Sinister: the edge of the world

[sophia katrina]

oh sinister,

all this talk of concerts and picnics and spring rain on the other side of 
the globe has made me melancholy. seeing b&s at the royal albert hall was so 
wonderful, and i wish i could repeat the experience... somewhere exciting... 
i think i must be suffering the famous geographical envy that you keep 
talking about. maybe all the australian listees should stage a rival 
meet-up? we could all drive to whichever point is equidistant to perth, 
brisbane, sydney and melbourne. we could sit in the desert, drinking beers 
out of an esky (aus., n., plastic box with blocks of ice for chilling food), 
roasting sausages and tofu burgers over the campfire, drinking beers and 
looking at the sky or at the thousands of kilometres of peaceful nothingness 
around us. then we could all go our separate ways again.(alternately, i 
could do as someone suggested and take advantage of my anonymity and go into 
too much intimate detail about my life. but you poor people have suffered 
enough on that front already).

you see, sometimes i forget that i live on the edge of the world*. but on 
days like this i remember. i think if i could just look over the horizon i 
would see walls of sparkling water falling into space. as it is, i can only 
see a line of tankers, suspended across the bay like a string of lights. 
they could very well be stars.

i've been thinking a lot about australia, and the thing is - i don't trust 
it. i have never been patriotic about any nation, though i have heard the 
word used well - by patti smith, or by ani difranco when she sings "i am 
patriot, i have been fighting the good fight..." when you have triple 
citizenship, it's too much of an effort. (on the plus side, i get a lot of 
marriage proposals, and quite lucrative ones at that, but i'm holding out. 
my sources tell me a US passport will go for ten grand on the black 
market...) i wrote my third year thesis on belonging and displacement, 
actually, and anyone interested in reading it can e-mail me. it is - 
marginally - more edited than my posts.

life here seems somehow precarious.  it feels like that diane arbus 
photograph, the one of a movie set on top of a hill. on first glance it 
could be a house, but on closer inspection you understand that it is a set, 
just a facade, and through the windows you can see dark clouds blowing 
across the sky. that's how i feel about this country. living here requires a 
daily, no, constant act of forgetting. my suburb is so fashionable that they 
film a tv show about the romantic misadventures of attractive 
twenty-somethings (it's called 'the secret life of us', and they show it on 
channel 4 in the uk). but to believe that st. kilda really is the 'lifestyle 
precinct' that tv says it is, to believe in the streets full of shiny bars 
and shinier people, you have to forget about the police beating up the 
aboriginal people in catani gardens. you have to walk past them, past the 
homeless people who hang around outside the 7-11 and play guitar in the 
middle of the night, past the women who stand on street corners on carlise 
street at nine o'clock on cold saturday morning, waiting for men in cars to 
pull up and roll down their windows... and you have to foget them. unless 
slumming is the whole point. maybe the shiny people want a kitchen full of 
stainless steel scandinavian applicances and a view of junkies from their 
living room window.

once a man overdosed in our front garden. he had been eating the roses in 
the garden. when we came home, he was lying there, flat on his back, with 
petals falling from his mouth.

in australia there is forgetting on a grander scale. forgetting that 
refugees are locked up in tin sheds in the desert, seeing tear gas for the 
first time in this supposedly civilised nation. forgetting that the 
government lied to us during the election and told us that the refugees had 
thrown their children overboard. 
(http://www.theage.com.au/specials/immigration/index.html)
forgetting that the governor-general let sexual abuse of children go 
unpunished when he was an archbishop. forgetting that aboriginal people have 
only had the vote for forty years, and that a generation of their children 
were stolen from them in a policy of forced assimilation. forgetting about 
the white australia policy and one nation and the salt that rises in the 
water tables every year because the trees are going and the land is 
rebelling. the trees began to go because the first settlers wanted to 
recreate english pastures and rolling hills. they wrote their homesickness 
across the land, the desert, the forests, deep into the crust of the 
earth... and the scars of their longing are still with us.

we have convicts on the australian side of the family (i know, because of 
the obvious impossibilities and falsifications in the family tree). the folk 
songs that convicts wrote have the most heartbreaking words. "bound for 
botany bay" ends with "if i had the wings of a
turtledove, i'd soar on my pinions so high, straight into the arms of my
polly love, and in her sweet presence i'd die." the whole history of this 
country is so brutal and so, so sad.

what do you do when you stop forgetting?

sophia
X


*the western, english-speaking, colonial world of course.


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