OK, *now* I'm back

Finally back from my Sydney trip—was at the eResearch Australasia conference for a week, and stuck around the most beautiful city in the world for the weekend. That kind of beauty, one should only consume in moderation, lest one start to take it for granted.

And end up a Sydneysider.

So I'm finally going to get back to the natural order of things; and I may even get back to blogging. As we say in Cretan dialect, now, να βρω το σειρά μου "I'll find my series". Where "series" is another word for "order", and Cretan switches the gender of the noun to make that differentiation clear.

I've found no hits for that expression online, which shows either that there isn't as much blogging in Cretan dialect as there is in Cypriot—or that the expression is only used in my mother's village.

Hyphenated Greeks in Movies and Television

An Anon commenter responds to my latest Will Be Offline notice with:

Don't worry too much, heartless Anglo. :'(

By the way, since you're an avowed Aussie multiculturalist (and because I *actually know*, rather than "eh know", nothing about Australia), could we have your opinion on the first piece here:

NEW AUSTRALIANS

Anon, you fail to let me know whether you're a Canado-Anon or a Greco-Anon (although the first line gives me a hint: this is about that .qc business, no? Attain sovereignty, and all objections are removed. Especially by ISO, who restricts two-letter suffixes out to politically sovereign(ish) entities.)

For that, Anonymous Yet Assiduous Reader, you get yourself yet another meandering and self-doubting rant on my identity!

I worry about the lack of structure of these postings in particular: they're unstructured because they are emotional, more than I expected. But I've embarked down this path of querying Quebec and Acadia, it's fair that I query myself too...

I have occasionally read Dean Kalimniou's columns (reposted from in the English-language supplement to Neos Kosmos, the local Greek paper). He and I do view the world differently. I may not be linguistically as assimilated as most Greek-Australians, but I am probably more culturally assimilated (not many Greek-Australians hang around in the Humanities, or the government IT sector).

I'll illustrate my bias with my reaction to one of his recent posts, condemning My Life In Ruins as Orientalist (from Ms Big Fat Greek Wedding):

The vast majority of the audience in my cinema was comprised of diasporans, mostly women. [...] They were also the ones that laughed loudest at the racist jokes that portrayed Greeks in the most negative fashions. For some reason, we love to hate ourselves, or rather the people who we represent the place where our parents came from, ever so slightly, and take pleasure in seeing them denigrated. I for one do not. Its time that our compatriot film makers are encouraged not to resort to cheap and tacky racist taunts and scatology when portraying their own kind, in the search for some non-existent approval by the dominant group.

I'm sure My Life In Ruins is dumb in ten different ways before breakfast, and I would probably loathe it, not least for its inane take on a real country with real people in it. And yet... I find the resentment of diasporans against the metropolis entirely understandable and inevitable (and as I've hinted, I carry some of it with me). It's not just "Orientalism", and that facile word lets you off the hook too easily when it comes to the ambivalence of the second generation towards the metropolis. We're not seeking non-existent approval by the dominant group. We poke fun at the metropolis because we are *becoming* the dominant group, we are assimilating. We are not Greeks, and Vardalos is not Dean's compatriot the way he would like her to be. That's that whole "seeing the world with Australian eyes" thing I go on about.

We are not yet Anglos either, which makes us... interesting. That's why we care about poking fun at the metropolis, rather than dismissing it as "Wogs begin at Calais". We are also still Wogs; the Chaos and/or Joie De Vivre of Greece shocks us all the more, because it's behaviour we find alienating, in a place we were told was home. (The "We" is rhetorical, and I have spent long enough in Greece to know better—though not long enough to feel differently.)

That's my take, not Dean's; Dean sees the world more as a Greek (to the extent of dropping words like "monophthalmic" for "one-eyed"), so I don't see the world the same way as him. But, to the article in question:

I ignored the Olympics, and I found sports events no real solution to the real problems Greece faces—but that's because I'm an ambivalent semi-outsider, and the Olympics did a world of good for Greek self-confidence. Australian journos did snipe at Greece, because they still buy into the old Orientalist tropes. Part of the reason is that they have access to the local replicas of pre-Western Greece. (That doesn't excuse it at all, but it did give them more ammunition.) Part of it was defensiveness about Sydney 2000 being The Bestest Olympics Ever. And yes, part of it was because they were pricks.

