Journalist Steve Dow has visited the tunnels and other secret places in Sydney.

In the inky darkness, we sweep torch lights side to side and slosh through sludgy earth in Sydney’s great unfinished eastern suburbs subway – which would never actually see a train, but instead become an air raid shelter.

Thin tree roots drape from the ceiling and glisten in the spotlights like spiders’ webs; thicker roots that long ago sprang through wall drainage holes twist across our path. Could these gnarly tendrils really belong to the old Moreton Bay figs guarding Hyde Park above?…

…(A)fter planners and politicians disagreed on the route, work on the eastern suburbs tunnels was abruptly halted close to the ANZAC Memorial. During World War II, the tunnels were converted into a public air raid shelter, which Sydneysiders thankfully never had to press into service. Brick dividing walls were added to create smaller bomb shelter chambers. Australian Imperial Forces officers stationed down here scrawled their messages that can still be seen, including their regiment number and the date, many in 1942.

We step into a rectangular chamber flooded in ankle-deep water, in which stands a rustic steel bell with a pointy top almost as tall as a person. One of our group whacks the bell with a plank of wood: the gong sound is deafening. Sydney sound-sculpture artist Nigel Helyer created and installed the work, known as An UnRequited Space, as part of ArtSpace Sydney’s Working in Public project in 1992, employing a wooden mallet “to sound out the midnight chime on ABC National for 21 consecutive days”, Helyer says. Memo to the ABC: your microphone cable missing for 16 years is still connected between the bell and wall down here.

The bell features in the movie and you can see it in the trailer. I had wondered if it was real. The room it’s in is dry in the film, probably because of the extended drought.

As we trek north, the air becomes more humid. We climb up a rickety metal ladder through a hole only half excavated and slip down a muddy embankment, meeting the edge of “Lake St James”: the drainage system of the city outer tunnel next door, the water stretches left and out of sight for a kilometre, 10 metres wide and about five metres deep.

The NSW Government says it aims to collect rainwater in tanks from the roofs of Parliament House, the State Library and Sydney Hospital, store the water in Lake St James, and recycle it back through the non-drinking system. Well, you certainly wouldn’t ingest this stuff, its fine film of brake dust floating on top.

The lake is home to an eel named Eric: “I’ve seen him, but no-one believes me,” one CityRail employee says. He spreads his palms a metre wide. “He’s about so big. An albino!”

The abandonment of the NSW government plan to use Lake St James as a water storage reservoir for Sydney is the real-life event on which The Tunnel hinges. In the film we see some of the old wartime air raid shelter rooms and hear the story of General Macarthur possibly having an emergency bunker down there. Unfortunately, my googling failed to find any regular organised tours of the tunnels.

This film is a must-see for anyone who likes to think of the strange, secret and eerie places which exist under our feet.

As you read earlier, the Strzlecki Ranges (and Gippsland generally) were dense forest once upon a time, and home to Eucalyptus Regnans (Mountain Ash), the world’s tallest flowering plant. (The world’s tallest tree is always a lineball competition between Eucalyptus Regnans and Sequoia (Redwood), which is a conifer growing in the US.) Since European settlement, though, Gippsland has been home to many loggers and farmers whose dream it was to rid the lush rolling hills of all the pesky tall trees, and they probably would have succeeded if those damn greenies hadn’t agitated for national parks in the twentieth century. Note the sign says “the site of the world’s tallest tree.” Yes, they felled the thing, measured it once it was on the ground, said “Yup, that was the world’s tallest tree, all right”, and put up a weird thing in its place for people to come and look at.

In case you’re looking here and there in confusion wondering if there’s an actual tree, there’s a sign and a plaque.

The World’s Tallest Tree
375 Feet or 114.3 Metres
If the tree grew here at this monument and was felled easterley < - along the road, the top of the tree would be at the white post near the fence on the south side of the road. Please take a walk to the white post. You will not believe a tree could be so tall.
Mr Stan Pethybridge.

Got that? If the tree was still there, and if they felled it again (still having difficulty not automatically associating “tree” with “fell”/”chop”/”remove”), It would go all the way along the road to.. this.

