Hair envy on the islands

The last week of the last millennium saw the rest of the world gathering tremendous caches of canned food products and heading to ground in reinforced concrete bunkers in order to shield themselves from the effects of the treacherous Y2K.

By contrast, the Samoans, who are somewhat accustomed to having a holocaust-surviving collection of canned meat and fish under the kitchen sink at the best of times, and for whom the electricity was hardly ever operating anyway (thanks to fifteen years of ineffectual foreign technical assistance and ongoing, bureaucratic bungling within the Samoa Electric Power Corporation), were disregarding the global call for disaster preparedness, and were preparing instead for the biggest, f’-off fiafia (party) the country had ever seen.

Each day, as the electronic, Millennium countdown clock ticked off its last 604,800 seconds, the Samoa Observer was awash with double page spreads announcing a growing line-up of exciting events and performances, the hurried opening of new bars taking advantage of the anticipated relaxing of the usual midnight curfew on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and international donor assistance to ensure that the last millennium celebration on the planet went off with one of the biggest bangs of them all (quite literally, as it transpired, thanks to China’s kind donation of a NASA-sized payload of expired, unsafe fireworks, which left at least one Samoan citizen looking remarkably like The Thing – but that’s another story for another time).

And amidst all this exciting, noisy anticipation, an additional entertainment option slipped quietly into Apia Harbour one evening, completely under the radar of the Millennium Celebration Organising Committee, in the form of “Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa” boat.

Like the grand old travelling road shows of the American Midwest in the forties, Bruno’s steam vessel was painted in garish primary colours, complete with a striped, barber-shop smoke stack and a flapping pennant promising the “Greatest Show of the Millennium”.

No one really took much notice of the circus boat until, four days later when we’d all recovered from our almighty, nation-wide hangover, the local daily decided that as the world had not ended, they probably ought to resume production, and went looking for a story that wouldn’t require them to travel further than across the street. And the story they ran with was none other than the international scandal that was “Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa”.

Every day for well over a month, the Observer ran an ever-revealing expose of this nod to old-world family entertainment. First it was that Bruno kept animals in tiny cages in the dark hold of his floating menagerie. Later, it was revealed by an international animal rights watchdog (of which no one had previously heard) that Bruno and his floating extravaganza had been refused permission to dock in Fiji on account of alleged inhumane treatment of his performers.

Over the coming weeks, the opinion pieces and letters columns of the Observer moved from one spectrum to the other in support of, and against the travelling, magical circus, with as many prominent local celebrities and politicians throwing their popular weight behind the “great and magical Bruno” as those who renounced him as a shyster and exploiter of innocents.

And through this barrage of newsreel and opinion, whether for or against, there was one act within Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa which managed to captivate and thrill the entire population. It was not Bruno’s somewhat malnourished, leaping lions that stole the show, nor was it the Vitamin D-deficient Russian bear with the balancing beach ball on his schnoz. It wasn’t the clown with the narcotic-shrunken pupils and the visible twitch which so melted the hardened hearts of the naysayers, nor the hind-legged walking of the mange-ridden pig which had the supporters up on their feet at intermission. No, the act which really got Samoa talking was Bruno’s incredible enigma, known colloquially as the Hairy Man.

Was this creature man or beast? Was he some prehistoric throwback, or the result of a pharmaceutical company’s genetic experimentation gone wrong? Whatever the answer, it got all the tongues in the country wagging, and everyone, whether doctor or patient, banker or client, lawyer or accused, land owner or tenant flocked to the Magic Circus to view the follicular spectacle.

And like the freak shows of old, Bruno knew how to give a crowd what they wanted. The Hairy Man was available for viewing after every show, where screaming children would writhe in their parents arms in fear of the hairy arms reaching for them through steel bars as the camera snapped away into the night.

And then, perhaps after two or three months, after the crowds had finally lost interest in the Hairy Man, and just before all of the animals expired from the heat and cramped conditions, down came the big top one evening, and just as it had arrived, Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa boat chugged silently out of the harbour in the dead of night, never to be heard from again.

Or so I assumed in a world where cruelty to animals is less tolerated than it once was, where unusual looking people are free to participate in society along with everyone else, and where laser surgery exist for even the most hirsute. So imagine my surprise on Day 1 of my return to Samoa, when driving through town, my saucer-like eyes were drawn to a massive sign advertising … wait for it … “Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa Training Academy”!

Training Academy!!? What could anyone possibly learn there? Bruno’s circus never had acrobats and trapeze artists; it never had Houdini-types escaping from straight-jackets in glass water tanks; and there were no contortionists or fire eaters. Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa only ever showcased a small number of performing animals (which he’d presumably bought for a song after they were forced out of circuses in other countries with laws prohibiting such cruelty) and of course, the Hairy Man.