But Dean's real contention, essentialist ("inherent?!"), and tub-thumping, and not unlike what you'll hear in any number of Greek cafés, is that Howard unmasked the Real Australia of racism and intolerance, and that multiculturalism stuff had noone fooled.

All I can say is, there is a racist Australia (which certainly includes Greek-Australians: ask at that café what they think of the Indians, the Vietnamese or the Lebanese); and there is an urbane Australia. The Howard years allowed the multicultural discourse enshrined by the left to be questioned, and brought forth some clumsy moves by the government to assert cultural continuity with Anglo-Australia. (That inane citizenship test where you had to name prominent cricketers.)

But the urbane Australia suffered a set-back; it did not vanish. The new government is not quite going back to the orthodoxy (I'm thinking of Rudd's latest statements in the Australian History Wars). Even so, you don't kill cosmopolitanism off that easily, though you might make it an enclave. For my part, I have not been penalised in my professional or personal life for being swarthy. Granted, I'm not that swarthy. But then, in several ways, I'm not as assimilated as I make out to be either; my cultural predilections have been noted by my friends, they have been queried, but they have not been ridiculed. (*That's* multiculturalism for me.)

And on the other hand, the racist Australia had suffered a set-back; it had not vanished. Yelling "in this country we speak English", as Dean reports, is an attitude that had not died out in the '80s, it was just more delegitimated than it was in the '90s. And there are parts of Melbourne where even the Anglo kindergarten teachers don't dare say so. I can find plenty of people to ridicule my cultural predilections; I don't seek them out. I still believe that time is not on the side of those who would reject me; meantime, my friends, Greek or Anglo, are my friends because they don't reject me.

Dean is right that my story still isn't on the TV though. Neighbours and Home and Awayare still noxiously whitebread, especially when they try not to be. I tune that out too. Is that blinding myself? Perhaps; but is Neighbours really setting the agenda of Australian identity any more, the way it could 20 years ago?

Neighbours. Hadn't seen it in a decade. Happened across it a month ago. Sixteen-year old gets pregnant, boyfriend is unsure whether to commit (why you little shit...), they eventually get back together, they refuse to marry become of some inarticulate pseudo-feminist stance filtered through soapie conventions and hormones, then decide to get married spur of the moment without bothering to tell their folks.

I'm unassimilated enough in my value system that I was reaching for things to throw at the telly by this stage. The thing is, the script writers were trying to be inclusive to my socially repressive viewpoints, by having a Korean student as part of the gang voice her misgivings, and that "where she comes from", family is an important part of weddings.

And the idiot sixteen year old's idiot sixteen year old blond friend angrily dismissed her for being a stick in the mud, and that was the last you heard of that (until the parents accidentally come across them and look suitably crestfallen, roll credits).

I knew which side the scriptwriter was taking. I growled, and switched the telly off.

(Um... I've probably just revealed I would be a bad fit for Quebec—or indeed, for the modern post-industrial world. Thing is, if you have multiculturalism, you will have different views of culture. You don't get to impose uniformity. You do get to require more respect of difference than I've just displayed, I admit. :-)

Yet things do change. Ethnics were predominantly figures of fun in the '80s in the media. I was horrified to rewatch Kingswood Country last year: yes it was supposed to be pointing fun at the old lovable racist, and the show was making some effort to subvert bigotry by showing its ridiculousness; but anyone who calls his son-in-law "oy wog" is now so beyond the pale, he's in Siberia. And even in the '90s Wog craze, there was still a sense that Ethnics were Abnormal. The Anglo waitress in Acropolis Now was overtly the only Normal Person in the show, and even though I found the outlandish Greek stereotypes recognisable and hilarious, having the Anglo be the reference point bothered me. I think it bothered other people too, because the Anglo waitress soon became a caricature of her own (greenie, socially conscious).

