The Cliff Edge

This is the walk along the cliffs at Coogee, just down from Stephen's place, where I waited one night, lost, child free, hungry and the car untidy, and always the uncomfortable gut and the hole that could never be filled. Sydney beaches in lockdown, the headlines screamed, 200 kilometres from Wollongong and Newcastle. Death of the Australian summer. Two men were arrested after they got on a public bus going down to Bondi. The bus driver could smell the petrol and alerted the authority. Police stopped the bus and escorted the two men off. They had petrol and bottles and materials for making molotov cocktails. How smart is that, getting on a public bus. Grass roots movement, so to say.

The beaches were quiet last night; neither we nor anyone else could really get to them. Five men were arrested in Brighton le Sands, a thin but picturesque bay along Port Jackson which has always been popular with out ethnics because it has no waves. Unable to swim; having arrived from the desert, they looked so uncomfortable with their burquas in the heat. They didn't mix, they gathered for picnics.

Keith Windscuttle also wrote: "All the evidence from the numerous studies of similar ethnic ghettos in North America and Europe show they produce much the same result, whatever the colour or ethnicity of their inhabitants. Ghetto culture for young men everywhere is characteised by interpersonal violence, sexual irresponsibility, incomplete education, substandard speech, a hypersensitivity about being disrespected and a feckless attitude towards work."

We had all grown up along the beaches, or it had become part of our psyche. Long hot summers; too hot to think. The key was simply survival. My old mate Colin has been staying for a few days, down from Newcastle where he had retreated, basically to die. But instead, with all the new treatments, he had rallied. Men in our 50s, these weren't our golden age. Indeed, we had never expected to live so long, to make it here through all the tumble that had ever been. I miss Howard, he said. I miss them all, I thought. They don't queue at the door like they used to, he said, remiss, but it wasn't just that. In those partying days, 30 years ago or more, we thought that every last step we took was changing history, changing the nation's psyches. We were the talent that would shake the age. Everyman's cafe is the centre of the universe, Cocteau wrote, and thus it had seemed. I had a house next to a hotel in Hargrave Street, Paddington, which Jenny had inherited and let me live in for minimal rent while I finished university.

In the end we sold the house for $30,000 because we needed the money. It would be worth a million dollars now.

Those were only part of the things that had gone wrong; with everybody carking it like flies as Aids spread across the world, wiping out a whole layer of Sydney's gays. And everything we ever thought meant something, was gone. Lou Reed played through the long afternoons, in the heat, and we could never have imagined a Sydney where the beaches were in lockdown, where ethnic gangs from the west terrified the residents of the beach suburbs, going on car smashing rampages. The text messages were distributed quickly through the seething uncertainties. "Rise up, rise up, Oh Lions of Lebanon."

More than 50 people have been arrested now. At Brighton le Sands police solved the problem by diverting all traffic away from the beach. It was basically just impossible to get to. It was sunset, and where normally, in the midst of summer, lots of families and tiny kids would splashing in the shadows, there was only two people in the distance walking along the deserted sand. All the craving had gone inwards. The itch would never stop. The emptiness would never cease. He would in the end never know comfort, never find his own place of peace, or worship. There was a profound cynicism, a jocular wit, and that was it. The dredging of the mine for more words, more sense, more stories, had reached a point where he could barely function. They sensed it of course, the bosses, because people always pick on the week. The impending catastrophe was averted only by putting on a blank mask. The luxurious beaches in the end were a poor resource; everyone looked so happy, so relaxed, so comfortable within themselves, and he, who had once known everyone, was lonely now. I find it hard to make friends, he said, and it was true. Time and the tides of the city had cannibalised the past, the generations to which we had belonged had gone, the groups which we thought would form the great novelists, artists and musicians of tomorrow had vanished in shame, chaos and self-indulgence. They looked so far away, those two people in the distance on the beach, while behind the police diverted the walls of traffic and the hope that we had once held vanished still further into a future we could never have recognised.

IRAQ WATCH:

The Vietnam war was still raging when I emerged into adulthood in the 1970s. I got out of conscription because I was going to university. By the time I had finished the war was over. I had never wanted to go, just simply didn't believe in it. Any comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq have been poopoohed. The helicopters ferrying embassy staff off the roof of the US embassy would not happen here. I remember saying on radio one night, some days you know you're watching history, when the statue of Saddam was pulled down, the scene beamed around the world. It was then I thought, hey maybe I was wrong, maybe this war is the right thing to do. The thought didn't last long, the quagmire worsened.

Here's a bit from Bloomberg:

President George W. Bush warned Americans to expect ``more testing and sacrifice'' in Iraq while urging his critics to consider the stakes of a war that he said is slowly being won. In his first Oval Office address since the start of the Iraq war, Bush directly addressed opponents of his Iraq strategy and appealed for continued public support for the war.
``The need for victory is larger than any president or political party, because the security of our people is in the balance,'' Bush said in an address tonight from Washington. ``I do not expect you to support everything I do, but tonight I have a request: Do not give in to despair, and do not give up on this fight for freedom.

Bush said the U.S. is succeeding by staying the course in Iraq.
``My fellow citizens: Not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq,'' Bush said. ``Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another dday. Not even the terrorists believe it. We know from their own communications that they feel a tightening noose, and fear the rise of a democratic Iraq.''