There is a good vibe in town today, it is really busy but not frantic, and people seem to be behaving decently. Makes a change for the Christmas period. Here are some men at work at David Jones, in the food court. I liked their hustle.
Oh, and ignore the Youtube suggested videos that show up after you have played the little movie – I don’t know how they select them, but they are nothing to do with me!
Memory is a strange thing. Just the other evening I had a sudden flash of remembrance, not of something profound, but of something more mundane. I remembered a cobwebbed string of brass bells, Indian in provenance, that I had tied up outside the window of my bedroom in Canberra, many years earlier.
My father had kindly built a deck outside my window at my request, and I liked to sit on the deck and look at the distant hills surrounding Southern Canberra. Those hills were a comforting presence, and they represented an ‘other’ place, a counterpoint to the suburban sprawl in the valley in which I lived. I had walked up those far-off hills one day, many years before that, crossing the border into New South Wales and winding up through a pine forest to break into the paddocks on the hilltops. The views of the Brindabella Mountains from up there were expansive, and served to elevate the otherwise drab suburban expanse of the Tuggeranong Valley in the foreground.
These elements formed the landscape of my life at a difficult time, and I am forever grateful for the calming presence of those distant hills, and indeed those closer to my home, where I used to walk for hours on end. I would walk for up to three hours at a time, climbing to the highest point above the suburb of Monash, and sit underneath the trig station on the crown of the hill. This was important personal time, and intensely creative – I would work through ideas, and imagine different realities, as if testing out fictional settings. The experience was formative.
If I am lacking something in my life on Melbourne’s city grid, it is perhaps the presence and view of distant hills, or an appropriate substitute. There is something dream-like about engaging with such a view, and the reverie it inspires is rich sustenance to the creative mind. I still associate those bells with this strange, floating, inward-looking feeling.
When we peer into the future of the cities we live in, the only one thing we can know for certain is that there will be change. Melbourne has changed markedly since I moved here in 1995, and the mind boggles to think of the transformations that longer time periods will unleash on the complexion of our fair city. In fifty years, who knows what Melbourne will be like?
One person who has allowed his mind to boggle in the aforementioned fashion is Andrez Bergen, ex resident of Melbourne, current resident of Tokyo, and author of the noir homage novel Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat. Andrez offers us one imagined future for Melbourne, and it has to be said that things don’t look so good. The dystopian Melbourne of TSMG, pitched at some distance into the future, has the unique distinction of being the only city left in the world. Unfortunately, things are not going terribly well in terms of civil liberties, the political climate or the environment. In fact, things are comprehensively fucked up on all fronts, and the portrait painted is of an overcrowded, polluted metropolis groaning under the control of a government vested in corporate interests and busy herding non-conformists and misfits into extramural death camps styled as ‘hospitals’.
Despite this undeniable grimness, the novel is also pretty amusing, and it mines the noir vein with gay abandon, to use an old-fashioned phrase. Andrez wears his pop-culture influences on his sleeve, and the result is a compote that mashes up a plethora of fictional frameworks into a believable, seamelss whole. Readers who know Melbourne will enjoy seeing the geography of the city rezoned and remapped, polarised by the presence of a dome over the CBD that shelters the wealthy elite. And god help you if you find yourself in Richmond, which Bergen transforms into a demilitarised wasteland; Abbotsford and other inner suburbs don’t fare much better.
I for one appreciate someone taking the time to imagine an Australia of the future, as it is a welcome change to the ubiquitous North American setting of much popular fiction, and science fiction. Nevertheless, that wouldn’t be enough to recommend it. Happily, TSMG is also a ripping yarn in the best dystopian, gumshoe tradition.
Oh, and on a final note, you will thoroughly enjoy the company of the protagonist, Floyd Maquina – he is ruggedly handsome and generally ruined; witty, self destructive and self-effacing with his air of gracious defeat. He has a weary charm that is impossible to resist. If only he were real…
