Boom! Excursions in fantasy land
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julienne van Loon
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Julienne van Loon's biography and other articles by this writer
Midland: Recently I watched a small group of drunks on the pavement across from the Midland library swinging punches at each other. There were four of them standing in a circle, each giving voice to slurred phrases that I understood to be insults only because of the gruff musicality with which they flew from the mouth. One, a fellow in his sixties and too well-dressed to be a street-dweller, drew my attention. He had a certain dignity about him. I admired him as he stood tall, tilted his chin and challenged the man opposite. But then he swung his fist in a fast, wide arc, and the passionate force of it was all too much for him. He lost his balance and landed with a loud slap, flat on the grey cement pavement. The punch hadn't come within an inch of the other man, who stood tottering and looking as if he might fall over of his own accord at any moment. I wanted to laugh at this impromptu, weekday-afternoon slapstick: the grand, proud swing of the empty punch, the comical self-inflicted damage done by the fall. Part of me wanted to stay and watch the rest of the show, but my initial smile passed quickly.
There was suddenly something about the scene that was not at all funny. I bowed my head to climb into the car. As I started the engine, I took one last look at my man, still spreadeagled on the ground and moaning. No doubt he'd hurt himself. All that pride and energy in the swing, I thought, and for what? The street rang out with the futility of it.
In the recent Australian feature film Last Train to Freo, adapted from a play by Reg Cribb, two thugs get on a train at Midland, Perth's easternmost suburban rail terminus, and travel the full length of the line to Fremantle. As they do so, they leave their own welfare-class people behind and travel towards the city, and then beyond it, into the elite western suburbs where they plan to run amok.
"Not much dog shit around Midland anymore," says Trev, the tall thug, at the beginning of the film.
"No," replies his buddy Steve.
"The locals are pretty good at pickin' up after their dogs now."
"Yeah."
"Not much dog shit around Perth anymore really."
"No, not like the old days."
As a resident of Western Australia for the last ten years, I have dwelt mainly in the far eastern urban fringes of the state's sprawling capital – hence my local commercial centre is Midland. If you know Sydney, you know the term "Westie" and you are familiar with the idea that the city spreads from rich to poor, roughly speaking, along a route more or less east to west, from coastal plain to foothills. Here in Perth it's the same, though the compass points are reversed. The rich have water views along the western coastline, while the poor peg out land further inland, where the heat intensifies and the Fremantle Doctor fails to reach.
Midland interests me in part because of its huge number of welfare-class residents – Steve and Trev are recognisable types – but also because of the astronomical rate of development that has hit the area during the last few years. I didn't live here during "the old days", but one doesn't need to have been around for long to have witnessed radical change. Trev is right about the dog shit disappearing. At the moment, the whole commercial centre of the town is one vast construction site. The state government set up the Midland Redevelopment Authority (MRA) several years ago to steer in the changes and to excite investors. "Be a part of the New Midland," advise huge MRA billboards all over town. The place is being reimagined, reinvigorated. In commercial and residential real estate terms, it is positively booming. And yet a huge number of people you pass on the streets and in the shopping centres are recognisably poor, uneducated, many of them drug-fucked, unwell, aimless.
"I know, in this boom-time Perth," says Reg Cribb when I meet him for coffee in a neighbouring suburb, "in this boom-time stupor that we're in – our football team has won and our house prices have gone up, doubled – that there are real problems under that, which people in Perth are not interested in looking at."
Cribb's script takes a ruthlessly realist approach to representing the "white trash" element of Midland through the two main characters, Trev and Steve – one an ex-con and the other his young sidekick. The film makes obvious the growing divide between one class and another, and focuses pointedly on the ongoing problem of violence on Perth trains. While Last Train to Freo has been well received on the east coast and overseas, reviews published in Western Australia have been cold, even scathing. It seems reviewers in the West are offended that the City of Light might be represented in this way.
"People are not interested in seeing anything that challenges them at the moment, socially, politically," says Cribb. "One of the reasons I wanted to write [the script] was [because] I thought why, in the luckiest city in the world, are there so many unhappy people? I feel it. Steve says, in his monologue, he says everyone's richer, everyone's more beautiful, and you read the magazines and the paper and you think, I'm not feeling that way. I'm supposed to be, everyone's telling me I should be, but I'm not feeling that way. So, there's a lot of discontent around, you know, in the boom period. That interests me. And as soon as you say, in the paper, money doesn't make you happy, everyone goes ‘Oh, come on, what do you know?' Or, ‘Don't tell me that. Don't tell me I can't go to Morley Shopping Centre and be happy. I got nowhere else to go.'"
A FEW BLOCKS FROM THE MIDLAND LIBRARY, my stepson lives with his girlfriend in a rented red-brick 3x1. They've just had a baby, my first grandchild – well, my de facto step-grandchild, to be precise. "People use the term non-biological," these days, says a friend of mine. "It's just easier."
As I pull up in Leon's driveway to see baby Anna for the first time, I'm thinking about John Howard's $3,000 baby bonus, and what it means for a young couple like Leon and Sam, living entirely on welfare. As it turns out, their eyes are wide with the possibilities. Three thousand dollars is a great deal of money to a family of four living off six hundred dollars a week in outer suburban boomtime Perth. They mention digital cameras and MP3 players and possibly a second-hand car. I think about the cost of running a car – petrol, registration, maintenance – but say nothing, not wanting to rain on the parade.
Anna is sleepy, slightly jaundiced, only three days old. She is the perfect newborn, utterly awe-inspiring, even to a non-biological grandmother. Her eyes are closed, but her tiny face is expressive, attuned to every small noise or bodily sensation. She seems completely content in my arms. In the weeks leading up to Anna's birth, I have been worried for her. Her father, twenty-six, is a recovering addict. He was bright once. As we sit in the toy-strewn lounge room on a hand-me-down sofa, the television delivers brightly coloured light and noise to an otherwise dark room.
Sam seems remarkably confident and happy, even just a few days after the birth of her second child. She tells me she arrived at Swan Districts Hospital at nine on Friday morning, gave birth to the baby at midday, and was home again by five o'clock. She's very young. I wonder how many more babies are to come, and whether Leon can straighten himself out for them. If not ...?
The newborn's face flinches slightly as her toddler half-brother slams a toy truck down sharply on the coffee table.
"She can hear you," I say to Jess, the toddler.
Anna's tiny lips purse and she screws up her face, as if to begin to cry for her mother, but then the idea is gone, quickly as it came, the face dreamily blank once more.
As I prepare to leave, the community nurse arrives, her bag bulging with the tools of her trade. She set up her scales in the middle of the coffee table and proceeds to place the naked Anna on the metal plate atop some light fabric.
"She's lost 600 grams," the nurse announces to two new parents whose faces seem suddenly stern and serious.
"Why's that?" says Leon.
"No, it's fine," says the nurse, reassuringly. "It's good. She's doing really well."
I wave goodbye, smiling at Leon who is still looking at the baby. There's hope for Leon in my heart, for the first time in a long time.