Skullthorpe's Blog

It’s  hot, dry and dusty, people are wearing red and white floppy hats in celebration of an almost hundred year old Coca Cola ad, it must be Christmas.
When I was a deal younger and firmly in the embrace of The Folk Revival I loved to search out old Christmas traditions and celebrate them, usually with copious amounts of alcoholic enthusiasm. Today any Christmas tradition you like is readily available on the internet, your local shopping mall or Aldi, in plastic and made in China.
Apart from on the fringes Australia is a secular country. Migrants who bring their faiths with them soon lose them under the onslaught  of the materialistic barrage that attacks from phones, tablets, TV’s and print. Gotta have the oversize ticky-tacky house (on it’s  undersized block), the four wheel drive, boat, comprehensive set of golf clubs, ride on mower and of course the essential leaf blower.  God doesn’t  stand a chance. The quaint little story of the couple who did not book ahead in peak season and had to make do sleeping rough, complicated further by the arrival of a bouncing baby boy, a crowd of shepherds and a trio of astronomically minded mystics is buried. It is buried under mountains of stuff.
Here in Australia, Christmas falls during high summer, when everyone wants to go on holiday. The Christmas thing frames the frantic desire to get away, see aunty Flo, Mum, Dad, The Grandkids and of course drive/fly too far, eat and drink to much and overspend on the Visa.
After the frenzy everyone goes back to normal, noses the grindstone and pays off the accumulated debt. Christmas.
This would all be very well but for the bigger frame. The plight of our species and the lost lonely ball of rock we inhabit along with a whole lot of other species, who entirly miss the point of leaf blowers, is irrevocably changing. There is too many of us having too many more. As a result we have filled our oceans with garbage, burned our forrests for profit, poisoned our water tables by oil extraction techniques,  covered all our best arable land with housing and are rapidly consuming all available animal, vegetable and mineral resources. I forgot to mention that wwe are also changing the climate to the point where our planet will be largely uninhabitable within a few generations. 
So we can’t  afford Christmas.
For our grand children’s survival we have to stop having so many.  If we care for them we have to radically change how we live. We all have to do it.  We need to force our polticians to take responsibilty for the governance of our whole planet. We need to pay more taxes, we need to force our governments to tax the multinationals – we need a fighting fund to get green done.
Right now there are bush fires raging and our friends are out there fighting them all because you thought it would be neat to own a leaf blower.
Me?  This Christmas Day and Boxing Day I am ‘doing the Community Markets’ so some of my friends can sell pointless stuff to resource profligate cashed-up tourists. Mad init!
Happy Christmas

Odd, it seems, to be staking tomatoes and attacking cooch invasions while helicopters constantly fly back and forth fighting bushfires less than ten K away.  It reminds me of the stories Grandma Ashby told us when we were young of her and her family sitting under the dinning room table playing rummy whilst the bombs fell. I have postponed my Melbourne visit to Mother not wishing to be away from The Boys, Max, The House and The Community at this time.
It is liberating to be free from my regular Melbourne frip. To suddenly have rwo extra days in the week is almost like going on holiday.  I have been able to get so much done in the gardeen and around the house. Had I gone to Melbourne all my available time would have been taken up with market preparation.
I am really conflicted over The Community Markets.  On the one hand they offer locals a chance to gain much needed income and on the other mostly it is about selling useless plastic crap we dont need to cashed up retirees. There have been not a few poor decisions made that effect  the market programs viability. It seems madness to have a market on Boxing Day which requires using mosst of Christmas day to set up. No one wants a market on that day. It must be The Arts Councils desperate need for money to pay wages and the oncosts of the art gallery that is behind it. The decision is certainly not winning the hearts and minds of the volunteers – that is very sure.
So we work in our gardens and prepare for community events while the helicopters shuttle backwards and forewards. The selfless, courageous and hard work of of our emergency services not with standing we are at the  mercy of the weather.  Violent  hot northerlies will turn the whole area into  a fireground.  Good rain will minimize our plight. The former is more likely than the latter.

