Author Archives: Therese Trouserzoff

Red Stick Ramble

26 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by in Bands at the Pig's Arms

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The Red Stick Ramble

The plan was for John and Gayla to meet the first mate and me down at the Pig’s Arms to listen to the Saturday night live band.  It was a simple, robust plan, tried and true.  This week we anticipated enjoying the company (for one evening only) of the well-known Cajun group “The Red Stick Ramblers”.

Red Stick Ramblers

Now to save you coming on all technical and objecting to the alleged notoriety of the band on the grounds that you’ve never heard of the Red Stick Ramblers, all you need to know is that they just dropped in on their way back to Louisiana from a sold-out gig at the Port Fairy Folk festival.

Folk ?  Pig’s Arms ! Ersatz moonshine liquor !  A potent and heady combination.  And the ever-present threat that John and Gayla might break into Western Swing or a Cajun two-step at any moment.  Worth witnessing at any entry price.

The crowd at the Pig’s Arms is “uninhibited” and when the band took the stage (well, took the five metre by four metre slightly raised wooden box), on time and significantly more sartorially splendid than the audience (the band was at least, shod), the first cross-examination question was “Why Red Stick Ramblers?”

The band ripped into their high-octane signature tune – the celebration of moonshine, “Made in the Shade”

“ You’ve heard of white lightnin’ and of mountain dew”.  We certainly had.

“So if you see me at a party on a Friday Night

Pickin’ and a grinnin’ and a feeling all right

Chance is my back pocket got a little thirst aid

“It comes from Appaloosa and it’s made in the shade.”

Yes, but “Why Red Stick Ramblers ?”

This is clearly THE question that the band fields all the time, and since it was clearly a great burden on crowd’s mind at the Pig’s Arms, Chas Justus, the guitarist, and Linzay Young, (50% of the fiddle section and the lead singer) indulged us and removed this great concern by translating back into the Louisiana patois (I hesitate to call it French, VoR)  “Red Stick” > “Baton Rouge” – where the band members met up – as freshmen at Louisiana State University, some ten years earlier.

Chas said that after eight years of the Bush Administration (and the Pig’s crowd knew he was using the term loosely), this sample of Southern white trash had never had it so good, despite having been bagged out by sophisticated Yankees.  Now that they’d hit the international stage they had gotten used to not only being despised as being Americans, but as being “Unspeakable” Americans post Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

I was wondering (Julius Sumner Miller-style) why it was so, but the band moved on and the matter was left to rise in the dark and warm space at the back of the brain until a few days later, when Don Watson filled in the dots.

I need to do a flashback and then fast forward you here.

I have intended to read Don Watson’s Book “American Journeys”, for ages, intensified by having read an excerpt speaking about the recent (and may I say joyous US election), published in an issue of “The Monthly”.  Now I know Don won’t be offended when I say that I’ve been damned slow on the uptake of an offer to purchase the hardback at $50.

So then, as a wild aside —- just hang on and give the old attention span a bit of a work out.—- it’ll come good, I promise —-.  Peter Cundall, on the Tuesday Book Club waxed lyrical, and passionate about Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize winning ‘Grapes of Wrath”.  I was weaned on Steinbeck four decades ago and I was determined to go and revisit this master work.  Steinbeck knew California the best, but he too, toured and wrote about the South.

Off to Bert Olbrecks Books and there, along with the Grapes, a half-priced paperback version of Don’s “American Journeys” found its way into my satchel by way of a commercial exchange.

Don’s prose is simply wonderful; luminous and echoing the clarity and simple elegance of the Steinbeck he quotes in his first chapter – Don’s 2005 trip into the Deep South, and New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina.  Instead of the dust that gets in every crevice, we smell the stench of saturated homes, drenched belongings, heat and damp, death and decay, neglect and callous Bush Administration indifference to the dire situation.  Don takes us with him and we sit stunned, staring out the window of the Lutheran Church van delivering basics to the few survivors who have chosen to remain.  If they had a choice.

