Categories: Melbourne

28 Feb 2010, Comments (6)

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means

Author: Helen

You know when a government come up with something that just really stinks of “cooked up by a PR company”? To give him credit, our State Premier John Brumby took on board that the recent attacks on Indian students and workers in Melbourne really did have a racist component and didn’t try to take the “Racist? Who? Us? How dare you!” route. But. Come on. Wasn’t there anyone in the State PR machine to say “hang on a minute guys, I think this might cause widespread uncontrollable laughter, eyerolling and blowing of mighty raspberries from the people we are trying to impress with our Sincerity™?

A FORMER AFL footballer is the nation’s first “respect” minister after being appointed by the Victorian government to tackle the growing racism and alcohol fuelled violence problems in the state.
Premier John Brumby announced Justin Madden would be the minister for the “respect agenda” as part of his election year cabinet reshuffle following the shock resignation of embattled Transport Minister Lynne Kosky this week.

I mean… Madden! Not only does he come from the background of Australian Rules football – a milieu which is trying with limited success to shake off its reputation for a lack of respect when it comes to women and people of other races and cultures. He’s also the minister least likely to be associated with the word “respect” by the long suffering inhabitants of Victoria. He has a long history of showing respect to developers and money, and none to architecturally significant buildings, grasslands, coastal communities or the planning rules set up to make our city livable. This leaked email about setting up a false public consultation process for a development has shown just how much respect Madden and the Vic Government have for the people of his State and the iconic buildings and places which they love.

Really, I’m not under any illusion that the Victorian government has our best interests at heart – let alone those of international students – but you’d think with all the money from developers pouring into the party coffers, they’d be able to come up with a more sophisticated PR response to the problem.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T – Find out what it means, before you create a ministry of it.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo, with bonus Bernice

4 Feb 2010, Comments (2)

P.Z. Myers is coming to Melbourne!

Author: Helen

Wow, a famous blogger and scientist coming to my town! When I found out last year that Pharyngula blogger P Z Myers would be coming to Melbourne this march for the Global Atheist Convention, I thought it’d be fun to book a few seats and see who might be interested in coming. I thought I might bring my Dad, a determined atheist, as well, although he wouldn’t be physically up to it unless the disabled access was well up to scratch.

Looks like I won’t be going at all, though. The convention’s already sold out, and it’s sold out as an indirect consequence of the Australian government favouring religious events over secular ones (with some notable exceptions, see below.)

Last year, the Parliament of the Worlds Religions received $2 million in funding from the Federal government, plus half a mil from the City Council, while the Atheist convention received nothing from any level of government. Some people (see the Pharyngula thread I linked to in the first paragraph) would say that it’s not the Government’s place to fund any particular event. I could go along with that, except that it seems to be their place to fund religious conferences.

Oh, but, you’ll say, the Victorian State government gives plenty of money to secular events. Yeah, the ones which are elevated to quasi-religions: AFL football celebrations and the Grand Prix, Festival of the Great God Car, which is costing us around $40 – $50 million this year.

I’m glad that the convention sold out, but disappointed to miss out on P.Z. And I’m disappointed that religious events can attract Government sponsorship (while many religions are awash with followers’ money) and a secular event is given the thumbs down. I would expect that in the US, but not here.

20 Sep 2009, Comments (12)

What Mr Bucket did next

Author: Helen

As of Monday after next, SO no longer has a job.

He hasn’t been a casualty of the financial crisis. He no longer has a job because things are going so well. Mr Bucket sales are through the roof and he can’t keep up.

You’ll remember that Mr Bucket started Going Off back in March. I forgot to blog about the Rose Street Market fashion-show-with-models for L’Oreal Fashion Week. Which was a whole lot of fun – see the ultra-professional Bucket segment here. Ahem.

He’s started running the stall on St Kilda Esplanade on Sundays and has been included in this book.

Wolf at the Door, a new place in Hepburn Springs, bought a fuckton of T shirts and were sold out by the weekend after that. He also had a writeup in Men’s Style mag – no link for that.

Week after next Mr Bucket moves into his new studio in an old factory in Brooklyn, next to an artisan associated with the Wolf at the Door, who runs a bronze casting foundry.

