An extract from Timon, a forthcoming novel …
The event is/was: Hester goes to a known far-right bar—a skinhead band playing, a white riot fest in an outer suburb pub. Yes, it’s ‘working class’ (mainly migrant Brit, essentially… adverb, middle English, from the Latin… you do the trace… essentially English in origin… children of the migration), and you’re going to have to deal with and process that. And Hester IS middle-class, no doubt, though most of her family are, in reality, mine workers and/or farmers and/or business people and cling to (note: cling… and ‘to’) middle-class aspirations while living otherwise. Unravel. Culpability, position you’re reading from—the little tricks of positioning, eh. But she’s a middle-class gal in her manners, thanks to mother and school (another story… maybe eventually, maybe not). She goes to hear the band and drink. She had spiky hair but now it is grown out, though a faint tinge of green is still to be detected. What colour ‘air ya got, will be asked, and she will say, Straw… She takes a ‘friend’ who leaves (a she of the left) after they’ve ‘settled in’, which is strategic. Now the tactics…
She drinks but she is only acting pissed. She pogos to the Nazi creeds and screams along with the racist chants which through the hiss she picks up immediately. She punches her fist. She is slammed into by a male patriot… and another and another. They are all males in the mosh (def doesn’t belong to leftish leanings)… they molest her and she lets them. The band takes a break and they invite her to their table, where an older man—much older—is surrounded by shaven headed white-ish lads… lots of swastikas. Really. And the older man speaks to her…
Privacy
Down the track, a vain and greedy man who believes he is a saviour will hoodwink the world into believing ‘privacy is dead’. He will furnish data miners with the means they need to sway governance. But Timon knows that the Zarathustra of even now (1986) has only been up the mountain of the mind. He also knows that mind and most minds are on public display, and he suspects it will become increasingly the case in catchment and depth of penetration. We must keep this in mind in the lush field-effect that is the narration, the reading, the vicariousness of print and speech, and whatever emanations of (this said text) futurity brings. The promise, the range of value-adding, to increase its nothingness.
Glitch
On whose side of the fence does a glitch occur? What of the truckie our Hester encounters in the ANM—an equivocator who, besotted with her, could be swayed against their acts, their cause, and even the ideology. Who could be shown another way, who could rebel against their hate and become an activist for pluralism, for tolerance, for sharing. Should she let him fall deeper in or blow her cover, take a chance, rescue him from what she is sure—she knows—is a damnation down to the atomic level. His name is Blue. He drives a Kenworth he is struggling to pay off. He seriously adores his truck, in an appropriately masculine way. But the glitch was in the ad hoc nature of the infiltration plan—Hester was a vegetarian aiming to become a vegan… it was one of the things she looked to Timon for by way of moral support. And among the foot soldiers, and the hierarchy of the ANM, there was no room for ‘rabbit food eaters’. They were to be shot in the spotlight like rabbits, like non-whites [insert racist terminologies here]. But she would hang in there long enough, before being threatened with a raw steak [literally] and ‘bangers’ [battering, insertion etc], to make a decision about Blue. She would manage that side of things—the dietary requirements, tricking them into thinking she ate as they ate, sort of. You’re not going to get much going here by way of humour, a subtextual laugh. There isn’t one. This flow is bereft of subtlety—it lacks the intent or the skill to pull it off and keep you entertained, sorry, people.
Back to the Event in Progress
The older bloke had a moustache and wasn’t white, though insisted he was in the ways ‘that matter’. Insisted with a cudgel in his hand. That’s all you need by way of portraiture. Wheedle deeper elsewhere, if you need more. The older bloke studied her at the table as they all drank. You could tell the music had given him pain. So, young lady, you like the band? She’s one of us, whoo-eeeeeeeee! screeched one of the patriot youths [age 22, white, ‘Anglican’, police record for torturing a pet cat and breaking and entering—tormented himself by alcoholic, disappointed ‘Ten Pound Pom’ father who wanted to be back in London]. Ignoring his follower, the older bloke says, We are a social organism some see as antisocial. But we are social, and know what we want in our society. Hester wanted to say heaps, but just nodded, and sipped at a drink that smelt like cleaning fluid handed to her by another of the pogoing Nazis. The drink was still sloshing back and forth as she sipped through the mini-straw, ice knocking at the walls, melting fast long before such groups became firm climate change deniers because don’t forget it wasn’t part of everyday discourse in 1986, not really. [Though global warming and greenhouse effect were constants in the conversations between Hester and Timon.] Hot days though, fucking hot! That was when Blue sauntered in.
He’d clearly come straight from work. He was covered in dust. Just back from dumping a load of shit up in the Hills, he said, and even the older bloke laughed. A knowing laugh. Blue looked straight at Hester and said, What, a new recruit? It wasn’t a lascivious look, which unsettled Hester more than if it had been. She felt she had to say something, and quick, as a beer sloshed across the table from one of the pogoers, who was banging his shiny head up and down [saying intermittently, Yeah, fuck! Yeah, fuck!] even though the band was silent. She said, You’ve been working… what do you do? I am an owner-driver… I am carting building rubble up to a dead quarry in the Hills… they dig out the stone then fill the dirty great hole in with waste crap. One of the patriots laughed at the words ‘dirty’ and ‘hole’… Blue ignored this, and said, I own a Kenworth but there are so many taxes and shit I can barely keep my head above water—the government is screwing me so they can give all real Australians’ money to Boat People… This multicultural bullshit means working white blokes like me struggle. Before Hester could speak the older bloke said, That’s it Blue, and we’re here to help you… together we’ll make this a country of Anzacs again… but with no Maori shearers taking over the teams, either! And he and Blue laughed, though the pogoers stared and then banged their heads some more, fist-pumping, hyped.