Don recounts the dreadful statistics.  More than two thousand people died and hundreds of thousands were made homeless and in New Orleans.  But nobody really knows the true number because so many bodies were washed out to sea.  And the poor and homeless do not leave records or estates for relatives to fight over in court.

While the Bush Administration was pouring cash in the billions into Iraq, the task of helping the people of Louisiana fell mostly to the two cornerstones of contemporary America – the church volunteers and private enterprise.  There was a profit to be made in souls and hard cash.  We’d better put our bets on Haliburton having both feet in the federal cash trough before the local contractors get a sniff.

And we know that it was not only New Orleans that felt the wrath of Katrina.  Amongst so many other cities and towns Don reminds us that 26,000 of the people of Baton Rouge registered as being homeless – but the actual number was suspected to be a lot higher.

Back in the lounge bar the Ramblers’ wild, driving and wailing fiddle tune ‘Katrina” (you took my home) brings the howling wind and rain right into the Pig’s Arms.

The silent crowd looks stunned and then the band swings like Sweeny Todd into their syncopated, shambolic drunken and sinister “Main Street Blues”

–        “The butcher and the baker and the undertaker,

–        The butler and the barber too,

–        The indian giver and the boy without a liver,

–        They’ve all got the Main Street Blues.

–        The lovers and the lawyer and the self-employer

–        Were all in the foyer sniffin’ glue,

–        Discussin with a Russian, who was munchin on a muffin

–        About those awful Mainstreet Blues”

The crowd is rolling laughing and the band segues into a Western Swing number.  Gayla springs to her feet and heads towards the tiny dance floor.  The faintest look of a call to duty flits across John’s face.  He clears his throat, silently mouths a “Yee-Ha!”, takes his partner and joins the indomitable spirit of Louisiana; the good ol’ boys from Baton Rouge.

“And it’s Oh Lordy me

And it’s Oh Lordy my,

This little Pig’s Arms

Keeps bustlin’ on by”.

And I can still smell the delicious smell of jambalaya and fillet gumbo wafting out of Granny’s Kitchen.

Our huge thanks to the Red Stick Ramblers at  www.redstickramblers.com

Of Dalliances and The Dunnee Men.

26 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by in The Mens

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Of Dalliances and The Dunnee Men.

………. or how things pan out for Gez

Gez ShedNot having sewerage connected was normal in Australia during the time of European immigration from early days till the 1960’s. The enormous distances between houses and suburbs and the sheer spread of just a few hundred people over many kilometres of land made the provision of infrastructure such as a sewerage system too expensive for many suburban areas at that time. The way out was for the local Council to provide a ‘dunnee pan’. This pan was a heavy metal container coated with pitch or bitumen and actually smelt quite fresh and spicy when just delivered. A bit like an industrial harbour foreshore, with moorings and thick ropes, tarred anchors and pylons. This pan would be used in a small outside room of about a couple of square metres and called the ‘dunnee’. An outside toilet, sometimes politely called by the upper shore, ‘the outhouse’. You have to go sometimes, don’t you?

The dunnee pan would be covered by another outer metal shell with a hinged wooden lid. With some imagination this could then be seen as a toilet. However, when lifting the lid, no matter what it looked like from outside, the smell and darkness from inside was broodingly brutal and left nothing to imagination. Not many would linger reading poetry or Thomas Hardy.

The pan would be collected once a week by burley blokes in blue singlets and verdant armpits, who would come before dawn and summer heat, to heave the sloshing but lidded pan on shoulders and put on the truck with the driver having a Lucky ciggie. Coarse oaths would be renting the still morning air and heavily shod feet would crunch the concrete path along the side of the veranda.

This dunnee pan would be capped by a lid secured on top with a metal band that would lever the lid tightly around the container, not unlike some preservatives such as sour Kraut or apple sauce of the present day. This was a job purely reserved for the dinky-di locals and much coveted. It was well paid and had all sorts of lurks, including dalliances with lonely women and early ‘knock-off’ times when finished. I am not sure if the smell added to their appeal, but rumours had it that many a woman, widowed, single or even married, was left happy after an early visit from the ‘dunnee man’.

