Everyone tells me Chapel Hill NC is not like the rest of America. They’re quite insistent upon that, I shrug my shoulders and gesture, “well I hear what you’re saying”, but I’m still profoundly impressed.  Perhaps it was crystallized for me when we dropped two year old Jeremy off at the Creche.  He rushed up to one of his carers, a middle aged bloke called Larry, grabbed him around the leg, held him tight, both arms bear hugging his thigh, face turned adoringly upwards.  My mind did a quick register, “man in a childcare facility?”… You’ve gotta be joking.  But Chapel Hill is like that, a daily exploration of daily contradictions and as I’ve been here now for almost three days I’m worried that this assault upon my deep inlay of irreconcilable prejudice, the fundamentalist within, is leaving me stripped bare. If it goes on like this, I shall, like a character from a Stephen Spender novel, cease to exist in anything approximating my cynical former self.

My arrival at the airport triggered this fear, this crisis of identity.  I was, (after some preliminary misunderstandings) astounded that the fee for parking was a paltry one dollar. Couldn’t believe it!!!  Tullamarine, Melbourne’s International Airport and “Gateway” seems complicit in making air travel, and arrival the worst of experiences, and parking is a gouging $14 for the first hour.  During the following day I became aware of other imponderables.  Free local bus travel, and outrageously extensive public bicycle and walking path system, free swimming pools, and suburban sub divisions (with a delightfully observed absence of ersatz public art), in which so much more than the most meagre and useless adjuncts to drainage are converted to public open space.   At the cafe I’m sitting in the wi-fi is free, and car drivers are courteous to a fault.

All this astounded me.  I thought that this was meant to be the land of the selfish capitalist, the land where private is all, public is to be abhorred.  Yet the absence of speed cameras, booze busses, police cars, boundary fences surrounding every house, the absence of rubbish, cigarette packets, beer cans, and McDonalds wrappers as decoration of the roadside, (all this in the land of McDonalds), and roads as cycle routes clearly marked, clearly patronised by hundreds of cyclists in which the motorist and cyclist alike understands the responsibility of sharing, courtesy, and respect speaks of a responsible, responsive and respectful society.

The further I went the more the contradictions rain down upon me, I am losing my sense of  definition, black is not necessarily black and white has gone fuzzy and in between, beyond this, the general “friendliness” of the locals is deeply unsettling.   To compound the issue, though I know there is a race divide, was my experience at the local cafe in which Latin American, African Americans and European Americans of all ages sat together savouring ice cream.   I was bewildered by the absence of the racial divide that I feel in Alice Springs, (although I haven’t seen a Native American yet).

In a day or two I’m off to see another America, possibly more correctly identified as a “real America”, but for this moment, I must content myself with an impression that this part of North Carolina shares more with (my imagined) nordic socialism of Sweden than the aggressive, singleminded selfish capitalism I’ve accepted as the norm.  Chapel Hill counters the preconceived stereotypical Australian view I had of this country.

 Quentin Cockburn 

Publishers Note: Having visited this restaurant numerous times over the past four years, both for lunch and dinner, having been more warmly welcomed each time, and been delighted by the food, I found this review irresistible and pertinent to PC principles.

Merlion (Singaporean) Family Restaurants by Carol Barrow

My daughter and I went to the Merlion in Southern Village, Chapel Hill (North Carolina) for dinner last night.

We go there for the Char Siew soup. We think it acts like penicillin, and can cure you of anything that ails you through the steam of its broth and the aromas that come with it.  We love that broth, the long noodles, the almost raw baby bok choy, the dumplings and the roast pork.  Sometimes we even ask them to add Beijing duck to the soup.  You know – duck soup!

Last night was special, though.  I changed soups.  I had the spicy seafood in lemongrass broth.  It was spectacular.  I know that they have a lovely menu, and that anyone can make “pineapple fried rice (yeah, sure….),” but we like their soup so much more than anyone else’s around town.

I keep forgetting that there are more restaurants than just on “the strip”.  Good restaurants are all over the place, you just have to look for them.  I’m going to let you in on a secret.  I have narrowed my down my eating out to family owned restaurants.

You know the kind: where the waiter is the owner and he remembers you and your family and what you like to eat.  He makes sure your water glass is full because he cares.  He wants you to come back.  He makes sure the place is clean andn the service is good because he has a stake in you.  When you come the first time he’s got the restaurant’s rent paid.  The second time, you’ve covered food costs, and the third time you come back, its about profit.

That’s not why he does it though.  A family-owned restaurant WANTS to be there.  It opened up in the first place because the owner genuinely likes people and wants to make them happy through his delicious courses.  The generosity of the owner’s spirit comes through in the way the dishes turn out.

