Born and Bred in Sydney

Although born and bred in Sydney, I have been living away from Australia on and off for the past twenty-five years and I was recently amazed – dumbfounded and aggrieved – to discover that in my absence Australians as a people are now having ‘feelings’.

I just read a story on the ABC national news website headlined with:

Moviegoers in Shock After Ceiling Collapse

“Posted Mon Jan 3, 2011 8:12pm AEDT | Updated Mon Jan 3, 2011 9:19pm AEDT
Moviegoers in Bathurst say it will be a long time before they feel confident enough to see another film after the ceiling at their local cinema collapsed.”

Now this, if it is really true, if those moviegoers actually made that statement publicly and it is not just a bit of journalistic mischief, betokens the demise of a once great culture, marked – nay! defined, I say, by a stoic indifference to – well, basically to anything.

I had a mate when I was nine named Lennie. Lennie was about three years older than me. Lennie’s family had arrived in our Haberfield Street from Tennant Creek, a place somewhere in the Northern Territory, remote enough to make him almost an immigrant as far as I was concerned.

His formal education, judging by his vocabulary, had apparently been non-existent; however his life education was light years ahead of mine. He was my role model for a while (until he poisoned my budgies) because he seemed to epitomize everything that I thought in my nine-year-old naivety an Aussie was supposed to be.

He was skinny, quick, agile, cunning, and unkempt; he blew his nose in his fingers, spat a lot, farted often, and was eye-wateringly profane. Lennie said fuck and cunt more often than anyone I’d ever met – or have ever met since.

He was also scornful of virtually any emotion, I say virtually because anger and animosity were both in his repertoire, but in Lennie’s mind I am sure these were not rated as actual feelings.

Lenny’s signature statement was “I don’t fucken care, cunt.” He used it on every conceivable occasion (alternating only with “So fucken what?”) even when it seemed to have no relevance to anything at all, but most notably on those occasions when a sentient human being might have been expected to care.

One time when Lennie and I were exploring the canal that ran alongside our street he stepped on a broken bottle. At the instant of the injury he merely said “Cunt!” which he said as often as breathing, and as we were both up to our knees in muddy water, did not warrant any remark. It was only later as we walked along the concrete path that I noticed he was leaving big, bloody footprints.

“Lennie!” I cried. “Your foot is bleeding, mate.”

Lennie glanced down, took in the trail of glistening crimson smears and replied: “I don’t fucken care, cunt.”

This was such amazing indifference to pain and injury – far beyond anything I believed I possessed – that I could only gape with admiration. Lennie not being any kind of conversationalist, we continued in silence along the path, headed for the railway tracks where we planned to set rocks on the rails in the hope of derailing one of the freight trains.

Eventually my shock wore off and I said: “Lennie, it’s really pouring out.” It really was, leaving small pools.

He deigned to lift his foot and there on the sole was a gash about three inches long, oozing blood at a generous rate.

“You’d better go home, Lennie, and get it fixed. You could get really sick.”

Lennie of course merely sneered and said: “So fucken what?” And walked on. I thought about pointing out the danger of infestation by whatever lived in the noxious, dark waters, being crippled for life, losing his leg, turning black and dying but I knew he would only give the same reply.

I can easily now imagine my mental Lennie looking over my shoulder – the real Lennie I am sure died a long time ago, probably standing in the middle of the Hume Highway, his companion saying something like “Lennie there’s a big fucking semi coming right at ya, mate!” and Lennie of course replying: I don’t fucken – ” – but I can well imagine my mental Lennie, trapped forever in my memory banks, showing his total indifference to all manner of today’s calamities, responding to each one of life’s insults, even death, with utter disdain.

I would never have wanted Lennie as my brain surgeon, or primary care provider, but if I ever had to walk across the Nullabor with anyone, Lennie would still be my pick.

Which brings me back to feelings: Lennie certainly didn’t admit to having any, and while he might’ve ranked at the top of an Indifference scale, very, very few of our compatriots would have been found below halfway, because it was a mark of weakness to display feelings of the more sensitive kind.

Of course, at stressful times like footie grand finals it was permissible to momentarily exhibit disgruntlement, distress, and if you were very pissed, even tears; but stoically, apologetically, because you knew you were betraying a core belief: Aussies don’t emote.

But today – and it pains me to write this – apparently as a race we have descended to those depths historically inhabited only by ‘sheilas’, ‘poofters’, and people born near the Mediterranean.

The idea that any red-blooded Aussie would let a minor thing like a collapsing roof put him off his movies – it just makes me gape. Lennie would’ve punched a hole in the fallen panels and sworn at the projectionist until the movie started rolling again.

Now admittedly Lennie was a bit over the top and if he’d actually had a larger vocabulary he might’ve seemed like a different person altogether, but on the same page as the story of the moviegoers are two other stories: the first is a coverage of the floods in Rockhampton where the residents are already cleaning up and putting things back to normal. And this item:

Man Drives to Hospital with Cut Throat

“Posted Tue Jan 4, 2011 8:49am AEDT
A man has driven himself to hospital after his throat was cut during a confrontation at his south-western Sydney home.”

The 65-year-old was in his house at Hoxton Park when a man he knew came in armed with a large kitchen knife at about 1:30pm. The attacker approached the man from behind and cut his throat before getting into a car and driving off. The 65-year-old drove himself to Liverpool Hospital and had emergency surgery. He is in a serious but stable condition.

Is it possible that this guy is from the same collective gene pool as the people who will never watch a movie again?

According to the Howard Florey Institute, which calls itself ‘Australia’s Brain Research Institute’, (is that a veiled insult or what?) 1 in 5 Australians will suffer depression at some time in their lives.

A startling statistic – startling that anyone would even bother fucking mentioning it in my view – and Lennie’s. Lose your car keys, miss the big bid on the job, find the wife in bed with the postie, have your town flooded, have a cinema roof fall on you, get your throat cut by someone you know – any and all of these are likely to dampen your spirit somewhat.

Twenty five years ago they would’ve pissed you off – today apparently it causes you depression. Life has hurt our feelings. No, wait – it has hurt our brains.

Now I’m confused.

Anyway, where was I? Right – it wasn’t always this way, Aussies assailed by feelings: at an earlier time, in the 70s, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser put it very well when he said ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ Heads nodded in public bars all over Australia that day – but then he blew it by crying on national TV when he lost the next election.

But really how did this happen – this moral decline? Is it a bad thing? Well, I think it is, because life requires a certain aggressive mindset. If you fall to your knees and weep at every hiccup then where would you be? On your knees.

To my mind, and speaking here also for Lennie, it represents the factual extinction of one of civilizations’ most unique species, and someone should do something about it… But alas it also is one of those vexing enigmas that bedevil mankind; for those who might care are already terminally infected and those who don’t care at all wouldn’t lift a finger.

Or as Lennie says: “So fucken what?”
Sigh.