Parents to Blame as Che Dally-Watkins Takes to Mountains for Community Wall Painting
Ahem. It’s all true. Those of you who remember me from such conversation-killers as “JESUS I smashed my Guccis”, “NON-vintage Moet? But father we’re at the races!” and “Please don’t touch my bag with your filthy hands it’s a Fendi” will howl that a year in the wilderness has changed me. Others may find recent socialist rants about health and education a sure sign that I’m never going to get on with my right-wing old man ever again.
Not true. I’m still a swinging voter with expensive jeans that I paid somebody else to pre-love. Nevertheless, last weekend in the forest I did contribute to a mural depicting a rainbow serpent and some scary gun-slinging chicks in the act of annihilating a band of tree killers. It was fun, messy and completely out-of-character. Or was it....?
Natural Activist, or Victim of Maternal Ambition?
Looking back, I guess I’ve always been the type to dabble in issue-based craftwork, a tendency for which my Mother is culpable. While other kids went to the movies to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Honey, I Never Get Sick Of Shrinking Those Little Bastards, Caroline and I were treated to such mind-expanding fodder as Gorillas in the Mist, Project X, Rain Man and my personal favourite, The Last Emperor (“...but mummy, how did the sink water turn communist red? Did he use his special emperor powers?”)
Afterwards, we were urged to draw alternative storyboards for the epic masterpieces, highlighting fatal flaws where the director had sold out history to earn extra dollars at the box office. At other times we were encouraged to create posters urging workplace reform for chimpanzee actors, including bargaining rights for nude scenes and the implementation of a minimum daily wage in bananas.
Oh my, the memories. On free weeknights, few and far between, Mum would supply us with scissors, uhu sticks and a pile of Earth Watch magazines so we could create issue-based pastiches depicting, say, the impact of communism on whaling in the South China Sea. Such projects were fun and inexpensive ways to learn about human screw-ups that would eventually inspire my very first embargo on canned tuna at Big Lunch in 1984 (1).
(One of Mum’s side projects was empowering us to be informed consumers of our lunchboxes. Some days she would even set tests: “Did you notice where the pitted dates were from today Lizzie?” “Yes Mummy, they were from the USSR” “Well, why did you eat them, Lizzie? You should never eat anything from Chernobyl.” Sadly, I never had the heart to tell her that lentil and date sangers tasted worse by midday than what I imagined even the most craven gulag cook capable of, and in my opinion constituted a childrens’ rights abuse all of their very own.)
Persecuted Paternal Figure Retreats Into Garbage, Blames Whitlam Government
“I don’t remember voting for this,” my father would mumble at the dinner table about the mandated tofu patty that occasionally appeared on his plate.
“You didn’t, Kelvin, but there are four people in this house, and while my kitchen remains a participatory democracy, then we will eat what the people want.”
“But Dad likes to eat out of the bin. If we eat what he wants then we’re all going to get impetigo and die.”
Caroline was right, of course, and her words spoke volumes about the first basic flaw of democracy, in that many people just aren’t smart enough to make important decisions for themselves. In a literal sense, she was also spot on: that very morning we’d caught Dad rifling through the bin to salvage a pack of Iced Vovos that Mum had thrown away, just after cracking him over the head with them.
However, such outright acts of civil disobedience were unusual for my father. Like most men who might find themselves stranded between a rock and a herd of politically marginalised Pakistani harpies, he preferred to remain aloof rather than to involve himself in the crimson tide of leftist ideology that constantly beached itself in his living room. Even when both sons made their first real-life tv appearances, starring as arrested student activists in a news item in 1974, he only swore mildly before going down to the station to post bail.
Besides, he had big dreams. These specifically involved the marriage of at least one daughter to a first grade rugby league player who would, in time, become a Liberal prime minister of Australia and install him at Kirribilli House. In his ideal future, he imagined a world liberated from ranting pinko-commies, where he could peacefully watch re-runs of Hey Hey It’s Saturday and Red Faces while eating meat from cans that he didn’t have to salvage first from the recycling.
(To be honest, I’m guessing at most of this. I have no idea what actually occurs inside my father’s head, nor do I want to have any idea. I can only really recall a conversation we had one Saturday morning in 1987, in which he explained candidly over a couple of bourbons in the garage that in his suburban utopia, he wouldn’t have to conduct A.C. Nielson exit polls each morning to determine whether or not it was safe to come home for dinner.)
On his 60th birthday, when I presented him with a homemade card screaming “DID YOU MURDER THIS ENDANGERED ANGOLIAN MOUNTAIN FERRET?” above a picture of a skinned, bug-eyed rodent and my own carefully inscribed “HAPPY BIRTHDAY FATHER” in sanguineous gothic calligraphy below, he nodded in grave agreement.
“What a nice personalised card, Lizzie. But gee whiz sweetheart, I wish you’d hold your shoulders back or you’ll never marry Ian Roberts.” Then he grinned cheekily at my Mother, “Have you still got that nice coat I bought you, Margie? You were a real stunner in that.”
Well, yes, I guess she was. What was my point again?
(1) Popular terminology among trendy five-year-olds for Normal Lunch, since Little Lunch commonly referred to morning tea. To use Lunch without an identifier might cause confusion among non-trendy colleagues and result in the eating of big lunch at morning tea time (see related discussion on the first basic flaw of democracy.)
Not true. I’m still a swinging voter with expensive jeans that I paid somebody else to pre-love. Nevertheless, last weekend in the forest I did contribute to a mural depicting a rainbow serpent and some scary gun-slinging chicks in the act of annihilating a band of tree killers. It was fun, messy and completely out-of-character. Or was it....?