There has been a great deal of activity in arts related initiatives lately in Mallacoota. This is partly the time of year but also, I think, the beginning of a rise in general levels of activity.
The recent P12 drama class production of A Dolls House showed what remarkable results  both artistically and in personal development are possible with minimum physical resources and maximum hard work, commitment, creativity and encouragement.
There was the opening of The Radio Station/Art Gallery which provides a permanent home for our community radio and an opportunity for local artists to sell their work.
The unofficial launch of Made by Mallacoota social/arts history project is planned to develop into a web based resource for history, local writing and the arts in general. 
The continued work being undertaken by The Mallacoota P12 Music Program is creating a new generation of young musicians.
Moves afoot to reestablish a local community/arts festival may come to fruition and the initiative does demonstrate a growing desire for things to happen.
The acceptance of The Community Precinct Redevlopment Plan will be a huge boost to arts infra-structure and now need planning to be instituted to create programmes and initiatives around the resources.
Opportunities for this may well be provided by The Regional Arts Victoria Small Town Transformation Project. This may be qn opportunity to bring all of the different initiatives, plans and aspirations together into a cohesive and creative structure that could seriously enhance our life qualities here in Mallacoota.
So come to the discusion at The Muddie at 6.30 this Friday and get in at the ground floor.

I first saw the faces over the shoulder of a huge African – morbidly obese, sweating and grousing into his phone as he mouthed a chocolate gelato cone. One face glowing the other withdrawn. The blackman got off at Richmond dripping and still engrossed in a subdued rant. The couple stood side by side. He strap hanging, she legs braced and electric. Smiling like a mother wolf she tucked a hair tuft behind his ear. He starred over her shoulder into infinity. Were they elicit on that train or coupled – heading workwards? She was so alive and imeadiatly predatory in her passionate affection and he was so far away. Was he worried for the collapse of The Gulf Stream or the fortunes of his pet office project involving paperclips? She – impatient to fork between cool sheets or to celebrate or display the wonder of her heart?
The moments chemistry cryptic. The formulation of the time slice unknowable. Lives are only episodic to others or when we audit our own pasts for faux purpose.
Small mystery: how could he be blasé-unburnt by the fire blazing for him or she unquelled by the chill?

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s303/sh/8f329471-dd87-45aa-960a-5fe7a566da91/dd9d6dd00d3b77dbbebe819e0475c137

Throwing rocks at the mountain.
Random rants and reflections from a life in progress.

