Taking The Pearce

OVERHEARD along the street, in a tense conversation between a father and his five-year-old son: “Come here! Now, or you’ll get one in the face!”

Clearly we are an advanced species. Happily, what with peak oil and climate change, we won’t be a species at all for too much longer, which will at least save a few young children from being punched in the face.

Or am I worrying too much?

He is, after all, an odious little turd (the five-year-old, that is) who may not be game to tell his father to eff off, but that doesn’t stop him telling me.

In the north of England it was common to hear mothers threatening their children with: “Come indoors Albert, or I’ll tear off yer arm and belt yer wit’ soggy end.”

My own mother threatened on a regular basis to skin us alive. She bore no resemblance to Hannibal Lecter at all. She used to wrap us in large and soap-smelling breasts that were warm and cuddlesome and I never once remember thinking: “Uh-oh, this is where she gets the knife out.”

But I don’t know, “…get one in the face…” somehow has a different ring to it.

So does, “eff of, granddad” and on that score I can assure you, there were no 1950 equivalents.

Indeed, it was not uncommon to hear of someone appearing before the magistrate for using obscene language. But even the newspapers wouldn’t dare print what was actually said. (I suppose it might have been “Crikey!” but I doubt it).

I hear you say, “See, it wasn’t uncommon.” And I take your point.

But my point is that at least no-one approved of it. No one condoned it. It was punishable. Now it’s more common than full stops in The Bible.

So what’s changed?

We all used to do it. Even when I was at school we swore, but not in the hearing of our parents – indeed not in the hearing of anyone other than our mates.

Now the f-word is the language of families. It has replaced “er” in the lexicon of space fillers while you think what to say next. And in some families those spaces are, necessarily, very frequent.

But they are families!

I am certain this father and his little boy are very close. I have seen them in the park, kicking a football about (“Get up, you effin’ wooss!”) and clearly having fun.

If I so much as slapped his wrist for the insults he throws at me I’m certain I’d be getting several in the face from his father.

So what changed? More important – how do we get back to the 1950s?

Well, we don’t. That was then and this is now. The past is another country. They do things differently there. Incomprehensible as it may seem, when this revolting five-year-old is 65 he’ll be whinging about the appalling drop in social standards since he was a lad.

My case rests.

Clearly, before our standards have sunk that low we’ll be wiped out by plague, war, famine or from constantly being punched in the face by our parents.

I’m sorry.

And if you think it’s an issue for a white Australian to be sorry — you should try being a Pom. A long time ago, when I first started thinking about Aboriginal history and the need for an apology I even thought: not much to do with me really, I didn’t get here until 1989.

I overlooked the inconvenient fact that it was my lot that started it. Not only here, but in every continent on the planet with the exception of Antarctica, and that was only because they couldn’t find anything on it that was worth stealing — nor anyone to steal it from.

They weren’t kidding when they said that Queen Victoria was head of an empire upon which the sun never set. Once it had passed over England it was on its way to North America where it lit up the appalling treatment of American Indians, the barbaric practise of slavery in the Caribbean, then on to attempted disenfranchisement of the Maoris, the destruction of the Aborigines in Australia, slavery again throughout Africa, the attempt to subjugate China by introducing its people to opium, the servitude of India in support of the good old British cup of tea and then back across Europe to Britain.

Wherever it was daylight — there was a place where the British inflicted pain. And all in the name of making a quicker, more profitable dollar (or, in their case, pound).

And by the grace of a bit of hanky panky between my mother and father on the grass at Bushy Park (and nothing to do with God at all, who strictly forbade those kinds of going on outside marriage, thank you very much) I happen to be British.

That’s when it all begins to get complicated. I find it hard not be grateful for being British. I mean… it would be tricky to wish I’d been black in South Africa when even breathing the same air as a white person was considered an act of treason.

I have a had a blessed life. I have climbed into the sunlight kindly provided by Queen Victoria.

Pity I had to climb over hundreds of other countries, races and colours to do it.

And I am sorry. The only alternative to being sorry is to be NOT sorry, and how is that possible (John Howard, take note). But the big question now is — what am I going to do about it?

That’s the one I can’t answer. I can tell you what I am not going to do. I am not going to disadvantage my own children to pay my ancestors’ debt to the Aboriginal people. I am not going to live without dignity and pride because my forefathers lived at a time when others were forced to live without dignity and pride.

But what I will do — and do do — is my best in a small and individual way to see that the kind of world in which such horrifying abuses of entire races and nations is neither glorified nor admired.

And I do it by living my life in ways that make it clear I won’t be party to it. Ask my children, and my children’s friends, and my friends. They understand —we understand — that the rot starts with a society in which economic wellbeing justifies the means employed to achieve it.

America has been worshipping that principle —  just as the Poms did and do — since they discovered turkeys and cranberry sauce.

And here  in Queensland a politician said to me before the last federal election that the political manipulation, lies, distortions and general lack of accountability over the Wheat Board, Children Overboard and David Hicks were all forgivable because the Howard government had grown a strong national economy.

I bet Queen Victoria said that, too.

I CAN’T help feeling a certain pride.

Antisocial of me, I suppose, but I feel like one of Robin Hood’s merry men, cheating the Sherriff of Nottingham of his taxes.

So the twin cities owe the government $10 million, do they?

Or rather, we owe the government $10 million. You and me.

