontic perfection, Dick lamented that he was not 25 years younger. Steph and I got talking. She seemed a nice girl. We both agreed how truly mind blown we were by our fresh companion.

Always ticking away furiously, Branson’s mind chimed effortlessly into our conversation. He pointed at the both of us with a toothy grin.
“There you go guys – ‘Virgin dating’, starts here!…”.

Branson's handshake commenced the parting of our ways. He strutted across Collins St towards the Sofitel, turning back on reaching the tram tracks and waved us on. “Don’t forget to send me pictures of the kids!” He turned again, and disappeared.

Steph and I decided not to get married, nor have kids. We didn’t even get to the first drink. Instead she took her train back to Glen Waverley, and I walked back home to Fitzroy, pondering the random collision of two distinctly polar lives.

Closure

I am a man who appreciates good closure. A first-rate narrative is one thing, but without a fair dollop of quality bang-up closure - positive, measured, juicy closure, then I just can’t help but feel left hanging at the end of a story. I demand the type of closure that brings home a good tale like a majestic cadence, the sort that tweaks the left side of your lips without consent, warming the buggery out of your deep cockles with fuzziness and uncompromising pathos. When Darryl Kerrigan won his court case, he branded the opposing prosecutor a dickhead, partied hard with Bud Tingwell and the rest of the fam, a flurry of warmth that preceded a concluding point-by-point narration from Darryl’s mullety, hole-diggin’ son about how everything turned out great for everyone. The first time I watched ‘The Castle’, its’ closure and homegrown pathos resonated and set my cockles aflame, creating a mighty shiteating grin that was uncontrollably splayed across my face for the days to come. I’m a sucker for a good dose of closure.

We’re all creating our own little movie reels of life each and every moment that we breathe in the air on this earth. Many will endure a fair gamut of genres in our life-reels, fluctuating across ‘teenage coming of age’, action-thriller, romantic comedy, and if you’re that way inclined, maybe even something funny with guns. Our lives are busy narratives, melting pots of countless plots, stories and tales, inevitably in constant flux, incorporating fresh casts of characters along with the staples, altogether wrapped up in an ever-present underlay of profound irony. I like to think that I’ve been living a pretty neat story of late, one which would rate at least a three and half stars from Margaret, and probably a grudging three from David. But my story is still a work in progress, the first in a series, a snippet and intro, a juicy taste of things to come. I recognise that the ultimate closure to mine and everyone’s story will only arrive once we finish inhaling air on this big carbon-battered sphere, something which may come sooner rather than later. But I can’t even wait that long. The most recent chapter of my story is one of the oldest and wrinkliest of chestnuts - the long recounted tale of the geezer who trots off to foreign lands, bears witness to some amazing stuff, then eventually returns back home only to find that sweet bugger all has changed but for the rapid new perspective born in his own noggin. Thematically it’s a travel piece with a smattering of coming of age, a clash of cultures, the awakening of one’s soul, and in many regards, a film about drinking a shitload of beer. My overseas adventure finished five months ago, but the journey has far from ended, merely a tiny segment of the greater narrative. Nonetheless, this chapter of my life is demanding a dose of closure right here and now, however preliminary, or at very least a suitable recap.

At the edge of winter, amidst the cusp of spring, August 17, 2006 was a bitey, wafty, downright cool Melbourne morn and this prodigal nut-cracking geezer had come home to roost…


‘From The Pantheon to The Fitz Town Hall’


It’s funny how the magic and essence of the city you’ve lived in all your life becomes too hidden to notice when you’re couped up inside it every day of your life. Four and a half months was the longest period of time I had ever spent away from Melbourne, and despite witnessing some of the most impressive landmarks of Old world Europe, coming home to the unrecognised beauty of my home city was by far the most revelatory. On day three back home, I killed some time at a little patch called ‘Gordon Reserve’, a nook on the corner of Macarthur and Spring adjacent Treasury Place and Parliament station. Behind me, warm sun burst down over the ornate Windsor Hotel and toasted my back as I gazed south down Spring St, eyes glazing over my immediate surrounds the same way they’d glazed over every foreign stimulating destination. The regal white, flag-tipped Governors mansion protruding from the lush green shrubbery of the Botanical gardens was suddenly so striking, I’d never even registered its’ presence before. I glossed over the ornate nineteenth century architecture, the palm trees, the chirping sounds of city Rosellas over the comforting rumble and clack of a W class tram. I became entranced by the spray painted smattering of cloud-blurred sky, spellbound by the rich blue and the depth of tone, as if the entire perceivable colour spectrum suddenly adjusted to a warmer hue once you crossed the Australian border. The skies in Europe seemed so much more pastel and light, dated and colour-drained, not nearly as brilliant as the skies back home. My God it was exciting to be back.

Despite a newfound adoration of my home city, I struggled to resonate with home in the same way I had done before I left. I was quick to realise that my life had taken a serious turn in the process of being away, and if a single word could capture the profound feelings of weirdness that accompanied the return it would definitely be ‘disjointedness’. I guess this was more to do with my own mental transformation than anything else. Very little had changed back home in a physical capacity, barring a new Asian two dollar shop called ‘Fantasy Box’ down the main drag, and some burger joint called ‘Flame Gorilla’, equipped with a man-size baseball-capped primate posing in the front window which would eventually scare the living shit out of me every time I strolled past it late on my way home from work. Box and Gorilla aside, everything was there as I left it – the streets, the characters and the giant wooden dog outside the station. I traipsed the backstreets past familiar corrugated California bungalows, with trees lining the nature strips stark and leafless. I inhaled chilly, crisp air and the musty odour of burnt cardboard cascading out from the nearby chimneys of the Amcor paper mill, a olfactory cocktail that sauntered me back to every memory of every winter I’d ever lived in Fairfield. I walked slowly past the 70’s redbrick Coin Laundromat on the corner of Rushall and Arthur – I lived above it right up until I went away, and my mates still lived there.
Opposite stood the equally gaudy block of brick apartments where the bony old bloke ‘Skeletor’ resided, directly above that mad Calabrese woman we named ‘Tales from the Crypt’. I remembered when we used to have massive waterfights with the local kids in summer, hurling wet rubber packages at their small heads, forcing them behind the lines of Crypt’s wooden fence until she emerged disgruntled, chasing the youth away screaming indecipherable pidgon English. This was the place I grew up in. I knew the streets like the back of my hand. The memories floated back to me like a dam-burst stream of cognition. Everything was all there and seemingly little had changed. But something just didn’t feel the same.

