On The Dole Again, a song NOT written by Wille Nelson

On The Dole Again, a song NOT written by Wille Nelson

On the dole again, I just can't wait to be back on the dole again

I'm so glad I chose to be a thespian

I can't wait to be on the dole again


On the dole again, not-even-dremin-of-goin-to places I've never been,

eating food I wish I'll never eat again

Oh how I love to be on the dole again.

Bridge
On the dole again, we take the bus 'cause we can't afford the highway

We're a bunch of fiends, insisting that the world pay for some of our way, what an outrage!

On the dole again, pretending that I'm looking for a stupid job again

love is standing in that giant queue again

Oh how I love to be on the dole again.

Bridge 2
On the dole again, like a bunch of losers we hitch hike down that highway

We've lost all our friends, 'cause we get drunk and sing songs like  My Way

(Sing first two lines of My Way by Frank Sinatra...sung like a sad drunk)

Whoops! On the dole again, I can't wait to be on the dole again

Oh how I love to eat two minute noodles with my friends

I can't wait to be on the dole again....Rpt. End. 

"On The Dole again..."

Standing in a Centrelink car park, staring at my car with its bonnet up, steam spurting from the radiator, thinking to myself that maybe, all those years ago, theatre arts probably wasn’t the best choice. That morning my 84 year old mother rang to tell me there are carer jobs in the paper. Thanks Mum, I’ll think about it. Maybe I can find a carer for me while I’m there.

            Is this a lesson in humility or just the culmination of years without planning? Both I suppose.

            It’s a good car though, the only car I’ve ever really taken seriously; bought it almost new and had it serviced and cleaned regularly. As I stare at it and wait for the RAC man, I think of a joke: my car isn’t a station wagon, it’s a stationary wagon. Ho ho! Not a belly laugh for sure, but it suits my whimsical mood.

            In my mid-fifties I’m becoming used to the inevitability of decay. The vortex grows each time it appears and I become accustomed to its chaotic wash. Colds and flues are bigger, noises harder to decipher, words at the wrong end of a telescope. A plus is that music is more resonant, it touches my soul with a firm embrace, and not just the old songs - every tune presses whatever that thing is (a button?) in my mind that leads to tears of joy or despair, or a deep and sensual groove.

            The mailman dropped off an invite to my Nephew’s wedding in Cancun, Mexico. Luke. Sweet fellow who lives in Chicago and works for Porsche as a graphic designer. Marrying Molly, a big and beautiful Irish American. A wish is all they’ll get from me, but a warm and loving wish ‘twill be.  

            And every day and night I hear reports of the extraordinary shows being seen at the Perth Arts festival that runs through to the middle of March. I suppose this sounds like a gripe but it’s really just a simple fact that few of us local performers can afford to see any of it, unless a work mate has a ticket or, as is the case for a few, they’re collecting the tickets and watching from the aisles.  

            Could this be a chance to create a modern version of Crime and Punishment, an Aussie Raskolnikov, a middle-aged clown who, instead of murdering an old aristocratic lady, runs down a wealthy fly-in-fly-out mine worker in order to steal their theatre tickets? He then attempts to justify his actions by riding the coattails of the AWU secretary, Paul Howes, who is currently battling the mining bosses and making veiled threats in the press. But Howes, who it turns out loves opera and ballet, just happens to be at the same show as the bitter and jealous murderer who recognises the Union boss and tries to appeal to his sense of justice and retribution. But Howes dismisses the man as a fool and a 'clown' and the sad buffoon is led away amidst the stares of new moneyed men and women.

            Instead I could just go down the beach and sit on the sand with my dog, knowing I at least didn’t have to pay for the parking or the beautiful view. And there, on a beach by the Indian ocean, I can read a book and attempt to forget the hideous realities that have been happening on this ocean. But it’s hard to do that, in fact it’s hard to believe what’s happening to those desperate folk who tried so hard to save their families only to watch them drown.

My cares are nothing compared to theirs. Only trouble is, it’s a whole lot easier to forget, to turn a blind eye, when you’ve just paid big bucks to watch talented Europeans in a warm and comfortable theatre. I wonder what some of those performers are thinking about us Australians and our selective welcome mats.

