Heat by Rob O’Neill

There’s been lots of talk over here about “downshifting”, moving out of high-pressure corporate jobs to adopt more “flexible” employment arrangements (read that as contracting). Telecommuting, usually from some central coast or Blue Mountain beauty spot, is growing fast.

It’s an international trend, of course, but given added impetus here by abundant lifestyle opportunities. Do some work, pop down for a surf, do some more work, go for a walk. It’s a winning formula. According to international pollsters telecommuting has doubled since 2000.

Anyway, I think the Girlie has been reading the papers, as she’s given Michel’s Patisserie the bad news: she’s only going to work on Monday evenings, having previously done Monday to Wednesday. Management took the news badly, of course. It is rumoured they considered closing down totally, such would be the impact of losing their star table-wiper. However, despite this strategic set-back it now looks as if Michel’s will soldier on, and the Girlie is already working on her new “flexible” lifestyle.

Rather than going surfing or out for a walk, this involves eating everything she can find in the house and then going to bed. Fair enough. That’s exactly what I would do. In fact it’s exactly what I did at her age.

This was my set-up: I lived in an old silver caravan half way down our garden in Ranui, in West Auckland. The caravan was parked under a willow tree, to keep the temperature just so in summer.

From my caravan I had a little intercom running up to the kitchen. When I woke up, say at three in the afternoon, I’d buzz on the intercom and ask for a cup of tea and toast … and maybe some biscuits, chocolate if there were any. A few minutes later, my Irish Mum, bless her cotton socks, would come wandering down the garden with a tray.

Then, ever so slowly, I’d ease myself into what was left of the day.

As with most strapping kiwi lads in the 1970s, it was my job to mow the lawn. Needless to say by the time I got up and ready, well, it was almost dinnertime, wasn’t it? Or I’d have to go out…

Come Saturday I’d blearily hear the lawnmower roaring closer and closer to the caravan and then feel it thumping angrily against the tin sides.

“Jeez,” I’d think, “keep the racket down, some of us are trying to sleep.”

My Dad would mow the tricky bits around the edge of the caravan, dwelling there noisily, much longer than he needed to. I’d eventually poke my head around the door and say something lame like: “I was just about to do that.”

Despite this, I certainly don’t make a practice of delivering brekkie or any other meal to the Girlie. She acts, as teens do, sullen and permanently hard-done-by. But the Girlie has a TV in her room, and a computer, and access to the internet, and a digital camera and a Walkman.

That’s serious cargo.

So don’t talk to me about hardship, Girlie. You don’t know how lucky you are. In my day we did it tough.

The dead hand of John Howard is causing some understandable wistfulness among liberal types here. Many are appalled at his new order of ultra-conservatism, Australia’s toadying foreign policy, measures that look designed to undermine state healthcare and to deliver monopoly to local media barons.

Above all is the sheer lack of leadership and inspiration.

But what strikes me is the imitation. Something happens in the US or UK and it immediately gets echoed here. Blair accuses the BBC of bias, the Libs attack the ABC. George Bush invades rogue nations, it suddenly becomes urgent for Downer to exert his power in the Pacific. The US backs away from multilateralism, so does Australia.

I’ve been reading Don Watson’s fabulous insider story of the Keating years Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, all 700 pages of it. Apart from being extraordinarily well written it’s a great primer on how this sorry state came to be. Keating of course lost to the “man with the airbrushed past”. He lost because both he and Labor had lost energy for the fight after four terms in office and because Howard managed to paint himself a fictional divide, between the “elites” and the “battlers”. He was on the side of the battler and, of course, everyone sees themself as a battler …

Keating was aloof, appeared arrogant, appeared too smart and disconnected and talked about the republic and APEC when he should have talked about jobs, education and health. He could easily connect with people but seemed to stop trying. It was just too much.

According to Watson, he wanted to destroy Howard, not just beat him. The hatred these two carry for each-other is visceral. It is when he is in a street-brawling mood that Keating is, oddly, at his most endearing, to me anyway.

Here’s Keating talking to Watson by phone from Israel in the lead-up to the 1996 election: “I think that little bastard’s done us some damage,” he said. “Ignore him,” I said, not wanting politics to spoil any miracles the Holy Land might work. “I’m not going to ignore him,” he said. “I’m going to drive an axe into his chest and lever his ribs apart.”

Howard is a famous nobody. Where others may try to develop character and conviction, he eschews both. If a policy is unpopular, he’ll drop it. If it’s popular, he’ll co-opt it. His backflips on GST, immigration, Medicare, French nuclear testing, native title, education vouchers and the republic are a matter of record and were patently obvious. For John Howard nothing is a matter of principle.

