Place Perfect and the Other Australia

 (ex) position: When in the summer 2007 Jean de Rotefort, a young French aristocrat suffering from ennui first arrived in Oz, his ears grew numb and exceedingly long in the shape of a Hobbit’s from the excessive strain of being ill-attuned to this new place and the exuberant facts he had heard about it. Australia was a land of ‘exes.’ Ex-colony of exiles expecting Australia had something on offer for them. This sense of promise persists today, making Australia exotic in the eyes (and ears) of foreigners like Jean. I first met Jean on a train to Darwin. He wore shiny jewellery, an Indian Turban and long, curly moustaches like a Maharaja’s, although his thick, coarse French accent would’ve betrayed his origins straight away. The Turban covered his ears so that I never knew if what he said about their extraterrestrial shape was true. Surely, the story he told me in the course of the two-day train journey from Adelaide to Darwin where we shared the same cabin is extraordinary enough in itself. A true migrant story of endurance and triumph over adversity. Jean was 22 when he left his parents’ home for the unhomely land of adulthood and vaguely understood he’d never return. We all long for our lost childhoods, always returning physically or in our memories and dreams to find only traces of other places, other times, other lives.

Jean’s Other Australia is one we’d rather ignore because we are either too cynical or rational. Australia took for him the appearance of something akin to Peter Pan’s Neverland, the magical island for children who never grow up. His subsequent disillusionment seems proportionally extreme and somewhat unfair, though perfectly natural. Eventually, I believe he was just a child who sought refuge in Oz where he was faced instead with the hardship of cultural displacement and his new position as an immigrant. His vision belongs to the migrants of this land whose eyes can see through the appearance of things and in particular the monotony of the Australian Suburbia he viscerally hated. When the newspapers related the details of his extravagant death, I decided to write this story. But I anticipate…

(ex) pensive fact: Australia is fourteen times and a half bigger than France although most of its hinterland remains uninhabited, which is not to say it’s uninhabitable. The Outback, not to be misconstrued with a backyard (which is how America patronizingly calls France) comprises hot and hostile deserts where dust storms can struck at anytime and paralyse whole cities under mantles of red. Australians now have cars and chiefly live on the edges where patches of green and the ocean meet. It’d be unwise for them to go on horse expeditions and explore the interior as did the first settlers, who were the first in naivety and childish stubbornness only. Some died of thirst and were left to rot somewhere between Alice Spring and the Nullarbor, but statues in their effigy have been erected in cities all around to remind ourselves of the meaning of the word stupidity.

Today, most Australians prefer the beach to the bush. They natural habitat is the relative safety of a place called Suburbia, made of an endless succession of square-grid streets perfectly flanked with ugly little red-brick houses all looking the same. The 2006 census counts one million five hundred and seven thousand nine hundred Sandgropers, or people of Perth. To this we must add Jean, freshly arrived from Paris, which makes it one million five hundred thousand nine hundred and one gropers and probably as many ugly little red-brick houses in a city however known to be the most isolated metropolis in the world.

Upon renting his first Australian room, Jean realised he could not remember the address. He’d change places over the years but had then learned from the consequences of failing to distinguish one red-brick house from another. Much to the wrath of his new landlords his solution was to repaint the brick in another colour. But on that day, he got lost and was thrown into the maze of housing blocks, parking lots and supermarkets where the Australian dream of owning a car and a house unleashed before him. Jean had been bored. Most bored people are dreamers, and vice versa. He had probably seen photos of wilderness in magazines like the National Geographic featuring Australia as a place perfect, pristine and untouched. Instead he discovered what the myth of the land of Open Spaces really was, a suburban Paradise Lost, infinity and beyond .

And while roaming the ruthlessly heated summer streets in search of his new home, a nuclear family-like war of petty domestic feuds driven by profit and mediocrity was being waged, kept concealed behind walls of silence and anger that oozed with the blood of conformism. It was not so much that the city was isolated from the rest of the world but how people lived, retreating to the protection of their homes as soon as the sun set while outside the streets were left deserted. A ghostly feeling seized him every time he walked through them. No, it wasn’t just that, but mainly that they lived in isolation from each other over here. What happened inside the privacy of one’s home and heart did not spill out easily and where Jean had come from he wasn’t used to this.

Ever a Cartesian, he decided to knock on every single door though most of them looked abandoned. After one-thousand-and-one-nights and one hundred times as many houses visited, and under the mocking claxon of cars flashing past (a practice common in Perth towards pedestrians), burned and bruised, he finally made it to what was to become his ‘burrow’ (some foreigners believe Australians live underground). A night of coughing and sneezing followed. Exhausted, deaf and dumbstruck, ears full of snot, mouth dry and feet fuming with melted bitumen and the price of experience, Jean locked himself up, refusing to go out or speak for an entire year. This led him to develop a fierce sense of propriety. In this sense he represented the ideal citizen, although he did not own a car as it was too expensive. In Australia everyone ought to own a car, a way to ignore that this vast expanse ought to be for pensive contemplation instead of crisscrossed and bought over.