Large families were given a ‘special 2 pan treat’, this usually meant giving very generously at Christmas time.( A couple of crates of beer would suffice.) Any large family that were too stingy at Christmas would soon find a lonely single pan again. Those dunnee men were often kind rogues but a law onto their own, revered and respected by many, but feared by some. The ‘dunnee man’ is now part of folklore and Tamworth Country music, but long gone since.

Our family was more than large and dad had to make some adjustments to a down pipe outside the dunnee that would carry rain water from the roof to the open storm water drain at the front of the street. Despite our generosity towards the Shire’s dunnee men at Christmas time, we never had more than two pans a week. For our family this was not enough. I never did find out how our neighbours coped, they had six children as well. We were on friendly terms but not that friendly that you could ask; what do you do with your poo? In any case, their concern was more focussed on the fan tail pigeons’ shit on their shiny new roof tiles, all caused by my brother John’s flock of sixty birds… It would be unwise to mention anything to do with poo!

It was not as if our family were too copious with ‘solid stuff’, no, it was the sloshing around of the liquid waste that was the problem. Of course, being right next to neighbours it wasn’t as if one could go outside at any time and urinate in the garden. This is what happened though. When the height in second pan became critical, and the dunnee man still a day or so away from collecting, that the boys were told to do as much as possible at school or wait till late at night and then in the garden in the dark.

In the summer this caused some olfactory concerns and when this ammonia like stench could no longer be hidden or blamed on Dad’s fertiliser for the veggie patch, that Dad did a piece of engineering that is still admired until this day, alas without his presence.

As I already said before, there was a metal downpipe running on the outside of the dunnee that carried rainwater from the roof to the trench at the front of the house. Dad simply cut a small hole in the fibro on the inside of the dunnee directly abutting the downpipe and conveniently next to the pan. This hole was also made on the inside of the downpipe, accessible now from within. Both holes corresponded and synchronized brilliantly. This hole was then used by all the males (six in total) as a urinal taking the piss straight down the downpipe and to the front of the house in the open stormwater trench. This trench was usually overgrown with weeds. Generous rains would wash it downhill and finally into concrete stormwater and into the Georges River. Council used to come along three times a year to get rid of the weeds and mow the grass around it.

Well, our trench was the most luxurious green and lush looking of the whole street. It would have won a blue ribbon for excellence if that nature strip could have been entered into the Royal Easter Show. It wasn’t till some years later that sewerage was connected and my mother’s dream of ‘own bathroom’ with inside flushing toilet was truly fulfilled.

My father was a genius. With the toilet indoors, the dunnee man receding into history; we were all riding high in the achievements wrought so hard by this migrant family of six children and parents.

Courier Cancelling

26 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by in Emmjay

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Oh, CAREER !  My mistake.  Career counselling.  The latest boom industry.

The Concise Oxford leads off its definitions of career with “a swift course of progress”.

Hilarious, eh ?  No mention of a blind alley down which a person’s joy and aspirations go and become quietly strangled by an assorted cadre of water cooler sociopaths.

Career counselling.  You go there with no concept of a career and someone with a soft soothing voice encourages you to believe that there is value and virtue in a logical progression of employment beyond mere monetary gain.

How unfair, confusing and pointless is the career counselling fiasco we throw at kids in Year 10

Do you think that a child is born and when asked what they want to do when they grow up, they immediately discard the notion of being a fireman, nurse, teacher, train driver, doctor, plumber, sparky, chippie, vet or truck driver – and demand to work as a career  counsellor ?  No ?  Then clearly this career counselling dude has chosen some other role for which he or she was manifestly unsuited – and now will assist you to do likewise.

Do you remember your turn with Mr/Ms White – the failed commerce teacher who was given the role reserved for useless people (equivalent to “Special Projects”) ?

Did it go something like this ?

