…

“Ah, so you’re off to see the vagina wall?”

This is pretty much the first thing anyone in Hobart says when you tell them you’re off to visit MONA, David Walsh’s subterranean Museum of Old and New Art. Well, it’s that or a remark about “the poo machine”, Belgian Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional, an industrial installation that over the course of 24 hours converts food from the MONA Café into actual, brown, solid, odorous, human-style faeces. It’s easy to see why they monopolise conversation – I mean, really, who isn’t fascinated by shit and vaginas? – but together they comprise a fantastically small proportion of the almost overwhelming affectual onslaught that is a day spent in MONA’s dimly lit world.

It’s hard to overstate exactly how much of an all-encompassing experience it is going to MONA. Used to the antiseptic white spaces and bright lighting that accompany most galleries of this stature, descending into the dark, windowless, sandstone walled boundaries of the place can feel like a veritable descent into the underworld. (This feeling is further exaggerated if you take the ferry there, a highly recommended option that really brings out the river Styx vibe). Our party had decided to take the full day option, which involved us leaving Hobart at 9.30am and then returning on the final ferry of the day at 6pm. If this seems like a lot of time to spend at a gallery, well, you’d be right, but you’ve also never been to anything quite like MONA.

MONA is the work of Hobart-born David Walsh, perhaps one of the most curious men in Australia, who has embarked upon one of the most curious endeavours in recent Australian history. Walsh, 50, pretty much spent the 1980s locked in a room, concocting a complex algorithm that allowed him and a few friends to become fantastically rich by betting on horse racing. How exactly you beat something as seemingly arbitrary and fickle as horse racing is beyond me, but if you’ve got a spare decade and an eye for numbers, perhaps it’s the project for you.

As his wealth ballooned, Walsh became naturally gripped by a need to do something with it. This began with a fetish for antiquities, in particular Ancient Egyptian caskets and mummies, but then expanded out to include some of the more outré edges of the contemporary art scene. When they talk of Old and New Art, they aren’t kidding: within ten metres of one another you’ll find a collection of Neolithic spearheads and a 2011 work by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota called Dialogue with Absence that features a white dress hanging on a wall with innumerable tubes pumping blood into and out of it.

As his collection grew, Walsh decided he needed somewhere to display it. $75 million later (of his own money, mind) and MONA was born: a vast, four story gallery space carved out of a sandstone cliff overlooking the Derwent River. There’s supposedly $150 million worth of art on display, which, in itself represents 30% of Walsh’s collection. Gambling, hey? The property also hosts a winery, a microbrewery (the beer is so, so tasty), a Café, a Wine Bar, a high class restaurant, a stage (for the MONA FOMA concerts), eight art-laden Pavillions (if you fancy staying on site) and some pretty goddamn incredible views of remarkably picturesque Hobart.

But back to the gallery. You walk in, get given your “O” (an iPod Touch that functions as your guide throughout the experience, tracking your progress, providing commentary and giving you a full map of what you looked at when you leave) and then descend into the catacombs. The design of the place is staggering, the rough hewn walls staring impassively into the suspended walkways and hidden alleys and strange sounds and barely illuminated corners that constitutes the gallery proper. As has oft been opined, it’s almost worth visiting for the design alone – rarely has the shape of a place felt so integral to the experience it contains.

And then there’s the art. The thing that really strikes you about the collection of work on display at MONA is that nothing is there merely because it should be. There’s no walls of Impressionism, on display because the gallery needs to showcase its total grasp of art history. Every piece is designed to elicit a response. Every piece is there because it provides some commentary on or some angle of inquisition into the way we live, or the way we consume art. People have described MONA as being an immersive tour into the gritty backwaters of your unconscious mind and I think that’s a reasonable appraisal. Sex, death, chaos, the body, dreams, decay, language – in this space all are thrown together and scraped along the surface of one another, generating strange sparks of recognition, cognition and, sometimes, disgust. Most of all, it just makes you feel: physically, emotionally and in other strange registers that you perhaps didn’t realise existed.