It was like I’d arrived back to a parallel universe with all the trimmings and illusions of my previous home, only without the familiar connection that I once used to have with it.

It took me a good couple of weeks to get back into the swing of daily life in Melbourne, and even then it all felt considerably strange. As time continued to barrel along at an incredible pace, the more the European adventure trailed off in my rear vision mirror, snowballing rapidly into one chunky, ever-distant memory. I reeled off every notable story to friends and family countless times ad nauseaum, recounting in graphic detail the diminished self esteem as a result of the world’s worst haircut, the exhilarating hot air balloon ride in Turkey, the unannounced 2am German booty call at the hostel in Cork and the disastrous Roman pub crawl where I huffed two thirds of a Cuban cigar and vomited spectacularly mid-slumber all over my top bunk. The latter was consistently popular. Each time I reeled off the same old stories, the less it felt like I actually did it all, as if the trip was one giant dream that never really occurred.

I promised myself during my final days in London that when I returned home I’d make sure to keep on truckin’ with the momentum and energy I’d scooped up along the way, to keep living large, thinking big, refusing to let the petty stuff that irked me in the past carry on as an anchor to weigh me down for the future. Two months sleeping in the shell of my old bungalow filtered back so many teenage memories and proved to be more than enough nostalgia. In November I pushed on with a new phase of life, moved into an awesome new terrace house right in the guts of trendy Fitzroy with my esteemed travel-pal, The Reverend, and jovial uncle Poida. I lap up each and every glorious day that I can on my upstairs balcony, taking in the randoms, the scenarios, the majestic yet modest Fitzroy Town Hall in the study window, and the energetic vibe of this awesome melting pot of a suburb. Two thousand and seven has already proved that it is going to be a massive and amazing year, and I am unbelievably thrilled at what possibilities might lay ahead, the Yellow Brick Road that only time will reveal

It is now five months down the track. 2006 has cleared its clacker out of the way for ’07, I’m two months away from turning 24, and life is continuing to kick a great deal of ass. Less than a week after arriving home I scored a job at Australia’s finest backpacker hostel, the elusive ‘Greenhouse’ down Flinders Lane. Checking in and looking after some of the most random characters from all over the globe was an all-too familiar situation to my lifestyle overseas, and I managed to ward off the onset of post-travel depression, continuing to live the traveller’s life vicariously through the misadventures and personal narratives of our frequently eccentric clientele. After the bed vomit incident of Rome I was forced to pay back some karmic dues in the very first week on the job, mopping up the technicolour yawn that some vicious bastard left for me one morning in room 413. Working at the hostel is one of the sweetest gigs imaginable, the first job I’ve ever looked forward to each and every day, though I do feel like Basil Fawlty a fair chunk of the time.

They say that one day backpacking overseas is akin to one whole week in your day to day life at home. Don’t ask me who ‘they’ are because, frankly, I’m blown, but I figure some enlightened tit must have uttered it because its’ nothing short of the truth. My adventure in Europe was a period of unparalleled liberation and awakening, of accelerated learning and perspective, a moment where time was thrust on it’s head instead of its’ arse and life was given the green light to take on a whole lot of fresh meaning. The four months overseas felt like a small eternity, a period in my life that I can only now, some five months later into a fresh year, truly appreciate and analyse with relative accuracy, and recognise just how important it was to the growth and progress of my very soul and being. And if the four or so months overseas felt like an eternity, the ensuing five months back home have felt like a fleeting snippet. Time is an elusive, paradoxical beast, simultaneously giving the impression that it’s whizzed past at the speed of light, yet at the same time feeling like so much has been crammed into it, like an over-packed rat at the local taxidermist.

I can’t say for sure when I’ll be thrusting the pack back on and venturing off to far off distant lands again. I know for certain that it will occur one day. For now, it’s as much of a thrill to look out each morning to the Fitzroy Town Hall clock tower as it is to the Pantheon of Rome or the Athenian Acropolis. Each new day is as exciting and brimming with potential as the last, and the possibilities of the future remain fascinating. Four and a half months in Europe was the greatest thing I have ever had the privilege of doing, a priceless chunk of life that has set me up well and truly for the rest of my days. And I am truly lucky to be able to come back from all of it to live in the finest location of the lot.
It is at this point that my finger is well and truly retracted from the temporal ass, my mind alive, basking gloriously amidst the highlight reel of memories of that trip, those magical Four and half months away.

My cognitive movie reel is full of award winning moments, a plethora of neuronal gold logies, and to date the European adventure pretty much tops the box office. I may not have won a lengthly High court case against a belligerent government developer, nor partied hard with Bud Tingwell and gone fishin with him in Bonny Doon. But for a while there I definitely felt like I was ‘dreamin’, I no doubt called someone a dickhead, and everything turned out alright in the end.

My name is Cam Hassard, and that was my story…


…and that’s enough closure for now.