There was a very bemused German family sharing this moment with me. I reassured them that there were some big trees left in Victoria, and suggested Powelltown or Tarra Bulga.

There’s a plaque, as well:

The World’s Tallest Tree
375 feet (114.3 metres)
This mountain ash grew about 160 Meters south from here on Mr Bill Cornithwaite’s property. [So, not actually "here", either.] Felled by him in 1884. And officially measured by his brother George, a govt surveyor. This plaque and adjacent Post erected as a Rotary project for the Thorpdale centenary, March 1976. Unveiled by hon. Jim Balfour, minister for fuel and power.

Awesome!

So, what have they done with these rolling hills, once they’re denuded of their tall timber? Well, Thorpdale is the potato capital of Gippsland. They even have a potato festival.

And of course, if you keep driving to Trafalgar and turn left to end your road trip and drive back to Melbourne, you’ll see that absolute staple of Australian Tourism: the Big Thing. Or rather, the Big Things. Gippsland: Beautiful one day, daggy the next.

The guy in the linked site goes on quite a bit about the difficulty of it all but having grown up driving old shitboxes around narrow, soft shouldered dirt roads, I wasn’t too worried about my 1994 Mitsu-bashi. We – the car and I, that is – made the distance without breaking down, driving into a ditch, plummeting to our doom from the high goat-track sections, or getting lost.

At Tarra Bulga I got to feast my senses on the quiet, wet, cool temperate – rain – foresty goodness which bores my family shitless, but I can’t get enough of it.

This is one of the remnants of

forests so impenetrable that Strzelecki’s overland expedition from Sydney to the settlement at Western Port Bay in 1840 was in places unable to advance more than three kilometers a day. Having abandoned their horses and supplies further to the east, they were at times obliged to physically throw themselves at the thick walls of scrub in order to make any progress, and came perilously close to starvation

which is strangely different from the story we get from anti-conservationists, who claim that thick forest didn’t exist before European settlement because the indigenous people of Victoria kept the environment open and park-like by non-stop controlled burning, so as to maintain their traditional hunting, as well as their traditional logging trucks, their traditional SUVs and traditional trail bikes.

Suggestion for a new tourist slogan: “More epiphytic ferns than you can poke a stick at!” No? Oh well.

Staying at Mirboo North was the usual terrible drudgery of red wine, food from the garden and wood fires, and this time, naturally, easter eggs and hot cross buns. Here are two more murals, this time from the supermarket.

Yes, congratulations Karen, who and wherever you are!

Although I haven’t got it together yet to bring my bike, there’s a Rail Trail – that is, a bike/walking/bridle path which used to be a rail line – from Mirboo North to Boolarra, which is useful to walk off some of the easter eggs and hot cross buns. Boolarra was badly affected by the Churchill fire on Black Saturday. You can see the trees here, about half an hour’s walk from Mirboo, regenerating after the fire.

Coming soon: Part 2 – exciting tourist attractions!

One of the countless Aspirational Families in these tree-lined streets™, Tom and Sue O’Really work as a teacher and a construction estimator. They have two children, Lily and Bradley. Lily, 6, has started primary school and attends after-school care. Bradley, 3, is in daycare. Sue’s income is just over $150,000, making them rich in the eyes of Labor and Leftist types who choose to ignore the stark, brutal reality of their suburban struggle.

“Are you joking?” laughed Sue when we pointed the mike at her so she could tell us how the government, hellbent on redistributing wealth and closing the gap between the alleged haves and have-nots, has reduced their lifestyle to a nasty and brutish struggle for survival. Here is a transcript of the interview which followed:

Newsfax Ltd: Now that the rate at which the family tax benefit cuts out has been frozen at $150,000, will this spell the end of your middle class lifestyle?

Sue O’Really: Well, of course, a lump sum in your tax return is always nice. But really, isn’t government income distribution meant to be targeted at, you know, really struggling families, on $40,000 and less? I mean, of course your wants always expand when you get more money. (Laughs) but shouldn’t we be directing Family Tax Benefit to families who can’t afford to send their kids to the dentist? Or use the money to put dentistry on Medicare?