Well, not me. I haven’t been fined for anything, so it’s you! You must feel a bit like Ned Kelly, and that can’t be bad.

You and 160,000 other people. Come to think of, it’s unlikely that many five-year-olds have been caught speeding, or that many 90-year-olds have been drunk and disorderly. Not in public anyway. So if you cut out all the people under 16 (the legal driving age) and all the people over 70 (the age when you’d like to incur a fine, but you’ve forgotten how) then it’s 136,000 of us — of you — who owe the Queensland Government $10,106,132.

And 71 cents. What’s more I bet the bastards demand it right down to the last tarnished one cent coin, even though it’s no longer legal currency.

That’s $73 each; slightly more than the Townsville Bulletin quoted this weekend when it included babies in strollers and old people in hospital beds in its calculations.

Enough, said the Bullie, for three parking fines each.

But I don’t drive, so my wife must have six.

Aha!

I knew it. That must be the reason she left me: she knew I’d find out sooner or later.

In fact I urge you to ask your spouse tonight how much she (or he) owes in fines. And while you’re at it, ask them what for, too.

There will, of course, be some who are beyond the pale. Internet pornography doesn’t sound like a Ned Kelly thing to me. But an unpaid parking fine? That’s a definite case of the establishment forces grinding the faces of the poor. Not for nothing do we have a Premier (Anna Bligh) who is related to the notorious Captain William Bligh whose tyrannical ways led his crew, 220 years ago, to set him adrift in an open boat.

Frankly, I like the idea of owing the government $10 million. That strikes me as definitely being one of those uniquely Australian qualities that John Howard used to go on about: mateship, good humour — and not giving a brass razoo about people in uniform.

Trouble is, the world’s changed. You can no longer take your horse and hole up in the bush somewhere until someone accidentally mops up a tea spillage with your page out of the court records. They have computers; and long memories; and laws to help them.

People wait years to get their money in civil actions, but if you break the laws — even the parking laws — they’ll turn up with a piece of paper that entitles them to tip you out of your knickers, if that’s the only collateral you’ve got.

I see the potential for a new trend in oneupmanship, not unlike the modern rush to claim a convict in one’s ancestry.

Dinner table conversation will turn to outstanding fines. Guests will vie with each other for the biggest debt. They’ll be hitting policemen with their handbags just to secure pole position.

Funny really, how we search for villains in our past. If you live in Townsville you’re surrounded by them! Just so long as we keep our doors locked, and when we hear the troopers ride up, the coal scuttle will make a handy helmet.

DID you know they can grow grapes with alarm clocks in them?

Or maybe they’ve found a way to make liquid clocks, which they mix them into the wine.

So far, though, they have only perfected this technique with red grapes, or red wine, and they can only set the alarms for 3am.

I know this because it is one of the universal laws of the nature that if you drink red wine you will wake up at 3am. I’ve stopped being amazed by this. I accept it as one of the cruel contradictions that fate mocks us with, like the pleasures of sex being balanced with sleepless nights, teenagers and the wet patch.

You can drink the wine, enjoy the evening, embrace your friends — but you’d better be ready to mow the lawn when 3am arrives, because you won’t be going back to sleep.

When I first observed this phenomenon I thought, hastily, that it was just the effect of alcohol on my aging organs. But if that were true it would happen with white wine and spirits. Beer, too. But it doesn’t!

True, beer will wake me up every half hour from 11pm onwards, but that’s because there’s so much of it and my bladder can no longer cope. But by 2am the problem’s over and I don’t wake again until the crows start hobnailing across the roof.

But no matter if I start drinking red wine at 6pm or 9pm or 8am — at three in the morning the red wine fairy is prising my brain open with a tyre lever.

Nor does this mean I am hung over. I don’t have to drink the whole bottle (although it’s been known); one glass will do it.

I should add that I have deliberately drunk bottles of the stuff in the hope that I can render myself so comprehensively unconscious that nothing will wake me for several days, but it doesn’t work. I still wake at 3am — and then I really do have a hangover.

I have compared notes with other people — some of them 50 years younger than I. Same result.

Is it the same in France, or Italy, or anywhere that wine is produced?

I hope not, for their sake. The French drink practically nothing else and the thought of a whole nation waking in a bad temper at 3am and berating their spouses in French doesn’t bear thinking about.

I suspect not. I suspect the red wine alarm clock does not recognise time zones, which means that in Paris it will be clattering away on the bedside table of the French brain at 5pm, when they’re all too busy to notice.

Look, I am not complaining. I like red wine and I’ve grown used to being woken at 3am. I have adjusted my habits to accommodate very early mornings. And if I ever need to be anywhere at 5am in the morning then a red wine nightcap will give me a guaranteed two hours to brush my teeth, shave, and find a pair of socks with no holes.

I have an ordinary alarm clock, of course. But I don’t trust it. It has let me down in the past. True, user error has had a hand in its failure… but that’s my point… you can set the hands, but forget to arm the alarm. And it wakes me in much the same way a horse galloping through the kitchen cupboards would wake me.

Red wine, on the other hand, is foolproof. There is a certain quietness in the call of the red wine alarm… as if a bird is perched somewhere in your brain, tuning up in preparation for the dawn.

If the bloody thing would stop treating my mouth like the bottom of the birdcage it would almost be a pleasure.