Last night was spectacular for another reason.  We crashed the family dinner.  Well, not quite crashed, but we were looking for the waitress who graduated high school with my daughter Flora  When I couldn’t find her I went looking for her.  And there they were:  simon and his wife Winnie; Nicole (my daughter’s friend); and her mother, Nancy, who also works there.  Eating dinner together.

Of course my daughter was mortified that I just sat down.  Then Nicole asked me if I wanted to taste her delicious chicken, and handed me a fork.  She was right, it was delicious.  Then Flora eased her way to the table and joined the conversation. (Flora was right to be mortified, not everyone has the skills to crash a family meal.  It isn’t a trick that just anyone can get away with.)

This is what life is really about – neighbours.  Stopping in.  Making room.  Being treated as family, even in a restaurant.  I couldn’t swear it, but I don’t think that would ever happen in a Red Lobster.

Merlion link here

“I am the epitome of the twentieth-century cosmopolitan, but I should have been  born an explorer in the time of Magellan.”  (From My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn 1959).  Your correspondents, having recently spent time in the Orkney, Peterhead, the North Atlantic, the North Sea, Lowestoft, Grimsby, Burnham on Crouch, and now in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,  are truly cosmopolitan.

With heightened savior faire, doors have been opened, insights made, confidences shared – widely.  Yes, you dear reader, are the beneficiaries of this selfless search for truth and knowledge.

So in Passive Complicity this past week we have brought you a smorgasbord of essential information and insight, beginning with a profound reassessment of naval engagements in the first and second world wars.  The piece titled Commemorative Scuttle looks at the role of Krupps in establishing the German High Seas Fleet and finishes with a moving commemoration of its scuttling in 1919

Our next piece looked at the commodification of history and the damage that can do in contrast with a contextual and accessible historic site in the Rousay Island, Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland.   The Ruins of Rousay

The blog then took a sophisticated gastronomic turn with a piece from Cecil appealingly titled “Pudding”

From there Quentin relayed a poignant tale of his daughter’s 13th Birthday…”she’d tired of themed birthdays, witnessed the escalating arms race in lolly bags, was bored to death with The Zone, a shopping mall inspired miasma of electronic games and paint ball……….”  Read more in Camping at 13

Film reviewers Dave Strappon and Margo Promenhance reviewed the 1947 film “A Bush Chrismas”  discussing its relevance to today’s society, and finding much to recommend it.   See images to left.
If you think that the bilaterally supported policies followed by the federal government in relation to indigenous affairs and remote health in particular are not counterproductive and racist then reading the Musical Dispatch from the Front and following the link to Olga Havnen’s powerful paper may cause a rethink.  The Publishers urge you to read this paper, discuss it, and disseminate it widely.

And relentless we are too.  we finish the week with William Blake’s 1794 poem “London” of which our poetry editor has this to say, “You can tell through this poem how much Blake detested the endless exploitation  of men, women and children and the endless, needless deaths.”  Read the poem and Ira Maine’s comments here

Regards

Cecil and Quentin
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

For the past three weeks our correspondents have been aboard two like minded vessels.  One, the floating kind, Betty Alan, a fifty foot gaff rigged wooden ketch, slim of line, elegance and strength melded into a romantic symphony of utility and tradition – Joseph Conrad meets Ian Fleming.  The other, ‘The Wobbly House’, as coined by my cousin, is a rough patterned weatherboard amalgam of creaking timber floors, exposed bracings and beamery of a maritime pattern.

 It is set between boat stores, with a mudflat tidal vista of Betty Alan, and a garden of sorts, undesigned, informal, almost weedy.  It’s a topographic expression of humanity at its most felt.  A combination of ‘Heath Robinson meets Wind in the Willows’ with a bit of Swallows and Amazons for a dash of added authenticity.  Both are unashamedly vessels for humans.
 But unlike many modern (and not so modern) boats and homes these vessels share an organic attachment to imperfect humanism.  They breathe, and are unimaginable without the reciprocated empathy that seems to exist between vessel and inhabitant.

I don’t think it’s an accidental conjunction; so who made who?

You see I have some inkling into why these spaces work so well; it is bound in the personalities of the occupants.  As Errol Flynn, (our patron) wryly remarked ‘We never own anything ourselves it just passes through us’, but he was talking about paintings.  Instead, try this: What I’m talking about are living spaces.  After a number of years in the design profession and thinking of Dockland renewals around the world I am brought home to a brutal reality.  Houses and boats, are like books.  Only when they have been caressed by a sympathetic hand, imbibed by a sympathetic mind, and the ideas and voices within are shared in a symbiosis of mutual regard can there be a ‘transference of soul.’

