On Being the Train Audience and the Studio Audience

The train is about to take off from Belgrave station and my bag bulges on the seat beside me.  If I was a baby, my mum would be accompanied by a hefty haversack full of nappies, wipes, a bib, a change of clothes, and whatever else is contained in nappy bags.  There are an astounding number of things that babies may need in a several-hour outing.  I'm unfortunately no different.  My burgeoning bag contains health-related d-ribose, progesterone cream, and coenzymated vitamin b6.  It also has a book, a 48 page green exercise book, various pens, a phone, tampons (grown-up nappies of a different variety) and a lot of crud on the bottom of a bag which hasn't been cleaned out in ages.

Girls from Mater Christi College, our local private Catholic school, are on the train too.  Two sit down across from me, and one begins to tell the other about some of the classes she had in school today - Maths, French, Orange House assembly and RE (Religious Education).  I wonder what RE looks like at Mater Christi.  Is it cutting edge and political, so that they get a glimpse of, say, a man overturning tables of people who are fucking around with charging interest on their money loans?  Or what about the version of Christianity that appears to emanate from the writings of Origen, in which a belief in reincarnation appears so commonly-held it's not even spelled out?  (At least I guess Catholicism had the decency to come up with a purgatory sandwiched in-between the eternal heaven and eternal hell, where you could work off your accrued karma until you're shiny enough for God to bear to look at you.  But that fear of never quite knowing if you've scored a one-way ticket to eternal hellfire is a wonderful touch when it comes to the minions.  Keeps them in line).

Do Mater Christi girls feel superior to the public school kids?  I would imagine so.  There's an inbuilt superiority/inferiority thing that automatically accrues when you spend more of our society's value symbol on one thing than another, so they must, even if it's unconscious.

A little way down the line, a massive amount of schoolkids get on at Upwey from the local high school, a rather cool-looking art deco brick building up on Burwood Highway that once housed Red Symons and then once housed Wendy Harmer.  One of the boys from Upwey High is yelling several times for Cassidy, but Cassidy, alas, does not appear.

An Upwey High girl in front of me is looking at her phone.  Her and her friend both have freshly brushed, long hair and a decent whack of makeup.  The phone shows what has the feel of a hastily snapped shot, of two boys in the schoolyard.  The way she's looking at it, pensively, cheek-chewing, I reckon she'll be looking at it a few more times this evening.

If Andrea and I had had phones and computers when we were teenagers, we would have filled up our hard drives with gigabytes of photos of Pas on hers, and Dale Cassar on mine.  I would have been quite happy to see the next round of photos Andrea had snapped that week, of Pas playing basketball, of Pas outside the maths room, of Pas saying hello as he walked past.  Pas looked like Stewart Copeland, which was pretty cool, seeing Andrea was in love with him too.  Plus, his name was Stuart too, so double bonus.  Andrea managed her love of Stewart Copeland and her love of Stuart Passingham quite well, I thought.

I apparently enjoyed being in love exclusively with unattainable people.  I was in Year 7, while Dale was in Year 11.  There is nothing now to remember him by except a few grainy memories of yearbook photos where he'd dressed up in makeup for a school play.  Dale left school at the end of that year, and I was mortified until I found Marc Ward to unattainably love the following year.  I would have filled another hard drive taking photos of Marc zooming out of school at lunchtime in his Holden Gemini, of Marc in his fluffy pink jumper, of Marc outside the maths room.  Marc's girlfriend, Suzie Szabo, was in the same year level as him.  I despised her with a warm fear and a cold despising that probably would have required a couple of photos of their own.

Marc was in Year 12.  I was in Year 8.  I liked my unattainable boys a little bit older.  That same year I would also full unattainably in love with Brian Mannix, the lead singer from Uncanny X-Men, for whom I would almost die running across Kings Way in order to reach as he got out of a taxi to go speak on 3XY.  It's not pretty, folks.  It's not pretty.  Several years after that, Andrea and I would go to see the X-Men play at The Village Green.  Andrea would ask for a kiss outside, and Brian would comply.  He would then say that it was the most amazing kiss he'd ever had.  Not that I'm chafing about that or anything.