Certainty, the bugbear of mankind

I don’t know why people have an incessant desire to be sure about anything. Where did it come from, this need for certainty and truth? We are animals of the earth, organic and changing according to the wind and the rain, as ephemeral as a flame. We breathe, that’s about it, and even that will cease one day or even one hour or second. Who knows? Is predictability that important? The need to know that tomorrow or next week we’ll be here next to that tree with a mountain over there and the same river flowing by, and those we love will be still there, loving us in return.

Okay, so it’d be a little unfair and also implausible if I came home tonight and found my neighbour had turned into a rhinoscerous and stampeded into my yard, wrecking my garden and smashing down my house. Or if a man went to the house of his lover to find he’d simply imagined her, the smell of her hair, the touch of her hands, her embracing smile – all just gone. And I really don’t expect to hear a report on the news that scientists have finally discovered that the Indian Ocean is really a large bowl of jelly. These things are what we call absurd.

But there are times when our environment is changed to such an extent it may well seem that reality has been replaced by an inscrutable and absurd alternative. During WWII there must surely have been a sense that some foul creature had reached into the heart of reality and rearranged things forever. As a reaction to that, absurdism and surrealism came into being, frivolous, child-like expressions where words and images shifted and morphed into the ridiculous and often hilarious. Was this a way of saying, “We don’t know, so don’t try to be certain.” Was it a warning to the world that ideologies based on certainty are crazier than any wild thing we might attempt to invent?

Or was it simply escape? The world has no meaning so why should we? And if there is no pattern, no God, nothing to guide us then we may as well be silly and have a little fun in the mean time.

Those Queensland folk who have dealt with floods and a cyclone, and some people in Victoria who only two years ago had a massive fire and now floods, must be wondering about the overall pattern of life. To have a natural event destroy one’s house and completely wreck one’s dearest possessions must make it difficult to trust the future. Why do anything, why build a living environment when it could so easily be taken away?

When a close friend or relative dies suddenly (and particularly by their own hand) one is left with a gap, a disconnection from what we might call the normal pattern. It’s more than a shock, it’s an onslaught on our very being, leaving us empty and cheated by circumstance. But really, by being more than just sad over our loss, by allowing it to infiltrate and shake the core of our belief system, we’ve actually cheated ourselves. We’ve been left with a philosophical mess we never saw coming.

Impermanence is one of the central ideas of Buddhism. Death is never left undusted on the shelf, it’s brought to mind with as much constancy as food and drink, warmth and friendship; it’s part of the family of life. Does this mean that Buddhists cope better with death and destruction?

When I toured to Sri Lanka recently I met many people who talked about the tsunami and how it affected them and their businesses. Not one person described a horror even though it probably was; they always smiled and shrugged as if to say “It was what happened” and their lives went on, perhaps a little less comfortably. And no doubt there are many in Australia who will do the same. I did meet a few Sri Lankans however, who needed to borrow to rebuild their houses and restaurants and are consequently in debt at very high interest rates. All the same, they weren’t spitting in anger over the usury (as one might); they talked about the bankers with a sanguine acceptance.

And the most devoted Buddhists, the monks, well they’re mainly in the central highlands, way up in the safety of the mountains, far from the hustle of tourism, far from capitalism and its co-conspirators style, comfort and glamour. And far from tsunamis.

Perhaps this is what our attachment to consistency comes down to: material wealth? If we define ourselves by what we possess then we’ll need to fight hard to hang on to a reality that could any day be taken from us. I began writing this piece because a friend quoted the American poet EE Cummings: “To be nobody but myself – in a world which is doing its best, night an day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”

My friend, a fellow blogger and inspirer of many, posted this quote and simply asked what we thought of it, thus sparking an interesting (and still on-going) debate about the nature of self and the concepts of reality and certainty. Questions arose, such as “Do we need to know ourselves?” and “What’s wrong with doubt anyway?” and so forth.