To these instances I can only counter the past season of MasterChef Australia, with its Greek chef making nouveau-Greek fish soup, and its contestants including a Torres Strait islander without comment—who was free to be a lawyer and play golf without being made a curio or a token. I'm not saying it was Kumbaya Rainbow stuff, but it was an Australia more recognisable to me, one in which Anglodom was not the fixed reference point, even if it was still the default.

How could Anglodom be any sort of reference point in a cooking show anyway...

That Greek chef founded the Press Club restaurant a couple of years ago, btw. Which launched Greek Fusion cuisine. ("You will find traditional ingredients alongside modern gastronomic tricks, with culturally conventional recipes revamped for the 21st century palate. ") That, I venture to say, is a diaspora thing right there.

If my diet ever ends, I may even go there one of these nights. (5 kg to go...)

Those Who Have Bowed Down

This started out as a meditation on Acajack's take on assimilated Acadians. I will still do that meditation, because it's a rich vein to tap, but it's not where this post has ended up, because I'd also been discussing with a friend about community politics among Australian Aborigines, and there was some cross-fertilisation of concepts.

There is contentious debate, wherever in the world there are assimilating minorities, about who is allowed to call themselves one of the minority group. Those debates are particularly destructive with First Peoples, as in Australia and North America; but they play out wherever there's a contrast possible between degrees of assimilation. I have a Greek-American friend who migrated to Australia, and was crestfallen to find that "Greek" in Australia means something very different to "Greek" in America, and any claim to Greekness she had would be laughed off. (I would have laughed too, and that *does* tie in to Acajack's post, because it is all about degrees of assimilation. But this post is sidetracked enough already.)

The debates are destructive in small disempowered communities: they introduce dissension and hostility in a group that can least afford it, and that can gain most from a united front. Those debates are politically suicidal, but where identity actually comes from, they're rational: asserting your identity forcefully is the natural response when your distinct identity is under threat, and the target of your forcefulness will not primarily be the encroaching majority (who aren't listening anyway), but your fellows who have made a different accommodation than you have. They need to be combatted, because if everyone emulates them, your distinct identity is gone.

Hence the French-Canadian term vendus "those who have sold out", about Anglicised Canadiens, or the Greek term προσκυνημένοι "those who have bowed down [worshipped]", about Greek converts to Islam. The traitor is more of a threat than the enemy.

That's one discourse, and in some ways it's a quite rational discourse. And artificially grouping together sundered tribes, that have little in common any more, blows potholes in the common ground they are supposed to rally around. Their group identity becomes a transparent fiction. *All* group identity is a kind of fiction of course, but some fictions are too flimsy to rally around. Especially when they're divorced from the rallying points people do gravitate to.

It's politically and demographically expedient to have a Standard Gaelic, for instance. But out on the Hebrides, where their dialect is nothing like it, promoting a foreign and artificial-sounding Standard Gaelic is going to make people stop speaking any Gaelic even faster. (Yes, yes, I've read THAT book on language death.) That's a counterproductive attitude; but it means that if you're going to defend an identity, politics dictate that you do nation-building—and get people to believe that Standard Gaelic is their language after all.

But the discourse of asserting purity and dismissing perceived traitors is completely inaccessible to a majority group, because their identity is not under threat—so they can't grok the responses of those who feel it is. Well, I shouldn't say that: sometimes they can—because identities are multiple enough that you can belong to both a majority and a minority group. Anglo-Canadians still feel threatened by the US, for instance, so they should be able to do some analogy between themselves and Quebec. But any analogies between US::Canada and Canada::Quebec are going to be halting, and people aren't good at shifting perspective at the best of times.

The other problem with a purist identity discourse is, it's no way to run a country. A political entity of any size has to rein in the will of its constituents to go their own way, and stay true to their own separate identities. Which is why nation-building explicitly sets out to counter it with its own discourse. It proclaims that you are not Virginians or Rhode Islanders, but Americans; not Arvanites or Graikoi, but Hellenes. And prioritising a national identity over regional identities is a move to do away with regional identities and their purisms, and substitute them with some sort of melting pot—whether those regional identities are just geographical, or cultural, or ethnic.