Gazing into the rapidly strobing windows of Gregory Barsamian’s Artifact, a giant head containing a whirring array of birds and wires and apples and bladders and hats, spinning and morphing and transforming into one another, I almost fainted. Looking at the harsh tubes and metal rigging of Cloaca Professional, I felt an uncanny and inarticulable sense that my entire being was being denied. Watching a bank of 30 televisions each containing a random person belting out Madonna songs – Candice Breitz’s Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) – I laughed my goddamn ass off (they’d hit Vogue by the time I got there). I almost cried reading the devastatingly beautiful prose etched all over Patrick Hall’s When My Heart Stops Beating. I spent over ten minutes standing inside Brigitia Ozolins’ Kryptos, an Aronofsky-esque exercise in sci-fi atmosperics, where creeping soundscapes combine with off-putting architecture, ancient cuneiform tablets and binary constructs on the wall to conjure one of the most soothingly null spaces I’d ever been in. And then I walked out and felt slightly creepy for spending too long in the company of the vagina wall AKA Cunts… and other conversations by Greg Taylor and the 150 women who’d had him make plaster casts made of their vaginas. Or cunts, I guess. (The women I went with both said they found Cunts massively empowering).

I could go on and on and on (hell, I already have), but words on a page can’t really transmit the cumulative impact of it all. At the end, the three of us walked out into the blinding sunlight and didn’t really talk all that much for a while. But after an hour or two the words came flooding back and we spent the rest of the night having furious, strange, sad, impassioned, drunken conversations about everything from euthanasia to love to children to stillness to, yes, vaginas. In the end, I can’t really put a full and unqualified mark on what this time at MONA stood for – it seems to elide such cosy categorisation – but as a profound testament to the continued power of art to make us flinch and reconsider and linger uncomfortably at the edges of the familiar it was a quite unparalleled experience in my life. Make the effort, you won’t regret it.

“People who only collect contemporary art are not collectors, they are just fashion victims” – Wim Delvoye

…

…

“A Sydney rugby league commentator has admitted that remarks during an NRL final attacking proposed anti-pokie laws were provided to him by Channel Nine management. The admission by Ray Warren, a recovered gambling addict…” – The Age

Look Ray, you know we care about you, right? You’re a member of the Channel Nine family. You’re true blue. The real deal. Dinky di. Ridgey Didge. No wait, that was Channel Ten. Forget Ridgey Didge.

The point is, we’d never make you do anything you weren’t comfortable with. You’re “The Voice of Rugby League”! We need to you to be on your game! By which we mean our game. Of Rugby League. I probably over-explained that.

Alright Ray, let me get to the point. You’ve obviously heard about this cuckoo idea that the Federal Government has about trying to stop good, honest, hard-working Australians from having a punt on the pokies right? I mean, it’s just crazy. Next they’ll be telling you there’s a limit to how much Vegemite you’re allowed to eat or that you can’t keep platypuses as pets or shoot down helicopters flying over your property. Every right thinking Australian knows it’s a load of crap. Like something out of Soviet Russia, this.

And again, I really want to emphasise that we’re not going to make you do anything you’re uncomfortable with. But. And this is a tiny but. Barely a but at all. Even smaller than Marnie’s butt. Ain’t that right, toots? Haha. Yeah, she loves it.

But, as we all know, tomorrow is Grand Final day. And everyone’s gonna be watching. And you, Ray. Rabbit, Rabs, Rabbsy… Ray will be commentating it. And everyone’s gonna be listening.

Have I mentioned that we don’t want you to do anything you’d be uncomfortable with? Yes? Alright. Just making sure. Because we really don’t.

So, about this Grand Final. We were just wondering if maybe you wouldn’t mind, uh, if you found the right opportunity, um, saying something about the pokies thing during the match. Doesn’t have to be big. A light mention. An aside. If you will. Something like, “Stewart out to Lyon and it’s a fumble just like the Federal Government’s handling of the pokie issue”, or maybe something even more straightforward like “Another four points to Manly. They’ve got to be feeling as good as I did when I won at the pokies last night. What a great Australian tradition”.