M White: “What sort of things do you like to do ?”  This is a trick question because (with the exception of Rex Hunt) there is no career involving lying around on the beach with a copy of Ralph or New Idea and drinking beer / gin and tonic (Mr White’s secret fast track to retirement).  For a while there it seemed like being a muse was the go.  Lots of long lunches and fine wine in the beer garden of the Pig’s Arms and being fairly available s*xually for artists, musos and artistes.

But a year ten kid is far more likely to nominate a job that an attractive person on TV does – say super model , news anchor woman, game show host or Formula 1 driver.  Thinking of a military career ?  Get in the rather longish queue for “RAAF fighter pilot”.

“Sports star” is the ephemeral career option of choice for the puny, poorly sighted or generally bewildered.  And every ghoulish year ten kid has had a mental rifle through images of themselves in lab coats and goth gear as a crime scene investigator.

Then you complete a battery of tests where they ask 13 questions in 27 different ways to cross validate each other and quantify the unquantifiable.  “Do you love to add up and check columns of figures ?”  “Would you find checking a column of figures interesting ?”, “Don’t you hate calculation errors ?”.  These are interspersed with questions about how much you despise your parents and whether you are energised by the great outdoors, maybe a circuit diagram or Proust. “And how exciting are balance sheets, eh ?”

Perhaps the greatest irony is that a suspiciously large number of Mr White’s counselees become accountants – or perhaps something slightly less exciting – like commerce teachers.

Well, as it turns out the top three careers perennially in demand (leaving out prostitution, politics and policing) are actuaries, tax lawyers and …….. accountants.  In rare instances – say for example during a mining boom, there will be a run on geology faculties and mining engineering schools.  Rarely heard is “I have my heart set on being a scholar of ancient Greek, Latin and Sumerian”.  And more’s the pity, but how could this possibly complete with preparing a profit and loss statement

A couple of weeks pass as you rocket towards the now barely noticeable school certificate or basic competency document.  Meaning you showed up occasionally and troubled teachers not so much.  Then comes the follow-up meeting where the awful truth of your future career will be set in stone.

You secretly want to be a doctor.  You mum and dad are both medicos.  Your two elder siblings are both at medical school. Your grandfather was a doctor before the unfortunate Chelmsford affair – the one you have been instructed to refrain from mentioning.

Mr White opens the envelope as if he was about to announce the winner of “Best Director” and you notice a faint smile before he reveals that the Boggs and Meers test – which has a very high reputation for accuracy – has narrowed your best choices down to  (drun roll)  ……“chef, waiter, taxidermist, radio astronomer and deep sea diver”.

He seems to be completely comfortable with the randomness of this eclectic mix and the lack of apparent unifying theme.

And then, to cap it off, he puts down the test results, pats you reassuringly on the shoulder and says something wonderfully supportive (and totally unhelpful) like “Whatever you want to do,  I am certain that if you apply yourself, you have the ability to achieve great things”.

And with that you head off to the bus stop.  On the bus, a scout for “Home and Away” notices your trademark freckles and recruits you for a screen test.  That leads to a walk-on part, which in turn leads you to a regular gig and a salary roughly twice that of your parents – even before you land the huge pet food commercial deal and become the face of Pal.

Meanwhile, back in the careers room, a despairing Mr White scans the newspaper for positions vacant, takes himself off to TAFE and eventually lands himself a job as a chef in a resort in Byron Bay.  And when you come off the shoot, the waiter (do you remember Mr Black – your former HSIE and visual arts teacher ?) serves you their trademark entrée – gamberi Senor Blanco.

A Stateless Response to National Disaster

26 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by in Politics in the Pig's Arms

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Centralising and decentralising the response to Australia’s biggest disaster

In facing massive disasters like the Victorian fires, there are local, state and national governments involved – as well as many non-government agencies (that some, including those in government, regard as being more effective in delivering and managing social welfare), we have a recipe for potentially less than the best outcomes.

The problem comes back to a basic idea.  We have a huge and so often hostile country.  And we have only 20 million or so citizens to pay the bills for our services and our physical and electronic networks.

