Sydney Cove back when it all started: are they ominous storm-clouds on the horizon or is it an approaching bushfire?
It’s January in Australia and I’m hot and bothered. Hot, because that’s exactly what it is: for weeks now it’s been thirty degrees Celsius in the shade, some days thirty-five. Last Friday went over forty; Sydney, just two hours drive north of me, had its hottest day ever – it breached the forty-five-degree mark. Here at home the chooks have their beaks open and their wings out and hanging low, so I’ve covered their run as much as I can with an old tent-fly – it seems to help, for now. But hot is hot is hot and there’s not much I can do about it. And I can’t do much about the alarming waft of smoke as it comes into town and gets us coughing. Last week there was an automated message left on the landline: ‘Tomorrow’s bushfire conditions are CATASTROPHIC. Activate your bushfire survival plan now.’ I put the sprinkler into the garden and, rather uselessly, turned it on.
All this is enough to make anyone hot and bothered, but it’s not all.
On 26 January there’s Australia Day; yes, it’s come around yet again. So the flags are out and about: they’re being stuck on cars and utes and trucks, they’re hung in shop windows, and they’re sent flapping in front gardens, stating the bleeding obvious, but also as though staking a claim all over again. We do it every year, our national day to commemorate the beginning of British settlement, when Governor Phillip landed at Sydney Cove in 1788. I was born and bred here, my forebears arriving by boat only a handful of years after that adventurous governor. Despite this ancestral longevity, however, and whatever blood I have in my veins, and all my thinking on the topic, I don’t really know this nation of mine; as I age I’m understanding it less and less. So, this summer, this dreadful, pressure-cooked summer, I’ve turned to our writers for assistance, for succour even, because their imagination, observation and skilful way with words are surely better than simply hanging out a flag.
Keep reading at Overland. Thanks to Jeff Sparrow and Jacinda Woodhead.
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 
6 comments
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January 26, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Jan
whisperinggums
Great post Nigel … I’ve read the lot over at Overland and commented there, but I love that you’ve addressed the confusion many of us feel about this day through writers. Thankyou.
(I do find the indiscriminate, in-your-face use of flags discomforting if not downright scary at times).
January 26, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Sue, thanks very much for the comment here and as well as over at Overland. Glad to hear that many are feeling confused about this day. Is the nationalism becoming more overt, more naked, perhaps even more violent? It seems to mthat it is. It’s a complex issue, and I’m glad it’s our creative writers who know how to explore these things – amazing how a carefully crafted paragraph is always more powerful that someone wrapping themselves in an Australian flag.
January 26, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Jan
whisperinggums
I fear it might be, though I keep hoping that it’s just my increasing age making me notice it more. You know, as in the older you get the more you observe it seems? It’s a vain hope though I think … and is probably the ugly side of multiculturalism, a reactionary response. I just hope it’s not going to be a losing battle.
January 26, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
‘The older you get the more you observe, it seems’ – yes, this is true, but it’s also quite frightening. I wouldn’t mind becoming quite ignorant in my old age! I’m only kind of joking.
On a more serious note, I do think our leaders have a responsibility to, well, lead our people to a place of more sophisticated thinking. Though it’s probably a bit hard to change the minds of the ‘Fuck Off, We’re Full’ brigade.
January 28, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Tristan
Hi Nigel,
You write “I don’t really know this nation of mine”. As is usually the case round this time of the year, I’ve been giving some thought to this idea of “knowing” my country too.
I started my Australia day with a walk to the Continental shop on the corner where I bought Afghan bread to have with my breakfast. I then went across the road to the Lebanese sweetshop for coffee. Later, I went for a swim at Clovelly beach, snorkelling with one friend who is South African and another couple of friends who are of Turkish descent. That night I watched the cricket over a meal of Indian curries as well as a few beers I’d bought from a bottle-o run by a guy of Eastern European origin – we’d chatted tennis and laughed about our mutual and irrational dislike of Andy Murray. Needless to say, this isn’t my everyday experience, but it was a pleasant way of “celebrating” a day that I’m really not comfortable with; it went some way in summing up my idea of the best parts of the place. I hope the day for everybody else wasn’t too far off mine.
P.S. Love the idea of looking to classical Aus lit to tell us a little something about this country we call home.
January 28, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Tristan, you know, frankly it sounds like you had a brilliant Australia Day. And perhaps that’s the reality for many of us – an almost daily experience of diversity, because that’s the sort of country we are now, and we’re all the better for it. So I wonder why our flag seems to represent a narrowing of cultural experience – is it because that’s what our political leaders have been doing to us? I think it it’s possible. And how good it is to have literature as a gateway to an understanding of what we might be and, perhaps, what we might become!