Having spent a great deal of the past 30 years being derisory towards Post-Modernism I am lately finding myself somewhat in sympathy with some of the preoccupations. The extreme view is of course ludicrous – everything isn’t text and the universe persistently continues regardless of activities on this minuscule dot on a dot on dot that we inhabit. There are general laws operating independently of anything we have to say or do. Significantly it is increasingly becoming obvious that more is going on than we currently have any notion in regards to these general laws. Increasingly it seems understanding is beyond our particular mental tool set. We evolved to eat, procreate and die. Intelligence is an accidental by product of our evolutionary path and it has been shaped by hundreds of thousands of generations of creatures with a very limited intellectual horizon indeed. Why we suddenly went down a path that suddenly invented civilization and the scientific method is one of humankind’s greatest mysteries.
I get the sneaking and undeniable feeling that 21st century westernized bits of this civilisation are becoming increasingly styled by the dead hand of Philip K Dick. Not that Dick as a ‘sci fi prophet’ (ugh). Science Fiction writers are notoriously bad at prediction. Can you think of a single early SF story with mobile phones, PCs or the Internet? They were big on ubiquitous flying cars, Martians, Moon Colonies, ESP and conveyor-belt pavements. What makes the 21st Century Dick-ensian (sorry) is the tone and atmosphere. The style of his quirky details glitters everywhere.
Eerily Dick are our consumer driven sub-cultures like the ‘New Age’ with its gimcrack ‘alternative medicines’ and pseudo spirituality. Amongst the members of our school population you will find kids who identify as a ‘Brony’. They are members of an internet based teenage/young adult sub-culture central to which is a set of toy ponies made for little girls and advertised through the medium of a tv cartoon series. These cartoons have become the philosophical underpinnings of a credo centred on friendship and loyalty and other positive life messages. A type of concept that could have been lifted straight out of a number of Philip Dick Novels
On the main stream – Shopping Malls with their surreal over abundance and faux choice seem straight out of a dark Dick psychotic episode. It is all very ‘Perky Pat’.
Just like many of Dick’s characters we all seem to be immersed in a collective hallucination. Omni-present is the continuous dumbing down of the media, education and political discourse.
The recent media circus surrounding Tony Abbot’s leadership is a case in point. It wasn’t the content of the policies that were under the question. It was the undeniable fact that the people of Australia had elected a mentally unstable buffoon as Prime Minister because they had looked no further than the short term greed motivated, fear driven, slogans created for his election by advertising agencies. Now after the gormless moron has been swept into the dust bin of history we are being convinced that something important has changed. This appears to be just because Malcolm Turnbull has a good taste in ties and can open his mouth for other reasons than just to change feet. The policies that underpinned Tony Abbott’s leadership are exactly the same as those under pinning Malcolm Turnbull. Australians are being fed a few short term crumbs with one hand while the country is being sold wholesale to the highest bidder by the other. This would, of course, hold equally true for the ALP if they were in office.
The explosive increase in the prescribing of anti-depressive drugs with their slightly psychotic alienated disengagement with externalities is a common theme in Dick’s worlds. Corporations, freed from social restraint by their global positioning, on the one hand develop these drugs to curb curiosity and concern and on the other market goods to glut the third chimpanzees insatiable appetite for novelty, alcohol, sugar, salt and fat. Largely undoing progress made in universal education and general public health. Fortunes are being made in consumer media products that gain greater and greater monolithic controls of our life choices, while at the same time trivialising them. The medical profession and the pharmaceutical companies are heavily investing in geriatrics, a guaranteed market, where deteriorating minds and barely functioning obese bodies are kept heavily drugged and alive for as long as possible. At the same time sports and other outdoor activities are being presented as spectator activities associated with advertising for alcohol and fast food.