So what’s really going on up there on the hill, behind those substantial Academy gates? Is it simply an online booking service for acquiring circus animal cast-offs? Or is a somewhat greying and thinning Hairy Man running a whole bunch of new recruits through boot-camp style drills for effective comb-overs? Or perhaps more plausibly, is it simply an international training camp for like-minded entrepreneurs to master the art of media manipulation? - Lord knows that in this pursuit, Bruno has proven himself a true talent of magical proportions.

Samoa continues its fine tradition of superior tertiary education … and sign-writing! Pic: Hagas

Gaugin, he went crazy, man; he went all tropicale!

Living the way we do in isolated, impersonal Australian suburbia, where one’s next door neighbours are as estranged as if from a completely different city, it is somewhat disconcerting, and at the same time very comforting to walk into a supermarket here in Samoa where I last did a shop nine years ago, and have the manager casually address me by name and suggest she hasn’t “seen [me] ‘round here for a while”.

Such was our wonderful return (or home-coming) to Samoa last week. Whether it be the owners of a bar, the manager of the bank or the waitress at the best pizza outlet outside Sicily, we found that our absence had been but a blip on peoples’ memories, and that there was little surprise at our return – which in itself is no great bombshell, either, as after only one week back, we can see why there are so many people who once washed-up on these shores with the intent of completing a short-term job, and then heading home, but who wound-up staying forever.

Such as sorry old James Percival (not his real name), Gaugin-impressionist (read: imitator) extraordinaire. Percival’s been here for about as long as anyone can remember; painting scenes from Samoa’s rich mythology in bright, tropical blends, and flogging them off for a bomb to salt-water-crazed yachties and sun-scolded tourists who he manages to convince, despite his dishevelled appearance, that he is Samoa’s premier artist. Well to some extent, this might be true; he’s been here for so long that he may well be the oldest surviving artist, but I’m not sure ripping-off Gaugin’s Tahitian-inspired master pieces makes one a great artist.

To be fair, Percival’s stuff is quite nice; the colours are rich and bright, and the scenes portrayed are both mystical and intriguing, but I think it’s fair to say they would be more appropriately hung in the living room of someone’s beach-side holiday shack than in the fine-art auction houses of Sydney’s Paddington, or Melbourne’s Armadale. He must have taken some pretty crazy drugs in the sixties (or at least drunk too many fermenting coconuts) to have come up with the scenes that he did, but alas, his last original idea must have been at about that time, and since then he has simply been reproducing the same twelve scenes over and over again.

Despite having gone completely troppo some time back, Percival still maintains some semblance of his upper-crust, British roots. True, the stiff upper lip has become a little limp in the humidity, and his mandatory sailor captain’s hat has lost its colour and shape, but there are still strong traces of Her Majesty’s plum deep within his voice box, and he continues to wear button-down long-sleeved shirts, despite the effects that the intense humidity has on his dripping armpits.

He may not have always been this way, however. In fact, at one time, Our Man Jim may have been quite the lady-killer. Samoan-born, New Zealand author, Sia Figuel, in her humorous and occasionally cutting observations about life and love in Samoa’s capital, Apia, mentions a foreign artist who regularly entertained and instructed young Samoan maidens looking to learn the ways of love from an expert in the field, so as to be ready with a few handy skills when the time came for their first dallying with Eti or Sione in the plantations behind the city. Could this have been the great and famous James Percival, or merely a fabrication of Ms Figiel’s in order to enrich her South Seas adventure? If the former, then it most certainly must have been a long time ago, as we discovered during our first drive through Apia last week.

At first we had become somewhat worried about the fate of James Percival when we noticed that the dilapidated Samoan fale (house), whose rotting roof and termite-ridden pillars served as his “studio” for decades, had been torn down to make way for yet another, highly imaginative (big and square) China funded-and-built, concrete business tower.

But alas, rounding the German-built clock tower, there he was, staggering down the middle of the main street, his white hair sticking out in all directions like a rabid dog, his grotesquely swollen, ulcerated legs all bandaged up beneath his thongs, a folio under his right arm and his massive gut squeezing out between the top of his ancient micro-shorts and the bottom of his shirt, crookedly affixed as it was by only half of its original buttons.

Clearly no ladies man these days, but the extraordinary artistic output of Samoa’s self-proclaimed, premier artist obviously continues to relieve unsuspecting visitors to Samoa of their hard currency. It’s good to see that in Paradise, some things never change.

Gaugin or Percival; who would know? Certainly not 90% of cashed-up yachties passing through Apia in the last 30 years. Pic: http://markelikalderon.com.

Heading credit: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Enema Time

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this some time ago, when I was last visiting; I’ve been um-ing and ah-ing about whether to post it … but here it is.

