The Doust Files - Albany Advertiser 26/10/2010

Now we are well and truly settled in Albany, a number of things have become clear – we should have done it years ago, the weather is even better than we knew it was, and we never want to shift again.

We know a number of families moving house right and we have counselled them to take great care, because moving house not only brings out the worst in people, it can be dangerous to personal health and wellbeing.

It’s not a good start, for example, when the truck arrives to collect your stuff for the big move and the driver admits he hates shifting.  My wife, our driver said, has made us shift five times and every time we shift we almost kill each other and that’s not the worst of it because she’s a Docker’s supporter and I’m with the Eagles.

Here’s the full tale.

Before the move I was in the bush and had to drive like hell to get back in time to load the truck. When I got home I discovered I was not as well advanced with my personal packing as I thought and so stayed up well past midnight packing books I was sure I would never read again, files I couldn’t remember the contents of and computer equipment that became obsolete just after Kevin Rudd started shaving.

Anyway, up first thing in the morning for the truck, no time for breakfast and hard at it long enough to realise that not everything would fit it the available carriers: the truck, the back of my station wagon, my mate’s half truck plus two-ton trailer and my wife’s sedan.

But, as is the way, when you have to leave you have to leave and so we left.

On the way I decided to take the long route through Bridgetown and pick up a spare gas heater from my brother the beef breeder. My sister-in-law, forever sensible and well meaning, suggested I stay overnight and rest. No way, I insisted, must be there with the sparrow to help unload the truck. I am a man and must push on for fear of letting down the truck-men.

I didn’t make it, because 45ks out of Manjimup, on the Muir Highway, a kangaroo, after a shocking week on the stock market, decided it could go on no longer and threw itself in front of my car. Not only did it take its own life, it took the life of my car.

There we were, kangaroo, car and me, stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to show for it but a busted radiator, busted bonnet, busted body and busted ego.

Luckily a car soon arrived on the scene but as he slowed he looked and what he saw was clearly a demented man in filthy clothes, with dishevelled hair and wild eyes. He planted his foot and left me standing.

I thought, hang on, this is my country, people know me, so when the next car slowed I yelled out: Hey, Jon Doust here. I’ve hit a roo. The occupant, a decent and local man responded: Dousty, what the hell have you done now?

And that’s how I arrived in Albany, looking like a rat flying out of some kind of hell.

 

The Doust Files - Albany Advertiser 12/10/2010

 We’re not big on anniversaries in this house. We never remember the wedding. Good reason too. It was a stinking Perth day, the groom was somewhat bruised from the previous night, the witnesses turned up late and the marriage celebrant was drunk.

But this one, we know it well. We love it. It’s our second year in the Great Southern.

 It was not easy making the big move south.  First we had to sell our house in the city and then we had to buy another house by the sea.

As usual, we didn’t do it the right way around. First we bought the house by the sea and then we tried to sell our house in the city.

I know what you are thinking: “Clever, innovative, imaginative”. Not really, because we chose to buy just before the market began to scream, kick and fight its way into a dive and we chose to sell as its plummet gathered momentum.

We are not, you see, the classic Baby Boomers.  No, indeed, we sold our city house to a Y-Generation couple who didn’t have enough money to complete the transaction and they still don’t.

What’s more, we were not cashed up after years of real estate manoeuvres, or share market profits and I had not decided to retire from my advertising agency after selling it to a multi-national.

In short, we were a couple of late-starters who met on a communal farm in Israel during the hippy boom of the early-middle 1970s. Oh, don’t get me started on those stories.

Indeed, we belong to that group of Boomers who will have to keep working until the man in the suit comes to measure us for the box.

That’s ok with me because I’m one of those blokes who has difficulty sitting still and if there’s nothing to do I’ll find something and do it, or re-do something already done, or undo something so I can do it again. Or even write a column for a local newspaper about it all.

Oh yes, there are benefits.  The beach is only three steps and one jump away and on a good day I can be there for three hours, walking one length, picking up human debris as I go, body surfing, then running back to the steaming hot showers like an old man who loves to run but his body wishes he wouldn’t.

Fishing is something I promised myself I’d get back to one but I haven’t yet. I’ve had offers, plenty, but they never confirm. What is it? Have they heard? Have they spoken to members of my immediate family who remember well my lack of patience and inability to sit still for ten hours on a dead flat ocean, only to come alive when the wind picks up and the ocean tosses us about like sardines doubled up in a tin for one layer only?