If John Howard got just one thing right – and I appreciate that even the possibility might be highly contestable – we have a country deeply rooted in the notion of looking after our mates (notwithstanding the lowest forms of life – arsonists and looters).  Perhaps JWH was a bit myopic in failing to grasp that our mates might also include people with whom we might not share as common ALL our views.  But the volunteers from other states and territories – and indeed our mates from other countries with special skills, rallying to the Victorian disaster, prove that we are indeed “One”.

Yet we have three levels of government plus a huge array of non-government organisations and a wonderful army of volunteers.   And the co-ordination of resources scattered thinly amongst this array of players is our great weakness.

As far as centralising disaster response goes, I think this disaster is a reminder that a nation of about 20 million people cannot afford to muck around with three layers of government and nightmares of co-ordination amongst states and territories.

As the Australian government is increasingly being called in to fix the states’ hopeless health systems and all the inadequacies and roadblocks caused by conflicting state commercial and other law, environmental degradation, education and transport, and on and on, the appropriate response for addressing the needs of all Australian citizens is the one that we saw when the other states’ and ACT fire-fighters went to Victoria.  Forget the red tape and all hands to the pumps.

We are all Australians.  And it’s time to dissolve the states and not just manage disasters as disparate states together, but manage the whole country at regional and national levels.

As a person living in NSW, I think we have plumbed the depths of state governmental incompetence and corruption and I for one would not miss them for a minute if they were gone with the wind.

There are clearly great people working in state governments and amongst the manifold public servants who implement state government policy.  But there also seem to be, from a total lack of evidence of magnificent success, many individuals with little or no vision, no depth of knowledge or experience in any particular discipline running important portfolios like health, transport, education, environment, energy and most importantly, water.  And there are the arse-coverers whose main agenda is to adopt a low profile, avoid effecting any change (positive or otherwise) and hide their incompetence and lack of energy and political courage.  Sometimes these folks are well-meaning, but in NSW at least, they have a proven track record being historically unable to work around party hack ministers whose only talent is to have the numbers.  For them, a big win is keeping their ministers off the front page.

If we accept that great, and even merely good politicians and servants of the public are in short supply, can we do anything to fix this situation ?  Some might argue that there is currently no prerequisite for a higher degree or any other professional training in running the nation, or even a small part of it.  Must do a TAFE course to be a plumber, but can run a state if all you have is the numbers.  Would a mandatory course in government do it ?  Apparently not.

Perhaps, as is fashionable now, Australians could take a leaf out of the “Big Book of How to Run a Corporation”.  If it is not working and adding value, just get rid of it.  Perfect solution for state governments.  If Australia did not have state governments, would we have allowed the Murray Darling to go guts up and excuse ourselves by blaming people who live in other states upstream ?

Imagine – no State Departments to amalgamate and re-amalgamate every time there’s a change in government.  No heads of Department to sack and replace with former opposition party hacks.  No ridiculous and endless COAG meetings to squabble over the tax receipt pie.

Imagine if we had a few dozen large regional councils running everything locally and a national government protecting us, negotiating with the rest of the world on our behalf, monitoring, funding and co-ordinating regional councils.  Would that not prove that states (for a population as small as Australia’s) are useless anachronisms ?  And we could get rid of inequitable state “taxes for nothing” like land tax, stamp duties, payroll tax (remember how those were goners when GST came in ?  Yeah, sure).

Instead of having six or seven different administrations for education, environment, transport, policing and health, we could have just one – setting one standard for every regional council to implement.

The Victorian fires have shown that Australians have a great capacity to work closely and care for each other in times of extreme adversity, despite our overly complex administration and governance.  We can, and should carry this through to all the services we need as citizens.  And we should have the courage to make the big changes that eliminating a moribund level of governance will require – and also those that will need to be put in place to make regional councils serve us far better than the many corrupt and incompetent gangs we find in today’s local government.