Now, we know you’ve had your problems with gambling in the past. But I’m sure you’ll agree, problem gambling is as Australian as putting a dingo on the barbeque or problem drinking. Something to be worried about on occasion, sure, but it’s what makes our country great. Imagine, if you couldn’t bet, you probably wouldn’t even be here today! Don’t think about it too much, just go with me. I mean, sure, you’ve probably sacrificed the possibility of a wealthy life with no material worries for the sake of your daily flutters, but what would you prefer? Sitting in your palatial home, night after night, watching cooking shows with your adoring wife and loving children while you stroke the crisp, un-bet $50 in your left trouser pocket? Sounds like hell to me, Ray. Sounds like the coward’s life.

And that’s just what these pokie players are doing. Escaping the unending drudgery and loneliness of their lives in the neon fantasy land of their local club house. And would you really begrudge them that? The chance to flirt with the idea of winning for the first time in their miserable, unremarked lives? Is that what you want Ray? You who have loved gambling so well. Huh? Huh? Is that how much you hate these poor souls, that you would deny them the one pleasure that animates their dull, seemingly endless lives? That keeps them moving from day to cripplingly long, featureless day? Would you prefer they just died, Ray? Would you? Would you?! Stop crying! Look at me! Look me in the eye, you miserable fuck! Look me in the eye when you say you want them all to die!

What’s that? You’ll do it! Great! Here’s a tissue. So glad things didn’t have to get weird. Now, we’ve been in discussion with marketing and they think directly after half time would probably be the best point to drop it, something about giving everyone a chance to get liquored up. Either way, I am super excited about tomorrow’s game and the fact that nobody is doing anything they’re uncomfortable with. Go Cats! What? The AFL? Ah, it’s all the same.

…

Because what part of the phrase “Black and white b-grade lesbian romance sci-fi spoof” doesn’t make you want to see it?

Jane is a lonely lesbian. Working at a greeting card store in New York, she hasn’t dated anyone in longer than she’d care to admit. Meanwhile, on the planet Zots, female Zotsians – bald, tight jumpsuits, deadpan – are being sent to Earth to have their hearts broken, because their excess emotions are depleting the atmosphere.

You can probably see where this is going, but add in some shady government agents, a budget within spitting distance of the ticket price and a brilliantly observed, affectionate parody of the films of the 1950s, and you have the recipe for writer-director Madeleine Olnek’s quite singular, quite funny take on interspecies relations.

“A hilarious date movie for couples of all orientations.” – Hollywood Reporter

…

As happens on occasion, there has been a bit of an uptick in interest around the idea of bullying recently. Driven by the senseless and sad footage of an older child hurling a younger child who had been punching him to the ground – and breaking the younger child’s ankle in the process – the conversation surrounding the incident has by and large descended into the usual array of well-meaning platitudes accompanied by a fair serve of mindless vitriol directed at the assailant, age 12. From the YouTube comments: “Sorry to anyone but i seriously think some one should kill that little fuck and skull fuck the shit out of him.”

Quite.

I finally broke and watched the footage last night. Truth be told, it unsettled me. It’s so easy, so tempting to see it and grin triumphantly, the indignities of your own adolescence overcome in this brief, vicarious moment of retribution. But bullying is about more than the intersection of two adolescents the Lord of the Flies-esque containment unit that is your average high school. It seems to be hardwired into the very process of becoming an adult, acting out the simplistic, Crayola-tinged outlines of how we’ll live when we’re grown up. It makes us queasy as adults to look on these casual torments, incapable as we are of remembering the social impulses of the teenage life, but it achieves little to try and implicate these children within our own moral landscape.

