Cho Seung-Hui and Columbine

Does this remind us of anything?
“You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your life but you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can, you had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, your brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Cho Seung-Hui's words remind of the Columbine massacre kids.
These are the words of the scorned and ostracised - one who could never gain acceptance among the bright confident and, perhaps seemingly smug in-crowds of school and campus life. The partying jocks and popular girls. Cho was a shy boy, never included. His defences were to withdraw into a shell of resentment and loathing. Just like the Columbine boys - except that they were friends and Cho Seung-Hui had no friends at all.
He lived alone, a stranger in a shared dorm, pretending the others simply were not there, his acute loneliness and sense of rejection feeding his psychosis until it grew out of control.
There is a certain campus cultural syndrome echoed here - one which inadvertently taunts and tortures the outcasts other students blithely describe as "loners".
We saw it in Columbine and we see it again at Virginia Tech.

There is probably no campus in the country where there are not students in a similar state of mind. It can't be helped. There is no blame. Young people are not psychiatric diagnosticians. They are young people, self-interested and preoccupied - yes, hedonistic, even. Retrospect has 20/20 vision but busy daily life does not.
So a college policy must be established encouraging students to be on the watch for the lonely ones - and some sort of group activities should be gently but firmly encouraged in which such outsiders can be given a sense of belonging.

In every instance that Cho's dysfunction was noted, it would seem that he was just sent off on his own again - to feel yet more alienated. They say he simply "fell through the cracks" - but it is hard to see an easy solution. We must all ponder it - as, indeed, in our different ways we are. The whys of that deranged student haunt all our minds.

There really is no point in turning campuses into high security areas. That is not the solution. These acts of hideous spite and revenge - Virginia Tech and Columbine - have come from the inside the campus in a world where, lethally, guns are easily available.
Of course, one could ask the USA to do something about the 270 million guns in private hands and heaven knows how many sitting about in retail stores waiting for the 10 minutes it takes to buy them, but the gun lobbyists will justify even these atrocities in the name of their inalienable right to bear arms. They will just keep telling us that it is not the fault of the guns.

True enough. It all goes much deeper than that. But let's face it, mad Cho Seung-Hui would never have wiped out 32 lives and sent 15 to hospital and nor would Harris and Klebold have killed 12 and wounded 24 if their choice of weapons had been limited to kitchen knives.

To family of Cho Seung-Hui

Now his identity is revealed - Cho Seung-Hui, a student of creativing writing who would appear long to have shown signs of psychotic behaviour. His imagination alone, one gathers from mentions of his "disturbed" creative writing. People described him as "a loner" - which, of course, means lonely, brooding, isolated, an outsider.

Amid the convulsions of shock and grief for those bright young lights snuffed out by his eruption of psychopathic violence, one must offer thoughts of compassion to his family - good, hard-working, hope-filled Korean dry-cleaners. And to his sister, another bright young light, a student at Princeton, whose future forever will be shadowed by the dark and awful shame of her brother's action.
Psychotics are hard to diagnose, hard to understand. People often just think they are moody and strange. They come in many degrees and usually are more harmful to themselves than to others. I am not sure that we ever will understand the mad voices which drove this young man to this deeply shameful act. But if we must apportion blame, let it not be to his family or to Koreans, but simply to guns, so easily purchased by all US citizens, including undiagnosed madmen bent on running amok.

Shame on the gun culture

It's about guns!
The Blacksburg college massacre was a madman with a gun. It was a gun culture disaster.
It could not happen if guns were not so readily available and so absurdly legal.
It took the Port Arthur massacre in Australia to shock the government into serious gun action - through which it paid people to turn in their guns. Not that guns were ever as easy to own or as common in Australia.
America is rampant with people who believe that it is their absolute right to own guns - lots of them. They are a powerful group - gun-totin' and aggressive and they have the government in their thrall. Everyone is afraid of them. Well, they have guns, after all. And there is nothing people with guns like more than having an excuse to use them.
This appalling college massacre must be a wake-up call to the USA.
Every day we read stories about friends accidentally killing each other because they are brandishing their guns. People with guns love to play with them, flaunt them, carry them... And they are constantly having "accidents" with them. Small children kill each other playing with daddy's guns.
There have been too many of these mindless massacres. People emotionally disturbed, people with grudges... They should not have free access to weapons of death.
The time has come to clue up and kill this gun culture.