Generally the members of our society live in small 2 to 4 member isolated family units in environmentally toxic oversized, dead-locked, bolted and security scanned dwellings. When they leave, they leave in sealed wheeled boxes and either attend work in a cubicle with a computer screen or go shopping in ‘shopping malls’ with identical shops and products to every other shopping mall in the country. Shops are now ‘self-serve’ with, what staff there are, often ignorant of the stock for sale. We are being conditioned to be unskilled, ignorant, solitary, afraid and neurotic. We are being conditioned to be more easily controlled.
As the postmodern deconstructualists would have is believe it is actually mostly about language. It is how we phrase questions, the accuracy of the words we use to describe things, ideas and feelings where in lies any hope that our society has of emerging from its current funk. It is how we deconstruct that which vexes and challenges us that is the key. Consider the ‘refugee crises. This is looming large and a lot of people are frightened, threatened and dead. There is no stand-alone ‘refugees crisis’, it is an effect of the superannuation crisis – where more or less wealth, educated individuals are prepared to, either through ignorance or greed, invest their money in arms manufacturers. They do this so they can visit Bali or Paris when they retire. If people actually applied the notions they have of humanitarian, cooperative and moral behaviour to what they are actually doing then most of our world problems would cease to exist. People applaud a development deal because it creates jobs. But what jobs at what cost? Nazi death camps created jobs. It is the language we use that defines us. The weight we apply to certain words and concepts. I have a friend who has had two strokes and a triple bypass operation who says he can’t retire because he couldn’t pay the mortgage on a gigantic suburban house. Do you get the inherent contradictions in that situation? I will remind you here that the word ‘mortgage’ is a Latin word for death-pledge.
It is becoming clear that a great deal of what we do and are (same thing?) exists only in the language we use to think about or discus it. Not the more obvious concepts within philosophy or theology but the world view that frames these ideas. What does the Christian inquisitions, pogroms and witch hunts, the Mayan and Inca wholesale daily violent human sacrifices and the biblical Old Testament story of Isaac tell us about the human religious impulse? The wholesale violent destruction of individual humans is a universal religious activity regardless of what ever tenants are espoused.
One of the functions of language seems to be to allow society to function unaware of contradictions like this. Words and ideas create chains of associations inside separate quarantined phase spaces creating distinctions between various sets of ideas and beliefs. The shift to the larger phase space that contains all of them, revealing them to be fundamentally identical, is not made. The contradictions within a religion (ie the disparity between the hating of Southern Baptists and the notion of a god of love) are seen as misunderstandings or heresies within a religion rather than expressions of what religion is. The relationships between concepts can be revealed or hidden depending on the use of language.
We all seem to be living in something like the deconstructed world of Philip K Dick. We don’t experience the world linearly like a graph we experience it as a field in which definitions are emergent as we examine finer and finer grain of detail or change the locus of our focus. As has often been said ‘common sense’ while indisputably common is rarely sensible. The human brain has evolved with the ability to contain unremarked whole structures of mutually contradictory ideas and systems. People can believe that The Earth was created in seven days with the Sun being created on day four. People can believe that someone like Karl Marx is able to fully explain and systemize the mechanisms of our human culture while being part of it. Violence is perpetrated based on the notion, that in some way, one football team is inherently better than another. So when you read something or hear someone speaking and you find yourself nodding in agreement – stop. Examine the chain of assumptions underlying your agreement with the statement and the statement itself and very carefully examine the words being employed.
Philip Dick wrote dozens of novels and short stories at a frantic pace, often under the influence of many multicolour pills, in an effort to support the alimony of three ex-wives. He died young. We seem to be living in his world. A sobering thought.