Often enough, of course, that nation building does not end up suppressing the majority regional culture in the stock of the melting pot, but reasserts it. I used obscure terms to differentiate between ethnic Greeks and Greek nationals just then, and there's a reason they're obscure: the discourse of Greek nationalism has been ethnic, and tied to the lineage of the Glorious Ancestors. The Albanian and Aromanian speaking Greek nationalists accepted that discourse as much as the ethnic Greeks did, if not more.

Which is why I only know of one person—an ethnic Aromanian and decidedly pro-Greek intellectual—who did use that distinction to argue that Aromanians could be just as Hellene as Graikoi could. In mainstream Greek discourse, Graikoi aren't the majority of Hellenes: there are just Hellenes. That discourse has succeeded, and there are justifications for it; but it doesn't allow you a language of civic nationalism, it doesn't highlight that national identity is a construct and not a gene sequence.

So there are constraints and expediencies, and there is submerging and repression, and there are melting pots and arguments. And where am I going with all this?

As a matter of naive and majoritarian faith, I still think that all other things being equal, it is better to wed than to divorce, to join together rather than to stand apart, to build rather than dismantle. As a matter of reaction, I also think that it is better to respect difference than to whitewash it, to integrate than to assimilate (though some degree of assimilation will and must happen), to build a nation on norms and quirks rather than bloodlines and cults.

There are problems aplenty with that faith. For starters, the marriages are not the outcome of teenage infatuation (not that that guarantees much of anything); they're typically arranged marriages. So you don't fall into them "naturally", and one arrangement is not inherently more defensible than another. There is a selection of groups you may align with; but that choice is never voluntary at a mass level. It is driven by habit and precedent and convenience, and it is open to persuasion and counterpersuasion. So "Today, I and my neighbour choose to be Panamanian" is nonsense. But "Today we as party leaders choose to be Panamanian, and will convince our neighbours that's a good idea" is commonplace.

(Cf. "Today, we as the local landlords choose to be Bulgarian or Greek, and will convince our serfs that's a good idea." I *think* Karakasidou's is the book that was claimed in.)

All other things being equal, it is better to wed than to divorce; but all other things never are equal. If the marriage is abusive, you do not perpetuate it. All identity of a group larger than one person are marriages, and soft-focus the differences, and if any marriage is to work, some suspension of disbelief is needed. But soft-focussing the differences without whitewashing them (and embarking on an abusive relationship) is hard, and it needs leadership and compassion and its own mythology. I don't know how you promote a Standard Gaelic or Irish, which are artificial creations (as any standardised language is), without killing off East Sutherland Gaelic or Munster Irish, which are real inherited languages—and get in the way of the standardised language.

In the same way, I don't know how you promote a Canada which encompasses both French and English identity, and not end up with a Canadianness as vacuous as "citizen of the Universe"—as Angry French Guy got an anglo musician to say. (I'll note that the musician was only slightly more enthusiastic about being Quebecois: his identity assertion was primarily as a Montrealer.) I sympathise with the effort, I think it a noble thing to try; but it is somewhat deracinated, and that makes it harder to arouse passion around.

How does this uxorious metaphor apply where people are thrown together? It is better, at least politically, for traditional people X to build coalitions and to be liberal about who they accept as their in-group, than to expend energy splitting and recriminating. For utilitarian reasons if nothing else. I recognise it's very easy for me to say that, when identity is about pride and fear and struggle; and it's not like I was enthused at the prospect of calling someone Greek who didn't speak a word of it. But expediency has its place.

It is better to have an Australia than a New South Wales and a Victoria warring over protectionism. It would be nice to have an Australian federation including New Zealand, which was a prospect a century ago; but the nation-building has gone ahead now, and putting that back together is pointless. There are, after all, limits in how wide a group marriage you can have, and couples do drift apart.

I think it is better to have a Trudeauist Canada than an Anglo-Canada and a Quebec. In some vague, idealistic, shared-history, "we're all in it together" kind of way. Or failing that, as a respectful marriage of convenience (see Risque, Beau.)

