Everything was upended 5 years ago, and it hasn’t changed. It’s just totally broken.
Nothing feels the same anymore. Outwardly, our regular Melbourne events seem to be rolling on, just like they always have. Just don’t mention the little hiccup we had a couple of years ago. But to me, they taste like burnt sawdust, not espresso.
This year, Easter Sunday was on April 20, between the earliest possible date of 21 March and the latest date of April 25, which happens to be ANZAC Day. Associated with those calendar events are a range of cultural observances. As luck would have it, just one week after ANZAC day comes a federal election, on May 3. And then, a week after that, Mothers Day on May 11. Oh, and chuck in a Popish funeral.
Such a concentration of events gives the lazy media endless grist to the mill. We see stories about Easter, which is of course a memorial to the creation of the Royal Children’s Hospital and a plea to all decent people to give money to a government funded public hospital on top of the taxes they already pay. Church congregations, but no-one else, except disingenuously, beg to differ, and during Holy Week re-enact, or at least contemplate, the historical sequence of events leading to the resurrection. But Easter eggs taste a little sour when one remembers how meekly churches shut their doors, emasculated their sacraments, and fell in line with the discrimination against the unvaccinated urged on them by the government.
What about ANZAC Day then? The traditional dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance was interrupted by a heckler. Widely frowned upon, in the aftermath. But no-one seemed to mind when peaceful protesters were shot with rubber bullets at the very same Shrine during the height of lockdown restrictions. How do you square that circle? ANZAC biscuits turn to ashes in one’s mouth.
The Australian Football League (AFL) makes a lot of money out of ANZAC Day. Every game across the extended weekend gets a special ceremony, special guernseys are designed and worn by players and fans alike, commentators outdo each other with superlatives and saccharine. That would be the same AFL that just happened to have premonitions that lockdowns were coming and just happened to decide to evacuate whole team loads of players, families and staff interstate days or hours ahead of the rest of us being placed under house arrest. Fighting for our freedom, we hear, on ANZAC Day. Fat lot of good it did us in 2020.
Now, we have an election visited upon us. Postponed because it rained quite a lot in Queensland. Too late to be postponed again when the Pope died. So now here it is. I think I would have heard if any candidate from the major parties had anything to say about the lost years, the ‘troubles’, the ‘terrible times’ or whatever euphemism people use for the shitshow we endured. Not a peep. Not a squeak. Who does a dissident vote for? The whole affair has been memory-holed. Why would a dissident vote at all? Good question.
Mothers Day surely will be untainted? Nope. Remember mothers who died alone because visitors were banned? Will anyone say anything? Write your own ticket on that one.
Disillusioned, disenfranchised, disgusted.
This article first appeared on Richard’s Substack, The view from down here.