By many measures I had a reasonably shit adolescence. Stricken with cancer a semester into high school and reinserted into my year group a year later, temporarily both bald and in a wheelchair, I spent most of my high school years on the perimeter, desperately lonely and prone to periods of verbal and emotional abuse. The line “Hey Ryan, go back to hospital” is seared into my mind for any number of reasons. While much of that was a function of those generally despicable years in a human’s development between 12 and 15 – and so, largely devoid of moral content – it’s hard to look back upon those times with anything more than a twinge of sadness and unease. I was merely fortunate enough that my family life was so enduringly warm and welcoming, my older brother’s post-school life in particular serving as a reminder that something better lay on the other side of this abyss.

And yet, and yet. What are we except the sum of our experiences? These unthinking cruelties crafted me, drove me, pushed me to become better. In my more honest moments, I can see that the unpleasantness of my adolescence acted as the generative impulse for what I have now become. Similarly, I have a circle of exceptional friends doing exceptional things, all seared with ambition and making their mark on the world, and yet, almost all of them would probably renounce their adolescence, given the chance. Well, would do if it wouldn’t mean that they had to give up the life they have subsequently made for themselves.

In his autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry talks about the experience of being caned at school. Perhaps better considered as an act of culturally sanctioned, yet generally extreme bullying, he wryly points out that despite our being so aghast at the prospect these days, our generation is still in all likelihood the first generation in the history of humanity that were not beaten by as children. And so he writes “I find corporal punishment as of no greater significance than bustles, hula-hoops, flared trousers, side-whiskers or any other fad. Until, that is one says that it isn’t”. That is, for Fry, the act of beating a child seemed to have little impact upon the production of functioning adults until the point when it was decided that it did, that children should be spared this nastiness due to its impact upon their development. It’s an interesting rhetorical flourish and one that sticks in my mind.

So far, this sounds like some grand celebration of the formative powers of abuse and I assure you I intend it to be nothing of the sort. I am intensely glad for the absence of beatings from my childhood, although, like Fry I cannot comment as to how things would be different had they been a feature. Similarly, I cannot know how things would have been different had my adolescence been a little more carefree and easy. But it all comes back to this strange moral cul-de-sac that is the life of the adolescent and the accompanying truth that those years are the site of the most blindingly felt kindnesses and cruelties of our lives. That for all the moments of abject sadness and fury, there are moments of such blisteringly exultant joy that they too remain burned into your memory for the rest of your life. The surge and swell of first love, the exhilaration of disobedience, the consuming comfort and solace of friends: very rarely will these extremes of feeling be seen again.

And so to bullying. There’s no doubt it’s a vile practice and no doubt that adults should make every effort to prevent it and to instruct children in the consequences of their actions. That is, after all, one of the less acknowledged but more crucial goals of receiving an education. But these moral panics, these portraits of winners and losers, the naming and shaming of offenders, do little except to turn generally off-hand events into potentially deeply damaging ones. For all parties. But we, as adults, cannot help but see bullying as belonging to a simpler moral existence, to cast it as a well-defined practice with obvious outcomes and definite solutions. But a war on bullying is probably as winnable as the ones on terror and drugs, and its prosecution just as futile. It’s a social process and one unlikely to go away while adolescents retain undeveloped frontal lobes. Hell, some people seem to carry it on into adulthood without too much effort.

But it’s not about teaching children to just “deal with it”, or to fight back against their oppressors, but to perhaps admit that adolescence brings with it sadness and unpleasantness and confusion and loneliness and anger but that this extremity of emotion – and our learning how to cope with it – is so vastly instrumental in the construction of ourselves as humans. After all, the bullied have no monopoly on teenage misery. We should offer support to all who need it, to those who require the promise of a better world outside the school they’re trapped in, and of course we should foster conversation about the rights and wrongs of human interaction amongst children of all ages – schools would be arguably better places were this a more acknowledged part of the curriculum. And there surely must be ways of avoiding this grim affair; violence is the least of all the answers. But I cannot help but feel that the way we react to bullying these days – the accusations of its increasing prevalence, the smile of self-satisfaction at well-placed revenge, the characterisation of all parties in the moral lexicon gifted to us by adulthood – cannot comprehend or assist those who might be suffering, and may actually be harming those who need it least.