E.E. Cummings was a man who lived through both the world wars, was arrested by the French on an accusation of espionage, and became one of the preeminent examples of the absurdist poet. His poetry and his drama, inspired by the writing of Gertrude Stein and the painting of Picasso, are perfect examples of the escape into the ridiculous. But is it an escape – to create sentences and ideas that challenge the normal pattern? Is it somehow ‘less’ to take words and images and to chop them up, juggle them around, then throw them into the air and see what lands, how it lands and how it makes us feel?

But Cummings poetry, and the work of the absurdist playwrights, while often

nonsensical, always made some kind of connection; it was never dribble by any means, always somehow sparking a feeling about the world around us, and always allowing us to revel in the mysterious nature of reality and unreality. It’s hard to comprehend the idea that Cummings or Spike Milligan (the Pope of absudism) might somehow be unduly influenced by the prevailing mood of society to the extent that they might be not be themselves; that these giant personalities might be subsumed by fashion or societal pressure is simply unbelievable.

But maybe that’s part of being a writer, a painter, a performer – the creative mind will always be fragile and vulnerable, in the same way Mozart was a victim of his critics and peers, and the idea that they could be swept under the rug of conformity is an ever present horror, just as meaninglessness and madness are feared by so many in the western world.

Everything has its dark side, its possible downfall and disintegration. Perhaps that’s why Buddhist monks spend so much time telling jokes. The journey to enlightenment might be a silly hoax, so hey, let us laugh as much as we can in the mean time. Or is it just that disconnection is the key to inspiration, so let us experiment with, indulge ourselves even, with chaos and uncertainty in the hope that the flight out of uncertainty will give us a new insight, an epiphany if you like, which will let us cope a little better the next time the bottom falls out of our world.

australia day

Australia day is looming. 26^th of January is the day we celebrate the landing of Captain Arthur Phillip at Sydney cove in 1788, one week after the five English ships landed at Botany Bay only to find it too windy and lacking in fresh water. So a party was sent to what’s now known as Sydney (then known as Port Jackson) and Phillip landed with several sailors to perform a small ceremony on the Saturday.

What we don’t learn in school is that the next day, after all the other ships arrived in Sydney cove, the women convicts were unloaded and literally handed over to a large party of sex-starved marines. A drunken, violent orgy ensued, and to this day in cities all round Australia, that party is reprised.

Yes, thousands of white Australians gather on the shores of their prospective rivers beaches and city centres to get plastered, sing the praises of their country then bash whoever needs bashing (and many who don't). Whether they go home and re-enact the largely non-consensual sex bit is hard to say, it’s not an easy thing to do a survey on (although I’d like to see someone try – Excuse me sir, after you’ve bashed this man senseless are you intending to go home and rape your wife?)

So, if you’ve ever wondered where the chauvinist yobbo behaviour might have come from, it started on day two. Every nation has its stereotypical characteristics, and Australia’s is all about mistreating women. One of the few Aussie jokes I know goes: An Australian bloke walks into a bar, goes up to a woman and says, “Do you want a fuck?” The woman says, “No” so the bloke says, “Well do you mind lying down while I have one?”

And Australian men will laugh louder than anyone at that joke. It’s a given that Aussie blokes like to get smashed, punch on for a bit, then ‘root’ whatever sheilla’s at hand.

But chauvinism isn’t just about mistreating women. The word comes from the behaviour of a legendary French yobbo (yes, they have them too) called Nicolas Chauvin, one of Napoleon’s soldiers during the Italian campaign, who not only mistreated women (hey, he was a soldier) but also liked to kill, maim, rob and rape the locals with a vigour that surprised even Napoleon. The story goes that Napoleon gave him a medal of honour for his commitment to fighting for his country. Thus the original concept of chauvinism connects it more with patriotism and violence rather than sexism.

And it seems that aspect of the Australian national psyche – the violent, racist one – is receiving traction as a key part of our reputation. A young fellow recently sent me his version of an ‘Aussie’ joke: What do you call an aboriginal flying an aeroplane? A pilot you racist prick! No doubt people like Pauline Hanson and John Howard helped that reputation along, but they weren’t operating in a vacuum. No, fear and hatred of aboriginal people began in the first settlement too, we simply don’t have records of it.