Oh, and he has bought this thing, which is really cute, but the exciting part for me is that our family mitsu-bashi isn’t the Bucket car any more and I get to do things on weekends like a normal person!

So, life is set to change. It seems all go for the Buckets and unusual and exciting things are happening all the time. SO has his books all in order and is doing his own super and insurance and everything properly. I’ll be looking at the Dow and the Futsi and the All Ordinaries with more than usual anxiety in the next twelve months and hoping we don’t have this W-shaped recession that some party poopers are talking about.

Excuse me while I just go and hyperventilate into this brown paper bag.

22 Aug 2009, Comments (34)

Not a Blasted Wasteland, part 2

Author: Helen

[Part One]

So, I’m sitting around the table with the people I volunteer with at Scarysuburb High, and the conversation turns to the people who are pushing for a new high school closer to where I live. I said that I hadn’t joined the group except as an email listee, because I’ve chosen to put my limited effort into Daughter’s school and there are only so many hours in the day, but I admired them for their support of the bigger picture and of public education.

Well, said one of the other mums, have a look at this then. And when I saw the article in the local newspaper she had brought with her, I realised what she meant. The group supports public education – just not the public education that the rest of us are using. Because the real public education is too scary!
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21 Aug 2009, Comments (14)

Not a Blasted Wasteland, Part 1

Author: Helen

Someone mentioned that it had been a while since I posted on schools. I’ve written letters to the paper, and thought deep thinky-thoughts about it. There’s a Movement going on in our neighbourhood, and it shows a burgeoning support for public education. But, contrary pinkofemmoblogger that I am, I can’t find it my heart to support them all the way. Why, you say? It’ll take a while to explain.

In my area, we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to Primary schools. When we moved here, we had three nearly equidistant public schools to choose from, all bright, well resourced and with high morale. We ended up choosing the one just across a park from our house, which the kids could walk to once they were old enough. I even discovered that I had some distant relatives in the area and one, about my age, had taught at that school under the existing principal. How nice is that?

In the matter of high schools, we are not so spoiled. We did have a local high school, which fell victim to the Kennett government school-closing orgy. We do have a local school which is only five kilometres away, and is easily accessible by a bus service which goes right by the school doors.

It happens that this is the school which the daughter attends and at which she’s relentlessly pursuing a highly academic programme, with plenty of input from some impressive and motivated teachers. This school excels in a broad range of areas, with special emphasis on music and the arts, including film and TV, and they excel in maths, science and technology as well.

Here’s the thing: It bears the Scarysuburb name. And it appears that since my area became gentrified, and the Audis and SUVs and two-storey extensions covered the land, the incoming population have the opportunity to send their children there. But the parents who “support public education” don’t want to send their children to Scarysuburb High, because they see it as dangerous, or beyond help, or whatever, because it is part of the existing system. And as everyone knows, the existing public system is scary and failing. They fail to see that it’s the flight of the middle classes to the private and Catholic systems that is leaving the public system underfunded and in danger of becoming a “safety net”.

They want something better, somehow, built for them, so that their kids won’t have to mix with the presumed dangerous paint-sniffers and ice dealers at Scarysuburb High and they will not have to go on a terrifying, twenty-minute bus ride to (gasp) an adjoining suburb.
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2 Aug 2009, Comments (21)

Parenting 2.0

Author: Helen

I’m sitting in the study having a look at Facebook. It’s about half past eight. I’m due to pick up the Girlchild, who turns eighteen in a few months, from the Pho Cafe in Scarysuburb, where she’s having a cheap and cheerful Vietnamese nosh with some friends – some of whom are eighteen.

Those friends, of course, may be served alcoholic drinks on licenced premises (in moderation: amirite?) Girlchild may not.

I am on the old desktop Mac. Girlchild, having torn up the first Year 12 semester like a champion, has just got a new raspberry, or red Nokia phone, from Dad. So she can facebook on the fly.

I see:

Girlchild: “really likes this resturant, essspecially the cocktails”. (Spelling! Tssk!)

So Girlchild gets a call. “I’m coming to pick you up! RIGHT NOW! I think you know why!1!!1!