My cousin is a scientist.  I do not understand what she does for a living, I do know she is a ‘Reader in Neurophysiology’ at University College London.  The house she shares with her Antiquarian Book Dealing Partner, is an expression of this.  Richard Holmes, in his celebrated book, “The Age of Wonder”* described how artists and scientists intertwined as colleagues in exploring the physical world, a realm in which the likes of Sir Joseph Banks, Hogarth and Reynolds would exchange vigorous debate with their equals in the febrile world of science, Faraday, Hershell, and Watt.  From this union, the fruits of enlightenment bloom to this day.

I cannot imagine the interior of either Betty Alan or The Wobbly House without a crowding of people, friends, relatives and children.  In Betty Alan the lockers are piled high with books, charts, navigation equipment and coils of rope.  As it rocked and pitched on the Atlantic and the North Sea, the proliferation of coats, jackets, tackle and sleeping bags swayed to the hearts that sang, in unison with the breeze through the rigging, across a topography of rolling wave-tops.
 The ‘Wobbly House’, part built, re-built and improvised through its last 400 years, is also a tuning-fork for the onshore breeze.  It groans under the weight of books, art, clothing, pots and pans, visitors and the collected miscellany of two very sympathetic minds. I could not imagine them living any other way.

In Australia, our standard definition of housing is non organic, fenced and austere.  This by comparison is shared, almost communally without interior walls. (As is much Indigenous housing within Australia)  It expresses a dynamic of welcome to those who are prepared to talk, share, observe listen and respect.  And somehow that preparedness to exchange, inheritors to ‘The Age of Wonder’, trickles outward along the Quay over the mud-flats and the rest of a very shared public community life that is Burnham on Couch.  We have much to learn.

* Richard Holmes. The Age Of Wonder 2008. “ How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science”. Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society prize for Science Books.

This is Part 1 of three from the Musical Dispatch from the Front first published 10 June 2013. 

Ngurrju mayi-nkulu?

In 2008 Professor Fiona Stanley gave the Hawke Lecture, which she titled ‘The Greatest Injustice’
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/the-greatest-injustice—2008-hawke-lecture/3169220

Half a decade later that Greatest Injustice shows no signs of amelioration.
Don’t worry about a thing cause every little thing’s gonna be alright…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGYAAsHT4QE

I had every intention of dealing with ‘Health’ in this Dispatch, when a speech by Olga Havnen found its way into my virtual mail box.

For those poor in time (such as those of you that haven’t the time to click on the musical links in the Dispatches- Wiyarpa!), I can strongly recommend you DO read Olga’s speech which is hereto attached Click Here.

Reading Olga’s 15 or so pages speech could save you a lot of other reading if you’re interested (as most Dispatchees are) in the grave Injustice being visited upon Aboriginal Australia.

I definitely can’t deal with the subject of ‘Health’ better than Olga has, so I’ll save my usual dose of ironic/satiric/cynical utterances for other matters.

TO BE CONTINUED Next Saturday

HOMEWORK Read Olga’s paper, there will be a test!

Film Review A Bush Christmas, 1947, with Dave Strappon and Margo Promenhance

The opening scene of this Australian film presents us with a vignette of kids leaving school in the bush on ‘breakup-day’.  One of the conventions of this “bush genre’ school of cinema is that it presents a romanticised view of ‘country’ that was designed to encourage as many British citizens as possible to emigrate in pursuit of a life that Britain was no longer able to provide.  Though over fifty percent of Australians lived in cities this film presents the mythological lie that we’re all knockabout bushman, capable of riding, shooting, and surviving in the bush.

In the story the holidaying kids decide to take a short cut over “blacks’ country”.  Its an innovative post war acknowledgement to include Neeza who is actually aboriginal.  He rides pillion on the back of Johns horse.  They encounter two rogues, busy changing the markings of some local horses.  Chips Rafferty plays the senior rogue – the archetypal mid-century Australian, lean, muscular and laconic, (a William Dobell inspired study in wiriness).  These rogues chat to the kids who are guileless and unsuspecting, and offer them a shilling each if they don’t tell the grown ups what they‘ve seen on the hill.  The kids subsequently discover they’ve been duped, and determine to retrieve the stolen horses.

The rogues – now thieves- display a deal of incompetence as bit by bit they are deprived of boots, food, and horses on their flight to an abandoned town.  There they catch and tie up their young pursuers. Then the rescue with a brief shootout as the police arrest the thieves, and congratulate the kids on their courage and daring.

