This is a tragic story… My mum fell over….

On one of her shopping expeditions in the community bus, my old mum carrying groceries to the house, stumbled on the bluestone edge.
The shopping cascaded down, the apples, potatoes, following the camber to a state of repose, the bottles and cans, and the odd bottle of wine cushioned by her body, and establishing a composition of sorts between the level and the deep blue scene.

Recovering from the shock, she admired the undercarriage of the gleaming four wheel drives parked adjacently, (speed humps require heavy vehicles), and realised, after checking, that there were no bruises beyond dignity.  She tried to get up, and couldn’t, ‘Oh well something will turn up’.

It must have been close to six o’clock. 
The humorless oncologist had arrived, he got out of his car, noticed mum sprawled in the gutter, walked over, “hello”, she warbled, “I may need your help”.  He put his briefcase down, the lives of countless cancer victims, safely entombed within the leatherette sanctity of polished brass latches.  He bent down, checked her legs, nodded ,“nothing broken” and helped her up.  He walked her to the door.  Mum thanked him profusely, laughing all the time, “Don’t worry about the apples, I’ll fetch them later’, and sorting herself out talking to her saviour she looked up, he’d disappeared into his private space.

Several days later, a letter arrived.  Mum likes letters, especially ones that don’t look like bills.  She noticed the address on the back, Dr so and so, ‘Oh how nice, a get well card’.

The  shock was instantaneous. An invoice for consultative services rendered, in plain type… a neat little invoice, though lacking a conversational touch, it was efficiency personified.

Mum decried the loss of community values.  “Well”, I remarked dryly, ‘he has assessed your value, within the community, that’ s a reciprocity of sorts…”.

My granddaughter lives on the other side of the world.  She is three.  She call’s me Guffy.  So do her friends, so does her “Mom”.  Her dad calls me Dad.  I visit often, and stay for a good long time.  My grand daughter and I hunt witches in her house.  And hyenas.  She loves watching the Lion King.  We hide under the bed covers; the hyenas live under the bed.  We need to keep fully coverd or the hyenas will scratch and bite us.  She calls me Mufasa, I call her Simba.  When we hunt witches my granddaughter uses a magic lasso to catch and subdue them.  I help her drag them up the stairs and flush them down the lavatory.  Sometimes they come back again.

One day she and I took the free bus across town to have lunch with her mom, at a little place near her work.  Lots of other moms and their kids had lunch with us and then we all went to the park to play.  After a while all the moms and the other children went home or back to work and my granddaughter and I were left alone at the park.  We had a few minutes to wait until our bus arrived so we played Little Red Riding Hood in the trees at the edge of the park.  A man came past walking a very big dog.  We asked him if his dog was really the wolf.  He looked at us strangely and didn’t answer.  He just kept walking.  We waited for the bus and blew the heads off dandelions.

My grand daughter went sound asleep on my lap during the trip home.  Playing all those games made me tired too.

After half an hour we got back to our village, and the bus stopped at the shops.  Nearly everyone got off, but we stayed on as we had another few stops to get right home.  Besides, my granddaughter was still asleep.

It took a while for all the people to get off, and even when they did the bus still stayed at the bus stop.  Absentmindedly, I looked up and saw four policemen talking to the driver and looking towards the back of the bus.  I looked at the other passenger trying to work out if she was a criminal.  The policemen were dressed in black and weighed down with weapons of all description.

Then the four policemen walked down the bus passed the other passenger and stood around where I was sitting with my sleeping granddaughter.  The other passenger got off the bus, quickly.  The policemen stood very close to me.  They towered over me.  I felt affronted.  They asked “What are you doing with the little girl”.  I said would you please sit down if you want to talk with me.  Crossly, they said answer the question.  I said she is my granddaughter, now will you please sit down.  They seemed to stand taller and closer.  “Prove it”, they said.  “What?”  I said, “she’s my granddaughter, she is asleep.  Why don’t you stay on the bus and I will show you where we live.”

Show some identification they said.  I pulled out my Australian Drivers License.  Over time the stud of my wallet had made a hole through the photo ID – right between the eyes.  Two of the policemen got off the bus.  After some time they got back on and said “We’d like you to get in the police car and we will drive you home.”  I said no thank you.  I will go in the bus.  My granddaughter was starting to wake up.  I was not having her wake up in a police car.

The policemen agreed to come in the bus to my granddaughter’s home.

After about an hour they finally said “We had a report of a suspicious man with a little girl in a park.  Then we followed this bus and found you.  We are satisfied that you are indeed the girl’s grandfather. We are only doing our job you know.”

My grand daughter and I still fight hyenas and hunt witches, although we do keep a good eye out for community minded dog walkers.  I’ve told a number of grandfathers about my experience and the vast majority have said that they would never take their grand children out on their own, especially not their granddaughters.  I think that is so sad.  No doubt the witches and hyenas are pleased.