Ever been constipated? Ever had that tight, bloated feeling in your guts that renders your every movement … your every thought inert as you try to circumvent the ever-growing, gurgling, hardening mass of excrement inside you; trying to ignore it and to get on with daily life, but ultimately, inevitably succumbing to the constant discomfort, not to mention the fear of excruciating agony when it does decide to expel its way out of your comparatively tiny anus?

Constipation renders you a non-thinking, non-acting vegetable … and on top of that, the idea of putting anything else in; anything that might add to the malignant poo-tumour in your colon, more or less disappears.

So spare a thought for poor Ol’ Donkey. I’ve been constipated for near-on two years! That’s right, two years of this growing mass of pain and anguish inside me. Two years of fear that when this finally does come out, it’s gonna smart like fire. But it’s time to purge – this pain and suffering within has stopped me from being able to think straight and to act decisively. It has given me a victim complex, and it makes me whiney and unappealing to people I meet. It has also made me irritable to those around me, and thereby is starting to cause pain and suffering for others … it’s time for an almighty, soap-and-water enema up the jacksie … and here it comes.

I haven’t written much on this blog for nearly a year now. For some of that time, I have attributed my lack of creative output to the birth and parenting of Hambones, but my recent circumstances have made it clear to me that this is just an excuse; it’s not lethargy and a lack of time that has stopped me, it’s my constipation, and its life-deadening impact upon me, that has made me creatively turgid.

In my Donkey way, I have always been careful not to reveal too much about myself on this blog for fear of those I work with and know becoming harmed in some way. I’m not talking about, “Errrr, Donkey said I was fat and dud root, and now all my friends on Facecrock know and I’m a laughing stock” kind of harm, I’m talking about real, physical retribution for people and their families.

But storing all this up in my guts has made me creatively constipated. How can I be expected to come up with jolly frivolities when there is such a horrible story to be told? How can I keep banging-on to the world about new cars, coffee machines, my trip to the dentist, when someone I know has been imprisoned for life on dubious charges for actions that most of us would consider an everyday occurrence? This constipation is painful, and the pressure ever-present. It has resulted in me closing my mind to the intake of new ideas, and new experiences. It has made me bitter and stale, and a shell of the Donkey I once was.

Those who have orchestrated this constipation have done so in their clever way, as they have been doing now for nearly sixty years. But as I again return this week to the place where it all started, I have decided I want my old life back. I want to be Donkey again, so it’s time to tell the tale.

I write this post from a place way up high, but I will not be able to post this from here – it is forbidden. This place is renowned world-wide for its peacefulness, and I lived here once, working with a group of dedicated young people who, despite the obstacles and civil restrictions which control and block their thoughts and actions every day, work for the good of their people. But when their fellow citizens had finally had enough of being told how to think and act last year (as seems to happen every ten years or so), and things went awry for the authorities, Mrs Donkey and I were “asked” to leave almost immediately after we stood, horrified, as a massive line of armed soldiers, armoured vehicles, people movers and tanks (all with their distinguished markings covered in newspaper to avoid identification on film or photograph) moved into the city to “subdue” their own people. What happened that evening, and over the following weeks has never been told, and indeed will probably not be unless something changes in the world of international politics.

But I know some of what happened. I know of three men who were dragged from their families by soldiers, one of whom has never been seen again. He was a colleague of mine, and after many months of no word about his location or welfare, or even whether or not he was alive, it was revealed by the authorities that he had been charged with separatist activities, and has been imprisoned for life.

Another colleague was also taken into custody, where he underwent physical torture and abuse for eight weeks. He has been released without charge, and his scars and bruises have taken the place of his once sunny disposition. He no longer participates in society.

And these are the “sensational” stories. For everyone else, there are the six-men, armed patrols which walk in single-file throughout the city, day and night, overseen by high-tech, infrared Closed Circuit TV cameras (in stark contrast to the ancient buildings on which they are mounted) and armed, roof-top snipers on every corner. There are the constant demands for producing of identity papers on every other corner, and there are the late-night raids on homes under the dubious guise of looking for some unknown person, during which the residents are forced to line-up outside in the below-freezing temperatures, sometimes for hours, as the authorities check and re-check identity papers and ask the same series of questions they asked only nights before.

It must wear people down to be exposed to this on a daily basis. But who would speak-out when there are families and friends to consider if one did? And anyway, who will come to these peoples’ aid? Certainly not the international community; that has been clearly articulated.

I return to this place every so often for short visits, to continue my work with those colleagues who remain. We continue to work for the good of their people – nothing to do with politics, just addressing basic human rights such as poverty, education, health. Since my first return after being ejected, things have become less tense, but still the menace remains, and still people, if you’re fortunate enough to have them whisper a story here or there, will tell you that they are far from happy with their lives.