It's so weird looking at these girls on the train with their phone and thinking about how different things were for us.  Yes, it's a common refrain held to by every generation that everything has changed, changed, changed (which is maybe more about time and memory and changes in ourselves than anything outside of ourselves).  But I think there's some validity in us reeling a little from all of the changes our lives have gone through.  It has been really different for each of the last three or four generations.  It's no wonder our heads spin so that we feel disorientated and need to go lie down and watch seven episodes in a row of Game of Thrones.

Things have changed in the ways teenagers interact.  It's so much more secondhand now.  Andrea and I would have been able to know way more about Pas and Dale and Marc than we could possibly have known back then, even with Marc's brother Carl to query.  We would have all known way more about each other.  And I wonder too if we would have known way less, maybe, in other ways.

Did we all look each other in the eye more back then?  Maybe.  We're definitely more in our own bubbles these days.  I miss the common sense of wider world community that was stronger when I was young.  Still, despite that yearning for the security of something shared, that doesn't mean that it didn't used to hurt to look people in the eye, with the shame I dragged around so intense at times, like a curtain.  It wasn't just the harsh paranoia that came from having an ever so slightly turned eye that people generally didn't notice unless I was drunk.  Looking people in the eye is such an intimate act.  I do understand the poetry of the eyes being the windows to the soul.  Sometimes it feels to me that with the onset of our awesome technology, we spend so much more time with our own eyes plastered to various screens, that looking at each other has grown scary by comparison.  Eek!  This thing I'm looking at ... is alive, and looking back at me!  Not in a box that I can switch off or delete!  This feels weird, man!  I wonder - has looking at each other become more like an invasion?

There are so many more ways to be alone while we're together now.  As a self-conscious, shame-struck teenager, I imagine that would have been better, that would have been worse.  But still, imagine, feeling like your friends were always in your pocket.  Friendships as teenagers are the best.  You need each other in a way you won't again.  Not like that.

The freshly-brushed pensive girl and her friend have got off, and another girl has sat in front of me now.  She has just sprayed a floral scent from her bag.  It's quite nice, actually, but it still causes my central nervous system to launch a weak panic stations alert that some incoming foreign body may possibly be trying to kill me.  I ignore this limbic panic, try to distract it like a child by noting how the high notes of the girl's fragrance don't screech like death metal in my nose the way a visit to the $2 shop would.

There are so many different schools on this train now.  But the uniforms are kind of all the same.  One girl wears dark and light purple and white check.  I would have been stoked to have that for Bentleigh High.  There are so many students that I wonder - are more of them catching trains to school now?  It felt like when I was at high school you went to one of the ones you were zoned to and that was it.  Are parents, in the quest to get their kids ahead, chucking their kids on trains so they can do the program that fits best?  Maybe.  I guess maybe some of these kids are on the way to their other parent's house.  It's all so scattered. And yet from what I can see, school curriculums are way more interesting than the dry, dusty crap served up to me in my high school years.

I talked to my mum about this.  She said she couldn't remember anyone from her high school catching the train, that everyone who accompanied her to classes in the late 50's and early 60's walked or rode.  There's something nice and nostalgic about that idea, that the friends you make at your school share the same space as you.

The David Jonecs ad on the platform at Box Hill has an Asian woman in a matching fuschia bra and undies set that would have earned her grandparents a pittance to make and mine much more to earn wheeling and dealing to get the lowest prices, the lowest prices, the lowest prices, which would then be marked up 400% or more to sell to us in the glorious land of globalisation.

I saw a woman on another train once, years ago, while I was on the way to work as an apprentice, vomit into the cardigan held on her lap.  She got out at the next stop.  As you would.

I get out at Richmond Station and catch the Sandringham train.  I have never been on this line before and it feels like people are doing quite well on it.  There are two men in business attire, separated by a sheet of perspex.   Both are wearing checked shirts on white backgrounds, with minor variations.  Are these shirts like the business version of school uniforms?  What's it with checks?  Do checks convey a sense of purposiveness, of industry, of concentration?