According to most historical records, however, including historian David Hill (in his book 1788), not long after settlement Phillip decided one day to attempt to convince the aboriginal people that the whites were a friendly and trustworthy mob. He did this by ordering his soldiers to bring him a well known aboriginal character called Arabanoo in order that Phillip might teach him English customs and language, and Arabanoo might then go back to his people to explain what he’d learnt.

Okay, sounds sensible. But did Phillip tell the soldiers to go talk to Arabanoo and make overtures to him in order to carefully encourage him into the settlers’ society? No, he told them to ARREST him! This in the age of enlightenment.

Anyway, a long and perhaps not so proud tradition began.

Another national tradition we attempt to hide, which also seeps unwillingly from our collective pores, is an obsession with homosexuality. So many Australian jokes are about buggery, so much of the ‘jokey’ behaviour between Australian men is to do with the possibility of anal sex ‘(taking it up the poo shoot’ or ‘vegemite mining’). Go to a pub or workplace in Australia and witness the ‘poofter’ antics.

This behaviour, like our collective treatment of aboriginal people, isn’t officially recorded by the early settlers (strangely!) but any observation of anglo saxon prisoners allows us to make some basic assumptions about what must have been happening. There would have been man on man action all over the place. The convicts, the marines, the sailors – all would’ve been into each other. But they certainly would’ve been shush about it; in fact Captain Phillip, who was originally against capital punishment for acts of violence (including murder) issued a threat that any man caught in the act of buggery would be sent to New Zealand and marooned amongst cannibals. Yeah, that’s right. All poofters will be eaten by Maoris. Gives a whole new significance to the Haka!

But, as any school teacher will know, once you prohibit a behaviour it becomes both taboo and delightful to perform. And that taboo is permanently imprinted on our national psyche along with the racism and the sexism.

With a day or two to go the flags are really popping out now, mainly on big white four-wheel-drives, particularly in working class suburbs such as mine. Even my neighbour Kim – who emigrated from Korea with his wife and kids – has flags on his car, big flags. No doubt this is his way to say, “Hey, I’m Aussie and I’m proud too.”

Just today he pulled into his drive, flags flapping away, and got out of his car with a big smile.

We greeted each other before going inside. And a naughty, provocative part of me felt like going up to him and saying, “Okay Kim, you’ve got the flags, the thongs and you’ve probably started eating shit food, but not once have I heard you tell a poofter joke, give the bird to a black fella or yell at your wife.”

Tattoos

Okay, what’s with all the tattoos on everyone these days? It seems like they’re more popular in western society than ever before.

In the sixties through to the nineties tattoos were something you saw on criminals and sailors. It was a badge that signified rebellion and low socio economic status. This is not to say all people with tattoos were poor, but if someone had a tat they weren’t likely to be a celebrity, lawyer, or a doctor (but they may well have been a witch doctor).

Now they’re everywhere! Glamorous sporting stars are parading them, along with actors, comedians, musicians, teachers and well…young people generally. Suddenly tattoos are common with middle class folk below the age of forty. They no longer seem to say “Careful of me, I’m a tough and angry bastard who’s likely to rob your house”. So what are they saying now?

Well, firstly the style of tattoo is different. The old LOVE and HATE ones on the knuckles are definitely out, skulls are a no-no and the pictures of sexy mermaids and cartoon characters such as Popeye, Olive Oil and super heroes are also rare. These days it’s more like artistic body decoration: swirling patterns in the style of Maori art; flowers and leaf patterns; sea creatures such as dolphins and whales (as opposed to sharks and snakes with vicious teeth); and any number of patterns that might be seen on a curtain or bedspread rather than a body.

Personally I wouldn’t ever want one, and when I see one on someone I immediately think less of them. Why? The obvious answer is that I’m a victim of a prudish, middle class up-bringing, but I think there’s more to it.

I have nothing against using technology to reshape and enhance the human body. I have a tungsten valve in my heart – due to a congenital heart disease – so I’d be a hypocrite to suggest that interfering with nature is wrong. And if someone has an ugly defect in their face or excessively large and unwieldy breasts, or they have some hideous deformity, of course get in there and fix it. No problem. But, like Botox and face lifts, tattoos are different; they’re not about survival or correcting a disfigurement or relieving pain. In fact, they’re almost the opposite in that they actually create a disfigurement and pain. They’re a permanent scar on the skin.