Jean had now joined the ranks of the Silent Minority, these newly arrived migrants who find it hard to fit in because they find it hard to describe what does not quite fit in their lives so that they soon vanish and become invisible. A year later, he moved from Perth to a small coastal town in the south coast of NSW where he taught French in a high school. A local newspaper produced an article including a photo of him holding a coffee cup on top of a beatifically smiling head. His arms were outstretched to keep it from falling and underneath it said, ‘so French so chic! A French coffee-lover who likes Australian coffee and culture!’ Underneath still, the article began with Jean’s first words since his expedition into the land of allocated spaces: ‘Wow! Australia’s big!’

(ex) centric fact: Jean de Rotefort was an aristocrat. At least his ancestors were. This means he was not immune to eccentricity himself. French history books like to tell of how one of these noble men guillotined during the Revolution declared after tripping over the steps of the scaffold to meet his death: ‘This is really not my day!’ Such ancestors make it hard to conceive the underwater world of silence that washed over Jean’s personality and transformed a strapping young lad and a jolly good fellow, yet somewhat pedantic (most aristocrats are) and loud rather than outspoken (his surname in French literally means ‘the one who burps noisily’) into a withdrawn, grumpy touchy old man whose dullness was only matched by the oncoming tidal wave of road traffic outside the window of his new Australian home. By that time however, Jean had bought a car and whenever he could he’d go on little escapades away from the humdrum of suburbia.

Australia is not insensitive either to a bit of extravaganza and excess from times to times. After all, it’s the land of the ex-centric (excuse my pun) par excellence, and its many (aristocratic) titles attest to it: New World, East of the West, World Waiting to Be Made (and we’re still waiting, for what, a new Australasia?), Lucky Country in the Antipodes (a word that means the place of the Earth diametrically opposed to another), Oz Land (nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz), or the Land Down Under, where people walk on their heads and children go to school on kangaroos’ backs. Speaking of kangaroos, I cannot help mentioning the most extravag(r)ant of all, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia (or Arboriginals, as Jean’s mother would’ve said, as if the latter were a native plant growing in the bush). If not for Aboriginals, Australia has very little to exhibit to the rest of the world. After dispossessing them of their land over two hundred years ago, it now uses indigenous cultures as a touristic attraction to draw revenue from. You may’ve seen some of these half-naked savages playing didgeridoos for tourists and their relentless thirst for an exotic souvenir to bring home. Once Jean had wanted to give money to a group of them hanging around Perth Central Station but they refused and hurled insults at him, half-threatening him with the base of a wine bottle. These types you do not see in tourist brochures, as they rarely ever smile at you.

Other things, too, that make Australia a sexy place to visit: its multicultural appeal or the self-professed rainbow-ing and queering of Sydney, where one of the biggest gay parades in the world take place every year (while Toni Abbot declared recently marriage should be between a man and a woman). And then there is the Opera House, a masterpiece of maverick architecture facing one of the most beautiful bays in the world (partly compensating for the unashamed suburban ugliness spreading all around like seaweed). And there is Uluru, the biggest monolith in the world (and a site of Aboriginal mourning for the genocide its people suffered) from the top of which Napoleon himself could’ve declared, had he been there instead of Egypt that forty-thousand years of history watches us. But I believe even Napoleon would not have found the words to express the sensation of crushing loneliness and deafening silence Jean felt when confronted to the brutal austerity of the Australian cityscape; of its tall, lonely skyscrapers like lighthouses lost in barbaric seawaters, incongruous vestiges of a civilization only so recently built and already devoid of any substance or soul; of its straight boulevards leading nowhere, with only car traffic to give you the illusion of time passing; of its shopping malls and generic brands, these new spiritual shrines of Australian consumerism where people go to buy their way to Heaven, and the empty trolleys they dump on road sides like the dead carcasses of washed away and well-extinct dinosaurs; and of their homes for which the door is always closed and the blinds shut, standing sad and silent, impersonal and immaterial, dead and empty.

