More notes on Australia

Immigration To Australia

Year one: busy busy
Year two: zolpidem
Year three: zoloft
Year four: metrol beta blockers
Year five: steroids for haemarhoids and Cymbalata for everything else

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"Can I speak to Alison please?"
"I'm sorry she's not at her desk at the moment"
Ok , could you ask her to phone me please
"Would you like to tell me what its about"
"No I fukking well wouldn't."
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Because I wanted to get away from Crime and incompetence in SA
I now have to put up with anal bureacrats who hate creativity and spontanaiety with a passion
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Thank you G?d
for being in Australia
thank you G?d
for bicycles
thank you G?d
for Yoga and rain
thank you G?d
for my so called mistakes

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Australia's synagogues
are its shopping malls
horse racing courses
and stadia
where its people try to still
with forgetting and numbness
the hunger for more
but if someone gives me a job
I will stop complaining

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While I have found some establishment Australian poetry (poetry written in Australia?) fresh and clever, I find much of it to be technically acomplished, but emotinally flat and instantly forgettable - soul less would be the metaphorical descriptor that comes to mind. Which probably says as much about me and my disinterest in recasting myself as Australian (whatever that might be - is Australian an Imam in Lakemba or is it a Tamil Tiger refugee making their way in Adelaide??...answer it is both, as well as the Aboriginal inhabitants and Anglo invaders)

( despite the tokenistic curtsies and nods in the direction of multiculturalism, the public domain here is still dominated and grounded in one discourse, one set of assumptions, one representation of normative reality) which is largely that of secularized English speaking Christianity - so from mainly Anglo TV presenters, to the temporal orientation points of Christmas and Easter, to the normalization of meat eating and heterosexuality and alcohol consumption and horse racing - the ideas about what is Australian still trump who actually lives in Australia, and the visibly or substantially different still live their differences in the safe and subterranean burrows of the private domain )

Message in a bottle

Hello from darkest sydney
where nothing happens very slowly
but perhaps not as slowly as it doesn't happen
in Cairns or September
who knows?
its enough to drive you to Bhuddism or Bretslavism
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Things I l loathe about Australia
its diffident complacency
its bureaucrats and civil srvants trained to think inside (the bottom left hand corner not exceeding 5cm of ) the box

box
its aversion to risk, its do it by numbers
its horse racing beer drinking war on fish tv
its blonde haired presenters, its fear of the depths
its do it by the book robotic pretence

Things I like about Australia
its diffident complacency
its bureaucrats and civil sevants trained to think in the lid of the
box
its aversion to risk, its do it by numbers
its horse racing beer drinking war on fish tv
its blonde haired presenters, its fear of the depths
its do it by the book robotic pretence



Australian history begins in Southern India
Australian history begins in Ireland
Australian history begins in Poland and Greece and Lebanon and South Africa
The narrative does not start here it only continues here
we all bought our lives inside us with us, and tried to continue them here as best we could, in some shape and form, even if we had lost everything there...

See also: australia-day