Tony Abbot is a ground state politician. If you cut away all the public school shine, speech writers and publicists what you are left with is Tony Abbot. They are all more similar to each other than they are different.

Our lives have been a developing scenario on every level.  We in the west now understand more about what motivates us than ever before. Historically  we started our journey in a world just recovering from a shattering world war. Some of my earliest memories are playing on bomb sites with military debris. A rising optimism and a rejection of the values that lead to war created us as Beats and Hippies both down deep and in their more cosmetic manifestations. For a while there it looked like we might be able to change the world. But what can only (in short hand) be called human nature and the sheer inertia created by a misplaced sense of abundance and mastery washed away the possibilities. The experiments in socialism failed when confronted by personal greed and the incipient pastoralism got largely  buried in accumulated stuff. So, guilt – no. Rage against human greed and stupidity – Yes. Despair at the world left for my boys – Yes. Guilt doesn’t  really cut for those who have kept the faith, nor for those who never had it but hypocritically pretended they did while it was fashionable. My emotion is Rage rather than guilt as we go none to gently into that great goodnight if you will excuse the paraphrase of a great poem.

There was a meshed grill on the wall next to the door with a big red button. Ariel depressed the button. ‘Ariel from dispatch got a newby who fell into a dumpster.’ The mesh squawked. ‘No, she’s not bad…. yes…. she’s with me. Needs looking at. ‘
‘Squawk.’ A videye, centred above the door lintel, swivelled and panned. The door clicked. Ariel opened it and went in grabbing Suzie by the wrist.
Inside at a desk a dark man sat. Indian? Pakistani? White coat impeccable. After the sordid, the clean almost hurt. ‘Ariel is it? (Looking at her tag) you are? He had a form. It was light green. He had a pen it was blue plastic.
‘Glinda.’
‘Glinda ‘…….. Writing, he looked up.
‘…Smith..’
‘Smith… I suppose someone has to be. Number?’
‘…Number?’
‘She banged her head, she’s as newby, only started this shift.’
‘Tag?’
‘I lost it in the dumpster, It was 143 something something I think.’
‘Doubt it, that would mean you were a dog handler, ….security..’ He looked her up and down and sniffed, ‘You on trash right?’ She nodded, he looked at a laminated list taped to the desk top, ‘286B’ He wrote.
‘I am not good with numbers’ She cursed herself, first rule – don’t offer… take. She put on a shit eater grin. ‘Sorry.’
‘Ok Ms ….Smith, we can check later, lets look at that ankle. Ariel put her arm around her waist and eased her over to the guerney in the corner. Suzie felt her warmth. Her head swam as she put it on the hard starchy pillow. She bit her lip as her boot was eased off. She heard a tap run, then warm water softened the dried blood that stuck her sock to the wound. More water bathed the wound. ‘You are lucky, a stitch or two and strapping for the sprain and you will be as good as new.’ Suzie heard no caution in the professional cheer and allowed herself to relax a little.
Bandaged, sock damp from a Ariel’s hasty hand basin wash, securely booted Suzie wanted out. Ariel was fidgeting. Suddenly the door opened and another white coat entered in a hurry. ‘Jacob…. some idiots fallen out of a cherry picker!… oh sorry…!
‘It’s OK, done here.’ He turned to Ariel, ‘You look after her?’
Ariel looked at Suzie speculatively and softened slightly… ‘I guess..’
‘Good girl’, and grabbing a first aid kit off its hook by the door, followed the newcomer out.
Suzie opened her mouth to speak. Ariel nixed it with a slight head shake. Her hand, concealed by her body, she indicated the ceiling pick up.
They left, very conscious of the incomplete green form and abandoned blue pen on the desk.
‘Shit! You lucky or what?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Shit, no worries, look, I got to get back to work.’
‘You won’t get into trouble..?’
‘Nah, old Maggie, she’ cool if you don’t push it. Late shift quiet, I just explain. Who’ your supervisor?’
The grin again, ‘Er, I guess I forgot her name….’
‘Trash right?’
Nod
‘That’s Abbott and he a he…. Who are you?’
‘…Like I said Glinda…’
‘Smith, yeah right!’
She tried the grin…. No dice.
‘Glinda I believe… Smith… I mean, really. You don’t work here at all. How’d you get in?’
‘I..I..OK..’ ‘Be disarmimg come-ON girl!’ Yeah OK… you’re right. I snuck in the dumpster.
You didn’t hurt that leg in no dumpster.
It was in a trap
In the car park?
In the desert, on the edge….
Alarm and curiosity compete, You one of THEM?
What?
One of Them… The Outers…You do them things they say?
What things?
You know … do it with animals and … kids, worship Allah and like that?
I am just trying to get to the mountains
The mountains?
On the other side of The Mall. Mountains…
Mountains… you crazy?
I just want out, want to be free.
Free?
All this crazy shopping shit, I don’t need stuff, I just need….
What?
…. Dunno, mountains I guess. Anything’s better than drifting around in the shadows or …. this, waving her arm at her surroundings violently.
Hey, no.. it’s great. Can’t wait to finish work, there’s a whole lot of new stuff in Camping.
Camping? Incredulous. You go camping?