I think what happens is I see a tattoo on a person and I can’t help thinking, ‘That’s there forever you know (unless you undergo painful and expensive surgery), how sober were you when you did it and how pleased are you now?’ Of course I don’t share those thoughts (hey I’d like to keep what teeth I have left) but I think it, and I imagine that’s what I’d be thinking if I had one myself.

So, with tattooing becoming extra popular, is there a growth in tattoo removal? According to a plastic surgeon friend “…you bet there is and thank you very much, I’ve just bought a new yacht.” An article in the New York times in 2007 quotes the FDA as saying there were over 100, 000 removals in the U.S. that year alone. Whether this is an increase, it didn’t say, but I trust my doctor mate who reckons it’s his main source of income, particularly as some tattoos can take up to fifteen laser treatments to remove.

But what’s changed in the western world that’s brought this on? What significant social and historical shift is this related to? And was it a celebrity led trend, i.e. did some actor or pop star got a tat and suddenly it grew from there? Apart from wtaching sport I have little to do with any commercial media so I have no idea about this.

As it’s occurred over the last decade there’s a temptation to relate it either the new millennium or 911 or a mixture of both. But what does the bombing of New York by Muslims (and a consequent war) have to do with young people marking their bodies?

Nothing I’d say.

It could however, have something to do with skin cancer. In recent decades tanning has become unpopular and considered ugly, when as we know brown bods were all the rage for many decades. The fashion mags are full of skin so milky white one can only wonder if Clown White # 4 has been applied. Are the tats a replacement for tanning, almost as a way of saying, ‘Okay, I can’t change my skin via the sun or a lamp but I can do it with ink instead.’ Or is it simply that white bodies are a far better canvas for tattoo art so hey why not!

Heaven knows. What I do know is that Mitchell Johnson’s arm looks bloody stupid, and if he doesn’t make up for it with a few more wickets in the Sydney test, well he may as well chop his arm off. Speaking of which, American comedian Lenny Bruce had a tattoo on his arm, as a result of being in the navy, and often had to answer to his Jewish family for whom it was a sin to desecrate the body. His aunty said to him one day, “How are you going to be buried in a Jewish cemetery?” Lenny replied casually, “Well, when I die they can cut the arm off and bury that in a Goy cemetery and the rest of me in a Jewish cemetery.”

My father has a tattoo for the same reason as Lenny: as a sailor in WWII he got drunk and gave in to peer pressure. It’s a drawing of a black swan swimming on a river amidst some reeds. He later went on to become a well-to-do middle class doctor who is now retired and living in Claremont. Many years ago, at a family picnic, when my father rolled up his sleeves, I overheard my older sister’s boy friend say, “Wow, your Dad’s got a tat!” as if the sun had suddenly turned purple and giant green ants started falling from the sky.

I wonder if at some future barbecue a dad will remove his shirt and a boyfriend will turn to his girl and say, “Wow, your dad’s got no tats!”

Saint Nick and his naked...

What’s going on in this world that a prominent footballer can’t do a bit of nude posing in front of his mates without it causing a media sensation, and the footballer (Nick Riewoldt in this case) has to go on TV to defend himself? Crazy!

Nuding up is an old tradition, from Grecko Roman wrestling, which was a nude event in itself, rugby players in the showers, blokes running naked on a cricket pitch, dropping the strides when you lose at eight ball without sinking one, chucking a brown eye out the window of a car, to simply parading your buff body to your mates after a shower. And if you’ve got a body like Nick’s it’s worth exhibiting – just so long as it’s not forced upon anyone. Think of the effort and money that goes into creating Nick’s (and many other) sporting bodies. If I had that kind of bod I’d show it off.

Unfortunately I have the kind of body that’s best hidden. If a trim abdomen is called a ‘six pack’ I have a small wine barrel.