…

I’m not sure exactly when I first decided that boredom needed to be eradicated from my life – my late teens perhaps – but one day I simply found this thought had germinated, pulsing silent and adamant in the background of my project of post-school personal reformation. I hadn’t, as others seemingly had, been instructed by my parents that ‘only boring people get bored’. It was a conclusion I arrived at independently, borne of the agonising lonelinesses of adolescence and made possible by a degree of social acuity only achieved post matriculation. And perhaps it was going to university that did it. And perhaps it was getting rid of my once beloved, never quite cool fluorescent orange, three-quarter length shorts. Adolescence: it’s a strange time.

But as soon as the thought had formed, I became possessed by it. Brimming with certitude (if not confidence), I started saying “yes” to everything – every social occasion, every extra-curricular activity, every technological innovation, every new style of music. The opportunities I had craved in high school were suddenly open to me. I accrued friends with zeal, wrote and performed in plays, worked in a bookshop, went to a four day rave in a Serbian fortress, did a semester on exchange in Canada, read/listened to/watched/looked at everything I could find that seemed to be of cultural consequence, had sexual liaisons, had a sexual liaison that ended with me having to climb out a window to avoid the girl’s grandmother, developed a tolerance for drink, developed a tolerance for drugs, joined the Student Guild Council, moved cities, moved universities and, on occasion, studied. It was a blaze of activity for activity’s sake, years spent, quite consciously, in the pursuit of anecdote.

Technology facilitated the process no end. As the internet began diffusing into every last crevice of our lives, even my resting moments became “active”. If I kept moving, the logic seemed to run, the mere fact of my motion will stop the spectre of boredom from ever again encroaching upon my life. I’ll be free. I’ll be interesting. I’ll have heaps of friends. Both real and on Facebook. In 2007, my love affair with the internet roaring toward its apex, I recall  actually uttering to my best friend, ’I just can’t imagine being bored anymore’. And I couldn’t. I had succeeded. I had become incapable of stasis.

Three years down the track, however, and I have begun to wonder whether perhaps I had been a little hard on boredom. Or that, at the very least, I confused two very different qualities.For me, boredom was the unavoidable correlative of loneliness. And if my teenage years had been writ in anything, they had been writ in loneliness. Not that he was always consumed with it, mind – the video games and endless reams of fantasy- and science-fiction were on hand to provide a certain buffer against the void – but it was always there nonetheless.

But for all their occasional companionship, boredom, I suspect, is constructed from different matter altogether. Because I look back further, toward my childhood proper, and I realise that so much of it was spent not in activity or adventure or in loneliness – although I was often alone – but rather in a remarkable fugue of boredom. Vast, arcing chasms of boredom that stretched, seemingly boundless, to the visible horizons of my world.

There were the hours spent following my mother around furniture auction rooms or accompanying her to aerobics class, although she maintains I often partook in the latter. I maintain I was so bored I seriously considered death. Or there were those afternoons sitting quietly in my father’s office, waiting to be picked up by mum, looking at the accumulated books and files and papers and wondering, first what this possibly had to do with the man’s medical practice (there being little administrative work or research required in the board game, Operation), and second how he could possibly own that much printed matter and none of it be in comic form. Then there were the days where my older brother was away and I was left alone to build fantastical and solitary worlds out of the constituent components of my backyard. We had a trampoline so at least I was always able to pretend I could fly. And, inevitably, crash.

But the pervasiveness of this sense of boredom makes me wonder whether it is, in fact, this feeling that accounts for much of what we glowingly recall as our childlike imagination. That beyond wonder, beyond fear, or perhaps in combination with them, it was that feeling of comprehensive, consuming boredom that provided the grist and impetus for the adventures of childhood. If you’re desperate enough an antique furniture auction room becomes a veritable wonderland of Narnian portals. Pushed to it by inactivity, I’d read my father’s incomprehensible medical transcripts and try and fit the words together into a meaningful lexicon. I’d jump on the trampoline and find myself bounding over a mountain, magical broadsword drawn, my furious, five year old hands ready to slaughter the oncoming orc hordes. Because at that age my career aspiration was, seriously, barbarian.