Keating tried to draw attention to these U-turns. He said Howard was trying to slide under the electoral wire. Watson writes: “He was, and he could be seen; and he knew he was and he knew he could be seen! And still they said they’d vote for him. And still one could not help feeling the media coverage contained the message that this was not gutless or duplicitous, but clever politics.”

Unbelievably Howard even went green for a few weeks.

Keating asked, now that Howard was all things to all people, “if next we would hear him say he was a Fabian socialist?”

But no one was listening.

And now it looks like Labor is just as gutless, only far less effective. Crean measures every word in a very faux Howard style. But that's not the way back for Labor. Focus group politics delivers sameness and what they need is difference and a leader of at least Keating's stature to carry the people with them.

One of those points of difference, it seems to me, is the ground of economic responsibility that the right is abandoning for big spending on defence. Make no mistake, this will have to be paid for eventually and it will be paid for out of social programs. Maybe that is the intention.

There have been several articles here recently about Gen-X resentment at the benefits us boomers received. They are now footing the bill. But if you want to see a prime example of boomer-led inter-generational theft, you don't have to look much further than the irresponsible spending of a John Howard or George Bush.

As for Keating, in the manner of retired Aussie PMs he still drops a rock in the pond every now and then. And welcome those rocks are.

Keating was often accused of arrogance, but his defence to this charge should be remembered: "The test of arrogance, Keating said, was how you treat the community."

Watson comments: "In the office and in the campaign he had treated the people conscientiously and with integrity. Howard had not released the policies by which the electorate might judge him. He had 'danced past the press gallery for a year.' That was arrogance."

I’ve been remiss in not acknowledging some of my correspondents and following up on an item raised earlier. You may remember I asked for details or confirmation of the New Diyala Bridge contract, an Iraqi reconstruction project supposedly worth a cool $50 mill to George’s business cronies.

Thanks to Richard P, Dave P and Chris M for further links, but they all seem to lead back to the same story. I’m almost ready to declare this a fake unless someone can come up with some corroboration.

Going, going …

Following Wednesday’s post Brendan S informed me Wellington has its own Arthur Stace: “Those with keen eyesight may notice the occasional ice block stick with ‘Brain Research’ scrawled on it. Sometimes ‘Brain Research’ is written in other places, but I've mostly noticed the ice block sticks. Could be an idea for our own sculpture? Maybe a large one in parliament grounds?”

What can I say to that? Kiwis are weird.

Mark E reckons there was an Aerobics Oz girl called Cheetah. Or was it a quirk of his adolescent memory?

I thought Cheetah was on Gladiators, Mark.

Paul C responded to my comments about the fake letters used to support allegations Iraq was trying to buy radioactive “yellowcake” from Niger: “I wonder if they included the paragraph, ‘and I need your help to transfer 1,000,000$ out of this country.’

Mark G filled in some details about Canberra I missed when I was down there: “You talked about the portraits but didn't mention the copy of the Magna Carta in the central hall. I think the APH's collection of exhibits is a good example of Canberra's weirdness.

“There are some nice pictures, a model boat, a few tea sets, and they blew about a million dollars on one of the better versions of the Magna Carta. I'm thankful you missed the civic artworks down Alinga Mall too, they're bloody embarrassing.

“If you ever come back there are three other good things I'd recommend. National Library (often has very good exhibitions), Questacon (fantastic for kids) and the High Court (nice just to walk through, easy to get to).”

Finally, several of you reacted to Granny’s orgasm, including Raewyn, who said: “Lovely column today - you really know how to hook the reader in to the story. Granny's line had me laughing out loud (which is a rare enough event).”

Aw, shucks. And it was all true!

Keep ‘em coming. We can see the site statistics growing nicely each month, but it’s even better to get your feedback.

By now half the world knows the story of Arthur Stace, the reformed bum, metho drinker and WWI veteran who roamed the streets of Sydney for 37 years writing the word “Eternity” in his own unique style. It was a one word message that stuck, to become immortalised on the Harbour Bridge at the millennium.

Well, there is now another message on the streets, all over the city centre, out to Newtown and beyond. The message is not quite as uplifting as Stace’s; you have to remember it, go home and plug it into your computer. It reads: “www.brokenman.net: Find your voice”.

When you plug it in you go on a journey, following various paths to, well, nowheresville. Along the way you encounter homilies such as “10 people that speak make more noise than 10,000 that are silent.” Apparently something wonderful will happen, but who knows what? The creator of the site has, however, managed to sell some CDs off the back of it. In all, not particularly spiritual, enlightening or even coherent.

Stace was practically illiterate. He heard the word that would become his signature shouted by a fundamentalist preacher.

“He repeated himself and kept shouting ‘ETERNITY, ETERNITY’ and his words were ringing through my brain as I left the church. Suddenly I began crying and I felt a powerful call from the Lord to write ‘ETERNITY’. I had a piece of chalk in my pocket and I bent down there and wrote it.”

