Reverse migration

[ataxi]

Cabaret is dead to me

I've been watching a tape of the band Sons and Daughters programming Rage* that I stuck on to record just before collapsing into the sack last night.

Sons and Daughters played a lot of stuff I'm going to call "cabaret-ish" where the focus narrows in on singer as icon, idealised as a replacement for some set of virtues. They

Comments

[eclipsedeyes]

I should mention that when I said I've been thinking about those things I didn't mean "I have formed the opinion", more that I was literally trying to figure out why is it that people need to leave and whether it is that suburban life as you put it actually lacks meaning or if it's just that we reject it as meaningless because of what we think it represents and thus reject ourselves. I think I just mean that so many Australians (not you, necessarily, by the way, in wanting to live O/S) seem to need to escape what they are.

Also I don't think there's anything wrong with leaving. On the contrary, I agree it's much better to have an understanding of the rest of the world than to remain insulated, isolated and xenophobic. What I'm trying to say though, is that we shouldn't leave in order to make ourselves into something different. "Copout" was def. a bad choice of word, since I didn't mean the easier route by any means, but possibly the less authentic one, the route of denial.

And by that I don't mean anyone needs to embrace any kind of artificial "Australian culture" they don't feel a part of or that they consider obnoxious. This is obviously not their culture otherwise they wouldn't reject it. I'm just saying there is an Australian culture (or 20 million Australian cultures) that they can't leave behind. That's probably the bleeding obvious, but anyhow.

As far as the Australian identity is concerned, people need to forget about it and stop trying to forge it. Too many people are too close to that issue, and speaking for too many people they don't represent.

You are absolutely right. Anyway I think you understand, I just wanted to clarify that I was thinking about these things rather than just trying to argue against the idea/value of reverse migration.

I totally agree about Australian crime fic - I haven't read volumes of it, but I agree it's much more authentically local than loads of australian "literature". I liked some of Andrew McGahan's books a lot...

[ataxi]

It wouldn't be reasonable for me to reject the "suburban life" out of hand. For one thing it'd be a bit of a blow to my mum and dad and basically everyone I know here if I did. It's more a case of it urgently needing to be put in proper perspective. Particularly with respect to how privileged a life it is, how different a life it is to that lived by the bulk of the world's people, how easily it can alienate people from their communities, and how irrelevant the corresponding material goals can be to happiness.

Instead, everyone from the Prime Minister down constantly reinforces the idea that attainment of an idealised suburban existence is the purpose of life.

Now, I expect that if my wife and I have children we'll do at least a large part of our child-raising in a suburb somewhere.

But Australia festers a bit too much in the suburbs. I think that's a fair comment. Suburbs, and especially the new kind, tend to average out the experience of the population. The way I can go to the nearest mall here in the ACT (at Woden) and it's practically identical to the nearest mall back home in Perth, and is attached to a Hoyts megaplex showing the same films and contains chain stores selling the same products, is in its own way denying us all identity. Which is part of the reason I got so scared when I first arrived in Canberra and it seemed as if that was all there would be here. Luckily I was wrong.

The new suburb is created the way old Roman cities used to be, drawn from the same fixed blueprint again and again with the same layout and basic amenities.

So basically, I think going to other places shows you it's possible to do things different ways. To get by without a car, to eat different foods, to have a smaller residential footprint without giving up comfort, amongst other things.

[johjohjoh]

yes, leaving the country with only a backpack for nine months... I couldn't a gree more.

suburban life no longer really appeals to me. At all, actually. But this is such an intensely scary realisation. It is all we are brought up to want, all that we know there is to dream of. One of the main reasons I left Australia was because I was feeling and had felt no patriotism for my country. I was not proud to be Australian and I felt no love of my country's climate, landscape, people (except for the people I love, but I'm talkin' society in general), lifestyle, etc. I thought leaving would make me realise how lucky I am to be living in Australia, but instead, the suburban life seems suffocating. the sprawl... the routine... Here, in Nova Scotia, there are few cars. People are within walking distance from all friends, institutions and amenities. the community atmosphere is palpable - running into friends on the street, in the market, in the coffe shop, on the stairs...

sprawl = car = isolation = sedation = my non-patriotism (my computer says the antonym for 'patriot' is 'turncoat' - any ideas what this is all about?). I love my home, I love Nedlands, I love the beach and the river. I just wish things were a little different.

I agree, 'going to other places shows you it's possible to do things different ways'. There is no rush to have babies. Why not live in Halifax for 6 months? Why not work in London for a few years post-graduation? WHY NOT??? There is always Perth back home, patiently (and somewhat sedatedly) waiting for me.

I am feeling bitter today. Sorry if this is harsh.

[ataxi]

You're not particularly harsh, you more or less describe my feelings. However I think contempt for suburban living is an easy option. It's more challenging to try to empathise with people who want to live like that.

Urban sprawl is a different issue, but it is a horrible blight on reality in Australia. The offensive thing about it is not even that it uses space up, it's that it uses space so poorly. Just the distance between houses and places isn't the problem, it's all the ugly street patterns and cutout shopping malls and petty boundaries of territory.