I was right, it wasn’t easy passing this through my sphincter … and the fear of more pain will exist for some time, as I worry about whether this post will create problems for me or for others. But it is an important story to be told … and I hope it will allow me to start feeling less backed-up, and more open to receiving nourishment. We’ll see…

Back in the Barnyard

In the movies it always comes out of a person's abdomen, but in my case, the alien arrived last week out of my left shoulder; a massive, three-headed, mucous-oozing extra-terrestrial with white-hot fangs and razor-sharp claws thrashing at my Garnier-perfect, Donkey skin. Three hours later, having been seduced by a Grey's Anatomy-type medical intern wearing a pair of cut-off, denim micro-shorts, three-inch heels and a performance-enhancing halter neck who just wanted to get her inexperienced hooks into a bit of Donkey's meat, I found myself drugged and lying prone on an operating table, my erection mashed painfully into the solid bench-top, while the Playboy Bunny gouged the offending alien foetus out of my back by and deposited it into a formaldehyde jar destined for the inaccessible vaults of the CIA's alien research bunkers, deep below the city's streets.

Just my luck, really! For two years now, Mrs D and I have been holed-up in Melbourne preparing for, and then facilitating the arrival of Little Hambones, and doing nothing much more exciting than sniffing the baby's bum every 20 minutes, changing his nappy and nicking up to the swings for a play between poos, feeds and sleeps. And now, on the eve of an all-new, South Pacific adventure, I get abducted in my sleep and done up the bum by a load of randy, Martian holiday-makers from an orbiting cruise vessel, and before long their foetid offspring is making a b-line for the sky through my left shoulder blade, effectively delaying both our intended arrival in a tropical paradise, and therefore by extension, my having anything useful to write about on this blog.

It's been 11 years since Mrs D and I met while working in the wonderful, tropical ideal that is Samoa, and now we're heading there again for a couple of months (this time with Hambones in trail) to work with our former colleagues, and to hopefully re-experience what it is like to really LIVE; which is what it really felt like amongst the most incredible, and yet disturbingly dysfunctional and absurd individuals ever to find themselves confined together on such a small rock.

We'll be interested in returning to see if the Religious Zealot is still managing the National Finances while swelling the borders of his already massive plantation interests (which at last check, totalled almost two-thirds of the country's landmass). We'll be interested to see if the Minister for Transport is still calling the shots, after he moved the centrally-located town bus station 25Kms out of town in order to make room for his new business; the country's only McDonald's restaurant (conveniently for the fortunes of his family, this happened just weeks before the Government slapped a restraining bill on the introduction of foreign fast-food franchises).

We'll be interested to see if the taxi drivers are still requesting to be paid in blow-jobs on Sunday mornings by transvestites skipping church, whether inmates of Her Majesty's Prison Service are still allowed to go home on the weekends so that the guards don't have to work, and to see whether the police still enjoy lying under the mango tree all Sunday afternoon, completely drunk out of their brains, while everyone else in town prefers to be behind the wheel when in the same state.

Yes, we'll be very interested to see if much has changed at all, and I'll be working on making sure, through the re-ignition of DonkeyBlog, that you all get an opportunity to meet the many colourful folk of Apia who prop-up the tropical bars and talk the legs of the stools, or who sell drugs and sex on the sea wall, or who sleep around with this teacher, that pastor or that politician while outwardly condemning their brothers and sisters of the congregation for doing likewise.

Samoa is a hoot; and as soon as this shoulder gash stops weeping fifteen different varieties of pus, I'll be arriving on its sunny shores, and dispatching regular updates. I hope you enjoy them!

The view of Donkey's shoulder just over a week ago. Pic: http://www.bigcheesepress.com.

Pigeon holed

I bet Peter Garret thinks that the worse thing about going to a "P" party dressed as a proctologist is that despite the jovial reception his gag generates on arrival, there's nothing funny about having to spend the rest of the night wearing latex gloves smeared in vegemite.

Pic: http://paradigmoz.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/peter-garrett-flag.jpg

How long is forever, Daddy?

I remember asking my father this over and over again when I was a youngster; one of many such questions which, whilst being but a small child with little emotional and intellectual capacity, I knew instinctively were the source of grating annoyance to all adults.

Other such examples which I personally delighted in, were "Are we there yet?" and "Caniva [insert whatever you like - ice cream, lollypop, balloon, t-bone steak...]?".

But, "how long is forever?" was one that Dad seemed to pause upon, ever-so-slightly, before offering his usually, entirely unsatisfactory (and perhaps, like a seasoned sparring partner, deliberately, equally abrasive) reply, "Go and ask your mother".

Interestingly, the particularly unusual pause before answering seemed to signal that some truthful answer existed somewhere deep within him, and the fact that it remained unspoken perhaps hinted at some regretful, or even shameful element. Perhaps it was that which kept me asking ... or perhaps it was just that I was an annoying brat.