Okay, footballers have done some stupid, callous and at times illegal things involving sex and young women; and some high priced lawyers have made sure they probably haven’t all had to face the consequences of their actions. So it’s a sensitive issue for sure.

But if blokes can’t get naked after a match or on a sporting holiday, well bugger me, we’re all stuffed!

Although you do have to question the motives of Sam Gilbert, the player who took the photo, put it onto his computer and left it there. Rievoldt claims he asked at the time the photo was taken that it be deleted. Gilbert said he would delete it but didn’t, either because he forgot or for some other reason, and when you think about that it’s hard to figure out. He’s either obsessed with Nick’s body or he wanted him embarrassed. How they’re going to train and play in the same team is beyond me.

None of this could have happened of course without the internet and its ‘viral’ possibilities. No doubt there were many photos taken of naked and semi-naked footballers right up until the nineteen nineties. But the chances of them being pinched and shown to millions of people were minimal.

The question is: has the internet created an environment where footballers simply can’t get away with carefree, blokey behaviour, or have we moved into a new morality that shines a puritanical light onto everything even vaguely macho and vain? Dare I call it a ‘virtual morality’?

I think it’s a bit of both, and one has created the other; now that things are in the open (or at least can be with one careless slip) it’s much harder to find a place to be a boofhead, and with that ‘openness’ there seems to be a vein of moral judgement toward heterosexual men getting drunk and naked or even sober and naked. It’s come about because of all the other controversies to do with footballers, rugby league players and how they deal with women, so anything that combines footy, booze and nudity gets thrown in the same dirty basket as rape, unwanted exposure and photos of Lara Bingle in the shower.

The AFL has worked its butt off attempting to bring footy players into the realm of sensitivity and understanding towards women. And the NRL aren’t far behind. They’ve introduced “respect and responsibility” programmes designed to teach players that they can’t force or cajole vulnerable people to be involved acts of sex, and they can’t treat women as inferiors. And no doubt there’s going to be some fellows who never get the message; after all they’re not running around those fields because of their prowess at philosophy and human rights law.

But the thing is Nick Riewoldt’s not one of those blokes. He’s the captain of his side because he’s a reasonable and fair player who’s seen by many as a shining light in what the AFL would like to call the new era of player behaviour. The problem is there is a woman involved, a young woman who claims to have actually taken the photo. Whether she’s lying or not (and it sure looks like she is) suddenly it’s all back in the realm of “Ohhhh no, not that again!” Because her claim, no matter how far fetched, puts her in the room. And she also claims to have been impregnated by another football player.

So now, what may well have been boofy men prancing round like ten year olds – nothing to write home about – is front page news and quite possibly detrimental to the career of an outstanding player. And we also have the likes of Victorian Women’s Trust executive director Mary Crooks saying the clubs need to work harder at their respect and responsibility programs. Okay, maybe they do, but wait a minute folks, it’s a photo of two men, one of them in the raw. I can see the development of a super sensitivity to all things masculine, particularly when it’s mixed with frivolity. But frivolous masculine behaviour can be a marvellous thing, and an important thing. Young men need to roll around and act like galoots, to be lose and silly; and no one needs that more than these guys who are so drilled and focused for most of the year.

I’ve always disliked the term ‘political correctness’ and even more so when it was used by John Howard to attempt to justify completely outdated attitudes towards aboriginal history, gay marriage and climate change. Instead I’ve liked the idea of being politically correct, of changing terms like ‘fireman’ to ‘fire fighter’ and ‘spastic’ to ‘disabled’. These are fine human progressions, as are the programmes designed to convince professional footballers to have care, concern and respect for all people, not just women. But we need to beware of establishing a moral tie so tight that we end up with a group of robotic, characterless nobodies. I think the term ‘nothing burgers’, fits best: no meat, no sauce, not even salad.

So, what do we do? Simple. The footy codes put their heads together and they build player time out clubs in every major city. Think of it as very expensive, high tech after school care for semi grown up men. They could have computers for internet, face book and games, pool parlours, coffee bars, reading rooms, meditation sessions, comedians, even snooze rooms. And all of it run by people who know footy, who know what it’s like to be cooped up in a hotel room on tour, to lie there awake because you’re wound up tight – all ready for the big day – or strung out because of a loss the previous day. And alcohol has got to be carefully controlled. Call me wowser but it’s simply not something I’d recommend to high performance sportsmen who at the best of times aren’t fully aware of the consequences of their actions. That’s the big danger of booze: you no longer care, and that’s its seduction too, you can let go.