Kafka's airport

Do not be tempted to change planes in Montreal en route to the USA. Who could have known that it would be such an exceptionally awful ordeal?

In blissful ignorance, we had accepted the Star Alliance option of flying Air Canada from Paris to Boston via Montreal. It was a bad start when Air Canada's Charles de Gaulle checkin desk insisted that, despite our long-standing booking and early arrival at the airport, we were destined to "the last seats on the plane" and hence, had to sit separately in central seats at the back of the plane. It was decidedly unimpressive, if not repulsive, to unfold my airline blanket after removing it from its plastic bag and find it absolutely covered in long blonde hairs. Such things seem par for the course these days. The cabin service was adequate and the seven-and-a-half-hour flight was pleasanty uneventful with good movies.

The big puzzle was when the stewards handed us all Canadian customs forms and said we had to fill them in - despite the fact that Canada was not our destination. There was considerable debate among incredulous passengers, but the air stewards just kept insisting, explaining that we had to collect our baggage on landing and go through Canadian customs. It seemed a bit odd.

But it came to pass. Of course, one of our bags was last off the carouselle, giving us some anxiety about our two hours of change-planes time. Little did we know that we would need every minute of it to stand about in slow cattle grid queues going through the most bizarre airport protocol in the world.

It turns out that Montreal takes transit passengers but does not have a transit area.

It is an airport designed by Franz Kafka!

The only way to get to the next plane is to go through all the formalities of entering Canada and then go through the formalities of leaving Canada and then go through the formalities of entering America. Hence we queued and queued in the cattle grids, firstly for Canadian Immigration stamps, then another queue for Customs. Then, lumbering along with our luggage, we had to follow signs around the airport to a Departure area where we had to queue at a checkin again, to show boarding passes, then fill in new Customs forms and join another cattle grid queue for US immigration and yet another cattle grid queue for customs before being able to part with the luggage and queue in another massive cattle grid for Security checking. By this time, we were not only cutting it fine to catch our plane, we were absolutely ga-ga with the infinity of zig-zag ropes and queues snaking to and fro across these endless hallways - and utterly mind-boggled that there was such a thing as a modern International Airport without a transit area.
If I was a gibbering cot case at the end of this absurd, impractical and insulting queue torture of officialdom, how on earth did old and frail people cope? Or mothers with bubs and toddlers?

Montreal, nice city that you are, you should be ashamed at this treatment of transit passengers. It is uncivilized and inhumane. Pure Kafka.

Ills of air travel

Air travel has now descended to a point where one can only say it has become a squalid experience.

I am old enough to remember when people dressed to travel. It was big deal - even in economy.

Now, one can't say that air travel is cheap. It is not. But it certainly is popular, despite the fact that it also is hell. Has become hell.
It has become an animal scrum.

I truly believe that most people are really nice - and interesting. But put them in the miserable airport holding pens waiting to get on planes and they are all the enemy. They sit about looking suspiciously at their fellow passengers, readying themselves for a ruthless ritual of queue-push and trample they to get to onto the plane. As if it's going to leave without them. When called in to board first (after the elite travellers, wheelchairs and babies), because you're one of the poor bloody sods allocated seats in the arse end of the plane, you suddenly find access to the departure gate blocked by a cram of scowling people. You have to squeeze between these sods with the better seats because they simply don't want to let you get on ahead of them. They want to be first on so they can hold up all progress down the plane by fussing around in the aisles while trying to jam ten tons of handluggage into the overhead lockers. The logic of loading the rear passengers first seems to strike some nerve of outrage in the modern traveller. So they push their way on among the tail-seaters and there they are, blocking the aisles in elaborate displays of aerial luggage juggling.

The airlines have their passengers where they want them - absolutely under their power. Well, let's not say the airlines as such. Whatever service or product one mentions these days is in busy answering to voracious shareholders and boards which forever seek higher and higher profits. There is no such thing as enough profit. Only "more". Hence, the interminable cut-backs and compromises.