When I get to the Pho Cafe there’s Girlchild and a couple of others hanging out in front looking a bit sheepish. We drive home. I lecture, Girlchild accepts lecture with relatively good grace. Of course, I only get this Teachable Moment once; now they know what not to post about on Facebook. We watch a DVD of Ghost Town. All is amicable.

Before bed I check Facebook again, and I see

Friend: “what did your mum say?”
Girlchild: “- – *sigh*”

So of course I typed

“SPRUNG”

And my friend Megan weighs in with

“oops-don’t facebook and drink at the same time.”

Megan lives in Vancouver. We haven’t spoken face to face in fifteen years, but she is family.

It takes a global village to raise a child.

2 Jul 2009, Comments (1)

Repost: Where’s Spiny Norman when you need him?

Author: Helen

This is a repost from the old Blogspot Cast Iron Balcony in March 2004. I was going to link to it in this LP post about Desmond Moran and the Melbourne gangsta thing, but the old blog has lost its template, and its paragraph breaks, completely. For those who perhaps aren’t familiar with Victoria and its obsession with things “Gangland”, I’ve reposted it here instead.

The gangsters of Melbourne have been having something of a killing spree lately. Killing each other, that is. There is even a special Task Force out on them called Purana, which the radio meeja takes great delight in pronouncing “piranha”.

None of us are perfectly consistent: I may be a bleeding heart pinko most of the time but I, too, have an inner right winger. It is hard to feel any sympathy at all for these characters and the temptation is to think “There goes another one! You Bewdy!” and perhaps award a mental Darwin Award.

Callousness is a two edged sword and something that there’s too much of these days, both in the blogosphere and the world at large. It’s to be resisted. Justice can be counter intuitive. Once you say it’s OK for one idiot to blow another away because the other lowlife blew his brudda away and anyway they’re less human than the rest of us, then you’re heading for Rwanda or Northern Ireland. And you’ll be no better than Ronnie Reagan. Remember that 80s joke? Reagan says, “Hmmm, you say there’s a new disease, it’s always fatal, and it affects homosexuals, prostitutes and injecting drug users?… And the problem is…?”

One good reason for ridiculing our homegrown Dougs and Dinsdales is that we need to stop portraying gangstas as cool. The Meeja pretend not to do it, but they can’t help themselves. I guess it’s too easy for a journalist on a deadline to whack in some Hollywood imagery to help a piece along. On the way to work the day after Lewis Moran’s death I saw a Herald Sun poster: GANGLAND KING DIES. Terrific! The Hun, usually of the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” persuasion, promotes this sad man to King status. This wasn’t on the online version, but we did have “Drama plays like a movie”.

A couple of weeks ago in the Australian, the wife of one of the gangstas had a bit of a grumble about it. Sorry, can’t find the link. Her opinion, that a group of younger wannabes at Andrew “Benji” Veniamin’s funeral, standing around in dark suits and black sunglasses, were pathetic and up themselves, reflected the views of many of us out here in the, ahem, wider community. She also mentioned, revealingly, that Veniamin was full of valium and on his way to his mum’s to get his washing done when he was killed.

Think on that, you young boys and girls. Is that glamour? Is that excitement? Valium, the drug of choice of bored Tennis mums in the 60s, and in the boot of the Merc, instead of another wasted gangsta, a load of smelly washing. Boys, organised crime isn’t glamorous; it’s boring. Gangsters are not people to admire; they’re clueless. ‘Benji’ wasn’t shot down in an exciting, Bonnie and Clyde-type scenario; he was sitting in a restaurant with a mouthful of Fettucine Carbonara*, on his way to his mum’s to get his washing done. As a crusty old feminist, sorry, I can’t resist a final poke: If he had simply learned to bung a load of washing in the machine and turn the knob, instead of being a knob, he might still be alive today.
 
 
*Embellishment alert: I do not know what type of pasta Veniamin actually was eating. It may have been Alfredo.

6 Jun 2009, Comments (9)

Saturday Earworm

Author: Helen

Because Friday was too busy.

I think it was Anne O’Dyne, or perhaps Caroline, who first pointed me to this lovely YouTube of Mike Rudd in the Olden Days.



I remember listening to that song when it first came out and riding our grey mare for hours down just such country roads, alone with my thoughts (or my friend Nicky) and the sounds of the crows and magpie song and the creak of saddle leather. The coolest boys at my high school looked like Mike.

