Professor Marcia Langton ... photo National Portrait Gallery
Dreams to end a total bastard of a year with a glimmer of some vital ethical intellectual revival
by PHILIP WHITE
Having woken to the news
that Marcia Langton and Dave Graney were the new chairholder and managing
director installed to save and restore what had degraded to become The Australian's Bogan Commission and
that all the refugees tortured in our Gulags were coming to live here, with
love, pronto, I would bung on some Thomas Bloch playing Benjamin Franklin's
glass armonica: music as magical and ice-pure as the snow in the Exmess myth.
Dave Graney, from his blog
I'd start with Bloch, or even better, William
Zeitler playing his arrangement of Tchaikowsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy on the glasses with a bass clarinet
and a harp massaging the silences: it eases its dainty
calm into the mind like a real slow sunrise.
In the fridge would be the
big bowl of ripe clingstone peaches I'd peeled and sliced the night before and
left to soak in a whole bottle of Oakridge Blanc de Blanc 2012 fizz with half a
cup of kirsch. I would take from the freezer the sorbet I'd made from Jansz
methode Tasmanoise Rosé and put a goodly scoop of that atop a serve of said
peaches and deliver them back to Sheba still a-slumber in the royal cot with a
bloody great tumbler of Krug Clos Du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 2003.
this bed or that; doesn't really matter ... you waste a lot less space in this one on the veranda at George's seven star in the Flinders ... late correction: make that seventy skrillion stars
All the caffeine required
would be an espresso castrato - smaller and even more concentrated than a ristretto:
all you get is the squeak.
Then I'd nuzzle in there and have another wee snooze
until that soupçon of coffee kicked in.
You know that precious
piece of downy neck just below the ear? I'd put my greedy hooter in that
blessed scented hollow and breath myself to heaven.
About elevenish it'd be
one thin slice of rye toast with a fold of smoked salmon and some tiny capers
in sour cream and a sprig of fennel.
Before we moved to some Vivaldi Glorias in
the sonic division I'd bang on a dash of
news on the new ABC to hear that the Abturn Bullbott mob has resigned and Pat Dodson is the Governor-general of the new republic.
To hear Senator Pat Dodson's maiden speech in the Australian parliament click here
They will have dumped the
dumb old bully-boy two party adversarial system in favour of a place where
there's no goddam fence to keep us out and people actually discuss and debate
the tricky issues at hand.
Just like grown-ups.
The Langton-Graney regime
by then will have adapted the new ABC factchecker division to monitor every
word our representatives utter in search of your actual, well, truth, the
results of which anybody will get on their cobweb devices, like as immediate as
can be.
Tractor drivers growing
and harvesting the nation's food would hear this live on the renewed Radio
National AM and shortwave wireless show without downloading fucking podcast
nonsense or carrying a great TV screen around on their shoulders on the
harvester to hear the digital ones and zeroes.
The parliament will have
been moved to Alice Springs, the fresh national capital.
We'd have a new flag: deep
blue sky with the Seven Sisters replacing the Crux Australis in the top half;
red Uluru smack-bang in the middle and a bottom half of a colour somebody who
can see colour chooses, maybe with some speckles to reflect the lively desert. I'd
leave that to the Papunya ladies. The graphics on the new nanofibre flag will change
according to one's location, mood or direction.
A cherry or two would fit
nicely in there before the godchildren and nephews and nieces and all their kids
arrive to fill the joint with chaotic glee and laughter.
Speaking of joints, I'd
roll a racehorse special and share it with Her Maj somewhere out the back. Then
lunch would be cool crudites and some cold smoked leveret and a glass of my
landlord's Yangarra Roussanne, after which the kids would peel open their
gifts: a ukelele with a Snark tuner, a Lee Oskar blues harp and a good book for
each of em.
You'd turn the other music
off about now while they learn how the Snark works. Don't let em unwrap the
harmonicas til they all get home.
As the arvo creeps across
it'd be thin slices of pink steak and horseradish with a '71 St Henri from a
magnum so there's enough for all the peerie bairns to have a wee educative sip
and a nice lie down.
Auntie Tilly would then
produce her proper Exmess cake and I'd use that as the best possible excuse to
open that '27 Warre's vintage port that's been winking at me for 45 years and
put it up with a ripe Stilton or Blue Wensleydale and a spoon.
By then it'd be time to
pull out the old Gibson and set back on the randa with Kelly Menhenett, Mick
Wordley, Joe Manning and The Yearlings and work our way through stuff we'd all
written: take it in turns; one song at a time while we finish that magnum. If
it's done, it'd be the perfect opportunity to pop the cap on that last bottle
of the Wendouree Cabernet 2013, the most mind-blowing Australian red of recent
years. Which I daren't review, on account of presenting Lita and Tony Brady a
gift on the occasion of their Wendouree temple's 100th vintage nearly seventeen
years ago.
photo Doug Govan
The gift? I promised never
ever to mention Wendouree again in the newspaper. Their response was perhaps
the most gratifying I've ever had in exchange for giving something away. No
other winemakers short of abject criminals have shown such savour at a guarantee
of privacy and a future of no grovelling nonsense in the press.
Years later, when the dying
newspapers were bearing their dry ribs to the final desert sun, I asked Brady if
it were appropriate to mention his business on the new gadget called The Internet.
He drew a breath, cast his
keen gaze at an horizon only he could see, and said "Well Philip, you
would be the best man to make that decision."
Tony Brady at the door of the meditation/retreat/slumber chamber in the new toilet block he built at Wendouree ... photo Philip White
A snooze would then be
appropriate while the guests and rug rabbits wended their way through the roos and koalas back
down the old dirt track to what they call civilisation.
That next calm slumber
would fall heavy but soft and velvet, like a musk and lavendar-scented proscenium
curtain.
Ooooh. Eeeew.
A lazy olive might be the
thing to savour if wakefulness intrudes: a bowl of those tiny Koroneiki jobs
that Coriole grows. You'd hardly be hungry for more substantial solids.
Proby nothing else would
be needed then but a little more cot. Lie back and hear that the powers that
were had banned forever the manufacture and sale of all war machinery and
equipment, weapons and whatnot. All that lucrative evil.
Anybody in a uniform or a
business suit with a haircut goes to settle Mars. Leaving the rest of us to fix this vile mess they
left us.
I'm sure we can do it. We must do it.
Mars will deal with them in his own sweet way.
from our book Evidence of Vineyards on Mars
So have a very merry thing
youse lovelies. You are my brethren. Folks who can read your actual language are a precious and
increasingly scarce treasure.
Thankyou for the gift of your attention for
another troubled twelvemonth.
What an utter bastard it's
been.
A year of exceptionally lucky encounters and friendships, standing in sharp and awful contrast to what's happening everywhere else.
On the condition that you
never ever drive with a gutful I promise to continue writing sentences long
enough to require a comma or two, especially if you also guarantee you'll read
something bright to a littley every day of your life.
And I'll dream forever of
a paycheck with least one comma in it.
Which leaves me to get
outa here and go looking for the Sheba. There must be one out there somewhere.
I can hear her breathing.
this page is from a real old notepad but it seems a fair summary of that year this old Earth just endured ... photo Philip White
photo by Satanika (Sister St Annika) Berlingieri