Postscript. Not long after this event I returned home.  A friend of my granddaughter’s asked where Guffy was?  The parents reported that I had gone back to Australia.  No, she said, I think he’s in jail.

Cecil Poole CP (Complete Prat)
As we have no image of Mr Poole here is an image
of a complete prat

IRA MAINE

There was a sense of pride in having a road with it’s own soul.  The road came to our village and stopped, as if it knew where it belonged.  It was, in the end, never destined to be any old dirt road.  It knew, somehow, it was part of the community and as such was aware of it’s obligations.  Of course we are talking about a road here, which might interpret these obligations in a wholly original and unexpected way from the norm.  Who knows, in the end, what a road thinks, what empirical conclusions it might arrive at?  Not much I would think, if you are a vast freeway, laid out in the pitiless sun and being thundered upon by all and sundry.  But a leafy mile or two stretch with shade and a view down to the vineyards is a different bottle of holy water altogether.  Who knows what changes occur in a road’s neural pathways as it ponders the heavens?

For about half it’s length the road is flattish and dodders here and there amongst the trees.  That’s where most of us live and where the Dip is.  It wasn’t always there.  The Shire came and had a look at it, put it down to subsidence and went away.  The same subsidence brought down enough trees so we could bypass this sudden depression (which was filling with water), and stockpile firewood.

Do you know what Horry Flint reckoned?  Horry reckoned that a crow in Croatia might have flapped it’s wings and caused assorted bits of the Earth’s surface to subside internationally.  He’s a long time boating man and understands  these things.  By a system of triangulation he says, you could work out to within a couple of metres where the first wing flaps occurred.  It would be then an easy matter to find the spot in Croatia, buy that piece of land and forbid the practice of flapping in the vicinity.  In this way we could avoid further subsidence at home and at the same time, raise land values in Europe.  The alternative, to breed wingless varieties of crows would be, in the end, impractical.  Besides, you’d be forever running over them in your car.

The trouble is, as Horry says, this works both ways.  If we were, as a protective measure, to develop Croatian no-fly landholdings this might engender a reciprocal arrangement in our neck of the woods.  Awkward international incidents might follow, brought about by (for instance) erecting your privy in the wrong spot.  Next minute your new dunny is centre stage, besieged by hundreds of irate foreigners with little or no regard for your mixed vegetables.

What if overseas pranksters begin to breed, in secret, vast flocks of experimental  hummingbirds and such like?  You could be enjoying a glass of red, or an innocent bout of rumply-pumply, and next minute not only is your best shirt awash with Cab.Sav. but you are six feet underground as well!  And how on earth, when your wife comes home and finds the Fire Brigade digging you out, are you going to explain the other woman?

Horry has, he tells me, more to say on this subject but as he’d finished washing his car he got in and drove away.

PASSIVE COMPLICITY 
produced, plagiarized and sometimes written by
Quentin Cockburn, QC and Cecil Poole CP & Bar
Passive Complicity allows us to rant, rave and laugh at life’s PC’s and then to do nothing.

But first a word from Errol Flynn, our gallantly flawed hero
“Women do not let me stay single.  I do not let myself stay married”
from My Wicked Wicked Ways by Flynn 1960.

The week started with Design Doctor and Claude defining sustainability – well, not quite.  And ended with them talking about the sense of community in Claude’s neighbourhood.

Captain Came and Took featured in this weeks Mine Tinkit

On Friday Ira Maine elaborated on one of his charitable works – on the Board of Endette Hall, home for some of the more senior people in our society, and followed this with his first appearance on Poetry Sunday with a poignant offering A Bucolic Tragedy.  Both pieces were tastefully illustrated in house.

Another Dispatch from the Front with great music and an interesting account of correspondence between the French explorer Baudin and Governor Phillip

Monday brought the first of “Our new community” series, a surprisingly cutting poem by Quentin Cockburn.

Yours in passive complicity
Quentin and Cecil

Over the next few posts we will have a look at “Community”.  This is likely to be a recurring theme in Passive Complicity.  Let us know your thoughts.  Today we have a contribution from Quentin Cockburn.