There are two separate phone conversations going on in this train carriage.  Both are about real estate, selling and renovating respectively.  There could possibly be three, but she's speaking Greek so I don't know, my Greek extending to kalimera, kalispera, kalinichta and baklava.  People on this line clean their shoes.  The woman next to me is wearing black and white leopard skin shoes and is reading the free train newspaper, MX, which once published an essay of mine that was a variation of this post here.  And so despite the fact that my shoes are ancient, I feel somewhat validated, until the the woman behind me says on her phone call that she is spending 5.5 grand on a mechanical door.  This once again makes me feel invalidated again until I realise that it's not her personal door, that organising the construction and installation of this door is a part of her job.

I do not like this relentless comparison.  It is particularly limiting.

The other woman has finished talking about her house that is up for sale and is now telling Kerry about how her husband is away at the moment and so life is fantastic.  Apparently they will take photos on the Tuesday.  Will that be enough time, given the opening is on the 7th?  It all sounds so important.  Important enough that those of us not wearing earbuds must be subjected to it.  But they're probably photos of, like, taps.  Or boxes of tampons.  Items for the next Aldi catalogue.

Although that doesn't really fit in with the opening, does it?  Still, never mind.  Thinking of this woman organising photos of something banal makes me feel better.  And really, the fact that I even bother going there with this stupid comparison, that makes me feel worse.

I reach Elsternwick, and here I alight to the ABC studios.  Anth is here to meet me.  We are being The Studio Audience this evening for the first episode of the new season of Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell.  As we enter into the studio, one of the people working there tells me this is exactly the same studio that the musical staple of my childhood, Countdown, was filmed in all those years ago.  I find it patently absurd that I never once went to a Countdown filming.  Brian Mannix was on it often enough, and Elsternwick was closer to where I lived than Richmond was, where we did go several times to see Blankety Blanks tapings.  It's an anomaly, a strangeness, a big chunk missing, something that should have happened in my teenage years but quite incomprehensibly didn't.

But I'm here now instead, at 44, and Shaun Micallef is a much more appropriate replacement, and a bit of a GILFIIHAL (GILF If I Had A Libido), and it's fun, but exhausting, to look at the making of a TV show.  It is tiring, being the ones responsible for laughing.   It is terrifying being the focus of the camera while an introductory skit is being filmed.  The camera, with it's enormous eye, pans from where it's pointed in our direction, where we have been asked to laugh, over to Mr Micallef, who makes some joke that I can't now remember because I was too fucking terrified having to juggle having a camera pointed at me and being required to laugh at the same time.

They didn't end up using the footage.  I was both relieved and disappointed in equal measure :)

But before I am allowed into the studio I must open my bag for inspection, the one bulging not with a gun but with progesterone and pens and b6 and so many wrappers, and old bits of cruddy paper that have been in there so long that they are caked with the unidentifiable crumbs that line the bottom of my bag.  It is terribly embarrassing.  And then some things fall out, and of course one of those things is a tampon.

I guess that's one thing that's changed from when I was a teenager.  I wouldn't have given a shit about how messy the bag was, but I would have been chastened, horrified, by the tampon.  Now, I don't much care that the man inspecting my bag knew for a fact that I insert wrapped cotton into my vagina.  But I did feel rather chastened that he also knows I'm a massive slob.

Empower Disaffected Teenagers, Rathern Than Control Them

For 16 years, Operation Newstart has been helping disaffected teenagers that are struggling at school by taking them out of said school for an entire term (bonus!)  Half of their time is then spent outdoors doing different physical activities that help build their self-esteem, while the other half is spent volunteering and pursuing vocational training.

Brayden Cartwright, who was interviewed on the ABC's PM, learnt through the program not only how to surf, but also how to envision a larger sense of future.  "School doesn't give you those opportunities to view other people's perspectives. You learn to work as a team.

"I didn't pay much attention [at school]; I didn't care too much.  I mean, depression and anxiety and a lot of stress weren't really helping.  I didn't know what I was going to do in life, where I was going to go.  I was just going to be a bum on the streets. So they really helped."

But unfortunately, now the Victoria Police - a major component in delivery of the program - has pulled out, stating that while it still wants to work with disengaged kids it is going to follow its own tack to do it.  This has been a big blow to Operation Newstart, effectively meaning that they needed to suspend their Bendigo and Frankston programs.  And now the Federal Government has withdrawn the $300,000 grant promised by the previous Labor Government to fill in the gaps left by the departure of the police in terms of delivery of the program, which puts in doubt the ability of the program to continue.  The Federal Government wishes instead to put that money towards its own method of tackling the problem of youth crime, which happens to be installing more CCTV cameras and better lighting.

