JUST A SUBURBAN BOY

 

 

The suburbs of Sydney have always been my home. To be a bit more precise, the western suburbs of Sin City are where I’ve kicked up a lot of dust. The closest I’ve come to an inner city postcode was in 1979 when I briefly lived at Darlington just behind Sydney Uni. But over the course of sixty years, my digs have also included Ashfield, Abbotsford, Haberfield, Auburn, Kellyville, Box Hill, McGraths Hill, Merrylands North, Merrylands and, finally, Greystanes. By far the two longest serving base headquarters have been at Abbotsford (for about twenty five years when I was growing up) and here at the ranch in busy Greystanes (for just over thirty years). I’m still not sure whether I’ve fulfilled all the requirements for displaying a mullet but, if I had hair, you’d think that most of the other crucial dot points would be ticked. The west is where I hang around and it’s where I usually have.

That’s not to say that what is actually meant by the ‘western suburbs’ moniker has always been set in stone. When I was learning to drive way back in the early seventies, I often took the route from Abbotsford to Parramatta via Parramatta Road and then returned to Regan Central along Victoria Road. I congratulated myself that I had gained experience in ‘country’ driving as a valuable precursor to the big RTA practical test that would soon follow. Abbotsford was considered a western suburb, at least in my mind, while Parramatta was some frontier place where Miss Kitty would fix you up with a drink…..but only after you had thoughtfully slagged into a designated spittoon.

A strict definition of ‘the suburbs’ is not the only thing that bugs me. During the first half of my career as a school teacher, I moved around schools and localities quite a lot. Riverstone, Auburn, Hilltop Road, Mt Druitt and Green Valley were some of the places where I worked. I quite liked all the students and communities associated with those differing suburbs but there was one uniting characteristic of them all. Supposedly, all these areas had once featured market gardening as their raison d’être. Even when my beautiful spouse and I moved into our matrimonial compound, I was soon informed that Greystanes used to be very big on market gardens. Given all of this intelligence, the Sydney basin must have been the fuckin’ market garden capital of the world at some stage in antiquity. It wouldn’t surprise me if Paddy’s Flemington was ground zero when it came to raptor nourishment and maintenance…….. at least before the comet hit. If those dinosaurs were in a particularly aggressive mood, they might even have bagged some pastizzi (which had, of course, been prepared earlier).

What has always interested me is the ‘people’ component of suburbs, that is, what ‘type’ of punter lives in a particular area. Is Sydney basically divided into two halves with the fifty metre marker (also referred to as the Goats’ Cheese Line) running roughly north to south and touching that very same Parramatta that I used to drive to forty five years ago? On the eastern side, do you have the affluent while to the west, is it the effluent? I believe an increasing number of citizens buy into the great divide concept, not so much in terms of where there is a concentration of Red Rooster outlets but, rather, with reference to the human constituents. The dichotomies of the rich/ poor, haves/ have nots, wasps/ wogs, taxpayers/ welfare recipients and skilled/ unskilled are all engaged in this warped and simple-minded construction of Christendom.

Our stupidity is regularly reinforced by the dog-whistling media. Andrew Bolt’s opinion piece The foreign invasion, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph earlier this week, further added to the hysteria and jaw-dropping marginalisation of suburban communities. Bolt rolls the barrel on enclaves, a loss of national identity, Italian-only speakers in Five Dock (apart from the cicadas), the evergreen Islamists and satellite Chinese television……… and that’s just for starters. It seems that the fears of an eventual black planet will finally be realised if this guff is taken seriously. The Leb-background citizens have crossed the Cumberland Highway and they’re now making their way towards enticing Greystanes. Break out the Winchesters! Fuck me dead.

The Regans received a letter this week from Cumberland Council regarding an imminent and gripping change to garbage collection arrangements in our area. While I usually find such information pretty enthralling myself (I’m a simple man and retired), the thing that really caught my eye was the council’s motto on the back of the envelope….

Welcome. Belong. Succeed.

Now that’s a pretty good take-home message which kind of shits on the angst and fear of suburban ‘infiltration’ and degradation. Memo to self- I must remember to pay those rates soon.