Newsfax Ltd: But food, clothing, gas electricity — it all adds up. Not to mention childcare and your private medical insurance, for which you now get only 20% rebate instead of 30%. With the cost of living increasing, shouldn’t eligibility for family benefits should have been lifted?

Sue O’Really: Look, of course the cost of living goes up. I’m not arguing with that, I just wonder whether “adrift in ocean of debt and despair” isn’t over-egging it a bit. Half of all workers earn less than $44,146 per year. Shouldn’t you be interviewing one of them? I mean, they’re taking money away from Leonie three doors down, for god’s sake, she’s on the single mother’s benefit and they’re going to put her on Newstart when her daughter turns 12! And… wasn’t it your paper and others like you who used to be against “middle-class welfare”, anyway?

Newsfax Ltd: Well, Wayne Swan said himself you weren’t that well-off!

Sue O’Really: Well, I can see how he would have been under pressure to say that. But it’s something thats easy enough to resolve through 10 minutes on the ABS website and some Year 8 maths. We’re not “battlers”. We’re not even “average”. According to the ABS, I’m in the top three percent of income earners individually and we’re in the top ten percent of households. So, yeah, sure, childcare is very expensive, and we did remodel our California Bungalow to twice its former size, and that means high repayments. And we try to eat healthily, and the cost of fruit is ridiculous. But to claim we’re doing it tough is just an insult to that half of the workforce that’s on less than $45,000 – not to mention disability pensioners, unemployed, single parents…I mean, they’re paying the same for fruit and vegetables as we are!…

[Newsfax Editor's note: You failed to get a proper response from this interviewee. Bin this story.]

It’s not published on line, so what the hell, that touch typing I learned at school has got to be good for something. Right?

With a vocal comfort zone that in past performances has seemed to swing with ease from melodic balladry to twangy country, what’s new about everything on Tess McKenna’s stylish and thoroughly satisfying fourth LP is that it’s all fallen into place. Recorded in Melbourne with Barry Stockley joining her at the controls, she’s got the mix just right between acoustic singer-songwriter and plugged-in band material. Gentle strummers such as the title track, Pancho Style [should be Poncho style] and Down By the Sea serve to perfectly set up the electric guitar crescendos of numbers such as Fill me Up. Love is Gone, a sinewy blues number, could have come from a hot’n'sweaty Mississippi juke joint, smouldering for nearly eight minutes without ever quite igniting. Better still is energetic rocker Hummingbird, with strategically placed harmonica lines. Rumbling bass and driving drums give Tidy Town a heavier, ominous feel, then it’s back to the blues on nine-minute closer Still our House, which is also the closest she comes to Tamworth on this set of songs. McKenna launches The New Everything at the Northcote Social Club on Sunday at 2 PM.
Jeff Glorfeld
The AGE, EG 18.2.2011

Tess McKenna’s fourth album, The New Everything, was recorded over a year in the low-fi setting of Fatsound Studio, with Barry Stockley & an ensemble of long time playing pals including Ash Davies on drums. The New Everything eases in between barefaced folk and dirty bang bang blues to sonic rock overdrive. This is singer-songwriter McKenna at her best – authentic, soulful & intimate.
Tess has toured her music extensively, supporting artists such as Nick Cave & Lucinda Williams; has played her music from as far as the Woodford Folk Festival to the East Coast Roots & Blues Festival in Byron Bay, from the Melbourne Concert Hall to Austin’s SXSW Music Festival in Texas, USA. Tess McKenna & her longtime band The Shapiros will be joined by special guests for an afternoon of pitch-perfect harmonies and shimmering guitars to launch The New Everything at the Northcote Social Club 20th February 2011. [Doors open at 2 PM - $12.]

The New Everything is out now on HEAD RECORDS & is distributed through MGM.

Ashley Davies, who plays drums on the CD, is off touring with The Dingoes. So I’m occupying the drum seat for the launch, and thereafter. Which is a huge honour, and an exciting day to look forward to.

Come and celebrate with us.

