Don Dunstan - South Australian Premier
Remember this for next time.
Before you wail, moan and gnash your teeth at disappointments or failed ambitions, faulty equipment or your bathrooms new colour scheme
-
just consider this.
Is it the outcome of your efforts, is it the object itself that’s causing the foul taste of bile to rise up the back of your throat
or,
perhaps,
just perhaps
the deficiency lies within you and your expectations.
That you want your ‘ideal world’ and instead find that you’re in an ordinary world full of ordinary things, or maybe even an ordinary world full of extraordinary things but your vision of this ‘real world’ is clouded by unreasonable expectations.
More often than not it’ll be you.
After the “Hamlet Debacle (2009)” I decided to hang around town for a while, get the vibe, see what was happening, catch a few shows, see the sights, take the air and generally sample the night-life.
{and also be amazed that there’s not a Don Dunstan Boulevard or a Don Dunstan Theatre even a Dunstan Memorial Garden – there probably is and since I’m a stranger here I just don’t know where to look but in these mean and lean times it’s not hard to credit that the petty chuckleheads who have control of this Capital, stuck between the freezing Southern Ocean and Australia’s desert centre could not bring themselves to remind the citizenry that there was once a state government that didn’t prize a balanced budget above all other things, that a leader of Government would value qualities that were artistic/creative/pretty in nature rather than functional that would have a bugger-all return on the money spent, but nevertheless would be money well spent. Don Dunstan was a forward-thinking State Premier who wore pink hot-pants once in public but should be remembered for much more and the current drop from around this place won’t be remembered for the tiniest scintilla of eccentricity or individuality
Those heady days are long gone. We’re at war !!}
I came this close to the Indian Ocean over twenty years ago and found the place to be a gentle, pleasant almost-city with too many over-sized churches and under-sized cathedrals. It now has the reputation Nation wide as being the Murder Capital, there are more murders per capita than any of the more (and less) populated cities in this wide red land. The locals of course deny this and try cooking the books to prove that this is indeed a worthy place to spend your tourist dollars and perhaps put down roots and raise small chubby children. I prefer the former description to the official position. Too much niceness is a mask for the under-current persecution complex.
Adelaide is pretty small, and it’s not that far away, on a fast jet plane you can be here from one of the proper capitals in a few short hours.
Perth on the other hand is miles away.
People from Western Australia quite rightly feel and act as if they’re from another country. There are other countries closer to the east coast than Perth. They are victims of the tyranny of distance but sheltered from the cares and woes of the Sydneysiders and the Melbournites (don’t get me started on Brisbane, Queensland hasn’t quite entered the Twenty-First century yet, they have been retarded by too many years of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen criminal dictatorship which still hasn’t been properly excised from their memory or polity and have about twenty years of catching-up to doy) and so the Perth people can literally think of the rest of the country as foreign to their ways of life.
But they are digging up their state with huge big mechanical diggers and flogging their valuable earths, minerals, rocks and ores to any and every person who’s willing to sling them a few bucks, these days it still gives them a sense of satisfaction to think that it’s their entrepreneurship and energy that’s helping keep Australia from free-falling towards a depression. They aren’t but it’s probably better to let those red-neck loons keep thinking what they want lest they leave from their distant environs and start spreading their peculiar lunacy throughout the civilised world. For non-Australians just watch any John Wayne western where citizens and soldiers are in constant and mortal battle with the indigines and you have the WA attitude delivered unto your good selves in a nutshell. They’re Texans without the Bush dynasty, their from Utah without the polygamy -they’re just crackers and I hope that they’ve saved a few dollars from their recent mineral boom because as soon as the US stops buying cheap gadgets from China there won’t be much more money coming in as it once did
So back here in the city of churches and car-parks there’s a developing ‘small-man with a chip on his shoulder’ syndrome being developed and it’s starting to make people mean and crazy (or at least it seems that way if you read their one and only popular daily newspaper which is a delight to glance through as you’re travelling on the modern and convenient public transport network – the locals think it is a rubbish way to get around town but they don’t seem to travel much anywhere else in Australia “The Advertiser“pretends to be a real grown-ups paper but it is one from a stable owned by a crude American media baron and would have topless big-breated women’s pictures prominent on page 3 if they could sell more papers using them and contains bugger-all real news and nothing devoted to artistic or progressive issues) .
Or they’re stressed-out by trying to be nice to people 24/7, Adelaide people are quite nice and helpful. Until they murder you and hide your rotting corpse in a barrel. They have collectively reached breaking point and haven’t yet learned how to more constructively to vent their spleen without reaching for their illegal magnum pistols or 12 bore pump-actions. They haven’t gone crackers but may well be on the precipice looking down on the nest of writhing vipers below. It won’t take much more of an economic decline to push them over the edge. One more car plant closure away from a massacre to get their homicide rate back to world’s best practice.
I’m going to a party here on Saturday evening with kind and gentle people, but I’m going to have a weather-eye open and be ready to hit the road at the first raised voice. I’m not expecting trouble – but you never know in this place in these times. Who knows it could be me, striking out first, worn down and broken by the weight of all the constant civility and politeness that has surrounded me on this trip. But I’ve enjoyed myself so …….
– see youse awl in another twenty years