Longneck
September 2013
I sit at my desk determined not to write about the election. Call it conscientious objection. Call it apathy with intent. Call it a disaffected political junkie trying to go cold turkey for the sake of his soul. Call it a riposte, however futile, to the analysis, opinion, commentary – expert and otherwise, interactive and otherwise – that these days rains down upon us, leaving us permanently drenched.
There are so many talking heads, so many withering pens, busy thinking up the next angle, or honing the perfect put-down (democracy, it seems, gives everyone an equal right to be rancorous), or predicting or creating controversy, or exposing gaffes, or condemning any worldview that isn’t 101 percent internally consistent.
Because the news never ends, those who gather it (current affairs is like a field of mushrooms) have a heavy burden to recycle information. But – if it’s not too political a question – can you sauté a mushroom that’s already been dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and deep-fried?
By chance, I was in Canberra the day Kevin Rudd called the election. At about the time he was telling the nation ‘It’s on’, I was explaining to an audience at the National Library that Arthur Boyd’s great painting Nebuchadnezzar on fire falling over a waterfall reminded me of the Ruddster: he’s a lit-up spectacle, he’s all go, he’s gotta zip. He hurtles through the air, keeping himself ablaze – for ablaze is what he wants to be – and, miraculously, the ground keeps shifting, dropping, disappearing, to accommodate his perpetual motion. But it turns out that I was dead wrong. On September 7 Kev might finally have hit the earth, his flame – maybe, just maybe – finally extinguished.
Not that I’m writing about the election. The second time I visited Canberra during the election campaign, I got gastro. In the course of my life, it was a minor event. I started feeling dodgy late in the afternoon. By early evening I was writhing and moaning. By what would have been breakfast time, I was fragile and worn … and yet hungry. The rest of my family got sick too, which made me feel all patriotic: gastro is such an Aussie virus, so egalitarian.
I staggered home from a week away to find that spring had launched itself (unlike Labor, it didn’t wait until the final moments of the campaign). The back lawn, which I’d mowed the day before I’d left for Canberra, looked like a cornfield. The garden beds and the fencelines were bursting with illicit, verdant weeds – so healthy, so arrogant. Was this an indication that the country needed a fresh start, a new way? Or was it a glorious mess that warranted nothing more than a trim?
On election day, I remained an undecided voter: I’d mowed the lawn but the weeds grew on unmolested. And although my brush with gastro was a hazy memory, I now had Influenza A (those yellow Clive Palmer billboards are highly infectious). As I stood in a queue waiting to vote, I resisted the urge to cough on the volunteers thrusting how-to-vote cards at me.
I found particularly perturbing the bloke who said he represented Get Up! He spoke to me as if I was a child who’d lost a puppy.
“We’re not a political party,” he said, reminding me of those telemarketers who start their spiel with “Don’t hang up, I’m not trying to sell you anything …”
Sure, and I’m not writing about the election.
When my gastro was at its worst, as my pungent sweat left body-sized stains on borrowed bedsheets, I entered an otherworldly state. Neither awake nor asleep, I came to understand, with utter clarity, that if I could somehow line up in their correct order the various physical sensations my body was experiencing – nausea, heat, the pulsating pain in the back of my head, multiple muscular aches, itchiness, a searing thirst – I could conquer the virus and instantly cure myself.
For the first time in my life, I experienced a spiritual sensation. I may have levitated (although I was sleeping on a blow-up air mattress). Or perhaps I just had an insight into what it takes to be a politician in the 21st century – I knew what I had to do but I had no idea how to go about doing it.
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