This one was No Sad Songs For Me, starring Margaret Sullavan, who was quite a hoyden in her youth, with Natalie Wood as her abnormally well-adjusted daughter. According to Answers.com,

…Sentimental melodrama about a ridiculously self-sacrificing wife based on the book by Ruth Southard and starring a 12-year-old Natalie Wood. Mary Scott (Margaret Sullavan) is pregnant when she finds out that she has terminal cancer with only a few months left to live. She keeps this information a secret from her husband, Brad Scott (Wendell Corey), who is carrying on an affair with his assistant, Chris Radna (Viveca Lindfors). Mary encourages her husband to pursue Chris as a replacement wife and mother after she dies.

Heavy stuff, eh, especially as I was in Natalie Wood’s shoes in 1968, except that I was a year younger and not nearly as adorable, co-operative or conscientious with my piano practice. So the movie should have had me wallowing in memories and grief, except for that other marvellous feature of the 1950s B&W: the LOLWUT!? factor.

Consider the events which the writer of this weepie considered believable in 1950.

The movie opens with the happy family at breakfast discussing a new pregnancy. Mary says she’s off to the doctor that day to confirm. When she does, the doctor tells her sternly that she’s not pregnant and is never likely to be again. We’re given to understand that the doctor’s an old family friend, but this is all he tells her. Oh, and the hilarity – Doctor lights up a cig while giving her the bad news! In the surgery. Oh, the ’50s, those were the days.

Dr. Bedside Manner obviously has no intention of telling her anything at this point. He only tells her about her terminal cancer when she leaves the surgery, walks out to the car, is overcome by an unseemly attack of patient curiosity and walks back into his office to ask him for more details. We are asked to believe that the doctor has diagnosed the cancer some weeks ago yet hasn’t seen fit to tell the patient, who, remember, is also an old family friend. RIGHT.

Mary then says “I remember you’ve been taking dozens of X rays for the last few weeks!”

Wouldn’t you think a woman who thought she was pregnant, instead of harbouring a fatal illness, would question having “dozens of X rays” taken in the (presumed) early stages of the pregnancy? But these were the days of smoking in the doctor’s surgery. They didn’t have those namby-pamby, politically correct safety procedures.

In 1950, it appears, cancer was universally a death sentence. Mary asks Mr People Skills if operations or radiotherapy will do anything, and he replies that the treatment’s still in the experimental stage. Well, perhaps IF HE HAD TOLD HER EARLIER she might have had a chance to get a second opinion, or something.

Instead of going straight to a solicitor to file a medical malpractice suit – seeing as he’s a family friend, I guess – Mary swears the doctor to secrecy so that she can conceal her condition from her family. The doctor readily agrees with this, since obviously he’s given to withholding information anyway. Incredibly, although he can’t do anything at all about Mary’s cancer, he is able to give the most detailed prognosis: Nine months to live, six months of which will be “on her feet”. Modern oncologists would be amazed at the ability of cigarette-smokin’ 50s doctors to pinpoint the exact course of the illness.

The rest of the movie pretty much consists of Mary becoming more and more saintly. Her terminal cancer appears to involve no painkillers, curtailment of social activities or even symptoms, apart from the occasional frown and clutch of the hand to the abdomen, or a brief lie down on the couch. We are not told where this cancer is. One imagines that the ending will be Mary lying on lacy pillows becoming ever more beautiful and radiant as death approaches. However, it’s even more hokey than that.

After participating in a batty, and saintly, ruse to make sure her husband’s affair partner/girlfriend, Chris, is around to replace her(!) (LOLWUT!), Mary spills the beans. Husband, suitably devastated, breaks his philandering and working routine to take her on a second honeymoon to Mexico, where they dance together to a mariarchi band, after which Mary obligingly drops dead, thus eliminating the need for the sad bedridden final phase, and making the handover to Chris more seamless.

Although Chris is an exasperating entitled little shit, one can have some sympathy for her as she enters the movie in the guise of a professional draughtsperson working on a dam project with the husband, Brad / Wendell Cory. Thus we have the classic 1950s/1960s scene where the new worker turns out to be a WOMAN! Oh the HILARITY! The world turned upside down! The exchange between Brad, the hirer, and Chris, the prospective employee, illustrates perfectly the complete disdain for female employees and her need to plead and supplicate to convince him to give her the job despite her manifest inferiority. He demurs because the job’ll require her to go outside and it might rain! A woman might… melt, or something.