I've become very sad and disillusioned by Qantas in recent years. A lifetime of passionate loyalty to the "national carrier" has been eroded into, well, straight-out aversion. I feel badly treated. Disrespected.
It is a very long time now since I had a civilized seat allocation from Qantas. It does not matter how early I book and pay - a year ahead! I am still victim to some perverse check-in seat allocation which will put me exactly where I hate to be, bumping around in the tail of the plane. Yes, I know it's the safest place. But it is not the most comfortable. I happen to hate it.
Yet, somehow, there is never any other seat to be had - even if I check in four hours ahead. Told that I can only get seat allocation at check-in, I al told at check-in that all the seats already have been allocated. Am I the only person who can only get seat-allocation at check-in. Qantas told me last time I inquired that I simply did not have enough Frequent Flyer points to merit a good seat allocation. I am only a Bronze flyer. Therefore worthless.
So, this time I chose Singapore Airlines.
Uh-oh. Arriving early at Adelaide airport to get seat allocations, where was I seated? Right at the back of the tail. Again!
And on the next leg to Frankfurt? Well, not quite in the back rows - but in the centre block of the tail section. This was another experience altogether - very odd. It seems the air stewards just can't see you there as they roam the aisles with their trays of drinks or snacks.

On both legs, the aircraft were filled to capacity. Indeed, I heard one check-in queuer in Adelaide mention that the airline had phoned to offer Business class seating if she would reschedule for the following day - the plane was overbooked.
Out of Singapore, Singapore Airlines turned into the Star Alliance flight which meant that it was also taking Lufthanser passengers and those of several other airlines. Needless to say, it was packed to the gunwhales, so to speak.
And there is the barrel over which the airlines have us. Volume is all. Sardine travelling at all costs, sorry, I mean profits.
So it comes to pass that the passengers are just a hapless form of product - willing to accept the myriad inadequacies, most of them with no idea that it was ever otherwise.

And, here comes the crunch, they travel packed in together against all rules of personal space, cheek to jowl with strangers in proximity they would tolerate in no other circumstance. They are fed a thin supply of oxygen to make them docile and drowsy. And, in sharing this meagre air, they share generously the myriad germs being introduced amongst them. Yes, I sat beside a sore-throat and coughing Malaysian accountant on the first leg and across the aisle from a French woman with an incessantly sneezing, nose-blowing streaming cold on the second leg. An ugh of ambient illness. And, that is not counting the chorus of sneezing, hooting and coughing from the rest of the section. Bugs and viruses from everywhere poured into an an aerial petrie dish.
I give myself three days before I find come down with my share of these illnesses. It is the dividend of every long-distance air trip.

Not only do we pay a lot of money to travel, it costs us.
Yes, a squalid business it is.
It is time for some organised air rage.

Hicks is torture for us all

As Australia goes into assorted paroxysms about the news on Australia's Gauantanamo detainee, David Hicks and his first court appearance, I slink into a corner of despair. I am sick and tired of hearing about this foolish would-be terrorist who now has pled guilty to supporting a terrorist organisation.
I think the American Government has been yet more obnoxious than Hicks in insisting on his lengthy and inhumane incarceration at Guantanamo, which is the very sort of hell hole of torment from which the US purports to want to rid the world. Its' treatment of Hicks has only served to turn him into a celebrated case - and, doubtless, a seriously traumatised nut case.

I venture to suggest that this whole shambles might have been avoided if David Hicks had stayed at school and learned a thing or two. He left school at 14, expelled - a raw boy with comic book dreams of being a warrior. He replaced school learning with gun learning, drugs, car theft and sex. He had two children by the time he was 20. At 24 he was off in Albania joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. Any fight would do. He tried to get into the Australian army, but it insists on education among its recruits. So he turned to Islam, headed off to Pakistan to be trained and the next thing, he was bragging he had met Osama bin Laden 20 times.
He was a pretty reprehensible young man.

But then the Americans mistreated him and denied him his rights in that vile detention centre - and he has been headlines ever since.
This man who sought to fight against his own people is now a cause celebre. Not a day goes by without mention of his name. He has turned into a major political issue - so much so that the forthcoming Australian Federal election is destined to be waving the flag of his case in a frenzy of point-scoring. It is going to go on and on.

And we are all punished for a school drop-out's stupidity.