Cairnlea

What a wonderful place to be happy and free,….
Inspired by the gardens here at Cairnlea
Where neat little pebbles in mechanical precision,
Invoke nostalgic yearnings to the Housing Commission
Where everything nice, a mortgage belt heaven,
Just within reach of the seven-eleven
The gym and the shops and the beautiful trees,
Interpretive features, the odd fleur de lys
Beautifully presented, inspired façade
A space for the kiddies, the wife and the car
It’s just the place for a warm inner glow,
Location location it’s all on for show
Conceal from the street and the neighbourhood watch,
The yawning abyss, the sense of great loss
An Orwellian nightmare beyond disbelief,
Like hollowed out corpses fissured with grief
A quiet resignation too late to save,
A life still-born inside a neat grave

Yours in Passive Complicity
Quentin Cockburn

A BUCOLIC TRAGEDY

My chance has gone, all hope dispatched,
Tears inundate my veggy patch.
I’d thought to fill your pastures sweet
With broccoli and purple beet,
Or share with you the Grand Mystique
Of Brussel sprouts and Fenugreek.

I’d noticed,oh, there’s much to tell
Of how your perfect buds do swell.
You rail against each sod and weed.
I’ve noticed how you husband seed…
And noticed with what pink-cheeked bliss,
You galvanise Asparagus.But now I find (my senses cloud…)
And must accept that you’ve allowed
The path between our beds to grow,
For all around the rumours crow,
You’ve got another in my stead
To labour in your potting shed.
A lesson’s here, and learn it well,
In matters horticultural,
Don’t take your ease, your ploughshare spent.
Come plough again, her pleasure bent.
Lest there might come another in
To fructify her compost bin!.

Ira Maine
April 2013

This is an edited extract from the Musical Dispatch from the Front, 25 January 2013.  

In David Hill’s book ‘The Great Race’ (The Race Between the English and the French to Complete the Map of Australia), the French explorer Baudin is quoted in a letter to his friend Governor Phillip (who apparently was fluent in French) as follows:

“…I have never been able to conceive that there was justice or even fairness on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of their governments, a land seen for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages or cannibals that has freely been given them; whereas they were still only children of nature and just as your Scotch Highlanders or our Breton peasants, etc. who, if they do not eat their fellow men, are just as objectionable.
From this it appears to me that it would be infinitely more glorious for your nation, as for mine, to mould for society the inhabitants of its own country over whom it has rights, rather than wishing to occupy itself with the improvement of those who are far removed from it (my emphasis) by beginning with seizing the soil which belongs to them and which saw their birth…” (Nov. 1802)

Two hundred and ten years later Dr. Gary Johns, former president of the now defunct Bennelong Society (a right wing assimilationist think tank) wrote an article in which he seeks to occupy himself with the improvement of those who are far removed from him.

Things can only get better….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIj-6fr2SlI

Dr. Johns’ article reviews Stephanie Jarrett’s soon to be released book ‘Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence’. Some shocking statistics are presented which lead Ms. Jarrett to the conclusion that the best option for Australian Aborigines to avoid or reduce violence is to move to the metropolitan areas and join the mainstream.

Living in the mainstream…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jwxy4Z27-U

Using the same logic … non sequitur cause and effect… I conclude from the statistics presented in the article that non Indigenous Australians would also improve their safety by returning to the cities.  Remote Australia would once again become ‘Terra Nullius’..

I furthermore conclude that an even better option for Indigenous Australians is to all move to Afghanistan where to the best of my knowledge not a single Australian Aborigine has been hospitalised as a result of violence.

All of this of course is nonsense.  I don’t know what Gary Johns’ doctorate is in but statistics and logic certainly seem to have been lacking in his education.  Both Gary & Stephanie appear to have a poor grasp of the principles of… cause and effect… and of justice and fairness.

Blind eyes of justice,
Deaf ears of power
Dumb moves of money
Left us in a desperate hour
Is this the final solution?

Revolution by Dr. John….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TW-nECJYqQ
Oops wrong Doctor!

European ‘culture’ in fairly recent times gave us the Holocaust, two world wars and many other calamities.  It will be a sad day when the multi-faceted European Culture that gave us so many wonders, is judged solely by its abominations.

Equally sad is the day when remote Aboriginal Australia is judged solely on stereotypes and stigmatisation derived from politically opportunistic spin and the dishonest or incompetent use of statistics and from general ignorance.

That day is already here.

As observed by us in Yuendumu, most of the lateral violence, hospitalisations, homicides etc. occur in places like Alice Springs.  Attention is focused on the violence per se; not enough serious effort goes into researching the causes of violence.  I suspect that disempowerment and dispossession has a fair bit to do with it.  Pushing people away from the bush is definitely not the answer, the reverse is probably true.  Blaming all anti-social behaviour to alleged inherent violence in an unchanging 40,000 year old culture is simplistic and false.  As  Baudin said all that time ago  “…I have never been able to conceive that there was justice or even fairness on the part Europeans…” about the then land grab.  His words are applicable to the treatment of Aborigines today.  We are seeing the final stages of the land grab.

As Rosalie Kunoth-Monks said: “There is no Aboriginal Problem in Australia, only a ‘white-fellow’ problem”