The plot then requires them to fall in lurve, but this is just predictable, because she’s a member of the sex class. That’s why we can’t have them on the job! They’ll distract the men!

In the final scene, the LOLWUT!? factor goes off the charts. Chris, the replacement mother, and the child Polly are sitting together at the piano playing a tragic musical piece. At this point, as far as Polly knows, Chris is the family friend/babysitter and Mum and Dad are just away on a nice holiday. The phone rings and Chris answers. It is terrible news from Mexico! Well, terrible for Mary, anyway. Chris makes some cryptic remark and they keep playing. Are they ever going to tell this kid anything? She never knew her mum was even sick. When are they going to actually let her know she’s DIED? The Wikipedia article on Margaret Sullavan says that her family life was fairly tortured and marked by suicide and institutionalisation. If this was the way 1950s families were supposed to handle family crises, I’m really not surprised. “Here’s your school lunch, dear. By the way, your mum’s not coming back from Mexico. She’s dead. I’m your new mum now. I’m sure Dad will explain everything when he gets back, but he’ll be a while because of organising the cold storage for the coffin ‘n all…”

Ah, those old black and white movies. If you’re ever tempted to join the conservatives in yearning for the Good old Days before the counterculture and modern medicine changed the world, when a man could still light up a satisfying fag in his doctor’s surgery and women knew their place, watch one of these and marvel. On the other hand, there’s no room for complacency yet; Judd Apatow and Charlie Sheen still churn out stuff which future generations will watch and…LOLWUT?!
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

Tess McKenna and the Shapiros
Union Hotel
109 Union street. Brunswick

Saturday October 30, 5 – 7

…and on Saturday December 4, 9-11

We’re also playing a short set between Aintree Sweet‘s sets at the Lomond hotel on Sunday November 14 I got the date wrong, it’s the 12th, and T mcK is cancelled for that night. It’s still well worth going along to check out Aintree Sweet, though.

Tess’s new album The New Everything is out on the Head label in November. Get yer Christmas orders in early!

ATTENTION
Weekend Cancelled – Go to work
Due to an unforeseen economic slowdown, this weekend has been cancelled. Please go to work as you would during the week. Anyone who does not report to work will be charged with absenteeism and risks being dismissed.
Special note: Church goers may attend Mass on Sunday morning, but only if their priest certifies in writing that they are regulars.

And just look at all those people in the background ignoring the message! I guess we’ll all get our pink slips on Monday.

This message has special resonance for me, as some of my weekends probably will be cancelled in the near future – An IT system which has taken years to build is nearing the go-live date and as a relatively lowly member of the project team, I might be a bit busy over the next few weeks.

One of my favourite things to do is to visit my brother in Tinytown, where he bought a Country Seat a while back. Not a bush block, a house in a quiet part of the town (if you don’t count an occasional milk tanker roaring past in the night.) He sold his house in Footscray and visits his place in Tinytown every weekend to dig the garden – a variety of potatoes, garlic, and every other kind of veg – chop wood, explore the surroundings on a little Postie bike, and drink red wine by the wood stove with his GF and any visitors and dogs who might be there.

Brother’s veg garden is not like my veg garden. Bro’s garden is some serious shit.

My brother's vegie garden in Tinytown, featuring a honking great trench. For potatoes? Or murdered neighbours?

Victorians will easily be able to work out Tinytown’s real identity, but I’m keen not to raise the profile on Google in case it becomes the next Fitzroy. There have been upmarket cafe sightings.

One of the many things I love about Tinytown is the murals. They’re everywhere – on the supermarket, the servo, the side of every shop. When the people there get up in the morning and there’s not much to do, they paint a mural.

How do you pronounce Trompe-L'Oeil anyway? Maybe that one should be Mobile-L'Oil.

Unfortunately, no airstrip here as yet.

There’s even a mural on the back porch of my brother’s house. That part will be demolished at some point, so here’s a picture for posterity.

Who are the Tinytown mural artists? There’s an interesting interview opportunity here for some enterprising magazine writer.