Peter

26 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by in Emmjay

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Peter was a belligerent Dutchman.  He was the size and weighed about the same as a year 6 school kid.  He was wiry, tough, tanned and constantly smoking.  He spoke  an interesting variation on English.  I used to ask him questions that required answers with lots of words starting with the letter “J”.  When Peter said the word “just”, it came out like “shoosht”.

I figure he was about forty, but his lifestyle rendered him as about 65.

He was the meanest and most miserable alcoholic bastard I’ve had the displeasure to have worked with in the shed and on the line, but despite this he was a machine that put a lot of the younger fitter and bigger blokes in the shade.  Tubby said that he was such a total bastard because he’d been raised below sea level and he never got a decent night’s sleep living in constant fear that his socks were about to float away into the Zuider Zee.

Peter was so tight with a quid that fish had more problems keeping the water out and the poop in than Peter had exposing his dosh to sunlight.  He used to show up at 7.00am – kick off time with a half-finished can of DA (his second for the day).

Peter invariably bit me for a couple of bucks for morning tea.  I was the only one to not tell him to go and get stuffed.  It wasn’t that I LIKED him.  Everyone hated Peter, but he was part of the actual foundations of the shed, and since I was the new kid, it was my job to do the putting up with.  And I soon learnt to get the two bucks back after we were paid and before Peter had stopped at the TAB or made it back to the Pig’s.

Nobody knew where Peter lived.  Nobody had ever seen him not at either the co-op or the Pig’s Arms, except for brief excursions to the TAB – before Merv had one installed in the pub, but by then Peter had gone – if not exactly to God, it was more likely that he had taken the big subterranean trip.  Most of the blokes were just happy that wherever Peter lived, it wasn’t at their boarding house.

Wal

16 Monday Feb 2009

Posted by in Emmjay

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Wal was an unassuming version of Dwayne Eddy who looked like he’d been dressed by his big sister – against his better judgement.

He was slightly built and on the periphery of the real action.  He was the forky, and we were the meat engines who did the heavy lifting and twisting.  Wal took away the pallet after we’d done the real work.  But he was quick, and precise, and unlike Tubby, you could rely on Wal’s stacks not toppling over and killing some hapless bastard.

Wal introduced me to the Pig’s Arms in the first place.  It was my first lunch down at the Co-op and everyone on the line went down to the Pig’s for three or four schooners.  Not really at lunch, more like , FOR lunch.  The beers constituted lunch and lunch was the beer.

So the afternoon shift was not memorable.  It might have been memorable except that after a few minutes, Wal walked me around to a quiet pallet of bagged rice, behind the stacks and that’s where I woke up after the boss had locked up for the night.  That was OK.  There was a shower and a cup of tea for the partaking but the lunch room was now the bedroom.  I don’t recall it ever being used for lunch, but if the weather was wet, it was a steamy and malodorous pit.

Wal was never referred to as “Wal”.

It was a complicated run of nicknames started by Danny.

Wal became Waldo – named after a popular professional wrestler of the time –Waldo Von Erich.  Waldo von Erich was the stage name of Walter Siebel who was billed as the brother of Fritz von Erich when they wrested as a tag team together.  They had a penchant for wearing vaguely Prussian military style togs and received the appropriate level of opprobrium from the audience as a result.

Wado became von Erich.  And when Danny decided he was tired of calling Wal von Erich, he shortened that to V.

Wal was always a bit retiring and to avoid a direct confrontation with Danny, he adopted a low profile.  Danny seized on this and insisted that Wal looked a bit depressed.

So he then referred to Wal as “D” – for depression.  Danny therapy consisted of yelling “here comes our little black cloud” every time Wal emerged out of the shed with another pallet.

Although this was clearly not good therapy, nobody was prepared to point that out to Danny, lest they become the substitute industrial victim.

Shortly after that D (who was our fork lift driver) disappeared.  He never reappeared at the co-op shed, or at the Pig’s Arms.

One of the Leichhardt Wanderers reckoned he saw Wal down at Central, but even Tubby – Wal’s forklift offsider said that he had no idea where Wal went.  Back to the 1950’s I reckon – where he was far less likely to have his flattop recognised.