Suburbia

In my entirety, I have never tolerated spending long periods of time in transit – I lived 3 minutes from primary school, 6 minutes from high school, 7 minutes from university and now 9 minutes from work. Faced with the choice of spending additional minutes swearing at my piece of Korean shit versus having a morning bat or maybe even something better, on an especially fortuitous morning, I know full well what I would chose and have chosen. I’ve recently returned from Mount Lawley to the West, just to pass through and say hello to a few old ghosts still haunting their half hectare dominions. What’s odd is that I seem to not miss the place a dot, save for the beach which is too difficult to access sans the piece of Korean shit.† Looking around, I feel a palpable sense of monotony, what with the L-platers and their X5s, that will never make it beyond the West’s major arteries, and the bored housewives whose sub acute depression is manifested daintily over burnt coffee and idle chatter about their children’s achievements in just about everything from hopscotch to brokering peace in the Middle East. Today, the talk is still all about ‘my school’ and some concerned parents amongst the 9 million visitors have noticed that little Johnny at the local public school can in fact add, divide and spell better than the twelve-thousand-dollars-per-year year little Johnny down the road. This is quickly followed by scoffs and smirks – Perth has a provincial culture, a status quo that should be/will be/must be maintained, true as losing your virginity to the daughter of a woman who fucked your father in the 80s, and whilst they did it after the America’s Cup win of 84 and you did it after a night at Club Bay View, all of you probably used the same park in Claremont, just 20 years apart. Insinuate what you will but that’s pretty standard round these parts. Because it’s never been about what you know. Knowing stuff might help, but really you don’t need to know shit to get your B.Comm at UWA. Knowing people might help though. That way you can source a few million in seed capital at age 25 and go peg a piece of the East Pilbara then bail once your institutional investors are on board. At this point the life assessment could read something like this;

Money? Tick.

Class? Class in the Australian suburbs is an odd concept – wearing a collared shirt to Club Bay View? TICK.†

Culture? “We go to Melbourne….to watch the Aussie Open and for the GFD – that’s Grand Final Day. Occasionally, we go to the cinema….but Australian films are all so negative, all they talk about are heroin addicts and Aboriginal stuff”

“But honey Samson and Delilah is so utterly rapaciously tragic lets go buy some Aboriginal Art from Kunnanananara and hang it above the mantle to show that we support uplifting the original Australians from the squalor that they live in and to prove that we are not… no… never have been and never will be racist. In fact lets go to the Kunnanananara so we can introduce our kids to some Aboriginies from that great film with Our Nicole…..because I’ve never seen one here in the West?”

I suppose Gosnells and Lockridge are somewhat far from the West but their closer than the East Kimberley. As for the collared shirt…how to differentiate from the dreaded Cashed Up Bogan? For in both CUBII (pleural of cashed up – the bogan and the broker) the same paucity of ideas, the same children on Adderall three times a day to ‘keep them stable’, the same passion for hyper-inflated property prices such that a new tertiary graduate is priced out to Bullsbrook, amongst the pine plantations and the trout farms.

There is no development of real social capital, for to build this requires interaction, for the worlds to crash against each other, to mixandmatch, just as Little Richard and Diana Ross resulted in Michael, and a bunch of Italians circa 1900 effectively created Fremantle + surrounds and then mimicked it 50 years later in Mount Lawley. Or perhaps Fremantle was the mimickee, Subiaco having been created by a Sicilian monk in 1851? But in the West, how to meet your neighbor when his front doorstep is a short hike away and when you finally get there you find that he actually lives in Singapore and bought his property as a tax deduction in 1993? When your idea of where you live extends only to the block of land which you physically occupy and control, merely perpetuating the very isolation and loneliness that JD Salinger talked about some 60 years ago. How does it differ from those gigantic swaths of land between Joondalup and Mandurah, where trains embark every 15 minutes on their 100 kilometre journey,
the inhabitants of which we dismiss as the blow-ins? I’m not sure it does – everyone just soldiers on in blissful ignorance, grateful that the land of plenty has afforded them so much fucking space.