But enough nation-building has happened in Quebec already that it is not compelled to invest in Canadian identity; and Anglo-Canada isn't willing to get that its identity has to be diluted to accommodate Quebec. It's like East Sutherland Gaelic vs. an artificial Standard Gaelic, in a sense: why should I give up my real, rooted identity as an Anglo-Canadian, to become a vague Trudeauist citizen of the world? I think the vague Trudeauist thing is noble, I think it, in its multicultural manifestation, the ideal still for my own country. (The one I'm typing in, not the one I did my dissertation about.)

In fact, when I was talking to my friend about the usefulness of national myths of damper, she justly refuted me—the pioneer mythology was a narrative of dispossession; and she advocated the song I Am Australian ("We are one, yet we are many") as the proper rallying point for a multicultural Australia.

But that kind of vision is a hard sell, and it takes real work to build, and it must remain vigilant against the tyranny of the majority as much as the splintering of the minority.

And that's as coherent as I can get about why I don't think Quebec should secede. It's not very coherent or compelling, and it's incoherent after a couple of months of trying to listen. But like I said elsewhere, even if the secession happens, Quebec will not expel Anglophones (though many will leave town), and there will not be a purge of Franco federalist collaboratist traitors (nope, not a fan of Jean Naimard). Difference will still have to be engaged with and can't be effaced, because purist discourses are no way to run a country, whether that country is the Dominion of Canada or the Republic of Quebec.

At least, no way to run a North American country. Or mine.

(The one I'm typing in, not the one where I got a taste for lakhanodolmadhes from. Identity is a complicated thing.)

Australian Secessionisms

Léo Langlois reasonably asks why on earth I'm obsessing about Quebec (and now Acadia). That's still a future post, though I've dropped hints already in comments.

John Cowan reasonably asks why I'm defending federalism, and have I not had dark thoughts of seceding from the Commonwealth of Australia, like New Yorkers had of joining the United States of Canada in 2004.

First, given my last post on Acadieman, the "United States of Canada" line just confirms the old fears of "Les Américains entament l'invasion de l'Acadie" (Ser. 3 Ep. 11: "Loyalist—Préserver. Acadien: ANNULER!"). I know noone was entirely serious about the USC (were they?), but I'm curious how the Canadians, fresh from their Molson's Beer Declaration Of Independence, took the whole shtick.

But be that as it may, a post on Australian secessionism.

Have I hankered to secede because wowsers have impinged on me? (With kudos for John using the right word "wowsers", of course.) I haven't, because to the extent that wowsers impinge on me, there's enough of them locally already, that I don't get to secede from. The geographically delimited wowsers have wanted to secede from me, which makes more sense. And the combination of natural resources and geographical distance has made Alberta-On-The-Indian-Ocean want to secede even more. Although only one clown has managed to set up a souvenir shop micronation.

To take things in order. And a warning in advance: this post starts with a defence of porn, and ends with a craving to decapitate monarchs. Heady stuff.

A wowser—Australian slang for a censorious moralist, a stick in the mud—is what at least some Australians would call the instigators of a police raid against the only porn studio I am aware of in Melbourne (complete with Wikipedia Cabal mediation), down self-consciously bohemian Fitzroy way. (And as you'd expect, with a very Fitzroy take on porn: the producers at least proclaim they're pro-women, although what the consumers make of it is out of the producers' control.) And yes, I know some would not call it wowserism at all, and that's actually the point of why I bring it up. The kicker is, said instigators are the Murdoch Press.

Let us assume that police raids against porn studios are the most pressing concern Fitzroy faces in this present day. Actually, with the feds confiscating books on jihad from the University of Melbourne library, and the Great Firewall of Australia still on the agenda (and including said Fitzroy studio, as well as random dentists' sites), you'll pardon my free speech absolutism for seeing it as a syndrome of something larger.

Assuming then that a bunch of Fitzroy porn consumers and free speech zealots will opt out of the Commonwealth over this... exactly who gets to secede? Not the State of Victoria, which is not restricted to Melbourne. Not the Far Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne, which have their own Bible Belt going (and whose less Far Eastern counterparts only recently repealed Prohibition). Does this end up being the Republic of Inner Melbourne? Is it delimited by the Zone 1/Zone 2 public transport boundary, or the furthest reach of trams into suburbia? I could easily end up having to show a passport to go to work each morning.