Outwardly, however, the question remained, for me, unanswered ... until recently, when faced with the responsibility of raising Little Hambones. I can assure you now, after experiencing it on a number of occasions in the last four months, that infantile sleep apnea has finally answered that often repeated question. I can now confidently assure you that the time taken for your baby's next, sleeping breath can seem like forever, and forever can be a very, very, very long time.

Maybe not Hawaii – more like the back-seat of the Kingswood on family holidays. My parent-given nick-name seems to have moved up in the world. Pic: www.myspace.com/kingofhawaii808

Space travel just got a whole lot easier

There was a big push in the 1980s to try to explain and demonstrate scientific principles to kids using everyday, household objects and activities.

Probably the main protagonist here was Paul G. Hewitt; very much the darling of my high school physics teacher, who himself was the kind of guy who clearly had spent most of his university years developing complex mathematical formulas to determine the probability of whether he was likely to ever get a root while at college (and not of the squared kind !). Anyway, this asexual nit-wit was enamoured with Hewitt’s quirky, avant guarde approach to teaching high-school physics, which regularly saw him smashing household furniture or blowing-up kitchen appliances, and as a result, we students were forced to sit through 24-episodes of Hewitt’s irritating, a-tonal, New York drawl on scratchy, BETA video tapes, hoping that someone would one day produce an axe in class with which we could demonstrate the concept of inertia on Mr Austin’s bland skull.

But while I wasn’t that taken with the US-style learning, I did develop an appreciation for the very Australian, The Curiosity Show, on which two nerdy, washed-up hippies from the 70s “made science fun” by encouraging us to make various toys and gadgets with bits and pieces found in and around our homes, and through this, demonstrated scientific principles.

I remember learning that if I set a tea-bag alight, I could watch it rocket towards the sky, and that I could make a cotton-bud fly across a room towards a target thanks to a crossbow constructed of a clothes peg and a rubber band.

On reflection, this was clearly a pretty good way to get kids to show initiative and to develop the skills of invention, but whether a result of a thirst to learn more, or simply a limited attention span, I was prone to upping-the-ante a little, which usually got me into trouble. For instance, there’s only so much one can learn from burning all the tea bags in the house, but what I really wanted to know, was whether the same technique could launch a cat into space. Poor old Fluffy definitely copped the brunt of it, and eventually Dad refused to pay the vet bills to have all the cotton-buds surgically removed from the cat’s arse. Not surprisingly, he also decreed that The Curiosity Show was to be permanently switched-off in our household.

Without the nerdy, TV hippies to help me understand my surroundings, I soon learned to develop my own techniques for demonstrating scientific principles in the home. Foremost amongst these was the method I devised to understand the speed of light. At school, we’d been taught that light moves really fast, but the figures they gave us to demonstrate just how fast, with all those zeros hanging off the end, were just too conceptual for my Donkey-sized brain to process. They also told us that planets etc are so far away, that it takes many, many years for the light from them to reach Earth. It was all too difficult to fathom, and without The Curiosity Show to put me straight, I was in danger of becoming completely ignorant.

Instead, I sought answers through rigorous experimentation under strict, scientific conditions, and I came to the conclusion that the speed of light was slightly faster than the time it took for me to reach my bed from the light switch – and, I can assure you, given an extreme fear of the dark, that was pretty fast. Thanks to my experiments, I now understood a concept which I later discovered takes astro-physicists many years of research to master, and through that knowledge, I came to understand other concepts, like why space travellers in movies always had to be put to sleep for years and years while journeying through the cosmos.

But now, after all these years, I can feel the ground shifting beneath me, thanks to breakthroughs in technology which are causing me to re-evaluate the laws of physics. The technology of which I speak entered our home a couple of weeks ago, thanks to a ridiculous loophole in international economic and environmental policy.

We received a visit to our home from a local business man who, for absolutely no charge, replaced all of our standard light bulbs with expensive, energy-efficient bulbs. The carbon credits his business accrues through this free service are sold (for a considerable fortune) to energy inefficient corporations, in order that they can claim carbon neutrality.

As ridiculous as this sounds, rather than global authorities forcing high-volume polluters to reduce their carbon emission, they instead endorse this ludicrous, highly involved process, and somehow everyone (except dolphins, whales, penguins and Pacific Islanders) is happy; the unethical, polluting corporations can pretend they are saving the planet, the business man can sit pretty on a great, big pile of cash, and even the Donkeys are saving some money on their electricity bill … completely ridiculous, really, but it’s that kind of world.

But despite the cheaper power bills, these new light bulbs are challenging the very basis of my scientific beliefs. Since their installation in our home, I can flick a light switch on my way through a doorway, and be well inside the room before darkness is expelled.

