[Since I'm on the Western World's Worst Broadband Ripoff this blog post is worth about five dollars.]
If I ever hear another variation on the
white Territorian is “better than blacks” meme I'll take the
radio control myself to guide the asteroid down on the dump.
There is no human more self-satisfied,
smug and utterly hypocritical than a Territory white man whining
about drunk blacks.
For the last few days, I've been
covering the World Solar Challenge. It's a “best of the best”
kind of gig: a combination of serious science, serious competition,
camaraderie, and motor-sport excitement without burning dead
dinosaurs.
Then I got within pregnant-man's
bad-breath distance of Alice Springs, and started encountering the
kinds of whites who live by pouring bad grog down black throats, and
bleating to tabloids about the outcome.
It's Monday night in this bogan
inferno. I've not only eaten shit for dinner, but eaten shit that
arrived an hour late because the short-order cooks (in this dump, a
mixed menu is means “steak, fish and supermarket curry and is
called “innovation”) can blacken Angus in three minutes but need
an hour and a reminder for a vegetarian pasta without the bain-marie
chips.
Just don't get me started on this
town's “we're just like London look we do curry” thing. Tonight,
the “curry of the night” was beef vindaloo in three different
places I called (before giving up), which tells me either there's a
shared kitchen, a shared chef, or a shared brain cell.
My motel requires – I kid you not –
a credit card swipe for the contents of the minibar, which are:
- Six Arnott's Nice biscuits stored in the refrigerator; and
- One UHT milk.
“Where's the water?” you ask. It's
in a tap in the bathroom and flows from a bore and tastes of salt.
It's captured in the glass shown in the photo, and although the motel
runs to a “tavern” that can deliver steak and barramundi faster
than pasta, it doesn't run to ice in the room although it's currently
around 10:30 and in another hour or two if I'm lucky, I'll see the
mercury dip below twenty by running the air-con.
In this WASP's nest, you don't even
need to try to get some uninvited opinion about the darkies,
Abos and boongs. Just sit still and look a teeny tiny bit not white,
like I might in a bad light while waiting for two dollars' worth of
pasta charged out at twenty.
Apparently, something in my face or
hair or grey pattern or the way I talk strikes some “blackfella
buttons” in Alice Springs, which is why I had endure the opinions
of one “Katter hat” bigot and two “stupidly fat tourists with
turned-back baseball caps” about what's wrong with The Blacks
they'd seen.
Except, guess what, the fake pom
beer-puller (WHY??? Why will someone from Sydney go to Alice and put
on a fake Londoner act?) who can't operate a tavern with just six
bloody dinner orders and get them right and in order can somehow:
- tell the difference between an utterly legless white electrician and a ditto blackfella, and
- deny service to one, while landing me – thanks shit-head – with the yelling bigoted ignorant pissed white as my entertainment while I waited for your cold fucking pasta, and STILL assume I was a black on a bender. “Nigel”, you are in every way due for the inferno.
(You also tried to appropriate a tip
with a cash-register adjustment. And you didn't notice that I was
using cash to drink, rather than charging to my room. The more I think about you, "Nigel", the more I want you taken to Darwin and fed to a salty.)
Yes, Alice Springs is full of
staggering-drunk people and some of them are black! In a couple of hours, sitting still and eating, I've had
two offers of fights (one for being a poof, which is the kind of
assertion that truckies and fools should test before they get
truculent over); I've had a long lecture from Mister White about
What's Wrong With the Country, I've watched the bartender try to
slide both white and black into a “buy the whole bar” oblivion,
and all the rest.
I particularly liked the square-jawed
superman wearing his “DuckDuckGo.com” T-shirt (“Dunno, mate, it
was a present). If he finishes the third bottle with the girlfriend,
you can bet that he'll get discreetly taxied home.
We aren't “better”. We just have
more money, which means if the unpleasant square-jawed superman who
was given his “Duck-Duck-Go” T-Shirt as a piss-take that he
didn't understand finishes his third bottle with his girlfriend,
someone will discreetly get them home instead of leaving them to
stagger in the street for the Channel Nine cameras.
That's Alice Springs for you.
While sitting in the shit-it's-hot of
Ti Tree I met the stone-cold-sober, intelligent, talkative and
way-beyond-me-wise shire service manager of the area. He knows shit
from shallots, he understands how to talk to a soft city wanker like
me while still sounding like a Territorian, he told me twenty things
I didn't know in ten minutes, and loves his people. Here in Alice on
the street below my window, a city-crap-big-screen-jukebox is watched
by white bogan idiots whose bikie-tax is inked on their arms, whose
moron-tax is labelled on the cans of flavoured ethanol they drink,
and courtesy the pissants among the TV crews they still think
they're ahead of the blackfella.
White Australia, you're a pimple on a
boil on the arse of a hypocrite, and Alice Springs is your epitome.