Er… no, but if I did it would be great to have.
Does anybody go camping?
Sure, my uncle goes every holiday
He does? Where?
Oh … Enfield, Portnoy……
They are just further down the strip.
Yeah, in-store camping, it’s cool. Cheaper than a motel and the shopping’s right there.
Jeez …and you think I’m crazy….
Lots of people do it, they bless the camp sites.
Who do?
The church, they have a special service and everything.
What are you going to do?
Do?
Are you gonna shop me to the Beefs.
Ariel bits her lip. ‘I guess not .. I like you…’
Thanks, Dry
No really…. I like you. We gotta get you outta here.
Thanks, I mean really. I don’t want to get you into trouble.
No sweat, hang here, Ariel grabs Suzzies hand and draws her after her, down the corridor, to a nearby door marked ‘Staging’. Inside the room, dimly lit, is full of huge open topped boxes full of what looked like enormous curtains, ‘gonna tell Old Maggie I am sick… stay here …. No one come in here on night shift.
Thanks. Really, and it’s Suzzie
‘(?)’
The name… Suzzie, not Glinda
Grins .. S’cool. She was gone.
Suzzie eased her ankle, it felt better, it felt good. Most of the pain had receded to a dull ache and throb. By some miracle it did not seem infected.
What to do?
She was not going to get to far on her own, too much difference to trip her. Like another planet. She looked down at her torn filthy clothes. Need a change, she sniffed, and a shower.
Ariel then.. for the moment… something about her was causing an itch that could usually only be scratched by a new lead guitarist. Curious…. But not now. She had to get out and through. The Mountains.
Time passed.
Maybe Ariel had gone for the Beef….
She went through her pack: spare clothes, all dirty, food consisted of an energy bar and some nuts, which she ate and drank the last in her water bottle.
Time passed some more.
A scuff and the door handle turned Ariel slipped in carrying a grey dust coat. Suzzie started, had she suddenly put on weight?
Ariel grinned, hitched herself up on the edge of a crate and kicked off here shoes and peeled off an extra pair of socks, unzipped her work smock and shucked it off along with a new shirt, bra, (nickers tucked in). She sat their looking pleased. You work here you don’t pay for everything. Under all her spoils she was only wearing a tank top, translucent with wear. Dark nipples starred at Suzie. Speculatively she touched one with her finger.
‘They for looking at not touching’
‘Really?’ She raised her other hand and finger-touched the other.
Ariel went still and looked into her eyes, ‘Mostly.’
Suzzie gently pushed her backwards into the box of curtains and rolled over the side and joined her.
After the giggles and just before their saliva mingled, the thought: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’
It took a while and more giggles to get off the two pairs of jeans.

I never done it with … girls before.
Been a while since I was a girl. ‘Love the one you’re with.’
What?
A song, an old song.

I produce four radio programs on our local station. Sounds Like Australian music (SLAM) which plays exclusively contemporary Australian Indi music occasional digressions into the past. POPZ which is a three hour program of Australian and International Pop music. New Kids on the Block (NKOTB), which I do in collaboration with the Grade Six from our local primary school, which features school news and the children reading their own creative writing augmented with a bit of post production. I also produce Songs To Aging Children (STAC) which is the programme most dear to my heart. The music ranges from early sixties to the present. It is the programme that reflects my taste in music.
I am always on the hunt for music. I get sent quite a few review tracks/discs and demos which mostly end up on SLAM. I don’t live near any record stores (closest decent one is two hours away) so trawl the net.
I was very lucky today. Progressive Rock has always been big for me and I found online an old sampler album in ‘The World of’ series (remember those). I had the embarrassing title of The Zowie Powie World of Progressive Rock. I used to own a copy. Anyway on it was a track by a band called ‘Touch’ – ‘Down at Circe’s Place’. When I was 18 I thought that that track was really cool. ‘Touch’ broke up in the early seventies and i forgot about them until today. I went on a hunt and finally chased a copy of their only album down which was self titled. It is great music. The new release (2008) has extra tracks of previously unreleased material.
Not only that but while I was chasing them down I ran into an Australian band called ‘Unitopia’ who are 21st C contemporary. The breadth of musician ship, sheer invention and richness of the Album I have managed to acquire (‘The Garden’) is beyond coherent superlatives, It is a double album that has to be listened to to be believed. I guess everyone knows about them and i am just slow but what great discoveries all in one day.
The other great musical news is Stonefield have released a new single that is a precursor to their second album. Those girls are currently one of my favorite Oz bands.
I don’t know why I am raving on while waiting for the potatoes to cook but there you go.