The absurdity is, a culture war issue, such as "wowser" implies, is not something to secede over, because the subcultural units at war could never work as political units. The Republic of New York City article John linked to didn't quite know what to do with Upstate New York either, but it knew it couldn't count on Upstate's support. Or rather, the culture was has to coalesce into a widespread distinct regional identity, the kind that ends up being a distinct ethnicity. Fitzroy porn, or free speech absolutism, is not the issue that's going to make latte-sipping cosmopolitan perverts a distinct ethnicity. At least, not yet.

And it's not the culture war itself that made the Yankees yearn for countersecession in 2004, but the political consequences of the culture war. A wowser—Australian slang for a censorious moralist, a stick in the mud—is how a New Yorker must think of the culturally conservative South. Especially as it has held the North to electoral ransom in recent elections. Australia's Deep South is the Deep North of Queensland. And in fact elections have been decided in Queensland over the past decade. Queensland saw the defeat of Keating, the flourishing of Hanson, and—through demographical changes parallel to what's now happening in parts of the US South—it's also seen the election of Rudd, himself a Queenslander. So there was an excuse for thinking of cutting Queensland loose. And Australia, like Canada and the US, was begotten as a federation because its colonies just plain did not like each other enough to begin with.

Yet there has been no ground for separatist sentiment to prosper in NSW and VIC. We're too arrogant to form the United States of New Zealand, and between us, we're still running the country; why would *we* secede from anywhere? More importantly, the heterogeneity of Australia has been substantially defanged. Melbourne and Sydney resent each other mildly, but noone I know goes so far as to say they're New South Welsh first, Australian second. And even though the states here retain decision-making powers, they don't have much of a revenue basis (though a spectacular constitutional powergrab by the Feds during World War II), and not much of a pull against Canberra.

Our nation building and mythology has been quite thoroughly and successfully centralist: few Australians I know could articulate an emotive defence of federalism. We have State cricket, but pay much more attention to international cricket. We have some state rivalry in football and rugby; in fact State rivalry has been conscripted as an acceptable alternative to ethnic rivalry in soccer. So we are allowed to yell at South Australians in the stadium. In the case of rugby between NSW and QLD, state rivalry is thoroughly institutionalised in the State of Origin Rugby whatever-it-is. (It's North Of The Border; I don't know how it works.) But think of ourselves as something essentially different? I'm not seeing it.

Even though we don't fully get each other ("It's North Of The Border; I don't know how it works"), and we fall back on the shorthand of stereotypes. Tasmania: inbred. Adelaide: boring. Canberra: civil servants (and boring). Sydney: flashy. Melbourne: morose. Brisbane: parvenue. Perth: ... very far away (and parvenue). Darwin: very far away and hot.

(And screw you Baz Luhrmann, for calling a movie about what one British aristocrat makes of the very far away and hot Darwin "Australia", because a British aristocrat's view of the homeland of Crocodile Dundee is still supposed to be the definition of my country somehow. What a drongo. But then, after the forehead-impaling folly of Moulin Rouge!, I shouldn't have expected any, you know, profundity in his construction of Australia.)

So we all do stereotypes, and Baz Luhrmann picks antiquated stereotypes to generate US box office buzz. Because we ignore each other behind a wall of stereotypes, we also don't know all of each others' stereotypes. I quizzed a friend what Brisbanites thought of Melbourne: if VIC is "Mexico" to NSW, and NSW is "Mexico "to QLD ("south of the border", and that not in a respectful way), then what's Melbourne to Brisbane? Now, Brisbane is demographically changing, as a big city, and my friend is at the vanguard of the latte-drinking movement (he's lived a while in Melbourne); so he may have a skewed perspective. But according to him, Melbourne to Brisbanites is a far-away place with good shopping and fashion, and doesn't figure in their daily conscience the way NSW might.