The older bloke allotted her to Blue. Blue, this is all a bit rowdy for Hester, Why don’t you take her out for a burger and a bit of a yarn, induct her into some of our ways, our beliefs and practices… Blue smiled… No, said Hester, It’s good here… And Blue’s smile slipped, but Hester couldn’t tell where it had gone, and wasn’t sure what it would turn into. The band was making noises again, getting ready to rip into a snarling bit of hate, and the room swelled with the hope of whiteness, the hunger of leucocytes…
The Shock Jock Who Loves It All
We agree, looks are irrelevant, but this vain fellow had lifesize cardboard figures of him located in city shopping centres: Tune in… on the dial… Bazza… the people’s talkback host… The figures were serious—shirt, trousers, tie… but he was reaching forward, to take you into his embrace. The hair was oiled, the teeth sparkling, the eyes mined for a depth they could never have. His specialty was ‘the makeup of Australian society’, his favourite topic of incitement a spectrum taking his listeners from Boat People to non-white migration. His listening demographic substantially white migrant ‘Brit’ and that first flush of white South Africans who would import a bigotry so deep and clawed that it would embolden racist movements in Western Australia for decades. Bazza loves it all, loves Australia, loves Perth… its people. Who its people are is the question he puts to us all. He is there across the decades, he is there lambasting Timon and his mates for protesting the ‘rebel cricket tours’ of apartheid South Africa, of ‘hand-outs to Aborigines’, to the loss of meat and three veg cooking, the mainstay of the armed forces. Chinese restaurants bother him, though he is known to feast on take-away, though others waiting for their meals have heard him mock-thankyou on being handed his order with, ‘Thankee very muchee, me likee your tucker-ee’. He is also seen by staff in the studio pulling the corner of his eyes up with his index fingers when a callback listener with an ‘Asian accent’ comes onto the line.[1] Anyway, he’s there in the background and the leader of the ANM, the older bloke—known to his crew as ‘Reg’—is a regular on talkback. Reg is lionised by the shock jock, often called ‘my wise friend from the outer suburbs’. We have Reg from Gosnells on the line—always welcome on this program… who is also Reg from Bindoon (right next to the SAS training facility) on weekends but this program is a Monday to Friday affair. The shock jock has just the right amount of levity for his listeners. He plays no further part in this narrative.
Blue and Hester
Aren’t you hungry? asks Blue, as Hester ‘picks’ at her food.
No, not really, thanks. But hungover.
Yeah, we really got plastered, didn’t we. Isn’t Reg fucking great?! He’s really helped me see the light. He knows all the history stuff and shit—knows how to outsmart the yellow and black bastards. He knows their tricks, what they’re up to—their ways of getting in through the back door. Their bullshit claims of persecution and all that refugee claptrap. And he can spot a fag from a mile away. A fucking conspiracy, it’s a fucking conspiracy, it is. He knows!
Yes, Reg is amazing—he can spot all the problems of the rainbow. Hester watches her tone, but has stuffed up already.
What? says Blue, confused.
Nothin’, just saying that Reg has got it all sussed.
He has! says Blue. Does the hard thinking. He says Hitler was a freedom fighter, he says that the stuff about the Jews is all bullshit. He’s done the research—his house is full of books on all this stuff. He swaps letters with historians and shit. He’s as smart as…
That’s incredible, says Hester. Careful, careful.
Then Blue stares at her, and does his smile thing again… But I can’t get into this shaved head and boots thing, said Blue. I mean, I wear boots, but they’re just work boots—I prefer sandshoes. But sometimes heads have to be kicked and boots work best.
I’m going to get myself some Docs.
You’d look strange in boots—like something doesn’t add up. Out of place. He laughs.
She picks up on the laugh. Depends how you look at me. She loathes playing the coquette.
You look alright to me as you are, says Blue. Blue isn’t smoking but he drops an imaginary butt to the ground and twists it into the dirt with the end of his sandshoe. He stares at the extinguishment.
Segregationalists
If we can’t change the country we will make our own country within Australia, said Reg, standing on the hill looking over the spread they’d bought with laundered money. In the glow of hills, in the spread of paddocks. But that’s a big if… we’ve got to hold the faith, we’ve got to believe we can change the whole. But we need to be disciplined… no more of these random attacks, we need a plan, and we need to stick with it. We need to shatter the foundations of ‘multiculturalism’. Send them back: all of them.[2] You are good lads, but you’ve got to focus. Here, you will receive training. Hester, you can help Olive [Reg’s ‘missus’] prepare the food… Blue, you’ve got army reserve training, you can share your knowledge. We will make this happen. I’ve arranged for three dongas to be brought in over the next few weeks, we’ll start setting up in a month, then get training, get ready for the segregation.
John Kinsella is a WA-based writer. An experimental ‘account’ of generic racism in the 1980s in Perth loosely based on Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Timon will appear in the US with Madhat Press next year.
Notes:
[1] Any ‘foreign’ accent is up for grabs in this. Way down the track, in his retirement years, the shock jock will be an avid watcher of The Apprentice.
[2] At this point in time, Reg was focusing his hatred on Chinese restaurants, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, and ‘blacks’. His checklist was interchangeable and roused with public discourse. ‘Send them back’ was an early catchphrase of his — ‘back’ could start from, say, the 1830s to the eternal present. God was useful in this way — God’s country was a gift, and a destiny, and he and his followers and whiteness shared in this (to varying degrees).