All this is because I grew up in a family that only fished or played tennis and when I hit eighteen I changed them for activities more in keeping with a young man who thinks he’s in the prime of his life.

I was wrong, the prime was up ahead. I’m in it now, I’m excited, I’m two years old.

The Doust Files - Albany Advertiser 28/9/2010

Over my long and illustrious-less career I have come to terms with the fact that I am not much good at many things, ok at a few and hopeless at a vast number.

Often people ask me: How does a bloke like you make a living?

And I reply: None of your bloody business.

Then, after I pick myself up off the floor, I answer truthfully: Essentially I make a living out of writing, speaking and acting.

All right, I know the next question? Acting? Do you know Russell Crowe? Or Hugh Jackman? What about Cate Blanchett?

No, but I have worked with people who have worked with people who have worked with them.

And I have worked with Jack Thompson. All right, not with him, but I once said “gidday” to him and ate breakfast on the same table during the shooting of one of the worst Australian movies ever made, Under the Lighthouse Dancing.

It all started in South Africa in the early 1970s when I was plucked out of obscurity by a German TV crew to star in a soft drink commercial.

I was chosen, of course, because of my serious good looks and my shock of Aryan blond hair.

I starred as a champion cyclist who rode his bike into a throng of seriously blond German models who threw themselves at me with soft drink in their hands, kissed my entire face and, once the shoot was over, dumped me like a sack of onions.

Then I was called on for an Afrikaans language movie, which entailed sitting next to the two stars at a rugby match and screaming “Achten tachta yoghurt asteblift”, or something that sounded a lot like that.

All this convinced me I had a big future in the movies and back home I scored major bit-parts in a number of Aussie films. Here is a short list: Justice, Thunderstruck and Needle. (It’s short because, well, it’s short.)

But, and this was my real Big Break, I have starred in many TV commercials. Oh, yes, everything from selling shoes, to lotto, healthy living, garage doors, and air-conditioning.

For the most part, people get that you are acting, but every so often someone misses the point.

I once took a phone call from a woman who was convinced I was a non-existent man called Doctor Coolbreeze.

I explained, with increasing agitation, that I was not a doctor, not an air-conditioning mechanic and, no, I was not coming to her house to fix her air-conditioning.

She was mortified. She would have been horrified if I had attempted the job, because no doubt I would have taken her house out with the entire ducted system.

So, in case you were wondering, given I’m on your screen sometime soon, no, I do not break into houses, I am not a cleaner of display homes, and I certainly don’t live in one with a much younger male friend.

And, finally, no, I am not a postman, I cannot fly a plane and I don’t work in a bookshop.

The Doust Files - Albany Advertiser 14/9/2010

In my line of work I have to drive a lot.

Moving to Albany was a perfect lifestyle choice, but not sensible for the making of a living to support that lifestyle. Travel is essential if you do what I do and as soon as I discover what it is, I will let you know.

These days, given I have history with kangaroos, I drive with a good deal more care and nowhere as fast.

When I say fast, I mean, of course, well within the speed limit of the section of road I am on at the time of asking. Or as near as I can get.

On the long drive there are many things to see and many experiences to be had.  Some of the roadside signs, particular those mentioning the current targets of local police, have themselves been targeted.

In the old days, about a minute ago, the usual way to target such signs was to use them as target practice on your way to a fox hunt, but graffiti artists have made their way out bush and some of the signs, although politically incorrect, have caused a smile, sometimes joined by a chuckle.

One sign I spotted last year suggested local police were targeting “mullets”, while another warned that the police were targeting overweight people of the female gender, although not in those words.

We even have our own version not far out of Albany that clearly warns us we are in “Mafia Country”.

But the places causing the greatest mirth and pain, for this writer, are the motels. In particular, the internal designs.

Whoever designed the internals of country motels has never had to stay in one, sit in one, dry himself in one, go to the toilet in one, or lie in one, or then get out of bed in one.

And I say him because, please excuse any hint of sexism, I cannot imagine that a women designed such pokey, ridiculous places. They would surely have considered people, whereas the man who designed the places I occasionally stay in was only thinking of a bottom line and noting at all about the line of a bottom.

On countless occasions I have opened a door only to find myself trapped between two doors; sat on a toilet and had to get up to reach the paper dispenser; banged my shoulders, elbows and knees while drying myself following a shower that only directed water against a solid wall; tiptoed around a shattered glass shower wall; and made a cup of tea with the kettle sitting on the bed.