So if Brisbane = Toronto, Sydney = Montreal, and Melbourne = ... Milan. Well, that beats Sydney = San Francisco, Melbourne = Toronto.

Nation-states are heterogeneous, however they might have homogenised their ethnicities. So long as there is a majority anything in the nation state—even if they're as identical as the Anglo cultures of the Australian states seem from a far distance: even then, someone is not going to do as well out of the deal. The aggrieved party is always the one who wants out of the marriage.

I only know of two wanting-outs in Australia that have been articulated. The first is culture-based: not Queensland, because South-East Queensland is rapidly becoming NSW in its culture and politics: Brisbane is a big city. It's North Queensland seceding from those liberal cosmopolitan urban bits of Queensland. The issue there hasn't been porn (that I know of); the big issue I'm aware of, because it affects my work, is that North Queensland is forcing South Queensland not to adopt Daylight Saving. (And there the issue is latitudinal more than it is cultural.) But North Queensland is finding it increasingly difficult to make common cause with The Big Smoke. The main stumbling block for them (apart from the small matter of the implausibility of the whole thing) is that they can't agree on which small regional North Queensland town would be their capital.

The other is secessionism in Western Australia. WA is a very, very far way from the Eastern Seabord. They've long resented their money and their authority going eastward; in fact there was a referendum on independence in 1933. Which won! The catch is, the state government which was going to enact the independence was simultaneously voted out of office; and because Australia western and eastern both still kowtowed to London, London successfully stalled the whole thing until the secessionists gave up.

Now WA has even more money, and still resents the money and the authority going eastward. So it's an Alberta kind of secessionism, certainly not a Quebec kind. It isn't being articulated as an explicit move to cut ties quite yet; but the once I went to Perth, I was struck that there were the trappings of a separate state identity, something now marginalised elsewhere in Australia. The black swan of the WA state flag was everywhere; I don't think most Victorians even know what their state flag looks like. (And with the minor difference between the state and the federal flag, I don't blame them.) Bookstores had West Australian authors sections; bookstores in Fitzroy would die laughing at the notion of a Victorian authors shelf. There is a Buy West Australian campaign; and Dick Smith had just fallen afoul of it because his jams were made of WA fruit, but were bottled Back East.

This floored me, because I didn't see the cultural underpinning of any sense of separateness. Well, except for driving in Perth. The fact that all the drivers around me were 10 k under the speed limit in a highway was very much a cultural identity issue to me; and as I was driving, I was constructively urging my fellow Australian drivers to adopt a common, strong national identity, by driving closer to the national speed norm.

NICK: Get with the f**ing programme already! Jehosaphat! I can't believe I'm doing 50 in a 60 zone! I CAN'T BELIEVE AN URBAN HIGHWAY IS LIMITED TO 60 KM/H!

Luckily for me, my fellow Australian drivers could not hear a word I was speaking. Maybe because I was speaking Spanish to their Portuguese, or whatever analogy they use for Back Easterners. Or maybe because my window was rolled up...

It may be secessionism in the water that gave rise to the Hutt River Principality. I checked out the origins of this WA micronation, and was roused to a familiar fury of centralist indignation; so it's good to know my attempts to understand What Quebec Wants have not blunted my core political values. Whatever the rights and wrongs and struggles and intricacies of Quebec, it sullies sovereigntism to mention it in the same breath as this jumped up clown, who has proclaimed himself a separate country so he'd get out of paying his revised wheat quotas, and styled himself a monarch cos you can't arrest monarchs, quotha, that's treason by an 1495 law.

YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME ABOUT TREASON, YOU LIBERTARIAN OAF? And while you're at it, why dontcha ask Charles I how well that 1490s law on lèse majesté helped him out.

Australia is not sending in the troops, I'd like to think, because the jumped up clown, as a tourist attraction and printer of fake money, generates more tourist income for the Commonwealth than would be squandered by organising a raid on the middle of nowhere to recover AUD 5303.72.