It appears that man-made technology is getting the jump on nature and the turning of the universe, and the speed of light is slowing down. This has major implications on what we know to be true, and more than likely, should this trend continue, we may no longer need to be put to sleep when we head out to explore that final frontier. Good for space exploration, perhaps, but not so great for young teenage boys trying to get a glimpse of a buff, alien-killing Sigourney Weaver in nothing but panties and a crop-top. I never did trust technology.

Energy-saver light bulbs - taking the thrill out of adolescence. Pic: http://www.comicbookmovie.com

Trash and treasure on the South Seas

Keeping up with the Joneses is difficult, no matter where you live. Out in the McSuburbs, there’re ever expanding flat screen TVs to be purchased; mandatory upgrading to the bigger, faster, louder, redder Holden Commodore to be managed; and children’s birthday party entertainment to be sourced which out-does Little Johnny’s surprise visit from Dorothy the Dinosaur’s illegitimate offspring last summer. It’s relentless, exhausting and mind-numbing, not to mention economically crippling.

But killing yourself slowly just to fit-in with the neighbours is not peculiar to the identical, pastel dwellings on the urban fringes. Even when you’re a funky couple of kats like Mrs Donkey and I, living in the uber trendy, fur-hat and petticoat-wearing, latte-sipping pockets of the inner north, the pressure to ‘fit in or fuck off’ is just as insipid. However, when doing so means sourcing the finest second-hand clothing the early ‘80s can offer, it’s not as simple as firing up the V8 and chugging down to the local Megamall for new pair of daks.

Far from it! Having an eye for a piece of risque, second-hand fashion that hasn’t yet been picked over by the hoards of freaks on Victoria St is an essential survival skill. Hesitate over that Shanghai silk dress with the ridiculous slit up the back, and you may just find yourself with nothing funkier in your wardrobe than a mink coat and a pair of purple, sequinned thongs/flip-flops to wear to the café – a “so yesterday” look which’ll see you shunned to the dark tables down the back, beneath the staircase where only the work experience waitress will occasionally dare to visit on her way out to the bogs for a smoke.

It’s a slippery tightrope; that of social acceptability in the cut-and-thrust world of unwashed bohemia and having ready access to a steady supply of ridiculous, second-hand threads is commensurate to one’s need for oxygen. Fortunately for us, my being notoriously too tight to purchase new clothing unless it comes with a sweat shop-sized price-tag to match the age of its maker, and Mrs D’s expert eye for eclectic, exotic threads complements well with our local area boasting the highest ratio of second-hand clothing stores per capita in the known world. It even works for lil’ Hambones, who, much to his grandparents’ collective derision, has never worn a new item of clothing in his short life. So to date, all three of us have managed to hold our own as we cram onto a single, uncomfortable wooden box on a frigid, Sunday morning winter pavement, sipping our lattes and offering a rigamortis smile to our equally uncomfortable, yet outwardly content, fellow funkies.

It’s a pretty recent phenomenon, this rapid rise in the social acceptability of second-hand clothing stores. Wearing someone else’s used duds has certainly not always been well received. Back in the day, it was a mark of upwardly, socially mobile suburbanites to clear the cupboards every spring through a donation of last-season rags to the poor and destitute. This convenient means of getting rid of unwanted garments had the added bonus of filling the donor with a great sense of satisfaction at their civic contribution, but strangely enough, it was generally assumed that the charities which received these clothes directed them towards dressing the poor and street-living folk; an odd assumption given that no one in my neighbourhood had ever seen homeless women getting around in pink, backless evening frocks or elbow-length white gloves, nor had anyone witnessed unshaven, urine-smelling drunks lying in the putrid back-alleyways wearing full-length, paisley smoking jackets!

Such is the nature of western charity, since the days of the Victorian poor houses, that once disposed of, the moneyed classes rarely gave much thought to their donation … until recently, when the sale of second hand clothing exploded into a multi-million dollar industry!

You can imagine the talkback radio-led outrage of the masses when they came to learn that charities, rather than using out-dated tuxedos and feather boas to clothe the homeless, were actually making a buck out of other people's [unwanted] donated gear (albeit a buck which was then used to pay for food and lodgings directed at the poor and homeless). Of course, despite their impotent frustration, the moneyed classes were unable to argue with the fact that the poor were still receiving a benefit from the donations (at least, they weren’t prepared to argue about it in plain daylight, but the issue burned for weeks thanks to the anonymous lens of talkback radio), and the issue eventually faded. People became used to seeing the funkies (and subsequently, TV soapie stars) getting around in used threads, and the industry took off.

