Someone should make a reality TV show called Tuckshop Ladies. The drama would be explosive. Elimination episodes would take place at Parents &Citizens’ Association (P & C) meetings, where parents and tuckshop convenors would battle it out in the style of the Jerry Springer Show. In one episode, the entire tuckshop staff would be made redundant; in another, an irate parent would hurl abuse at the new tuckshop convenor for taking pies off the menu. The stakes would be high – some tuckshops have annual profit margins of $500,000. There would be tears, award ceremonies and, of course, cooking.
Author: benjamin
Bush Love
In retrospect, we had been adequately warned. Days before we arrived at Wooroolin’s Peanut Pullers and Backfatters Ball — an annual Bachelor & Spinsters’ event in rural Queensland — I’d spoken to one of its organisers over the phone. “B&S balls used to be a big thing in rural areas,” Jodie Butcher told me, “so all the single farmers and farmer’s daughters could meet someone. It was a proper sit-down meal in a hall, then you’d have a dance.” When asked exactly how B&S balls had changed, Jodie laughed. “Over time,” she said, “I guess it’s gotten a little bit … feral.”
As such, the invitation for Backfatters featured a sketchy illustration of a giant peanut happily having sex with a pig up the rear. I understood where the committee had gotten ‘peanut-pullers’ from: Wooroolin, a township with a population of roughly 200 people, lies just outside of Kingaroy, and the entire region is known as Australia’s peanut farming capital. ‘Back-fatter’, I discovered, refers to the local piggeries. Jodie told me that a sow at the end of her breeding cycle will become so enormous that locals call them backfatters: “It’s the committee taking the piss — that all we’ve got out here are peanut pullers and backfatters.”
The Benefits of Being Ethnic
For someone who grew up in a Chinese family, I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood wishing I were white. In my mind, being white would mean I’d finally have access to all the stuff Anglo kids took for granted, like roast dinners and matching crockery, as well as forearm hair and eyelids.
I wasn’t the only one. Most non-Anglo kids raised in Australia — whether they’re Sri Lankan or Somalian, Greek or Japanese, Indian or Italian — will have probably resented their racial background at some stage. It manifests in different ways. Think back into your past. Did you ever hurl your dinner plate at your mother, disowning your native cuisine? Perhaps you’ve used bleaching creams on your dark skin, or waxed your hirsute European butt cheeks. Continue reading
The Forms of Androgyny
It’s hard to talk about androgynous people. To clarify: this isn’t because of any social taboos or prejudice, but something more literal — people who don’t identify as male nor as female are actually difficult to discuss, because English doesn’t allow people to identify as gender neutral. All of our third-person pronouns are categorised by the male-female binary. People are either “he” or “she”. You can’t use “it” — it sounds dehumanising — and “they” can be grammatically awkward.
One way of getting around this is to adopt a new pronoun altogether. In March, Sydney-based Norrie (who has chosen to abandon the family name May-Welby) introduced many of us to “zie”, in place of “he” or “she”. Norrie — who began life as a male-to-female transsexual, before opting out of male-female distinctions — made headlines when the Sydney Morning Herald declared “hir” (not him, not her) the first person recognised by the state as neuter.
Body Double
In the second term of Year 11 English, Callie MacNaughton and her classmates were given the outline for an assignment: they would each have to give an oral presentation and it could be on any topic they chose, as long as they argued a point and it was something they believed in.
Speech day arrived and students launched into passionate, earnest manifestos on ‘why all cigarettes should be banned’ and ‘why people shouldn’t drink and drive’. Callie nervously waited her turn. She’d chosen a sensitive, potentially contentious, subject: why gay, lesbian and transgender people deserved equal rights. Continue reading
Out of the Closet
Faux pas run in my family. Between us, my family members have made chatty references to leukemia with friends, not knowing that our friend’s sibling had died of leukemia. We’ve bemoaned our pale, wintery “corpse-like complexions”, before remembering we were at a funeral. We’ve impersonated the effects of stroke, to people whose friends just had a stroke. Between us, we have a special knack for saying and doing all sorts of wrong, hideous shit, at the exact moment when people need it the least. I suppose you’d call it a skill.
Supermarket Sweep
It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a warehouse. A muscular Pacific Islander man reverses a packed forklift through the gate, when a bikie named Terry – tattoos, goatee, belly – rushes out to direct him. “Over here, Pete!” he hollers, gesturing like an airport tarmac guide.
In a few hours, 4000 to 5000 people from all over the Logan shire – an area that houses nearly 200 ethnic groups – will be lining up outside to receive bags of free groceries: 70 tonnes in total. The queue will be so long, it’ll stretch beyond the oval-sized car park and into the streets. Today is Free Food Friday, an event that The Tribe of Judah – an unlikely mélange of Christian church, Harley motorcycle gang and charity organisation – holds several times per year.
Bogan or Gay?
Spend your entire life in Queensland, and you know a bogan when you see one. All my family needed to do was drive 30 minutes in any direction and we’d hear the banjos from Deliverance, and smell roadkill cooking on incinerated garbage. The further you drove on, the less teeth you’d see. You’d encounter Caucasian people whose first language was English, yet were impossible to understand. “Ows it garn?” they’d ask. Then, seeing we were Asian and speaking English: “Youse Strain, eh? Liall be.” The men wore their shorts high; the women wore their breasts low. They were bogans.
Dead, Wrapped in Cardboard
People might flock to the Gold Coast to feel alive, but it is increasingly also a destination for the dead. Drive inland, away from the scorching beaches, breakneck theme parks and thumping nightclubs, and you’ll eventually hit the quiet, bushy hinterland that locals affectionately call “the green behind the gold”. One of the suburbs here is Mudgeeraba, a place that is becoming widely known for its cemetery.
Gail Webb, a softly spoken funeral director from A Gentle Touch Funerals, leads me through the company’s cemetery, which ranges over nine hectares. “Quite beautiful, isn’t it?” she says as we walk among the headstones. Here, the burial ground is divided into two sections: a clippered-lawn cemetery to our left, with flat plaques in tidy, graph-like rows, and a monumental cemetery to our right, where a spectacular convergence of money and grief has taken place. Some of the memorial shrines are so large that they double as stone benches.
The 10-Year Reunion
On the day my classmates and I graduated from high school, a motivational speaker addressed us all in the assembly hall. “By the time your 10-year reunion comes,” he said, “only one of you will be working the job of his or her dreams.” He looked down and referred to his notes. “About a fifth of you will be happy with your lives. A third of you won’t be, and the rest of you will be somewhere in-between. Also, judging by the size of your year level,” he added, “one of you will be dead.”