Days Volume Two

* Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer. The financial and economic crisis now upon us is by far the most menacing of the past century - even more so than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is not just a "subprime" crisis; it is systemic - affecting the entire financial system. It is also global, affecting various countries in various ways but affecting them all. In achieving a certain "globalization", we have been uniquely successful in globalizing collapse, chaos and misery. It is a globalization which, in our short-sighted negligence, we never envisaged. In this crisis, even a country such as Australia is no more than a subordinate, neo-colonial, financial and economic dependency. In essence, we have reverted to what we were before and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Whitehall, Westminster and the Bank of England played the tune to which we jigged... From 1969 and especially from 1971, when the United States cut the dollar link with g...

* Art gallery window, Redfern. His cattle didn’t get a bid; they were fairly bloody poor, What was he going to do? He couldn’t feed them anymore, The dams were all but dry; hay was thirteen bucks a bale, Last month’s talk of rain was just a fairytale. His credit had run out, no chance to pay what’s owed, Bad thoughts ran through his head as he drove down Gully Road, ‘Geez, great grandad bought the place back in 1898, Now I’m such a useless bastard, I’ll have to shut the gate. “Can’t support my wife and kids, not like dad and those before, Crikey, Grandma kept it going while Pop fought in the war.” With depression now his master, he abandoned what was right, There’s no place in life for failures, he’d end it all tonight. There were still some things to do; he’d have to shoot the cattle first, Of all the jobs he’d ever done, that would be the worst. He’d have a shower, watch the news, then they’d all sit down for tea Read his kids a bedtime story, watch some more TV, Kiss his wife go...

* Sydney Harbour Bridge. "So where did our Dear Leader stand? Well, he said, emerging briefly from a pressing round of photo opportunties at sporting events, it's got to be worth a try; anything's better than a perceived American defeat... This remained Howard's position: he would leave our existing forces there, do his best to ensure that they were not put in any serious danger, and withdraw them as soon as Washington agreed, all the while loyally pretending that the troop surge was something more than his mate's desperate attempt to salvage his reputation, to be paid for in blood." Mungo MacCallum, Poll Dancing. Strangely he walked back into his old life as if nothing had happened. He contacted his children and they came around to visit. They didn't say anything about him having been away. He rang up his work, got told when his next shift was, and showed up; again as if nothing had happened. Everything was muffled; he felt the undertow of depression as s...

* Moon over Redfern. "Almost no professional believed the new strategy was anything more than a face-saving device, designed to provide a buffer period during which Bush could blame Iraqis for the manifest failure of his grand project. Bush himself admitted that it would cost some American lives, and the lives of who knows how many more Iraqis, but he was still unable to offer a coherent justification for the huge and growing sacrifice, for his apparent demand for yet more victims to join the multitudes already dead." Mungo MacCallum, Poll Dancing. The cruelties layered themselves over each other. Nothing could stop him. The days passed in a hazy dream. Part of it was comfort, he didn't have to be anywhere, he didn't have to do anything. He couldn't make a fool of himself, because he was interacting with nobody. The other residents, or inmates, almost never spoke. Even when they did talk, it was never to him. The television droned in the corner; even more boring i...

* Murals, Redfern. In the early years the company generated much needed local employment through its extensive building works programs, but suffered many financially crippling delays due to an uncooperative South Sydney Council. When the Fraser Coalition government was elected in 1975, a year later it terminated capital works funding to the project. Without financial assistance the Block descended into disrepair and disorder. By the early 1980s the Aboriginal Housing Company had acquired almost half the properties on the Block and with another change of federal government (Hawke/Keating) came renewed support for Redfern’s Aboriginal community. In 1994 the last house on the Block was finally owned by the Aboriginal Housing Company. However, by the early 1990s heroin had begun to infiltrate the community and the Block gradually became so violent it was a virtual a no-go zone. Police rarely ventured into the community except in large numbers, and with armour to protect them from flying br...

* Maroubra Beach. "Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born." Doris Lessing. "This is what people do not tell you. What is wrong with being old is it's so boring. A very good remark which people should remember. They talk all this...rubbish about how you get older, wiser all that. Rubbish! You get-bad tempered." Doris Lessing. He tried to reach out, a hand draped in desperation, longing, don't forget the camp effect, he tried to struggle back into some form of consciousness. The government had lost him entirely. The left were in power from coast to coast and the chattering classes now ran the country. There had been so many false dawns. He didn't know who he was. The nurse came in and he pretended, unsuccessfully, to be asleep. Are you alight? she aske...

* Mural, Redfern. WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness. The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest. The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the co...