Oh, how we will miss them.
Oh, how we will miss them.
The Grand Ridge Road only took two days, so there was still plenty of Easter/Anzac long weekend to check out the tourist attractions of East Gippy. Near Thorpdale, you can see this sign:
In the Easter break I did something I’d wanted to do for quite a while – go for a road trip along this road, which follows the top of the Strzlecki ranges in East Gippsland. Just myself, while the family fended for themselves at home (Mr Bucket works on weekends, of course, and the kids are allergic to country air.)
Looking north from the Grand Ridge Road, somewhere between Tarra Bulga NP and Gunyah
The O’Reallys are the typical so-called “well-off” family who are now staring down the barrel of the Gillard government’s crushing “middle-class welfare” reform. Our intrepid editor sent this reporter out to one of the up and coming suburbs to get the real lowdown on how hard hit these families are by this merciless class warfare.
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.]
I’m taking some weeks off work courtesy of the wonderful 48/52 , and having an at-home holiday with a rare respite from early mornings and reasonable bedtimes. So it was that on Saturday night I found myself watching a late-night 1950s black and white movie – something I haven’t done much of since the demise of Bill Collins and Ivan Hutchinson’s shows. Oh, how I used to love those old black and white movies (cue massive eyeroll from the kids). Some of the interest lies in a mixture of plot points which appear to have been written while dropping acid combined with gender and class expectations which are all too real.
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
I bought a new pair of shoes yesterday. Conventional wisdom has it that all women love buying shoes and indulge in this activity whenever possible. I disagree. I fecking hate buying shoes.
My problem isn’t with style decisions, but size. Well, style, too, but more of that later. The minute I’m in the car with the shoe box on the front seat I start to bubble over with stress. A year or so ago I bought a good pair of walking boots which turned out to be an unacceptable fraction too large (they moved at the back of the ankle with every step) and I’d been around the park a couple of times with the dogs before I overcame my denial, so I felt it was unfair to give them back to the shop. It took me an eternity to find a second hand buyer for a pair of boots.
My latest pair is a pair of low-cut walking shoes for everyday dog walking and such. I need something with good foot support and tread – Dunlop volleys don’t cut it with my crap knees and feet. Now I’m sitting here wiggling my toes and getting up to circumnavigate the house another time and being Neurotic. Are they too big??? Are they too big??????OMG? Of course they look enormous, but I have to accept that I have enormous feet. There is just an infinitesimal amount of movement. But it is first thing in the morning.
I still can’t bring myself to cut the label off. The dogs are hanging about looking at me expectantly. “You’ve got your shoes on!” “Yes, but I’m not going out in the park yet.” “…”
I’m fairly certain they are The Ones. Yes, I should have decided this in the shop, but that is not the way my mind works. On the drive home from the Shopping Mall from Hell and overnight my fearful Wrong Size fantasies burgeon until I’m convinced they are flapping boats in which my feet roil about from one side to the other, while people point and say “Look, it’s Krusty the Clown!” Then I put them back on, and nope, they seem to touch my feet at all points except the bit at the end where I can wiggle my toes, the old test learned in childhood.
And the next size down really was very snug.
These are from a bushwalking shop, again. My first call was to the sport shoe shop which rhymes with Toot Blocker, because they’re supposed to be good at fitting your feet, but Aaaaaaargh! My eyes! I am not going to put these shiny, white-silver-metallic-fluoro monstrosities anywhere near my feet. Sorry. Can’t you make some in, say, plain red or grey or black (not those orthopaedic-looking black ones) for the rest of us? As you can tell, I’m not a sporty person, so I don’t go into these places. I was surprised to see that the price of my bushwalking boots was not as ridiculous as I’d thought; people appear to regularly drop similar amounts on these metallic horrors.
Good grief, you’ll say, how do you ever buy shoes for work? Well, my three pairs of work shoes: Low heels (black), purchased 2003; Mary Janes (black), purchased 2005; Boots (black), purchased 2007. That should tell you something. Good thing I work in IT.
I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have to go back to the shop today.
Behold my tremendous feets. Yes, very beige.
It’s Sunday! Let’s NOT write about the election! What about something less depressing and more relaxing?
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.
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I could hardly see for the tears as I stumbled into work today. Sure, last week’s news was gut-wrenching enough, especially the Kevin Rudd presser, but this was nothing in comparison with the suffering I was witnessing today. You shouldn’t even listen to the breakfast news when you’re as sensitive as I am.
First up there was the revelation that a rich old white guy, who’d held onto the highest office in the land for over a decade, had been denied the fun new position of international cricket honcho. It’s not the first time “cricket” and “tragic” have been used in the same sentence for JWH but now the words have been sadly reversed. Tragedy is too mild a description for this terrible blow.
Then, after I’d recovered sufficiently to get out of the house and drive to the station, there was the voice of Ian MacFarlane, like velcro dragged over gravel – possibly more than usual as he struggled to contain his emotion – telling of the persecution of “the miners” at the hands of the cruel, perfidious government. “The Miners”, you understand, not “mining corporations”, because (as Pavlov’s cat and Tigtog pointed out) that would make Twiggy and Gina Rinehart sound like members of the Rich list rather than plucky little blokes and blokesses who go down pit every day and come out blackened and dishevelled.*
“The guvmint holding a gun to the miners’ head! …An aggressive attack!…Xenophobic comments made about foreign ownership! A fullon attack by the guvmint on the mining industry!1!”