I was in one a month ago up in a wheatbelt town which shall remain nameless and no sooner had I entered that I felt like a kangaroos trapped in headlights on a wet and misty night in the middle of a road in the middle of nowhere.

I had no idea which way to turn and finished up trapped between a shower curtain, a toaster and a bed rail. I’m lucky to be alive.

The Doust Files, Albany Advertiser 31/8/2010

Have you got your Rate Notice from the City of Albany?
Have you burnt your Rate Notice? Did you want to burn your Rate Notice? Did you want to stuff your rate notice up … a drain pipe?
I am tempted to ask if there was, perhaps, something else you might prefer to burn, but that may well hasten my arrest under the criminal code for incitement to riot, or cause havoc, or, at the very least, disrespect to legally elected representatives in a due and democratic process.
Which leads to me suggest what asses we are, you and me, the lot of us, including Len, my retired Bruce Rock farmer mate and Phoebe, my young and funky lawyer friend who yells at me from across the street.
What are we doing? Why don’t we stand up and make ourselves available? We would never have got ourselves into this mess. Would we?
I’ll tell you why, because it’s a thankless task, local government, any government. I’ve got mates in a couple of houses of parliament and every time I see them I say: “Get out! Now! While you still have a smidgeon of sanity and you still have at least one friend.”
Anyone going in should go in with a set term in mind, say six years. Then they should bugger off, go home, back to the farm, to the law office, open a gelato shop and give some other poor sod a go.
Nothing worse than watching tired old pollies hang on for dear life because that’s all they know, all they’ve ever done since the old days when they had a real job and they still think they have it, but they’ve forgotten what it is.
Well, there are a couple of things worse, like accidentally ironing your tongue, or being run over by a rotary hoe, or being forced to eat rhubarb with potato.
Watching the current Federal campaign has reminded me what is wrong with the grass roots: there’s no vision. Both leaders argue over the same policies, each one offering fifty bucks more than the other, hoping we will go: “Hey, wow, fifty bucks, that’s great. I can buy a new pillow.”
And that’s what’s wrong with local government, no vision, no grand plan, just knee-jerk responses to jerking knees.
As Pete, my Noongar mate often reminds me, Albany was the first wadjela (white fella) town on this vast west coast: “Surely we could make something of that by embracing the two cultures, make the town a symbol of transition. For a start, what about using Noongar and English in all signage and all visitors to the region to be welcomed by the mayor and an elder.”
Then there’s the brilliant idea I’m sure many of you have heard about to return Albany to its original name, Frederickstown, once a year, for one month and fill the place with activities and historical re-enactments.
Pete reckons Lockyer’s mob were late-comers and he’d like to go back to Kinjarling, the original name for the region, meaning place of rain.
These are big visions. They may not be your visions, but why not give them a try. If they don’t work, we could mix and match and try others. A town that continually re-invents itself would be exciting to visit.
Too many people over the last couple of weeks have come up to me and said: “What are you going to do about it, Jon, the rate hike?”
First of all I commiserate and then I say: “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to write a column. That should make the buggers quake.”
There, I’ve done it. When they bring the rates down next year, you’ll know who to thank.

The Doust Files, Albany Advertiser, 17/8/2010

At the time of writing this column, I am somewhat relieved to know that this most boring of elections is almost over.

Never have I known such a vacuous contest, with both leaders touting policies that could, just as easily, belong to the other.

Those of you at least as old as me will well remember the great contests of the past, even the 1962 stoush between the magician Menzies and the artless Caldwell makes this current bout look like something  from World Championship Wrestling.

And who could forget Fraser versus Hawke, then Peacock up against Hawke, followed by Howard v Hawke, then Peacock again, then Keating versus Hawke, then Keating chucking cake at Hewson and, oh yes, Lazarus himself, Howard tumbling Keating.

What tussles. What drama. You could even, hard to believe I know, tell the difference between the party platforms.

My personal favourite was the Fraser Hawke clash of 1983 and I saved the entire election campaign in political cartoons.

In those days telex machines were standard issue in state government offices and I worked in one as a contract journalist.

Each and every day reams and reams of telex print outs were tossed in bins and then laid to rest in the Shenton Park garbage dump.

But not where I worked. I lovingly saved reams, stuck them on my cubicle walls and on their backs I glued every single political cartoon from the nation’s major daily newspapers.

The epic 1983 battle is probably best remembered for the carton by Ron Tandberg (Melbourne Age) of Malcolm Fraser with his pants down.