Not just a petfood scandal

Rat poison in wheat from China! This turns out to be behind the renal failure death of dogs throughout America.
How the wheat became contaminated is anyone's guess. A rat plague in the wheat storage facilities? Misuse of agricultural chemicals?
China has quite a history of the latter. It remains a very disturbing problem as Dune Lawrence points out in Bloomberg.
"Pesticide poisoning affects half a million Chinese a year, causing more than 500 fatalities"

For a long time Western bio-tech companies were dumping into the Third World markets products no longer saleable in their own arenas. This, notoriously, resulted in some serious pollution of food sources, especially in China, where farmers were making almost random chemical mixtures because they were unable to read the labels on the products. There was a time that Hong Kong put a ban on fresh foods from mainland China because of the toxic levels of pesticides etc.

My suspicion, therefore, is that we have here a tale of greed from two directions. Firstly, there are the agri-chem corporations which sacrifice ethics for profit in dumping discredited product on hapless poor countries. Secondly, we have the petfood people buying the cheapest ingredients to keep their shareholders' pockets lined. And, in a class of their own, there are the pet-owners who choose expediency as a way of nourishing their animals. Theirs is the crime of laziness.

It astonishes me that people who purport to love animals don't think about giving them more pleasure and better nutrition in their meals. Food is not only necessary, it is one of the fundamental sensual experiences of life. And yet, people who are prepared often to pay thousands for a pedigree animal will blithely fill its bowl with tinned or pellet food.

It truly is not hard to cook for the dog. We cook in three-day batches - ground chicken stewed with carrots, chard and parsley, bulked with pasta or rice and sprinkled with vitamins (plus, for our elderly doberman, Glucosomine). There are variations on this theme, of course. The dog loves the whole ritual of his food preparation, as he loves his food. He drools for handouts of carrot as the chopping goes on - his favourite treat, apart from blueberries. Cooking the petfood is as economic as it is wholesome - and it has provided a dividend of eliminating dog farts capable of asphyxiating a small nation.

United in music

Festival time in Adelaide and a whole city is out in the streets partying. What a glorious spirit the Fringe brings forth. The experiment of holding Fringe festivals every year seems to rise triumphant, embraced with loving enthusiasm by the city at large. The parklands glitter with coloured lights and crowds, the sidewalk restaurant tables are packed late into the nights and exuberant people stream through the streets. There is so much going on it is hard to know where to be.
I was at Womadelaide, however - one of the world's exquisite festivals, a celebration of world music. In Adelaide it fills the huge Botanic Park, this drought year, rather dusty. Flags flutter on towering bamboo poles, lanterns hang from the gracious old trees, roaming performers in all bizarre guises entertain the picnicking and wine-drinking masses and we all swarm from stage area to stage area to settle for the performances of choice.

It is on a very large scale and, for those of us on an opening-night reviewing schedule, it is very strenuous - scampering to and from our transportable backstage office to turn around tiny, tight reviews for the morning paper. It was wonderful, at about 10pm, to sit under a tree and drink a glass of red wine, bone-tired at the end of the deadlines.
Just letting the rhythms of the world throb around one - tango from one stage and Celtic from another. They had replaced the deep, seductive drums of earlier performances, those pulsing rhythms which join the crowds into one huge visceral mass of humanity. One looks across to see the sea of people bopping as one... This is one of the secrets to this festival, one of the reasons it evokes such sweet temperament amid the crowds.

Another is the universality of the programming - all ages embraced, meeting in the sharing of music. Thus from the Mahotella Queens, the South African all-dancing-and-singing grandmothers, to the Gotan Project's techno for the young, the jaunty jigs of the Irish for all, Latin, Indian, Aussie...


It was wonderful on my review schedule to find myself sittings amid a carpet of friendly strangers with the stars twinkling through the boughs of the old gums and sheoaks, listening to the mysterious and mesmeric harmonics of the Tuvan throat singers. Grabbing needed refreshments - a superb ginger, lime and lemon drink, from the gentle hippies manning their sumptuous cafe tent lined with Persian rugs and serving chai teas, organic coffees and home-made cakes.

A drift of the scent of marijuana here, incense there, aromatic curries, coffee, beer... fragrances all around - another cultural intermingling feeding the senses until they are quite sated.