I’m ready to go to the barricades to try and just get the concept of a fair go back to this country. Now if you’ll excuse me I think I’m going to cry again. I just can’t bear this treatment of helpless people.
The historic spill on Thursday had some of the hallmarks of a stage play, a Greek tragedy, or as the Americans say, Kabuki. Bekk wins by reproducing the whole thing in LOLcats (or LOLpolz) for your education.
I heard Kevin Rudd channelling Shakespeare on the ABC Breakfast program that morning, doing MacBeth and Duncan simultaneously.
KR: it’s far better these things are done quickly rather than being strung out over a period of time.
MacBeth: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (Act 1, sc 7)
Quite a contrast to a past era where Labor politicians expressed their keenness to do people slowly. But back to the Scottish play. It was an ominous coincidence, and the weather outside the kitchen window was obligingly dark and rainy, but in this case it appears there were four witches, not three.
“When will we four meet again?…
when the hurly burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.
That’ll be ere the 6 o’clock news set of sun.
Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
DRASTICK ACSHUN MUST BE TAKEN
LEST HE LOSE US TEH ELECSHUN”
I’m sure the right wing commentariat would like to riff on Julia Gillard/Lady Macbeth, but it isn’t really a starter. The apparatchiks played the three four witches and Lady Macbeth rolled into one, and Julia was MacBeth herself. Who, you will recall, was a pasty freckly celt. See, it all fits. It’s spooky.
As for the next few weeks in the media, this pretty much says it all.
First post for Cast Iron Balcony 2010, and the first since I took a break from it. I missed it.
Towards the end of last year, it was just getting a bit too hard. In some ways, CIB was becoming the victim of its success. I’d had requests for interviews from journos and invitations to post on prominent group blogs (haven’t been doing anything there, either.) Most people would be ecstatically happy, but because I’m a neurotic over-thinker, my response was to begin to obsess over the quality of every post and my lack of a PhD in every subject I blogged about. One of the group blogs I’m a part of is mainly composed of academics and other professionals, which made me think… well… What right do I really have about to write about stuff, anyway? And what right do I have to occupy a position as a “feminist blogger” in the Ozblogosphere without ever having taken a tertiary course in gender studies?
Of course, the answer to that that Miranda Devine, Catherine Deveny, Andrew Bolt, the De Britos and hundreds of other bloviators don’t have the slightest hesitation about hitting their keyboards about any topic whatsoever, and they get paid for it, too. So I should revive this blog and keep on doing what I started it for: writing about whatever’s interesting or angsting me at any given moment.
I think that as the readership of CIB increased my sense of responsibility increased to the point where every post on something I care about became a 10,000 word essay which had to be researched for three weeks before I wrote a word. I just made it into very hard work. Plenty of political blogs are an intelligent articulation of how the writer reacts to events or other writings, rather than a pseudo-academic or pseudo-journalistic exercise.
In other words, I needed to get over myself a bit.
Also, 2009 was a hell of a year. How was yours? I had one kid finishing grade six and starting high school, and another one doing VCE and wanting to start Uni straight away, no gap year. So we had the quadruple-whammy of: Grade 6 end-of-year stuff; Supporting VCE student through exams (like being the person in a little van who putters along after the endurance cyclist or long distance runner who is near the finish line) plus VCE end-of-year stuff, including a major formal Graduation party; Choosing, applying for, and doing orientation things for younger kid’s high school; Choosing, applying for, and doing Open Day things for eldest kid’s University.
As well, we had VCE Graduation night, Schoolies week (shudder), and various other bits and pieces to do with schools. Girlchild passed VCE with elan and has been accepted into Arts at Melbourne university.
Life has also changed a little since my Dad had a fall and broke his femur in September. He’s 89, so he’s doing bloody well considering, but he gave us a scare and spent time in Rehab (No, no, no!) and now has a wheelie walker and a community worker who comes to give him a shower. He still has reading, writing and cricket, but he’s lost bushwalking and overseas travel forever, I think. I’m going to check out disabled-friendly bush tracks for the cooler weather, but harder stuff will be out.
My mum, who’s 88, has had the boundaries of her life shrunk radically overnight. As she can’t leave Dad for very long, she’s had to give up a lot of her activities (Labor party membership, Quaker vigils; you can see where I get it from, can’t you?)
Then, also, we went to New Zealand for the summer holidays, so it’s only now that I’ve got the time to show my blog some love. I’ve had help from this talented web wrangler, who you might recognise.
Image notes: Last summer I posted a photo of our garden taken from the balcony, which is actually a deck and not a balcony at all. The apricot tree behind the perching dove is gone. A few days after I took the photo, there was a terrible heatwave which cooked every leaf on the tree. I waited to see whether it would regenerate after winter, but it was definitely dead; it was a sad job pruning it back, then back again, and finding only dead wood.
In case this becomes like a sad metaphor for this blog, I plan to plant a couple of trees and many, many (drought tolerant) plants this coming autumn as well as watering and nurturing the blog.
Helen also writes for the Australian Group blogs Larvatus Prodeo, Hoyden About Town and cooking blog Progressive Dinner Party.
Nick Possum
Uncensor