Some of the roads I rode down have kerbs and gutters now. You can never go back.

Words and chords here – the chords are all over the place, but they’ll allow you to work it out for yourself.

12 Mar 2009, Comments (19)

Mr Bucket goes off

Author: Helen

Mr Bucket the microbusiness went orf over the Christmas period and still seems to be chugging along quite happily despite the dreaded GFC.

He sells a lot of t shirts to tourists and asks them to send photos of themselves wearing them in furrin places. My favourite: Transylvania.

Mr Bucket goes to Transylvania

AND! Bucket movie.



This was a real family effort with Mr Bucket’s film student niece behind the camera and Mrs Bucket on drums, soon-to-be-brother in law on guitar and recording console. (Please don’t judge me too harshly for that high hat, it was on a borrowed electronic drum kit, which is a sullen and uncooperative creature).

AND!!…
Melbourne L’Oreal Fashion Week is coming to the Rose Street Market to set up a runway to model the stallholders’ fashions. With real emaciated models and everything. If you think the bucket look is not going to catch on, well, just look at this then! (H/T: Blurb from the Burbs.) That’s happening on March 21 (Saturday).

AND!!…
I was downing a few with a friend in Lane’s Edge cafe in Bourke street, the one which has hosted a few grogblogs, and across the laneway I spotted a trendy young thing wearing a Vote Bucket T shirt.

Surely world domination can’t be far away.

3 Mar 2009, Comments (2)

May I take this opportunity to apologise to the entire expat Indian community?

Author: Helen

There has been an increase in attacks on Indian students and workers in Melbourne’s inner west. Clearly, it was time for the police and other community leaders to take notice and do something about these race-related crimes. Did they they put a spotlight on the people who were doing the robbing and bashing? Did they talk about their intention to bring the perps to justice and enhance the safety of public spaces generally, and work with the Vic government to help change the attitudes of Bogan Youth? Hardly. The response of the Victoria Police was to recommend that young indians should stop talking so loudly in their own language and should not be louchely and recklessly carrying things like iPods and laptops on their daily commute. In short, pull your head in and stop flaunting your great wealth before our simple peasant folk, in case you get yourself bashed. And robbed.

Inspector Scott Mahony complained that the police had been blamed unfairly in the story, because “members of the indian community” had complained at a public meeting that their countrymen were noisy and obnoxious. Right, that lets the Victoria Police off the hook completely, because if someone’s fellow-countryman says something denigratory towards them, of course you take the totally unbiased opinion of this codger and publicly run with it!

This reminded me of Lauredhel’s article about other victims of crime and how the use of the passive voice, and constant advice to the crime victims both actual and potential to take defensive action themselves to not get themselves raped, or get themselves robbed, makes the perpetrator invisible and takes all the light and heat off the people doing the crime.

It’s not the first time this has happened. A Sudanese boy, Liep Gony, was bashed to death by two white thugs in October 2007, and the police blamed the incident on the Sudanese community who, they thought, had failed to assimilate properly.

I use a train and a bus daily on the routes to, from and around inner Western Melbourne and I can tell you from long experience that a lot of students are deafening. Not Indian students – students. Anyone who says that’s an Indian thing really hasn’t been out lately. It’s a function of being young and silly. (Some) students travel in packs, yell to each other, and generally seek attention. They’re immature and sometimes quite irritating. Duh – they’re young! This in no way excuses crimes against them, I would have thought. The idea that Indian students are somehow “flaunting” their iPods and laptops, also, is simply racist. I see thousands of caucasians and others using their laptops and ipods, and schoolkids carrying valuable musical instruments, every day. It’s good defensive practice to keep smaller items packed away, but to say that one ethnic group may have their laptops on show and the others are “flaunting” them simply betrays an underlying idea that one group is entitled to have these things and the others are behaving in a manner not befitting their station.

The Victorian government should examine ways of improving community attitudes on the one hand (well, not making them worse’d be a start), and the appalling lack of any personal safety on the “public transport system” at night, instead of blaming the victims of the crimes. And they should start to get a bead on the invisible perpetrators.

Sushi Das has more well-crafted scorn.

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