The pity of progress

They are an endangered species - facing extinction. It seems so perverse. They do no harm, these lakeside shacks. And yet, bureacracy has ruled that they may not stay. Those who holiday in them have been given lifetime occupancy - but one which curtails the tradition of handing down. The movement is to reclaim foreshores on lakes and rivers where families of the less wealthy have always holidayed in their simple, much-loved shacks. Shacks are an official "eyesore".
On Lake Alexandrina at the tiny town of Milang, there is this community of lovingly-kept shacks, primitive little constructions occupied for generation after generation, where fathers fish and children learn water skills and explore wetlands. This community has fought the demolition edict and begged for a heritage listing, for it knows it represents a history of holidays and cultural mores. Officialdom has denied this request. The shacks are doomed.


Milang is not a tourism mecca. It is a fairly obscure little township - one pub, a pizza place, a general store, a campground... It sports a small wetland trail, dry as a bone now in the drought, a train exhibit and a little cafe-cum-information centre. It is a darling town with a history of lake activities and some historic buildings. But it is a bit off the beaten track. Tourists trickle through and are enchanted by the time-warp, particularly by the shacks.

The irony is that the bureacracy which hates the shacks is the very one which will approve the developers. Are large condos more beautiful than these colourful, characterful little shacks? Ye gods, no! They are the new ugly. The greedy new ugly. The eyesore and the bane.
Is there some rule that says that the rich should enjoy water views and the working class should not?
Apparently there is.
I abhor it.
The shacks of Milang represent all that is joyous in family holidays, in childhood pleasures, in the simple things of life. And in an egalitarian culture.
This is not jet ski sound-and-water-pollution territory. Nor powerboats and mindless watersports. It is sailboats, canoes and fishing - the gentle water pursuits. It is a haven of black swans, pelicans, ibis...

Destroying this little world is nothing less than a government crime against family life!

In support of hemp

Hemp! Hemp! Hemp!
The call by Australian union leader Bill Shorten for the country to replace water-wasteful crops such as rice and cotton with hemp is the sort of common sense I have been waiting to hear from the world of politics - as they bleat and argue about the drought and the pitiful state of the poor, over-used River Murray.

Which complete idiot decided that Australia should be a rice or cotton-growing nation in the first place?

Talk about inappropriate, illogical and completely damned profligate.
The ultimate inanity of it all is that Australia has to export its cotton to India, China and Korea to have it processed. That's only half an industry - with a considerable cost to the environment. The Cotton Australia website admits freely that cotton "ammonium nitrate, radiological sources, harmful biological materials and hazardous chemicals" are associated with cotton-growing. Chemicals such as endosulfan, sodium chlorate, paraquat, aldicarb, disulfoton and phorate are actually national security concerns, for heaven's sake.
What are we doing here?
All it can do is to pollute the landscape and suck up the water supply.

As for the rice. We grow the worst rice in the world, in my expert culinary opinion. I do anything to avoid buying Australian rice - because it always means a disaster in the pot. I love my son very much - but when he brought Australian rice into the house instead of proper Thai Jasmine, I was really piqued with him. I had to cook this crap? Guess at water measurements because it is never consistent with the ancient traditions of rice cooking? Our neighbours in Asia grow wonderful rice in environments suited to the required irrigation. I don't care what the industry proponents say, it seems to me that we are compromising our fragile environment for the sake of an unnecessary and second-rate product.

Australia now has a scandalous 2500 rice farms and brags it lives at the top end of the international rice market.
Australia, always short of water, now is in the throes of drought. But we still divert water for rice crops.
Hemp is the logical answer.

It is no silly hippie solution as the market conservatives try to propagandize. It is a brilliant fibre crop which produces a product stronger than cotton with by-products equivalent to wood pulp plus an excellent seed oil. It endures drought and climate variablility and it does not need a squillion pesticides or supplements.

But of course, gasp, it is "hemp" and attracts the knee-jerk response of the ignorant who seem to think it is a drug. It has negligible THC. The THC thing is the big red herring and the rice/cotton vested interests will drag it around to see if they can make it stink rather than change any of the things they are doing.

It will take a resolute government to tackle water shortage from the cropping point of view. One with a new sort of moral fibre - er, so to speak.