Natural Activist, or Victim of Maternal Ambition?
Looking back, I guess I’ve always been the type to dabble in issue-based craftwork, a tendency for which my Mother is culpable. While other kids went to the movies to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Honey, I Never Get Sick Of Shrinking Those Little Bastards, Caroline and I were treated to such mind-expanding fodder as Gorillas in the Mist, Project X, Rain Man and my personal favourite, The Last Emperor (“...but mummy, how did the sink water turn communist red? Did he use his special emperor powers?”)
Afterwards, we were urged to draw alternative storyboards for the epic masterpieces, highlighting fatal flaws where the director had sold out history to earn extra dollars at the box office. At other times we were encouraged to create posters urging workplace reform for chimpanzee actors, including bargaining rights for nude scenes and the implementation of a minimum daily wage in bananas.
Oh my, the memories. On free weeknights, few and far between, Mum would supply us with scissors, uhu sticks and a pile of Earth Watch magazines so we could create issue-based pastiches depicting, say, the impact of communism on whaling in the South China Sea. Such projects were fun and inexpensive ways to learn about human screw-ups that would eventually inspire my very first embargo on canned tuna at Big Lunch in 1984 (1).
(One of Mum’s side projects was empowering us to be informed consumers of our lunchboxes. Some days she would even set tests: “Did you notice where the pitted dates were from today Lizzie?” “Yes Mummy, they were from the USSR” “Well, why did you eat them, Lizzie? You should never eat anything from Chernobyl.” Sadly, I never had the heart to tell her that lentil and date sangers tasted worse by midday than what I imagined even the most craven gulag cook capable of, and in my opinion constituted a childrens’ rights abuse all of their very own.)
Persecuted Paternal Figure Retreats Into Garbage, Blames Whitlam Government
“I don’t remember voting for this,” my father would mumble at the dinner table about the mandated tofu patty that occasionally appeared on his plate.
“You didn’t, Kelvin, but there are four people in this house, and while my kitchen remains a participatory democracy, then we will eat what the people want.”
“But Dad likes to eat out of the bin. If we eat what he wants then we’re all going to get impetigo and die.”
Caroline was right, of course, and her words spoke volumes about the first basic flaw of democracy, in that many people just aren’t smart enough to make important decisions for themselves. In a literal sense, she was also spot on: that very morning we’d caught Dad rifling through the bin to salvage a pack of Iced Vovos that Mum had thrown away, just after cracking him over the head with them.
However, such outright acts of civil disobedience were unusual for my father. Like most men who might find themselves stranded between a rock and a herd of politically marginalised Pakistani harpies, he preferred to remain aloof rather than to involve himself in the crimson tide of leftist ideology that constantly beached itself in his living room. Even when both sons made their first real-life tv appearances, starring as arrested student activists in a news item in 1974, he only swore mildly before going down to the station to post bail.
Besides, he had big dreams. These specifically involved the marriage of at least one daughter to a first grade rugby league player who would, in time, become a Liberal prime minister of Australia and install him at Kirribilli House. In his ideal future, he imagined a world liberated from ranting pinko-commies, where he could peacefully watch re-runs of Hey Hey It’s Saturday and Red Faces while eating meat from cans that he didn’t have to salvage first from the recycling.
(To be honest, I’m guessing at most of this. I have no idea what actually occurs inside my father’s head, nor do I want to have any idea. I can only really recall a conversation we had one Saturday morning in 1987, in which he explained candidly over a couple of bourbons in the garage that in his suburban utopia, he wouldn’t have to conduct A.C. Nielson exit polls each morning to determine whether or not it was safe to come home for dinner.)
On his 60th birthday, when I presented him with a homemade card screaming “DID YOU MURDER THIS ENDANGERED ANGOLIAN MOUNTAIN FERRET?” above a picture of a skinned, bug-eyed rodent and my own carefully inscribed “HAPPY BIRTHDAY FATHER” in sanguineous gothic calligraphy below, he nodded in grave agreement.
“What a nice personalised card, Lizzie. But gee whiz sweetheart, I wish you’d hold your shoulders back or you’ll never marry Ian Roberts.” Then he grinned cheekily at my Mother, “Have you still got that nice coat I bought you, Margie? You were a real stunner in that.”
Well, yes, I guess she was. What was my point again?
(1) Popular terminology among trendy five-year-olds for Normal Lunch, since Little Lunch commonly referred to morning tea. To use Lunch without an identifier might cause confusion among non-trendy colleagues and result in the eating of big lunch at morning tea time (see related discussion on the first basic flaw of democracy.)
posted by Pinoy Zilla at 4:21 AM
4 Comments:
Liz liz liz,
You are seriously getting sillier and stranger over there. You really have to get home to the Western world.
And where did the link to me go? Hmmm?
This makes me sad.
Come on, it wasn't all Gorillas in the Mist. I distinctly remember dad taking us to see the My Little Pony movie at the embarrassing ages of 10 and 11.
Other cherished memories:
"I'm hungry"
"Give her some bread and dripping, Marg"
"Where's dad? Is that him down there with a bread and butter pudding from the cake shop?" (Hilarious Benny Hill-style chase scene ensues as mum reclaims the cake and chucks it in the nearest bin).
I think it was Care Bears and not My Little Pony.
Jeeeeezus Cazzie, get your facts straight now girl ;)
I wonder who anonymous was?
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