But before all this recycled commerce came the fore, what was never recognised was what the charities did with all those crap clothes in order to make the money to help the poor BEFORE we had embraced second-hand clothing stores. The answer to that, my friends, is the Pacific. Throughout Melanesia, Polynesia and I presume Micronesia, it is not uncommon for an entire village to pool their resources and purchase from some third-tiered middleman, a huge bale of used Australian women’s, men’s and children’s clothing, and, come arrival day, to almost rip each others’ jugulars out in a mad scramble to nab the best gear with which to clothe the family for the following year.

As mentioned previously, the moneyed folk of Australia’s urban sprawls tend not to give anything appropriate away, however, only what they don’t want, so as a result, one recognises some pretty strange (and hauntingly familiar) fashions on the Islands.

For instance, it’s a pretty regular sight throughout Polynesia to witness a buff, young, tattooed, cropped-haired tough-guy strutting through a village wearing a t-shirt with a fluffy pink dog painted on the front. Or an old man wearing a thread-bare, child’s nightie baring a sickly-smiling, Strawberry Shortcake! About the only island folk who ever end-up looking the part are the grotesquely masculine transvestites, their obese legs and shoulders (and machetes) crammed into pink or pale yellow, sequined, backless, full-length dresses.

And you'd be surprised at just how close to home it all gets. Late one night in 1999, I came across a security guard manning the guard house of the National University of Samoa wearing a t-shirt from an Australian student association I was a member of in 1993, of which there would have been only about 100 t-shirts printed at most!

Freaky coincidences aside, the other great thing about unwanted Australian clothing ending up in the Pacific, is a) that a considerable number of inappropriate garments get shipped abroad, and b) that what is inappropriate in Australia, is not always perceived so amongst the 'English-as-a-second-language' islanders. So it is therefore not uncommon for a man to be standing in a Samoan church on a Sunday, all dressed in pristine white and beaming a beatific smile, and across whose chest is plastered one of a number of rather suspect phrases such as "I've seen God and she's black" ... and no one seems to mind.

My personal favourite, however, was an elderly, wrinkled, hunch-backed Solomon Island woman hobbling along the streets of Honiara wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a sprightly Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli, trade-mark thumbs in the air and twinkle in his eye, issuing the speech-bubble caption, "I just fucked your girlfriend!". Magical stuff!

More recently, it appears that wearing clothing which sports inappropriate English phrases in non-English speaking cultures is becoming very fashionable, so much so that it is being extended beyond dumped, second-hand clothing, to new clothing produced locally. A perfect example seems to be the preferred head gear of high school students in Lhasa at present, who in order to protect their scones from the intense, Tibetan sun, are sporting American-style baseball caps with the rather obscure, priceless phrase, "I Fuck the Fakeshit". I dunno what it means ... and most likely, neither do they (or their teachers), but it has been widely embraced, and I just wish I had have had the guts to wear one to school when I was a lad!

Caption seen on an elderly Solomon Island woman's t-shirt, circa 2005. Pic: http://media.photobucket.com/image/Fonzie%20fucked%20your%20girlfriend/RKCFonzie/Fonzie.jpg

The power of metaphor

The Populous Security Bureau bugging devices must’ve been popping like cherries at a B&S ball the other night as I sat in one of the world’s highest restaurants discussing the history and current political situation in Burma with my high-altitude colleagues.

You can imagine the freedom I felt after a week (and in their case, a lifetime) of being careful about everything one said and did, so as not to openly express any opinions or attitudes at odds with the government, openly discussing in a public place the activities of an undemocratically appointed, unlawful military regime, imposed upon the people, and which restricts religious, political and social freedoms, whilst deliberately and systematically culling huge swathes of the population, from the urban intelligentsia to the rural peasantry.

You might also imagine what was going through the minds of these colleagues as they lapped-up information about events and government processes in this neighbouring country; happenings which, although having never heard about them before, must have seemed so very familiar. Occurrences such as the systematic and aggressive persecution of monks, violent military responses to peaceful protests, restrictions upon the populace in terms of their freedom to worship according to their religion, lengthy incarceration of citizens without charge or trial, the unspoken and unexplained disappearance of generations of loved ones.

It is no surprise that they were so interested in asking questions and listening to what I knew of the happenings in “Burma”. I wonder if they wondered why they’d never heard this before?

I also wonder about the poor drone up there in the communications control tower who was deciphering our monitored conversation, and writhing in anguish and indecision as to whether they should bring the discussion to the attention of their superiors; whether they would be praised for their diligence, or chastised for wasting the time of their betters on a conversation about another country’s irrelevant activities. Being a bureaucrat cog must suck.

We all thought it would lead to change - again this sounds oh, so familiar. Pic: www.apheda.org.au

It’s a boy! … and we’re back and runnin’

…hopefully.

Three months ago, after an arduous ordeal spanning a-day-and-half, I was again, for perhaps the third or fourth time in my life, fortunate to find myself on the receiving end of that most joyous of life’s lessons; where one’s fate can alter from seemingly utter despair to hope and good fortune in the blink of an eye.