Irony unites Khouri and McAuley

Australian kayaker Andrew McAuley must qualify for a Darwin Award.
The adventurer died recently on while trying to become the first person to paddle alone across the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand.
Shortly before his death he had said that, although he didn't think adventure was worth dying for, nonetheless, some people needed to put their lives at risk to appreciate how precious life is.
And his death proved what, exactly?

Meanwhile, Norma Khouri did not turn up for the world premiere of Forbidden Lies, the film in which she stars. Instead, she has been sending out letters of protest saying that the film is all lies.
I'm starting to get the giggles.

Norma Khouri unravelled

Norma Khouri took us all in, hook, line and sinker. But what reason did we have to suspect that she was not telling the truth when she emerged as the author of Forbidden Love, (Honor Lost in the US), the emotional expose of honour killings in Jordan?

We brought her to our city as our guest to celebrate her courage in writing the book, promoting it as a Big Book Club selection, providing discount coupons to make it easier for our readers to afford. We invited the city to meet her - and they came in numbers so large that we had to open the huge Hilton Hotel ballroom to its maximum size and still had people standing.

I introduced her to that sea of people in a paeon of praise - as a woman fearlessly championing a cause.
On meeting Norma, I had been entirely charmed. She was modest, amusing, self-deprecatory and, above all, passionate about her cause. I will admit, however, that I had earlier found it necessary to quiz her in a way that I would not usually do in the course of an author interview. I had found some strange discrepancies in her book and wanted to clear them up. I could not, for example, understand the why and how of her move to Greece. When I asked about this she answered at some length with such fluency and ease that it was not until I went back over my notes that I realised that there had been no actual answer in her words. I had thought I heard an answer, but it was a charming zig-zag. There was no "there" there. I was more annoyed with myself than with her. How come I still had no answer to such a simple question? Now I would have to write around it - "when in doubt, leave it out". But that was not the only puzzle. On first speaking to her, I exclaimed at her American accent. I'd never met a Jordanian with such a strong American accent. "How much time had she spent in the US?", I asked. She gave a long response in which she attributed her accent to the American School in Amman, a diet of American movies and television and a passion for emulation. I could only comment at how well she had mastered the accent - for, I had no reason to suspect that she was not on the level. None of us did.

I suppose the thing that convinced me about Norma Khouri's authenticity in writing Forbidden Love was how bad she is as a writer. The book's text is simplistic in style, clearly put together by someone who is trying to tell a story but who has absolutely no talent as a writer.
And, of course, the book's cover brandished the promise that it was, indeed, a "true story". One tends to trust the Random House label. No, we had no cause for suspicion.

It was Sydney journalist Malcolm Knox who smelled the proverbial rat, and we all went into shock. His revelations reverberated around Australia, where Khouri had been living in high secrecy - to protect her from jihad, or so she told me when first I reached her on a super secret phone number.

Malcolm Knox, in a fine piece of investigative journalism, discovered that she is not only Chicago-raised but also allegedly wanted by the FBI for swindling an elderly woman in Chicago. She turns out to be married with two children.

Wrote Knox:
"Khouri's hoax will take its place in a long Australian tradition of literary fraud, from Ern Malley to Helen Darville-Demidenko. But no other fraudulent book has had such wide sales or impact..."

Many pennies dropped about Khouri's inconsistencies when I read this, but I still wondered. It all seemed so odd to fake with altruistic intent. After all, her mission was to shame the tradition of Islamic honour-killings - to save young women from death at the hand of their families. And, frankly, I could not dislike Khouri.

Now at the Adelaide Film Festival a documentary on Khouri and her story as a fake has its world premiere. Forbidden Lies allows Khouri to tell her own story to camera and then accompanies her to Jordan where she promises to prove that her friend Dalia was a real person who was genuinely killed by her brother because of her association with a young Christian man. But, come Jordan, Khouri is suddenly backpedalling and fudging. She cannot find those promised locations and there is no record of the victim ever ending up in any morgue or cemetery. Under the cool gaze of the camera, we watch Khouri unravelling, coming up with sequential excuses and layers of desperately transparent lies. Oddly, it is really sad. But she has chutzpah. Denying the swindling allegations, she creates a whole new story in which she casts herself as the victim - and we discover a new book is on the way, an autobiography of an abused child whose only way of coping with life is by inventing it...
What a pity we don't believe her.
But somewhere, somehow, we still like her.

