Summoned on Monday by Boss to help her in Canberra. Chased delegate round the country to get approval for travel, then spent much of Tuesday trying to rectify a fault within the system (AIFIS for those who are knowledgeable about such things) in order to raise a movement requisition so travel could be finally approved, Qantas could be paid, and I could catch a flight via Adelaide at 5 pm (a more laborious schedule than the one originally planned through Sydney), etc. This is a very typical public service scenario, in my experience, but ... how much am I being paid an hour to waste my life in this way?
Grumbled to Rob, the HR manager, about the situation, which was in part rooted in the failure of certain people to change my details on the system correctly, despite my sending them an email request months ago. It took four emails and assiduous follow-up on my behalf to ensure that my records had been changed correctly on another part of the system.
‘Why can’t people follow a simple email?’ I asked Rob.
‘The trouble is we’ve become a mediocrity,’ says Rob. ‘People have come not to expect much from this organisation now, so we've attracted all the dregs.’
Yes, but … how difficult is it to follow a simple email? What kind of people are employed in this organisation? (This all recalls an evil comment made by one of the right-wing types in the Victorian Office that the Titanic was a sheltered workshop.)
Rob starts waxing lyrical and philosophical.
‘The problem is that as we all get older, you find that we become more of the same person that we are rather than less. I become more "Rob" as time goes by … the Titanic becomes more “Titanic”.’
I’m reminded of the fact that he has an everchanging stream of Kahlil Gibran-style bon mots attached to his emails. Needless to say, what with the imminent approach of middle age and all, I know what he means. In the psychobabel discourse of baggage, I’m probably carrying tea chests rather than overnight bags of the stuff by now.
‘But the thing we can hope for,’ Rob continues, ‘Is that in the next life we’ll be re-born. We’ll get the chance to start all over again with a new life. I might become, say, Paris Hilton ….’
It’s a difficult call, imagining the stubby, freckly 50-something ex-police officer from Tennant Creek transmigrating into the blonde, vapid stick insect doyenne of reality TV.
‘I’ve never quite gotten my head round the maths behind reincarnation,’ I say, ‘I mean, if there are exponentially more people being born than ever, then how do the old souls match up with the new ones?’
And indeed, I think that’s a fair comment, especially since you never hear anyone recounting their past life as a (genuine) stick insect on a leaf in the North Balwyn garden or a Staffordshire bull terrier in a C19th coal mine. One is always human in a past life - romantically and tragically human - such as a witch who was drowned in the Spanish Inquisition or French aristocrat who was guillotined.
So – to Canberra, beautifully Autumnal, though the people there as always look singularly drab, boring and bored. I remember the bewildered comment from a Danish intern we had in Sydney on her return from a visit to Canberra: ‘It is a city without people!’ she exclaimed. It’s also just about the only city in the country where the queue for Business Class at the airport is invariably longer than the one for Economy.
I was signing in at the lobby of the Titanic Offices when whom should I turn to see but Chris, coiffed and suited in the manner of a character in a mini-series about thirty-something lawyers in a Top London Legal Firm. He was accompanied by a near-octogenarian European ex-diplomat and a wheelie suitcase almost as large as himself … Chris was last seen in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands, wearing white trousers encrusted with orange dust, searching desperately for a laundromat (actually, that’s something of an exaggeration).
I bumptiously said ‘hello’ to Madame in the manner of an overly familiar Australian (she survived), and then Chris and I made plans to catch up for dinner that night.
Met up with Chris in Manuka and went to a restaurant roundabout where Ottoman’s used to be (and probably still is somewhere) with a name like Verv or Varv or something. It was very try hard, in a ‘trying hard to be Sydney’ way: it was all stainless steel, concrete floors, shining surfaces and incredibly uncomfortable souped-up kitchen chairs. And ‘foodies food’ – y’know, post-nouvelle cuisine that takes up more of the plate than nouvelle cuisine ever did (otherwise Australians would never come for a night out of eating). In fact, much of Canberra is like a strange Sydney implant, as if a boutique/gourmet street from the Eastern suburbs had been suddenly plonked down in the middle of the southern NSW country plains (and a particularly useless Eastern suburbs street at that).
Saw a man at Verv who looked rather like the Deputy PM sitting at a table, surrounded by blond, braying, pinstriped people (escapee Aryans perhaps) … And behold, it was the Deputy PM, albeit slightly more youthful looking (well, he looked his chronological age instead of older) and with a much healthier skin tone than I expected.
Chris and I talked intensively, as gay men and straight women are want to do, about the big things in life – death, other people, Alain de Botton and Sydney. Chris thinks that dear Alain is on to something with status anxiety, that he’s encapsulated something of the zeitgeist of our contemporary obsession with continually checking over your shoulder to make sure you’re acquiring more than the next person, etc, and the need for our generation to overcome, transcend this, etc.
