The Days We Thought Would Never End

This is Martin Portus and Katherine Brisbane. Katherine was a former reviewer at The Australian and established Currency Press, which has published plays and artistic debates and all this sort of thing for many years. Martin is now director of communications for the Australian Museum. We draw blinds across the past. We giggle and we think everything will be alright. I was standing on the footpath yacking to a neighbour, Sunday afternoon, as one does, the heat and the infinite all combined in the boiling sky, and he drove past and tooted. I used to know Martin more than a quarter of a century ago; in rambling old Adelaide houses and a world far removed. He tooted, in his old blue BMW, and I didn't recognise him at first, thinking, who the hell is this tooting at me; doing the usual how to be polite while desperately trying to remember whoever the person is. Sometimes you loom large in their lives; and they don't loom at all in yours. Or the other way around. Twisted turns. We had some good times; way back then; in shadows and curtains and cool rooms; when there was an infinite future not an infinite past. I show up, I do my time in the brutal reality of it all, and go. He sniffs; you've always been funny about money; over stray comments and strands from the past and foyers. He was going to a launch of a book on What Is Wrong with the Australia Council, the government funding body for the arts which like almost all government institutions ends up in a bureaucratic mire while virtually no money is actually dispensed to where its meant to go. Sydney is caught up in the drama of the Cross City Tunnel, an infrastructure farce from the Carr era which is costing a fortune and creating massive traffic jams and is hated by all and sundry. It is making the NSW state government look like a bunch of incompetent fools; which has never been far from the truth anyway. Carr had them boxed; sweeping into press conferences, making his announcements, picking the two softest touches in the press pack, answering their questions and sweeping out. A busy man. Far too important to dally. Or to make mistakes. Or to befriend journalists. We shared so many hopes and they never worked out. Things were complex; more complex than they need have been. It was the era. And then, with the veil drawn, he swayed and laughed, sober these days, drinking lemonade in the foyer while the usual suspects got drunk on white wine and crapped on about the allegory of the methaphor of the allegory. I couldn't understand what they were talking about, and I doubt they did either. Nothing like a few wines to rid one of the need for common sense. Hardened hack. Cynical noiw. The socialism of our youth burnt out on the flames of a thousand stories. You could chop 90% of what the government does and we'd all be better off. The dreams and the grand speaches and the white limousines; their air conditioning running in the heat; it was all a waste. Some poor bastard had worked hard in some factory so the secular left middle class could sip their wine and jostle to have the most progressive, most perfectly political views. He didn't bother. He stared and he glared and he kept on going. In those caves in Malaysia, when you had looked so beautiful, when he had been so much, so surprisingly in love, were not just decades, but universes away. He skulled his lemonade and headed for the door; after the working of a foyer barely worth working. Goodbye, goodbye, see you on Tuesday. They danced around, argued about Australian politics and what he deemed the poor state of Australian journalism. It's so boring, so conflict focussed, he said. Don't you think? No, I don't think, journalism is all about conflict, but I demur. We part and I draw the veil; but don't ever think I don't remember.