Final scene christmas dinner on the verandah, high summer and laughter, stern but adoring parents, and classic orchestral refrain.

It would be impossible to make a film like this now.  The children ride helmet-less, and when they fall, don’t require counseling, stress management or intercession on behalf of child protection agencies.  This is a radical take on childhood.  Each kid has a distinctive personality, and not everybody gets a prize.  The aboriginal kid, though the butt of ‘good natured’ colour jokes, is skilled, ingenious, good humoured, and an acknowledged Leader.  The other Leader is the older girl, it is she who decides to pursue the thieves across range and country, and details the party which raids their camp.  The kids live off the land, they know how to track, light fires, and entertain themselves and be independent.  Even the littlest can ride competently and (when  forced) will eat Witchetty Grubs as demonstrated by the plucky Neeza.

As in Smiley* this exploration, adventure, and engagement with the world around them is shared with a backdrop of fire-crackers, brawls, bushfires and baddies.   All good humouredly acknowledged by the police sergeant who knows the townsfolk, and exerts authority through his respect for and familiarity with the people.  We all know this is not true either, as society was cold, insular, neglectful and sub-Dickensian.  The nostalgia is knowing that nothing’s changed.

This really is a radical film that deserves another look.

* Smiley Gets a Gun 1958. I believe the genre endured till TV’s ‘Skippy’, then the bush as ‘evil and dangerous’ returned; mysterious, untamable – cf. Picnic at Hanging Rock. , Hence contemporary bushfire neurosis and delusions of certainty and suburbia.

Images for a Bush Christmas

Mid Autumn and my daughter was stuck with a problem.  What to do for her thirteenth birthday party?  She is an enthusiast, and not yet dulled by the cynicism of adolescence.  She’d tired of themed birthdays, witnessed the escalating arms race in lolly bags, was bored to death with The Zone, a shopping mall inspired miasma of electronic games and paint ball, and sworn off the desperately contrived excursions to Fun or Theme parks, like Sovereign Hill, or Water-world.

She yearned for something simple and distinctive.  She had a brainwave! ‘Why not take the best of my friends camping – to ‘Our favourite spot!,’ the clearing in Wombat State Forest!’

I nodded, secretly thrilled for although this is just a clearing in the bush, it is a place of pilgrimage for me.  Easy to get to. No fuss required; arrive, pitch the tent, and enjoy the atmosphere – no phones, no gas, no electricity, no discordant noise.

The invitations, designed and hand made by my daughter were dutifully sent out, and one by one over the following week the response and attendant enquiries came:
‘Will it be SAFE?’
‘Are there any PROPER toilets?’
‘Who is MANAGING this?’
‘Are you REALLY camping in tents?’
‘Will there be FIRE?’
Do they really want to ask ‘Do you have APPROPRIATE medical competency?’ and by inference “Is my child SAFE with YOU?’  (Am I being paranoid?)  We imagined a cross referencing of phone calls amongst concerned parents, a bit of worrying and grudging acceptance.

Succumbing to the weight of concern about SAFE toilet facilities we decided to forego the ‘bush camp’ and settle for a formalised campsite, by a lake. The website depicted a “pleasant beauty spot”, That’s it, problem solved.

The advertised “pleasant beauty spot” was, on our arrival, a muddy morass crowded with campers intent on noise, unlimited alcohol, testosterone infused driving of motorbike and massive four wheel drive  – which consisted of much revving of motor, then using the aggressively treaded tyres to dig and throw as much mud as possible.  They seemed to sneer at the arrival of our small convoy and our young campers. We could barely hear each other over the revving motors and the amplifiers blaring a fusion of ‘Southern Rock’ and ‘Black Sabbath’.

Our decision to leave was instantaneous, and as dusk approached we raced to our preferred spot.  It was isolated, serene, and bathed in a late winter light. Unpacking we furiously set about building the fire. This was great fun. Flames flickered between the leaves gathered furiously by the girls. It burned magnificently, and then, as the girls roasted marshmallows we set about the tedium of setting up the tent and preparing dinner.  That night we all slept famously. After a hearty breakfast cooked on the campfire the girls had a competition of sorts to build shelters out of branches and leaves

Perhaps the parents, regaled with tales of great fun, (and toiletry of the most primitive kind), will demur when the next camp is proposed.

It transpired as the girls laughed under the glow of the campfire, that most of them had never ever been camping and now my daughter says, almost acknowledging it as an established fact, this was the best party ever.
Yes, the camp was an outrageous success!!!

THE END