Of this land and of these people other titles apply: Netherland (or New Holland, as it was once called), Land of no Return (which it was for the first convicts arriving by boat and still is for many migrants who cannot afford to pay for an airplane return ticket), the Lost World, Atlantis, Terra Nullius, Bubble Land, Land of the Forsaken, Forgotten Land, Noland, etc. Of this land and of these people, Jean had soon adopted the fatalism and stoicism that spat ‘fuck the rest of the world’ when what it really did was to remain ignorant of it. Australia’s remoteness was what’d attracted him at first but it now took on a different meaning. The Other Australia was an ‘I-land’, insular and self-centred, conservative rather than exploratory, where adventures of the kind Jean used to read as a kid only remained in movies like Crocodile Dundee or The Man from Snowy River. Nothing much happened in the news apart from the weather forecast - sky-blue, hot and sunny - and the latest sports scandal. Australia to his disappointment seemed to be content in its secure mediocrity, a land of laid back, nonchalant middle-class pampered spoiled brats who had it tough and rough once-upon-a-time and never did again. They drove in air-con, window-stained, high-perched four-wheel drives so the land wouldn’t encroach on their cocooned selves - a land of crooked trees and odd creatures sounding as if they’d come straight off Tim Burton’s imagination and to which Jean felt he did not belong.

And on TV he saw fear everywhere. He realised the fear was always portrayed as if coming from the outside when in fact it should have (and did) come from inside people’s disconnected lives with the land and each other: boat-people threatening Australian borders, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, poverty and devastation in the Third World, migrants threatening to steal Australian jobs and the Australian way of life, more war in Palestine, more threats from same-sex couples wishing to marry and eroding the sanctity of Christianity, genocide in Sri Lanka, terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the US or Europe, but not in Australia, never in Australia… and…control of the body, body lotions, weight watchers programs, counter-programmed with junk food ads to make you feel addicted and want to kill yourself sometimes because you feel hopeless as an individual…spiritual land of the spiritless where suicide, obesity, drug consumption and alcoholism rank highest in the world… a land of eccentricity indeed… and… more violence in the form of carpet sales (Australia is obsessed with them) for 99,99 dollars only! Buy, buy, buy! says (no, yells at you!) the commercial when you already own more carpets than an Arab and all you need really is love as the song goes.

But deep inside a well of anger was growing and when Jean moved to Melbourne in summer 2009, a giant bush fire, the biggest recorded in Australian history had just leaped over Victoria, nearly reaching Melbourne and killing hundreds of people and destroying hundreds of homes. It took another year for the fire to propagate in Jean’s oesophagus and for the voicing out of things kept burning up for too long. In the meantime his hearing had improved, although his ears’ elongated shape, the result of years of having to listen to others without being able to express his own judgments reminded him that he may always remain an Alien in this country. His first words after what I would call Jean’s metaphorical traversée du désert (crossing of the desert) were as a left-wing activist and over the megaphone, haranguing the throng with the fist of his throat in a deep, muffled voice: ‘Be Loud, Be Proud!

(ex) it: When I think of Jean’s Australia, I see two non-reconciliatory paths, like the two sides of a coin or the two faces of the moon. One dark, one shiny bright, a surfer’s paradise and a strange place indeed even for an Australian-born like myself. Jean called this place “Ca” (IT), for like Stephen King’s creature it represented many names and no name in particular, feeding on our fears of the unknown and incarnating different shapes at different times and for different people. Australia had had its Yellow Peril and now its boat-people. What would tomorrow bring before we make peace with the land and ourselves? When I met Jean on the train to Darwin he had veered towards mysticism and as we approached the end of our journey I asked him if he thought there could ever be beauty or magic in suburbia, of the same magic he’d spoken so eloquently when telling me about his vision of another Australia. His voice by then was that of an old guru, incantatory and annoyingly jerky.

‘What you see is…not what you get…and…what’s real is not necessarily what’s true…to yourself. Spiritual concealment is not…absence of it. Bulldozed away are the spirits of this land, but the land itself…remains.’

I felt he hadn’t answered my question. I wanted something - any charm or spell would do - to bring home from my own spiritual journey and save my marriage from imminent failure. At the time my wife and I were contemplating divorce and I would’ve killed to know what’d gone wrong in my life. Jean’s story had struck a sensitive chord within me: was suburbia really the root of all evil? So I pressed upon: ‘But what about the magic?’

‘Close your eyes…and imagine…another place…learn to see through things…with your heart.’

I felt cheated: another cheesy thing to say from a man who was probably a liar and imposter. What of his Hobbit ears, and who did he think he was fooling, recounting how he’d roamed the streets of Perth for nights on? And how he could’ve once been an activist and be now reduced to such a vegetative state? When we parted I asked where he was going: ‘Walkabout.’

I scrutinized his face and knew he wasn’t joking. Half of it remained dissimulated, turned towards the red Outback, and the other half had an air of childish stubbornness and dreamlike determination.

I quit my multi-million house/wife in Toorak soon after that and bought a farm in the Peninsula. The days dozed by until one morning on the front cover of The Age a photo of the now dead Jean de Rotefort appeared. He’d been found walled up alive within the red-brick of an old derelict colonial house the authorities planned to demolish. It was headlines for several weeks on and died off. But the nirvana-like smile on his face when they extracted his corpse would remain to haunt me till the end.