It’s one of those cases where less is definitely more. You really don’t need to hear anything else. The power of the word, the beauty of the style in which it was written and finally the mystery and persistence of the writer’s mission became the stuff of legend, with documentaries and a flurry of newspaper articles leading up to Stace’s ultimate memorial on the bridge at midnight on 31 Dec 1999.

Much more coherent than “brokenman” Jordan and infinitely more amusing is John Howard’s web log:

"Canberra makes everything look lame. Except the ALP, who look lame in any state. Canberra just makes them look like, super-lame. I told Simon Crean that, and he was all, "Yeah? Well the Liberals are like, super-lame times one hundred!" And I'm like, "Then the ALP are super-lame times infinity plus one, no returns!" So he stuck his tongue out at me then ran off like a baby. He's so immature."

I Googled to try and find out who is behind the site but without luck. So then I dropped them an email.

And here's the reply:

"Rob,

My name is Ruth, I'm 17, I live in Melbourne, and I enjoy long walks along beaches and romantic candle-lit dinners. I have a dog I don't really like and a computer that I do like, but I'm fairly sure it's going to die soon. The dog, unfortunately, is in good health. My current ambitions include finishing year 12 without going on some sort of killing-spree through the school staff room, and to somehow utilise the technology used in anti-terrorist fridge magnets to repel scientologists from stopping me on the street to offer free personality tests.

As for media, yeah, I had a fleeting 15 minutes last year when the SMH did an article about the site (I think it's still available online if you chuck it in google). I think it got a write-up in a few other things, possibly the Bulletin... bah, I can't remember. Have also done a few interviews on radio about it. Haven't done much media stuff for a while, because clearly major world events like the break-up of J-Lo and Ben Affleck, and Shane Warne's sex life take precedence.

Hope that helps,

- Ruth"

I was hoping it'd be something as perfect as that.

This morning I had one of those moments, one of those profound moments when the spirit, poetry and everyday life come into alignment. Unexpectedly, you are transported onto a different plane, away from daily mundanities onto the plane of the highest senses.

The plane of art.

I didn’t have the correct change for the bus this morning so I walked out to the point in Drummoyne and caught the ferry instead. It was one of those beautiful Sydney winter’s days, the harbour flat as glass, the sun pouring down and the arch of the Harbour Bridge refreshed, renewed and once again providing the grandeur and beauty you’d long taken for granted.

The ferry zipped along, picked up another load of passengers at Milson’s Point and then turned for the Quay. We shot under the bridge and then slowed to drift up to the wharves.

That’s when it happened. James Joyce would have called it an epiphany, in his terms a moment of deep artistic insight. On the foreshore at Circular Quay, at 8.30, in the middle of the peak commuting hour, the girls from Aerobics Oz Style were stepping it out, out, out …

It must have been a shoot for their summer series, as the the silver bikinis shined bright in the morning sunlight. There it was: the sun, the harbour, the bridge, the Opera House – and the girls from Aerobics Oz Style. I was not only uplifted, I was transported back, back in time nearly twenty years to my little suburban nest in Avondale.

The Oz girls used to join us almost daily in our little home. The mother of my children, she who must be obeyed no longer, was constantly trying to keep in shape. I’d lounge on the couch and Vick would do whatever it was that people were doing that week to keep fit. Naturally there were always some vital accessories – one week it would be little rubberized weights, the next weighted wristbands, the next something else.

Remember Step?

To do step you had to have these foam rubber steps. We had those as well. You couldn’t possibly step from your back garden onto the verandah, that wouldn’t do at all. You had to have the foam rubber steps. And then there were the endless latest, newest exercise videos. In time, and quite a short time it was, these would all end up unused in the spare room.

But one thing that never changed, never went out of fashion, was Aerobics Oz Style. I never worked out to it of course. But this morning I realized the lasting impact the show has had. I could still remember the girls’ names - well, two of them anyway. There was Effie, the little blonde who never said anything, just jumped around and looked oh so cute. Then there was June. June was the stern, dark-haired leader. Her deep European accent demanded respect. She would have been just like a James Bond Euro-spy, except she was doing aerobics. June …

June ...

Anyway, both Effie and June are still on the job, so to speak. Twenty years on and still stepping it out, out, out on the foreshores of Sydney.

You need those kinds of constants in this tough old nasty old world.

Quite independently, I’ve had my first run for the year and switched to skim-milk lattes. They call them "skinnies" over here. I’ve had to retrain my barristas, who usually have a cup ready for me as soon as I appear around the corner from my office. They tell me this is the week: they’ve had five or six regulars switch to skinnies in the last few days.

You can feel it in the air. Summer’s on the way. It’s shape-up time.

Anyway, the awards are on. The Netguide Awards, that is, and there are all sorts of categories you might want to nominate your favourite website in, best website, best design, best personal blog ...