In the harried confusion of surgical masks, scrubbing-up and calamitous crash trolleys, I was fearing the worst. Just when I began to give up hope, and thought I was about to lose the greatest gift of my life, a sudden gasp, a splutter and a wail, followed immediately by two great, big hands being flown over the top of a surgical screen towards his Mummy and Daddy’s astonished faces, my life changed forever; bestowing upon me two fabulous gifts, namely Mrs Donkey - safe, happy, healthy … and a mother to the bumper-sized new addition, a largish, but completely healthy, baby Donkey (henceforth, owing to his advanced, athletic physique, referred to as “Hambones”).

Since that day, I’ve been busting my ass in an attempt to successfully implement the only job in your life for which no academic course, on-the-job training or subcutaneous patch exists with which to prepare or assist you. I’ve been wandering around in a sleep-deprived, semi-lucid state trying to look after my new boy-o, and have had absolutely nothing extra to add to society but a vacuous gaze and a stupid, proud father’s grin. Certainly no creative juice left in the tank with which to direct towards this decrepit, forgotten by-lane on the information super-highway.

But I must say, despite a lack of parental experience or direction, I’ve discovered some kind of inherent, naturally-selective, guiding quality within; a force which leads one to love one’s own child unconditionally; a force which can turn even the most irresponsible individual (yours truly) into a diligent guardian, entirely committed to protecting his child from whatever evils may darken his horizons, no matter how threatening or cruel.

I remember a Warner Bros cartoon where the drunken stork drops the wrong babies off at the wrong homes, and when he sobers-up and realises his mistake, he heads to the top of the bean stalk, where the Daddy giant is trying to change the nappy of a tiny little baby with the aid of one of those old-fashioned jewellers’ eye pieces. I always thought it was touching how Big Daddy clearly loved his family’s tiny new addition, even though the wee babe was perhaps not quite what he’d signed up for. Fiction, as always, is built on basic truths, and I can attest that there’s definitely something there between a parent and his newborn … something magical … and despite the severe lack of sleep, it’s a wonderful feeling.

Aside from a lack of creative energy associated with multiple, nocturnal nappy changes, the other reason for the poor frequency of despatches on this blog has been my mistaken understanding that I’ve got nothing interesting to say to the masses these days, seeing as though Junior’s arrival has temporarily put paid to exotic locales and unusual work practices – after all, who wants to hear about living in the inner suburbs next door to grammatically challenged “drug deelers” (sic), across from a Polynesian truck driver with an anger management problem, who takes it out on his drug-addled trophy-wife to the sound of The Eagles’ Hotel California on a weekly basis? Or how two of the biggest nerds in the barnyard manage to fit-in with the brown-cord-wearing funksters (read: wankers) of inner-Melbourne’s fastest emerging, hippest slice of urban bohemia? Or Donkey’s foul-mouthed, daily exchanges with bicycle-ignoring taxi drivers? Or office antics with a bunch of colleagues comprising alcoholics, bogans, Antarctic explorers, drug abusers, mad scientists and psychotic feminists?

Clearly I’ve got nothing to write about! Unless, of course, people are actually interested in hearing about the neighbourhood vigilantes’ ruthless campaigns against the resident, although poorly educated drug deelers (sic), and what it’s like living across from the street from Eti the truckin’ maniac and his very own Judy Garland (circa 1947, when Jude was dallying fairly heavily in the nose candy), and how two geeks try, but fail pitifully to fit-in with the funky, ‘latte-sipping hoards in their designer, recycled brown, and Donkey’s daily, crotch-ripping defeats by the barely-discernible verbal taunts of immigrant taxi drivers, and the various conflicts and intrigues of an eclectic mix of colleagues comprising functioning and non-functioning alcoholics, heavy-metal tragics, second-rate, illegal airplane pilots/Antarctic explorers, drug users and abusers, mad (although not-quite-qualified) scientists and psychotic feminists … and y’know, I was thinking to myself today that maybe there just might be enough material there to get me started.

So I’m gonna give it a go … parental duties permitting, I’m gonna pour my creative talents back into this literary pillar; apply iron-hard self discipline and commit myself to regular, insightful commentary into the daily machinations of this inner city barnyard; stand fast in the face of suburban mediocrity … QOIJWDiqjgvriweirjgikdWQAjidwiQJNJIUJIIK … slurp!

Whoops, sorry, I just fell asleep on my keyboard and will have to turn it upside down for a while to let the saliva drain out and … hang on, what is this milky vomit in my hair? Urgh! OK, so I’m not entirely sure how this is gonna go.

Wish me luck.

Donkey.

The big baby has arrived Pic: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/