The state of the states

Unlike America, Australia has always been in some denial about the differences in character and attitude between the states. While America is proud of the contrast between, say, New York and California or Georgia and Vermont, we have been a bit secretive about state contrasts - seeing it as some sort of dirty family business. The feelings between Australian states have not been exactly affectionate.

Hence, the immense schadenfreude we now feel at the Sydney Morning Herald's report of English psychologist and author Oliver James's analysis of the Australian states. He has said the things that we mutter to each other but dare not declaim. He has said that Sydney is the most vacuous city of superficial people obsessed with real estate, personal prestige and appearance.
The "Dolly Parton" of Australian cities!

He has hit the nail on the head. He has not mentioned, because he may not have known, that Sydney also produces the most astonishingly arrogant attitude towards the rest of Australia - a sense of absolute superiority. It would eliminate the other states completely, if it could. If it cannot ignore them, it will demean them. It is all-wonderful, all-powerful, it is simply all.
We call it "Sydneycentricity" here in the south.

Sydney has created its own image of the other capital cities - none of them friendly. We, the arts capital, are always dubbed "the city of churches" and accused of a conservatism which does not apply. We are also dubbed a "poofter" city because of our emphasis on the arts.

Melbourne is the upstart, greedy city, in the Sydney view. If Sydney disdains Adelaide, it loathes Melbourne - a feeling that is reciprocated by Melbournians. Hobart and Perth? Well, they are not worthy of Sydney interest at all. They are so remote, they are country towns in the big city view of the country.
Now, of course, Sydneysiders are in a lather of indignation. They have been internationally exposed as the vain and vapid, materialistic drears that they are. All they have is more. More people and more money, more traffic and more tourist.
I've always described Sydney as a "blousey" city - like an overblown rose. It is showy, gorgeous and big.
Adelaide is the pink bud rose - delicate, pretty and rich with promise. If one was to continue the rose metaphor, Melbourne would be the yellow climber, Hobart the wild bramble and Perth the standard rose, staked tall and isolated, but lovely.

Sydney has dominated the country like a schoolyard bully (yes, changing metaphors) - and we have all cowered in our geographic corners, quietly seething resentment but not nationally disloyal enough to repay the rudeness. Certainly in Adelaide we have always known that we are the creative crucible of the country. We export brains and talent to the rest of the country - and the world. The more we lose, the more we make. Perth may have had the first art festival, but we are the Festival city - simply because, like Edinburgh, we were made for festivals. We have the cultured population and the physical dimensions to make arts festivals into all-embracing happenings. Our festivals are not just a program of events scattered around a vast area, as is the case with Sydney. They are a city coloured in the arts.

Melbourne, our nearest capital neighbour, is jealous and predatory - thieving what it can from Adelaide's events. I quite like Melbourne, but I find its inability to come up with its own ideas a bit tiresome. I find Melbourne's pathological loathing of Sydney most amusing, however. Melbourne wants to be what other cities are. It lies and contorts history, it steals and generally behaves rather badly.


Adelaide? Well, at a million people it is just the right size. It is small enough to have a sense of community but large enough to have a thriving metropolis. It has a vast stretch of superb beaches and lush, agriculturally productive hills - along with fertile wine and dairy valleys. We eat extremely well - living an enviable quality of life which is untrammelled by congestion. We are what they call "a lifestyle city". A gentle decadence prevails. We neither need nor want what Sydney has. Particularly its attitude.

So why haven't we blown the whistle on the ugliness of Australia's most beautiful city?
Perhaps it is because we have a population of only 21million versus the USA's 310 million that we have kept a loose sense of nationalism rather than state identification, allowing the most populous city to stake its claim as gateway to the country. Perhaps we simply don't want to wash our dirty linen in public.

It took a foreigner.

Oh, Molly.

The geographical distance could not be greater but nor could the spiritual proximity.
Molly Ivins was one of my own kind - one of the very best. She may have been writing in Texas, but we were reading her in South Australia. Avidly. With absolute joy that she was allowed to have a voice in the American media landscape. The balanced voice, the funny one - satirist and wise woman. She wielded wit and irony as weapons of mass communication.
That breast cancer has taken her is an outrage and an injustice.