But how did we get to this contest, this inane slap-up devoid of real difference and absence of vision, where the only recognisable difference between the leaders is that one is a man and the other a women and even then we can’t be sure because they both wear pants?

Until they go to the beach, then it’s obvious, because one is clearly smuggling feral animals, which, by the way, is a Federal offence and I’m surprised he hasn’t been on Border patrol.

I blame Bob Hawke. Sorry, let me rephrase that, Mary Wheatley would blame Bob Hawke.

Mary was one of those champion country women who could darn a sock, ride a horse over a cliff, shoot a pig, strangle a fox, crochet a delicate doily, nurse a dying chook, and bake the best Pavlova ever.

What’s she got to do with it? She once said at a party up at our house in Bridgetown, while Hawke was still president of the ACTU, that he would be the next Liberal Prime Minister. We all laughed.

What she meant was, if Hawke gets in he will take us on a lurch to the right, which he did. And we’ve been lurching to the right ever since.

The two major parties are so far right that even Bob Menzies would be shaking in his grave, right alongside Malcolm Fraser, who isn’t there yet, but clearly sometimes wishes he was.

A few people I know are disappointed that Kevin “Elmer” Rudd and Malcolm “Mad Max” Turnbull are not facing each other. At the very least, the level of debate would be well above the current denominator.

Very few of us, of course, would have any idea what the hell they were talking about, but big slabs of me misses the drama, the difference, the facing off of two massive, delusional egos, tragically flawed and destined to fall and rise and fall again.

Oh, the good old days.

POSTSCRIPT:

It's all over now, but not quite. 

Here are what I believe to be the best outcomes of the election: the rejection of Wilson Tuckey, the rise of the Greens, the election of a 20 year old, and the two major parties get what they deserve - hung!

Column 2, Albany Advertiser 3/8/2010

Down on the beach I am known to many as “the guy with the cut off pants”.

Or “the guy who is always picking stuff up”. And sometimes, simply, “that guy”.

Those who walk regularly along that wonderful stretch of coast between Ellen Cove and Emu Point don’t have time to get names, we’re too busy walking, getting our daily, breathing that air direct off the Antarctic, embracing the Great Southern Ocean.

Yes, I said embrace, even at this time of the year. I can tell you, there is nothing more bracing than walking into the Great Southern and allowing the freeze to creep up your body until you no longer have any feeling below the waist.

Then there’s the first dive, oh, help me please. That’s when the freeze takes charge of your head and leaves you bereft of thought, sensibility, memory, or taste and when you are done and the ocean spits you on the beach like the rag you are you run like hell for those hot showers.

Who is responsible for those hot showers?

This person should be nominated for Citizen of the Winter Months.

I love this person. I will care for this person in old age and deliver chocolates and garlic to his or her door on demand, on request, at any time of day or night.

Excuse me, I left the scene of the column. This offering was to be about the debris I find on the beach. Deviations, be warned, will occur regularly.

The debris gets to me. I can’t help myself. Have to pick it up.

In the beginning I only picked up the big stuff, the plastic bags, nappies, tin cans, plastic bottles, large lumps of poly something or other and large clumps of fishing line.

I walked by the small stuff, thinking, well that won’t cause any harm. It won’t kill anything.

Then I read about the swirls. The swirls changed my attitude. Now I pick up every single item, no matter how big, how small, even if it’s not there and I can’t see it.

What are the swirls? Good question.

Out  there, in the big blue yonder, as you can imagine, people are dumping all kinds of trash into bays, off ships, into rivers, drains and much of it finds its way, eventually, in to our great oceans.

And when it gets there it floats along, inanimate, sometimes swallowed by an unsuspecting fish or mammal, but often just floating, drifting in the currents, taken along by ocean movement, until it meets a swirl.

A swirl is an eddy like current that collects stuff and sends it around and around and around forever and ever.

They are like cities of waste in the middle of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans and to attempt to remove them would be to cause havoc and destruction to all other creatures in the immediate vicinity.

There are a number of massive swirls in the planet’s great oceans, packed tight with human debris and there is not a thing we can do about it, except hang our heads in shame.

Oh, two other things: don’t dump your stuff and, if you are not a dumper, do the planet a favour and pick up the dumpers dumping as soon as you see it.

Ps: From now on I will refer to Perth as The Big Swirl and Canberra as The Pig Swirl.