Control, not empowerment.  Um, yeah, awesome idea.  Take teenagers who have plenty of reasons to feel alienated and disenfranchised because their culture is one cold, alienated and disenfranchised biatch herself, and doesn't support them in the ways they're screaming out for internally, where life is confusing and changing and they're scrabbling to keep up with it.  What better wise way to deal with those kids who are falling off the edges of everything by installing having even more electronic eyes to watch them from a distance and make them even more anxious and suspicious?  Awesome vision there.

Operation Newstart says that it is doing the work that governments should be doing when it comes to helping to cut youth crime.  I'm not so sure I agree with that statement.  I mean, I feel confused these days about what role I believe a government is meant to play ~ I have a left-wing heart but I'm in agreement with those on the right when it comes to the need for limits to government size, at least when it comes to the calibre of government we see in the dying days of the Western Empire.

A government's influence (which seems so often to translate into abuse of power and control) seems to me to grow in proportion to its distrust of its citzenry, compounding their resultant powerlessness and alienation.  We as a people are so routinely and regularly watched over, inspected, prodded and noiselessly threatened from afar that I don't even know if we even recognise half the time what that kind of environment has done to us. 

I tend to think of a government's function primarily as a large centre of administration of our money and resources, rather than it being the province of things like keeping crime under control.  The government should be a centralised place from which we can use our money in ways that will benefit us as a society.  For that to happen, a government needs to have a level of trust in its citizens, where it gives them free rein instead of smothering them under accountability standards and red tape.  Australia is so burdened by bureaucracy I reckon its edges must be starting to melt into the sea.

At this point in time anyway, governments are not good at operating in any other method other than the stock-standard old empire methods of control that alienates us all further.  It is exactly the same way that our economic system functions, to keep us in slavery to running the rat wheel instead of being able to put our best talents to use for the benefit of ourselves and other people, and to receive their talents in return.  Money is supposed to be a bridge between my talents and yours, not the seven-lane megahighway that shunts us all into the emergency lanes.  The elements that are meant to be tools for our empowerment have instead become the hammers that smash us over the head.

I was a disaffected and alienated teenager once, and she doesn't beat so far down beneath my chest even these days, and I know for a fact that what you need most as a teenager is a tiny bit of security when there's barely none, belief from the adults around you that it's okay to let go and experiment, and evidence that those same adults aren't really a bunch of rather stupid dicks.  Teenagers don't need much encouragement to think adults are dicks because that's part of the terrain that goes from being a child to becoming an adult.  Teenagerhood is all about breaking free.  Cultures other than ours have recognised this and initiations and rituals have been built into this time of life as par for the course ~ powerful, symbolic, culturally-embedded tools that helped teenagers move forward out of their comfort zones, learn to depend on themselves, take responsibility.  We might not agree with the methods of some of those rituals and rites, and some of them might seem dodgy to our modern day sensibilities, but they served useful purposes.  Ones that might have helped me feel less derailed myself, helped to encourage my own burgeoning sense of curiosity about the world, helped me to hone my risk-taking into stuff that might have been good instead of shagging guys when I was way too young for it and getting pissed every weekend because that was the only ritual going round that appealed to me.  Seems crazy and shortsighted to me now, even when I think back to that same teenager because she had such an intense desire to engage and understand the world, to be given a chance.  She couldn't have articulated it, but she was ripe for some ritual and ceremony and passage-riting, but unfortunately there were none for the taking in the culturally dead Australia of the 1980's.

And not much seems to have changed.  Which is why initiatives like Operation Newstart are such important ones, and why relying on the government to initiate enterprises which work, that create meaning, that give us a sense of being the writers of our own story, is not something we should hold our breaths for.  Because as far as I can see, the only language the Abbottoir Federal Government seems to speak is the usual one of control, fearmongering, and of adherence to the status quo.  The last thing they want is for people to be empowered.

We must do that ourselves.  Change has never, ever come from the top.  Not the sort we're all looking for, or need, anyway.  The sort of change that ... well, will change everything.