a) Why, it’s kicking off everywhere… except Melbourne
It’s been a wild year. After two to three years of seeming paralysis after the GFC, things kicked off. Indeed, as Paul Mason’s timely canvassing of the issue says, it appears to be kicking off everywhere.
Everywhere except Australia.
A pedal through Melbourne’s leafy north-east the other Sunday offered telling ride-by snapshots of middle-class Australia in 2012. On lower Heidelberg Road there’s a billboard advertising domain.com.au’s new iPad app, telling its punters ‘You’re not a property buyer, you’re a warrior in a battle for territory’ (?!); a few Ks up the road, the ‘Save Ivanhoe!’ campaign – signs on the plush, deep lawns of capacious interwar houses – reminds all passers by that ‘we’ oppose inappropriate development. But the most telling combo is just south of the Eastern, on Belmore Road, where the mausoleum bling of display home McMansions (with names like The Consort, the Ambassador, The Concubine), stretching from Box Hill to Kew, is punctuated by 100s upon 100s of dead CRT TVs. They’re everywhere: small and massive, old and new, many with cardboard signs saying ‘works fine’ and the remotes sticky taped to the top. Others lie face down on the nature strip besides curious baby magpies or reel silently against trees, their faces tagged up or smashed in. Who tags a dead TV? Thousands of people, apparently. Some have been there for months in the grass, soaking up the dog piss and the rain, waiting for the TV angels to swoop down and take them to TV heaven, or Lagos.
Middle-class suburban Australia in 2012 seems untouchably far from everything except itself, in which it remains totally, contentedly absorbed. When the weather’s good, you get the sense that things will be like this forever. Talking Heads said it: heaven really is a place, a where nothing, nothing ever happens. The countervoice says: ‘a storm is blowing in from Paradise’. Cyclones make it this far south when they’re made out of capital, when capital is built out of promises and premises that turn out to be false. I cycle past another sign, which reads ‘guard dogs patrol these premises’. We’ll need another decade or three to know what McMansion Australia was really made of. I have a feeling many of the CRTs will still be on the nature strip. But my sense is that, just like they still work fine for free-to-air, the TVs gathering in our streets can be viewed as a form of unwitting political assembly. In one sense they the real Occupy Melbourne, in that they do accurately represent the actions, interests and credit card transactions of the 99%.
Their presence says so much about Australia. Somehow it’s totally okay to throw out a TV, leave it on the street. We trust that someone will pick it up; sometimes hard rubbish do. Or dawn brigades of ageless Carnie-like men – the ones who monster the still dark stalls of Camberwell market of a Sunday – will spirit them away. Their presence also suggests, perhaps, that we trust that those who do pick our ex companions up will take them somewhere and treat them with the respect you would treat aged pet or parent. Put away quietly somewhere. Personally, their presence chills me, they’re sentinels from a future doom. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…’
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