The City and the Grime

This is Les Kennedy, the police reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. This is him outside the Blacktown Court, I think it was, where the court was a series of runways under construction. We were there, the usual suspects, for the appearance of a mother who's daughter had died from a methadone overdose. It was the usual classic; it was nobody's fault, the house, "a supermarket of drugs" the police prosecutor described it, had more than a litre of methadone, a safe for the drugs to be locked up in, theoretically away from the children, and there was the classic clash between the police prosecutor and the presumably left wing magistrate, who appeared to be oozing concern for the distraught and emotional mother, who's six year old daughter Rose had died of a methadone overdose after she had given it to her thinking, allegedly, that it was cough medicine. Even here, even now, the scams continued apace. Nothing was anybody's fault. The supermarket of drugs was just another house. The grieving parents were not murderers. Two more kids ended up in hospital on methadone overdoses and it was nobody's fault. Or the doctor's fault. Or methadone's fault. She sobbed, she cried, she twisted. We were immune to blandishments. We just wanted the story and to get going. The police appeared to have absolutely no sympathy. The stepfather was silent, depressed, refused bail, said nothing. The mother was voluble, tearful, trying frantically to get out, and was refused bail. A handsome officer in shorts laughed right next to her, what do you expect if you've got a house full of dope and you're doped yourself; and these were a sub-species in the sprawling suburbs, irredeemable, dependent on welfare, drunk, stoned and unable to look after themselves. We saw them every day. And in the end it was hard to know if we cared either. We filed, we wondered where the world was going, we watched our own grime turn inwards and looked upward and away. There was little that could be said, in the end, did we even know each other's names; the gang that was everywhere in a city which had essentially collapsed into warring factions, ghettos, classes, suburbs where no one crossed the line. The stratification of wealth. I saw it all like froth at the edge of the beach; looking down, and somehow, my heart was gone, compassion disintegrated; scattered with an aridity that just didn't care anymore. We were professional empaths and the empathy had gone. We needed to keep our own hearth secure; our own futures tied up; and all around everything we had ever believed in was gone. Single tragedies and multiple tragedies, like malt whisky, came and went by the day. Our time was brief. Our dignity gone. I pleaded for a better life and forgot how good things were in the cesspit we still called home. This city used to be a great place to live, 30 years ago, I said to a taxi driver, the universal taxi driver, and he nodded. It was always easy to agree. The good days were gone. Sydney was a big city now. And with it came the grime.