‘Do you mean like a new form of Zen Buddhism?’ I say facetiously. Neither of us has read the book but what Chris is saying certainly touches on a certain angst I associate with Sydney perhaps more than anywhere else in the country. (And why is it Alain rather than Brad to voice these things – is it to do with of the status of the Nerd?) (Cf. Previous post: ‘The value of gloom’, 6 May 2004.)
We both share similar reservations about the Sydney Life. Chris came to Sydney to escape Deadelaide and has found it fairly vacuously competitive (well, my interpretation of the gist of what he said). I was born in Sydney but always felt uncomfortable about the Australianness it exuded – that brash, tan-legged, beach-bleached hair Australianness. (When I worked in Manchester almost 15 years ago, to my great joy people doubted I was Australian, until they decided I must be from Siith Iiffrica or Zimbabwee instead.) In fact, I was only comfortable with the idea of being Australian after living in Melbourne for ten plus years.
Chris and I talked about how it’s difficult to live any decent sort of life as a single person on $50 k pa in inner city Sydney. Then we talked about the whole marketing mentality, which is indeed a global phenomenon, but particularly crystallised the Sydney attitude for us: i.e. the idea that the way in which you present things (especially yourself) is far more important than what you’re actually presenting.
I’ve never gotten over this – for example, that you would give someone a job on the basis that they leapt around saying that they were wonderful, rather than checking out that this was the case, yet this happens all the time. (I suspect dating works on much the same basis, most straight men being so handicapped in the human insight stakes. In fact I’d almost – but not quite – go so far as to say they’d believe you had great tits if you told them that.)
The other thing that really characterises Sydney for me is the idea of ‘funk’ as opposed to ‘cool’. When Sydney people are being cool, it’s often in a more ostentatious or showy, performative way of signposting that one is being cool I’d associate perhaps more with the word ‘funky’. And it can be accompanied by statements of acquisition like ‘I’ve just bought …. three pairs of Camper shoes on the cheap in Spain’ or ‘a gorgeous minute studio with city views in Darlinghurst for $1.34 M’ or ‘a fucking great, inordinately huge, shamelessly useless stainless steel can-opener from House’, and so forth. Whereas I think Melburnians eschew this kind of blatant behaviour to a large degree, and the signposting is more implicit than explicit, in the way of irony and the original meaning of ‘cool’.
Anyway, I’m sure this Sydney behaviour can be viewed affectionately at some level, and after all, Melbourne can be an understatedly mean place in its own way… Like when how everything can hinge on whether your brother played cricket with someone else’s brother at an Awfully Important Private School (I suspect the same thing goes on in certain niches within Sydney, tho on a much smaller scale). Or how you can become a social pariah figure for wearing the wrong shade of black.
I know many have been down this comparative path before, but I just want to add my own particular little dig about the Sydney / Melbourne dichotomy (with apologies to Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous): Sydney is to Melbourne as:
Funk / cool
Performance / inference
Raffishness / earnestness
Acquisition / inheritance
Marketing / studying
Surfaces / grittiness
Sunnyness / gloom
Parrakeet colours / black
Camel kitten-heeled pointy-toed shoes / black kitten-heeled pointy-toed shoes
Good Thai food / good Italian food
Tepid vaguely identifiable brown substance / decent coffee
N.B. how one always goes to put Sydney first in this binary pairing. (It may surprise the voyeurs at home to hear that Elsewhere is up the earnest rather than the raffish end of the spectrum, but alas ‘tis true.)
Anyway, back to the Titanic… Got up early and raced to catch the Sydney plane. Ran through Sydney terminal buying alcoholic chocolates to thank staff members who helped deal with the Great Travel Debacle, then discovered Alice Springs plane was running late, got back into office by 2.30 pm, rang Boss … who was shocked to find I’d left Canberra this morning, thinking that I was going to stay another week there with her.
Ummm, I don’t remember that being said. Seems like we’re dealing in some form of psychic communication these days on board the Titanic. Truth of the matter is that I’m exhausted after the octogenarian festivities, a couple of early morning flights and all the other stress at chez Titanic. And there’s still a gig in Katherine in a fortnight’s time that I have to organise with my Darwin comrades… can’t see that being done from Canberra…
She sounded a bit frantic. I felt bad but I’m getting incredibly vague and dysfunctional. I don’t think a weekend in Canberra would do me any good. I was also looking forward to maybe escaping out bush on the weekend, even if only for a few hours, and catching up on some movies if possible. Perhaps I can go back next week…
Other news: Stephen C has come up with the best possible riposte to a friend who takes up blogging: send them a lovely long letter on nice notepaper in a calligraphically addressed envelope.
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