But the spitting in the eye of the People of Australia is there, even if the ABC journos think it's so terribly cute. I want to bring in the slippery slope of any number of Australian laws and treaties this guy can violate because he's ignoring Australian law. (Gitmo on Hutt River. There's a reason Gitmo was in Gitmo and not the States to begin with.) But the flaunting of the Australian Taxation Office is enough to get my goat already. The man is setting his souvenir shop up as a TAX HAVEN! He's forcing my government's ambassador in Dubai to waste time clarifying that no, the jumped up clown isn't actually a country! ARGH!

And the pièce de resistance, the bit that wants me to don commando gear and go shoot up a souvenir shop in Middle Of Nowhere WA: the guy still professes loyalty to Elizabeth II. So you diss my country, you diss my government, you diss the founding myths of damper and Gallipoli and the inspirational fiction of a classless society (A MONARCH! He styles himself an ABSOLUTE MONARCH!) ... and the core of loyalty you have kept with you, the one thing you would not sacrifice on an altar of fake postage stamps and constitutional crotchet-work, is allegiance to... the Queen of Fricking England.

If that's not an argument for an Australian Republic, I know not what is. And the refusal of the Australian Taxation Office to collect taxes from the jumped up clown, since he declared "war" on Australia (TREASON! Mother-loving TREASON!!!), or of Australian officials to detain him at the airport when he fronts up with his own crayon-sketched passport... is almost reason enough to secede from Australia itself. Yes, I know it doesn't actually matter. Yet in a sense, if a country is to present itself as something worth fighting for... it really does matter.

Apparently the legal black hole which has prevented the troops going in in the first place has a lot to do with the misaligned way WA was set up as a colony to begin with. Yeah, thanks a bunch, colonial administrators from 200 years ago.

... Maybe that's why I like Quebec in the end. They don't do libertarianism either...

Bid Time Return

The cleanout of my books complete, I'm slowly trying to rearrange them into place in my garage. There's a couple of duplicates that have been mercilessly discarded—I didn't need both the 3rd and the 5th edition of O'Reilly Javascript book, or two Perl in a Nutshell books. One might further argue that I don't need either, now that noone in IT uses dead trees. I'm still somewhat sentimental about these things, even though on the few occasions I have a Perl query (and, mercifully, even fewer occasions for a JavaScript query), I google it—or use the Perl Books on CD that came with the O'Reillys.

I'm also getting rid of my high school violin. Eventually. Don't want to discuss it. The baglama stays; the fact that I don't play it either is overall less traumatic.

One of the books ferried across Saturday for hosting in the garage is one of two or three hardcovers my Dad bought me when I was seven. Bid Time Return, by Fairlie Taylor (née Addie Fairlam). The book was the childhood reminiscences of young Addie, born 1887, written when she was close to 90; they're engagingly wide-eyed, and describe a very different world to anything I'd ever experienced. I read the book when in Launceston, in I guess 1978. Eight years later, in a novelistic coincidink, I was living in the same Cheltenham that Addie grew up with. Well, it wasn't the same Cheltenham; our street was market gardens until the 1980s, Southland Shopping Centre has taken out a huge chunk of the suburb, and of course the cityscape is nothing like what Fairlie was describing. No horses, no hats, no pothooks as the introduction to handwriting, no Protestant–Catholic hostility, no thirteen year old girls running auction houses.

But Charman Rd is still there, with the railway station even older than her—even if her father's auction house (and brother's photography shop) aren't. (And even if, because of Southland, the shops around the railway station tend not to do as well.) The cemetery behind the railway station is still there—now, according to some high school kids' history assignment, housing Fairlie as well. Cheltenham Primary School is still there, and for all I know so are the tree stumps they'd play around.

I never loved Cheltenham, despite living there for twenty years all up: it was a dormitory suburb, not enough going on, the action was in the City and Carlton and Northcote. And heaven knows, I couldn't write 170 pp on my childhood at twenty years' remove, let alone seventy. Nor am I any better off for writing a sequel: I have no memory and no attention span and no accretion. And of course I can no longer even read a book all the way through: page, page, skip 10 pages, skip 50, back 30, and completely missed how exactly that Callum chap got to be the lost love of her life. (Things got telescoped once she got to teacher's college.) Still. Would that I could write as vividly and engagingly at 37, leave alone 90...