An old and familiar groove

27 August 2006, Day 159

Melbourne, Victoria

The steady rhythm of working life has me zipped-up in it's straight jacket once more.

This is the cut of the cloth:

Monday: Wake up and grudgingly go to work. Tap numbers into a PC and strain my eyes (no glasses). Try to look around the town centre at lunchtime, but realise half my break is gone by the time I get downstairs in the lift. Get home and do the weekly shop with James, then cook, eat, do the washing up and realise that it is 10.30pm, then slouch off to bed.
Tuesday: Much the same during the day, expect skiving expeditions to the toilet increase. Stay in, but achieve nothing constructive with the time after making dinner, doing the washing and visiting the internet caff.
Wednesday: Look forward to going out in the evening. Scrape through the day and bite my tongue when my accent is compared to Prince William's. Realise that my eyesight is being reduced to the same state it was in before I left home! Stay out in town and go to the Greenepace meeting.
Thursday: Same office day again. Party night which involves going to see bands/exhibitions and then falling over into bed.
Friday: Go into work with a hangover and no sleep. Feel grumpy and 'emotional' all day and go home and have an early night.

So you see, it's not that I've stopped bothering with or thinking about the blog. It's still going to be kept up to date, but less frequently until we leave Melbourne, mainly cos there ain't so much to write about.

Seriously, though, I am still enjoying myself a great deal and there are elements of having a daily routine which enable me to get myself in check after four months travelling and decide what it is that I want to do next. For Mum, Dad and anybody else who might be interested, here's a quick catch-up on what I have done in the last three weeks:

We've spent a lot of our spare time with Dave and Jodie. As I mentioned in my last blog this is a fantastic piece of good fortune as both of them have been great fun to hang out with and it's a bit of familiarity so far from home. Considering how long I've known Dave (I started my middle school with him in 1989), it's an unlikely situation that I should be socialising with James and Dave two people I've known for well over ten years, in Australia.
Because of Dave and Jodie's design background we've been to a fair few exhibitions such as Genevieve Gauckler's exhibition at the Someday gallery, which James and I otherwise wouldn't have visited. I've often wondered how both of them got into setting up Peskimo as a business and labour of love. That night I found out a bit about what makes them tick which I really knew nothing about.

My work is OK. I did promise myself that I would do anything other than work in an office, only because that's what I do at home, and this trip - if nothing else - is about challenging myself to try new things. In this instance, however, the practical necessity of funding the rest of my trip outweighs all else in the short term. The only other thing which I could have picked up for two months work (most bars aren't interested in anything less than about 3 months commitment), was cash-in-hand manual labour, which would have been risky, and if I'd got injured on the job bloody stupid. What the job does give me is an insight into Australian office culture, that is to say that how it appears to be indentical British office culture. The behaviour of folk in Aussie clerical jobs is very similar to that of Brits, which is probably why everyone seems to know and appreciates the British sit-com the Office, and grin when I tell them that I'm from Slough.
Working here makes me think Australian superannuation arrangements are preferable to pensions in the UK, mainly because employer contributions are mandatory and the employee takes the fund with them from job to job and continually accumulate to one account. Lots of people I know at home don't think about pensions until they're into their late 20's.
By a quirk of fate, I'm working in the team with another bloke called Dan Morton. As you would expect he is sophisticated and charming. Actually, he's a nice enough Melboure Uni student taking a sabbatical year, whose Dad is from England. Who knows, perhaps we're distantly related somewhere back along the line? I've never met anyone with the same name as me before, despite Daniel being an incredibly common first name and Morton being a less-than-rare surname. Well, there you go.

Perhaps my favourite thing to happen at work was when I had to speak to a bloke with a really thick Aussie accent on the phone regarding payment of his employees' super. He responded with an informality better suited to the pub: 'Now look here mate, a lotta my pals are pretty upset about this June super cut-off business, and how the super funds do nothing to help our employees make sure they get their cash. Now what d'ya reckon you boys can do ta help us owt?' Short of a hotline to John Howard or our CEO there wasn't a lot I could do, but I was cheered by his optimism.

In my spare time I've been familiarising myself with and finding ways to contribute to the local group of Greenpeace activists in Melbourne. Julien, a St. Kilda native and Greenpeace intern, is involved mainly with climate change and renewable energy issues. He's organising this year's 'Walk Against Warming' which coincides with the International day of action against climate change. You can see last year's website here, but it apparently wasn't that hot (!).
The big difference this year is that it coincides with the UN Conference on Climate Change being held from 6-17 November in Nairobi, Kenya and we've got far more time to organise and plan than last year. The intention of the event is more or less education, but also to sway politicians in time for the state elections. The scales still need to be tipped on people understanding how to tackle this monster.
Anway, after a few drinks and a good chat, I got the feeling I'll be able to help Julien out a fair bit. He also lives just round the corner, and is someone I can talk to about football! It certainly impressed me when we were talking about England, and the subject (as it inevitably does) turned to Torquay United:

Julien: 'Who's a good Torquay United player? Hmm. Gregory Goodridge?'
Dan: 'How do you know about Greg Goodridge?'