So why can’t people let go sober? We’re not trained to, and we don’t have the places, the meeting grounds for that. It’s time to encourage these young, exceptionally fit and strong fellas to let steam off, and to do it legally and safely.

Survival

Sitting up in the members at the WACA and watching the test match, a willy wagtail flew down and danced its cheeky dance on the metal rail in front of me. Hoping I had food, it just waggled its tail and looked at me. “C’mon mate give us a crumb or two!”

It was a bizarre shift of focus: from this wide view of a match that meant so much to so many, and was being transmitted across Australia and the world; Englishmen sitting at home and in pubs, barmy army revellers at the WACA singing along to the trumpeter, mates in Perth texting each other as the Mitchell Johnson saved the day with his bat – and there, inches from my face, was a brave and tiny being hustling for its life. “C’mon fella. I know you’ve got food!”

I reached down into my lunch bag and gave it some crumbs, then shooed it off knowing for sure it’d stick around for more.

Then I spent the next few hours thinking about survival. The previous night I’d seen images of people failing the survival test as their boat smashed on rocks at Christmas Island. I switched TV channels quickly, but not quick enough to hold it together. Tears flowed. And tears are fine, good in fact; but I’ve been in a mood lately where I feel that if I start crying I’m not sure I’ll stop.

My own survival is in question. Bills are piling up like never before, work is scarce (and shouldn’t be at this time of year) my house is a crumbling mess and my fridge and pantry are close to empty. And worse, I can’t think of anything I’d like to do that might assist my survival.

But there’s simply no comparison is there? Between me and those drowning families I mean. They’d gone so far, put so much on the line, most likely because what they left was unbearable: torture, rape, loss of income, loss of everything they owned. And bang, one bit of bad weather plus a faulty engine. Hard to describe that horror.

But they were trying so hard to survive, to keep their families alive, happy, safe from harm. And that’s why I simply can’t understand why we might despise them or wish them anything but the best of luck. As I write, the local hero Mike Hussey has just scored his long awaited century. He’s a survivor and we love him for it. Times have been very tough for Huss, and for the whole team. And to see a bloke doggedly push through it all despite all the critics, despite the likelihood of being relegated to a lower grade of cricket, is wonderful. It’s what so many Australians like to celebrate: the battler who’s down but fights back and survives. And when they don’t survive but they tried against impossible odds, we turn it into an iconic moment, march in the streets and write songs about it.

So, why can’t we apply the same values to those fleeing families? There’s a strange schism there, a kind of social pathology, a disconnection of such massive proportions that if it weren’t so tragic it might be hilarious. A year or two ago the American social commentator and political Conservative, PJ O’Rourke, expressed similar dismay at they way we tend to treat asylum seekers. On the TV programme – Q and A – he turned upon a Conservative Australian, Julie Bishop, and told her we should welcome those people as heroes because they have such a strong commitment to freedom and equality. We should treat them as a new kind of royalty he suggested.

And while a few of us punched the air in celebration after seeing the mean-spirited Julie Bishop get a dressing down, it was a joy that was short-lived because we knew that as this happened on the ABC, the people who want to stop asylum seekers, the haters and despisers, would have been watching some dribble misnamed ‘reality TV’ on another channel. And certainly no Australian newspaper would have reported it.

I think back to that willy wagtail, with its plucky attitude and ruffled feathers, and yeah, it has qualities that Huss shares: it’s not the grooviest of beasts, not a glamour guy like some in the Australian team; it’s almost ugly, and you won’t find it in too many magazines about what Australia means to the world, just as you don’t often see Huss in the gossip pages or on the TV with Oprah and the like. But I imagine that in some corner of the WACA it’s busily feeding it’s young – in between battles with far bigger birds like crows and magpies – and it’s doing what we’re all doing. Surviving.