COLUMN 1

This was the first of my new columns, published once a fortnight on a Tuesday in the Albany Advertiser, Western Australia. It had to happen, bound to happen, because I like writing a column. But once a fortnight? Yes, this gives me time to finish a book, to surf, run, drink tea with friends and make a living. Oh, by the way, I have started another blog, just about socks, and all forms of public art protest. You can follow it here SOCK IT!

And now, the new column:

 An election? Oh, no, not again.

Didn’t we just elect a bunch that were going to fix all the problems created by the last mob who said they had fixed all those created by the previous mob but there were a couple left over and we’d better elect them again because the others might really stuff them up, instead of just muck them up?

My Dad once came back from Mexico with a smile on his face. He said: “I met this tourist guide in Mexico City who had the perfect political solution. He said whenever they elected a decent politician, the first thing they did was shoot him.”

Dad thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

Now, I don’t want you to think my Dad was some kind of hippy revolutionary, far from it. He was a solid citizen, businessman, farmer, Rotary Paul Harris Fellow and chairman of the Bridgetown Hospital Board when hospitals were run by sensible, normal people who could remember when they had their tonsils removed.

 Stan, the man, my Dad, would not have liked Kevin Rudd. He would have wondered what the hell he was talking about every time he opened his mouth.

He would have thought Tony Abbott was internally conflicted, stood too close to you when he talked and needed to cut his “arrr” output by about 97%.

As for Julia Gillard, well, I’m pretty sure Stan would have been excited by the prospect of a female leader but he would have been concerned about her naked ambition. And he might have made comments that some would have found offensive.

He was, for many years, a member of the Liberal Party, but he never left a gathering without stirring the pot by making fun of something, or someone, Liberal.

He was, in short, a normal Australian bloke with a larrikin sense of humour.

I remember saying to him once, after listening to him complain about the government of the day, which happened to be Liberal: “Hey, you voted for them.’

Quick as a flash, he replied: “No I didn’t.”

 Which surprised the hell out of me.

“Who did you vote for?” I asked.

He never told me and went to his grave without telling a soul.

Because, you see, he belonged to that generation that firmly believed you should never discuss politics, sex, or religion. The first fascinated him, the second he thoroughly enjoyed and the third left him asleep in a back pew.

Whenever there is an election in the offing, I always think of Stan. On the first occasion I put my hand up, for no particular reason other than to fill in the time I had available, Stan loved every minute of my madness.

He even admitted to voting for me. The silly old bugger knew I didn’t have a hope in hell but that was the year Paul Keating went up against John Hewson.

Stan reckoned Keating had a touch of megalomania and that Hewson would have been better off if he’d sent his wife out ahead of him.

Throughout this election campaign I will be calling on Stan’s humour, sarcasm and disbelief. If you stay with me, we might just make it through.

This will make you laugh

THE LATEST SOCK NEWS

(click on above link)

Guess what? Hanging socks works

For more, go here: SOCK IT!

The 2010 Sydney Writers' Festival

IT'S all over now.
This particular writer is exhausted, inspired, liberated, berated, chastened, hastened and slumped.
My back hurts, my neck hurts, my feet, my hands, most bits.
Why?
So much time spent sitting, in your own sessions, in other people's sessions in planes, buses, taxis. Not good for  the back, Tony.
(Have no idea who Tony is, but the name came to me so in it went.)

HIGHLIGHTS
Being insulted by Alex Miller (Lovesong) as he bought me a cup of tea.
Listening in to Tom Keneally, Michael Cathcart, Richard Glover and Jack Marx as they wended they way through Australia's past.
Sitting in a big hall watching and listening to John Ralston Saul, Michael Cathcart, Deborah Snow and Tony Kevin as they named The Five Things the World Needs to Change. Tense.
The final address by Peter Carey when he insulted us, the entire nation, said we were dumb and getting dumber. No-one disagreed.
Then there were two sessions I participated in.
One with Susan Maushart (chair), Richard Glover (ABC radio) and John Dale (crime writer and novelist).
It was our job, the men, to examine ourselves and discuss masculinity.
It was Susan's job to lambaste us and make us look silly.
We all succeeded, with great humour.
For more, click: Masculinity  
Then there was a delightful session on memoir with two fine writers: Brenda Walker and Mark Tredinnick.
For more, go here: Memoir

It was a fine festival and run with charm and calm by Chip Rowley and his team of yellow shirts.

Jon Doust with Lone Frank, author of Mindfield.

Brenda Walker, Reading by Moonlight, Jon Doust Boy on a Wire, Mark Tredinnick, The Blue Plateau.