As a child, boredom isn’t necessarily coupled with loneliness, it’s coupled with inquisitiveness, a need to discover or to create in order to fill the nothing moments in our lives. It is, to put it another way, the motivator of play. It’s only as we grow older that boredom becomes afflicted with this existential anomie, the state of terrifying aimlessness that we go to such lengths to expel.

Not that there’s anything particularly novel about this idea of the loss of boredom. The increasing demands of age seem almost purposefully designed to eliminate periods of idle thought from our lives. However, I wonder whether this is a necessary product of maturity or actually the product of a particular cultural, and increasingly technological moment. Certainly, the concept of boredom animated the thoughts of a number of early twentieth-century philosophers. Heidegger, for instance, one of the foremost existentialist philosophers of boredom, saw the act of waiting for a train as the archetypal location of this (anti-)phenomenon. And you can see how the train station must have once acted as the free man’s prison; a defined point in space, inescapable and static, a release from which was subject to a suite of external forces that one had no capacity to see or influence. Nothing to do but to rest with one’s thoughts. Not that Heidegger enjoyed the prospect; for him, boredom was a ‘silent fog’.

Eighty years later, and I recently decided to undertake a small personal experiment: to go a full thirty minute tram ride without using my iPhone. No Twitter, no Facebook, no email, no music. Four minutes later, having unthinkingly removed the phone from my pocket four times, I managed to school my hands and turn my attention to the semi-panicked frenzy unspooling in my mind. As I felt my thoughts clatter and fizz and circle in on themselves, frantically searching for some semblance of stimulation, I realised that this was close to the first time that I had let my mind be at ease in a public space in well over a year. Showering, I realised, is essentially the only point in a given 24-hour period where I am both awake and only focussing on a single thing – and so it’s unsurprising that it’s also where I have my best ideas. There’s no links to distract me there, no pressing emails, tabs or finicky bits of personal administration. Just a cosy, contained space, my thoughts and a severe dent in Melbourne’s water catchments.

To my mind this correlation between inactivity and creativity exists because the impulse of boredom is, roughly speaking, exothermic. It’s productive, rather than receptive, the brain’s being forced to grasp for something outside of itself. At its extremes – like those reported by prisoners in solitary confinement – this impulse is capable of conjuring phantoms, sounds and entire conversations with non-existent humans. A sign of creeping madness, sure, but also indicative of a defence mechanism designed to ward off the injuries of a chronically under-stimulated mind. It’s creativity at a terminal point, where the brain shows itself capable of creating entire worlds before it collapses into incomprehensibility.

Although the malignancy of such a degree of boredom is self-evident, I do think it’s suggestive of  what we might be missing in its erasure. While only a brief  and non-solitary tenure, Bertrand Russell also found prison to be a time of immense intellectual fecundity. Jailed for his opposition to the First World War, Russell used the opportunity to write his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, a burst of creativity spurred by his freeing from the pressing concerns and aspirations of everyday life. And while I feel no particular attraction to the principles of mathematical philosophy, nor, for that matter, to jail time, I do worry about the fact that I have allowed the internet to invade my life to the point where I actually have to retreat into the shower in order to gather my thoughts. That it’s not entirely unknown for me to check Twitter while sitting on the toilet, just to see if anybody has retweeted that hilarious video of a cat humping a dog that I posted 70 seconds ago. That I have to try, and think, and put in effort merely to be by myself.