Attitudes towards climate change here are even more divided than at home over the issue of nuclear power. One of the main reasons I am involved with Greenpeace is their total rejection of the nuclear 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' alternative energy to carbon rich fossil fuels.
At home the big nuclear talking point is the replacement of our elderly nuclear power plants and Trident nuclear submarines. In Oz the focus is different. Australia sits on 40% of the world's uranium resources which big business now has in it's sights. Who is to say that this deadly and finite resource will not prompt the next war frontline in the future when oil fields are sucked dry?
John Howard is an active supporter of nuclear energy and Kim Beazley is changing the ALP's attitude away from caution to increased consideration of further uranium mines and domestic nulcear plants. Despite having only one domestic nuclear energy facility a number of prominent politicians have begun to advocate nuclear power as a means to affordably reduce greenhouse emissions and perhaps allow for large-scale de-salination plants. Australia has very extensive, low-cost coal reserves and substantial natural gas. The brown coal used in Victoria such as at Hazelwood power plant is horribly polluting. According to some sources it is the most polluting power station in the industrialised world (based on CO₂ per megawatt hour sent out). Because of the ready-supply Australia could and probably will continue down the dirty brown coal route, but if and when it takes climate change seriously, it could be blindly lead away from one path to destruction and down a nuclear cul-de-sac. This is the time to make sure the public don't let it happen.

".. whilst you can guarantee that uranium mining will lead to nuclear waste, you can't guarantee it won't lead to nuclear weapons." - Anthony Albanese (Federal ALP, would you believe).

* * *

I've continued my exploration of some of the other suburbs of Melbourne, including a slog around Windsor, Prahran, South Yarra, Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy all in one afternoon a couple of weeks ago. Brunswick Street in Fitzroy is still the most vibrant street for my money. It feels like the centre of the band scene and a focal point of the street community.

We got an idea of what this 'street life' was like for previous Melburnian generations at the Skins n Sharps display on Gertrude Street. During the late sixties in Britain the skin-head cult appeared, perhaps as a violent reaction to hippydom. This same machoistic and hedonist movement was adopted in Melbourne by the turn of the dcade. Individuals morphed the look from skinheads to sharps. At that time sharps were skinheads retaining their 'tails' a mullet-like fringe of hair at the back of the head. One band adopted by the scene were AC/DC - the most successful Aussie band in history. Indeed, you can identify a bit of a sharp look in early photos of Bonn Scott. A more a natural part of 'the scene' were poeple like Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls. Regardless it was a reminder to us of a time when youth culture - for better or worse - was less established, local and honest about its intentions. Birds, booze and fighting: that's about the size of it. It was not intellectualised or something that could be packaged and sold to kids like todays 'subcultures': goth, punk, emo, sports casual or what have you. The sharp scene was organic to isolated and poor kids wanting a sense of identity and belonging; they knew it was nothing more than that, despite plenty of bullshit then too. The scene, moronic as it might have been in someways, belonged to them. I don't think kids today really think when they dress a certain way or listen to a set of bands or type of music. It's not so much peer pressure that forms the subconscious choice, it's case of selecting from a range of brands which sell you an image which you can be a part of, if you have the money. If you don't, well...

Finally, football absence has got to me to the extent that I've had to take action. Tonight I'm going to watch Melbourne Victory play Sydney. 'Soccer' is it is known here, is on the up. A few years ago with the National Soccer League on the verge of collapse, there was a breakaway 'professional' league set up in 2005 - the A-league. The reason for problems with the NSL were numerous. Just some of the oft-touted problems were: potentially divisive ethnic support for individual clubs, incompetant national administration and multiple clubs in a single city spreading support too thinly. This type of overhaul would never (and should never) happen in Britain, but Australia and New Zealand make up the best part of a continent not a country, and soccer support bases have not been organically established in the way they were in the UK.
Regardless of whether the slick new coporate sponsored structure was a good idea, this league and it's eight teams from Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Newcastle, Gosford and Auckland enjoyed a largely successful inaugural season. Bringing us back up to date, the Socceroos enjoyed a fabulously rewarding World Cup, making it through a tough group stage only to be knocked out in the second round by eventual winners Italy. Having observed the behaviour of some of the Aussies in Bangkok, it obviously meant a lot to them, and that passion is ripe for redirecting towards the domestic game.
Whether I'll enjoy this type of football when so much of what I like about supporting Torquay United is absent (intimacy, community, lack of corporate backers, fewer money grabbers etc.), has yet to be seen. I think that the sense of being at the start of something growing and popular will appeal. Tonight's game is at the Telstra Dome, which is bigger than Olympic Park which is Melbourne regular ground. The change of venue is because the Football Federation of Australia want to make Melbourne v Sydney the equivalent of a European derby game. The difference to home is that it isn't a local affair, but the rivalry of Sydney and Melbourne as cities has deeply embedded historical roots, and is not a wholly manufactured thing either. I hope the intensity of an Old Firm derby style game can develop between the sides (minus the bigotry and violence).

To give you an idea of how sport is conducted over here, and the support it gets from the City of Melbourne, here's a little anecdote from the other day. I went along to Melbourne city square about a fortnight ago to watch Melbourne Victory do a PR event to launch the new season. This involved plenty of 'Samsung' tracksuited vendors handing out glossy postcards with images of our heroes on the front - internationals Kevin Muscat and Archie Thompson. Samsung, the shirt sponsor, were offering a deal on the back of the cards to win a trip to watch a Chelsea game, whom they sponsor in England. There is a strong interest in English football here and a feeling that the English Premiership should be the template for the A-league (God preserve us). Amongst the local dignitaries present to make speeches and show their support amidst other major sponsors of the side was Lord Mayor of Melbourne John So and Minister for Sport and Recreation Justin Madden. They announced a new State Government funding commitment of $750,000 for junior football development in Victoria. I can't imagine this happening with Torbay Council for Torquay, but then I never have to listen to someone from Samsung banging on about their new Samsung 'Imagine Victory' promotion at Plainmoor.