Which isn’t to say I begrudge the internet its place in my life. It has provided me with inordinate opportunity and joy over the years, and remains the centre of my social, intellectual and professional being. That is, without it I would have neither a social life, an education nor a career. Nor am I in any way that caricature of a digital addict, stuck at home night after night because of an inability to confront the world without the aid of a laptop screen. I am gregarious, in all likelihood, to a fault. But, still, I fear my immersion in these online worlds may be causing my mind to become endothermically geared, a mere sponge for the information onslaughts of the digital age, dopamine squirts masquerading as useful data, the majority of its creative flux simply directed towards the procedural compartmentalisation of endless stimuli rather than being left to pursue its own ends.

In short, I long for ideas again. My ideas. The shining purity, sudden serendipity and occasional madnesses of undiluted thought. But I think that in this future finding such is a task we have to actively consider in our day to day lives. To realise there are limits to what we can create solely through the mirror hall of reflected ideas that is the digital world. To learn to prize proper, absolute solitude again. And to know when you might just really, really need to have an extended stint in the shower.

…

Following on from the bold steps taken by the Swiss electorate last year to ban those hideous eyesores that are Islamic minarets, the French lower house yesterday voted overwhelmingly to ban that other paragon of Islamic-ness: the burqa. Of course, not that it was phrased so bluntly – the law makes reference only to “concealing one’s face in public” – but nonetheless, the law was quite unequivocally aimed at those who, for whatever reasons, wore the burqa. Them, and the presumably tiny subset of the population for whom balaclavas are acceptable fashion choices.

So, how big was the issue in France? Well, depends what you look at. In terms of public sentiment, huge. In terms of practical effect, close to non-existent. There are approximately five million Muslims in France, a country of over 60 million. Two million of these are women. Two thousand of those wear the burqa. So, the French legislature sequestered itself away for a little while and came back with a law that in a roundabout way made it illegal for these women to abide by their religious code. Given that these were probably not the most emancipated of women in the first place, I do wonder if this will lead to the extension of liberté to these women or simply make them unable to leave the privacy of their own home.

Now, I’m going to be the first to admit, this is a vexed issued. A very vexed issue. But it continues in the grand tradition of Western nations everywhere tailoring laws to incredibly specific subsets of their populations in order to assuage some broader perceived social unease. The minarets in Switzerland (of which there were, in total, two), the “boat people” in Australia (which account for a remarkably tiny proportion of our illegal immigration), the burqa in France, these are all, for want of a better, less mind-blowingly pretentious word, synecdoches; that is, these minor and practically insignificant issues function as symbols of a more generalised angst in the population about the presence of outsiders in a now unfamiliar system. Which is why they’re so capable of being leveraged by political forces, and often in such opportunistic fashion. Because, say what you will about their necessity, the bitter debates that these symbolic struggles tend to kick up do have the handy side effect of diverting people from the real issues to hand. Namely, in France’s case, sky-rocketing debt, persistent unemployment, plummeting productivity and the potential financial collapse of the entire European Economic Community. But really, that is as nothing when there’s a handful of already subjugated women with covered faces to be dealt with.

With all that said, I’m no fan of the burqa, and neither are most of the Muslim organisations in France. As they point out, the Koran makes no reference to the need for women to fully veil their faces. But these debates still play in to some pretty fundamental questions regarding how we see the interplay between the person and the state, and also the person and the community in which they are embedded. For instance, to what extent does the idea of a secular society guarantee freedom of religious behaviour? We don’t let Rastafarians smoke pot or Mormons marry more than one person, so is it justifiable to ban the burqa on similar grounds? Do religions deserve any special consideration at all? And, religion or not, at what point does the distaste of many overwhelm the choices of the few? Even more specifically, is the wearing of the burqa actually a free choice, worthy of being defended, or is it an oppressive symbol of male domination that by definition could not be freely chosen? If Sex and the City 2 is to be believed, the answer to all of these is OMG FASHION!!!!

But these debates are not as distinct and abstract as we might think. Right now, South Australia is saddling up to a proposed law to ban the wearing of the burqa in public buildings and government offices, while back in May Federal Senator Cory Bernardi called for its wholesale outlawing on “security” grounds. Being based essentially on a single mugging by a burqa clad person, that opinion piece perhaps suffered from an excess of extrapolation, but it nonetheless suggests that the sentiment is teetering on the edge of the political mainstream, and might only need a closely run election to burst into the open.

Normally at this point in time I’d finish with a vague declaration of principle, some sort of sarcastic remark about Tony Abbott and an unrelated YouTube video of a cat trying to get at some birthday cake, but this time, I dunno. It’s not that simple. And perhaps it’s not even that important. But I guess I just hope that when this debate does eventually happen, as it almost assuredly will, that it doesn’t become the cesspool of unwarranted xenophobia that it has every chance of becoming. And that it doesn’t begin to – a la asylum seekers – overwhelm every other matter of substance to which this country needs to cast its attention. And so we live in hope.

Oh, alright, you can have the video:

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I was eleven when I first found out I had a sister. Breakfast in our backyard on a Sunday and my mother freshly returned from a ‘business’ trip to the East Coast where she’d gone to meet the daughter she’d given up for adoption twenty-six years earlier. The early spring sun was dripping through the trees as she told us and I saw tears glistening in my older brother’s eyes. Being eleven, I think the enormity of such a revelation passed me by initially, but I’d never seen him cry before and the sight was sufficient to set me off too. In the years since, I’ve always found our tears hard to explain. That is, there’s no strict emotion to which they correlate. It wasn’t sadness, or joy, or pain. Rather, it was something more subtly drawn, a shifting in family dynamics that, being so young, I could only dimly perceive.

The secrecy of the trip seemed fitting, though. Up until this point nobody knew about the child except for mum’s best friend and my father. Despite being only 21 when she fell pregnant, she had kept it hidden from everybody: her parents, her nine siblings, the baby’s father. She simply wore increasingly loose fitting clothes for five months and then departed, telling everyone she was going on a trip to New Zealand. Instead she used the money she had saved up to go travelling through Europe and took herself to Ballarat until the baby was born. She even arranged for pre-written postcards to be despatched from New Zealand at regular intervals. Not much gets past my mother.

I can’t imagine what the isolation must have been like for her then, stuck in the country without family and friends, waiting for a child to be born just so that she could give it away. It must have been achingly lonely, but for mum that was the only possibility. Being raised a Catholic, and dealing with the mores of the time, abortion was never even a consideration. Neither, evidently, was staying with the father. Despite years of gentle prodding, mum has never told anyone anything about who he may have been, but for the faintly ridiculous fact that he was a “ski enthusiast”. Not even my sister knows who the man was.

Mum didn’t feel she could reveal it to her own family either, although not for the reasons one might expect. When she finally did tell grandma, in 1996, the day after mum had herself met her daughter for the first time, grandma’s reaction was a tear-choked “Why didn’t you tell us? You know we would have raised it as our own”. But for mum that was the exact reason she hadn’t. Always poor, Irish immigrants, grandma would have been looking after seven children of her own at the time.

So my mum left. Aptly enough, my sister was born on April Fool’s Day, 1968, after a full day’s labour. She was whisked away before my mother could lay eyes on her and was adopted out to a farming couple in northern Victoria.

So, to return to the question of those tears. Shock was part of it surely, but I think it was something deeper than that too. I think it was a reaction to the sudden humanisation of my mother, the realisation that for the first time in my life she wasn’t a semi-abstracted deity, but was, rather, just a person, frail and fallible, with a history and secrets and a life beyond my seeing. But every child has moments like that, it seems: those points in time when they realise that their parents exist in the same order of being as everyone else and so have to rearrange their love accordingly. It’s a fall from grace, of a sort, but most of growing up is.

Yet in the absence of that sheen of invulnerability, one’s parents suddenly become a lot more interesting and vital. Rendered human, it’s possible to see with some clarity what it is that actually makes them remarkable. I don’t pretend to understand the full scale of what giving away her baby meant to my mother, nor how she resolved it all in her own mind. But by any measure it’s an incredible set of decisions to have made, and to have lived with. In discovering them, I can only look on in quiet wonder at the woman she came to be.

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