Unbecoming
Posted on | January 11, 2007 |
“I really am getting bored in a way I think Brisbane either causes, or at least cannot resolve.”
Eric Michaels‘ AIDS Diary is - scarily - the only accurate representation of Brisbane I’ve come across in print, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I found it for $1 in the half price bin at the Maroochydore Lifeline this week. When I moved to this town, I only had Andrew McGahan and John Birmingham’s books as reference points, and as an Honours student writing about the economic underpinnings of grunge literature, these guys had a certain nihilist appeal. But actually living here, it’s clear that if it existed at all, the world those authors described was populated by an overly large bunch of disaffected, insolent, dole-smitten white boys. They may be turning into nice men by about now, but back then I don’t think they would have had much patience for girls like me. I sometimes catch a glimpse of that Brisbane through friends’ anecdotes, or imagine it while walking past the few decaying Queenslanders still condoned in my neighbourhood. But it’s not the city I’ve experienced these past three years.
It’s all the more compelling, then, that Michaels’ diary spans the period of almost a year between 1988 and 1989. What does it say that a characterisation that’s 20 years old has more resonance than those written a decade ago? Perhaps it’s more evidence (if any was needed) that the Keating years were a complete anomaly in this country. The terrible forboding and ennui that permeates the book is captured best in an early paragraph: ‘the world I look out on now seems so drear and painful, so devoid of joy, so mean and petty, not such a bad place to leave.’ Dying of AIDS, it’s gayness itself that Michaels mourns: ‘It’s the oppressions, the cathedrals of inequality and greed that are to be built out of that rhetoric of the failure of liberation that I have no great wish to see.’
The book is sobering for readers my age/class/education level who may remember hysterical TV ads about AIDS but are pretty unlikely to have friends who will actually die from it, in this country at least. Yet its lesson is that the vicissitudes of bureaucracy and national security mean that none of us are ever completely secure, especially when our loved ones happen to share our gender. We know this. In their capacity to encourage humanity and sentiment for others, our immigration laws have hardly improved in recent times.
It’s for these reasons that for me the most inspired passages are those that describe Brisbane’s fixation with ‘tidiness’, a metaphor that encompasses everything from the property market to prejudicial visa regulations:
“Tidiness is a process which, while avowedly in the service of cleanliness and health, in fact is only interested in obscuring all traces of history, of process, of past users, of the conditions of manufacture. Tidiness inhabits and defines a ‘moment’, but one outside time, ahistorical, perhaps the ancestral dreamtime home of all ‘Lifestyles’. It is a perfect bourgeois metaphor.”
This completely suits the Sunshine State I’ve been attempting to show a visiting friend this week - the bland cafe lifestyle from Noosa to New Farm, James St to Boundary St, Southbank to The Emporium. It’s little wonder that this is only the second friend to have visited me since I moved (or is it? I think the Brisbane many Sydney people envisage is about as accurate as the 90s grunge lit was, when it isn’t just a joke, or that place where Powderfinger and The Grates come from). Reading the book before heading to Sydney tomorrow, I also can’t help but think how much my own behaviour resembles Michaels’: vociferously struggling with the sociality of small academic networks; completely unable to hold on to anyone to share daily life with; going back to Sydney too often so that I can momentarily feel engaged and normal. When he becomes too weak to look after himself, Michaels spends all his money on interstate phone calls. He fantasises about moving back to Sydney where he knows people who care enough to look after him.
But it’s too easy to simply dismiss this as Brisbane. The combination of academic life, a writerly temperament and a queer identity are overdetermining factors of loneliness (which some would call selfishness). In such a life, what are the alternative networks of support to be drawn upon? And at what point does it become evident that a city is complicit in the lack of such alternatives being available - that it is actively fostering such constraint and atomisation?
I’m especially curious about this given that there is another wave of amazingly talented people preparing to leave Brisbane at the moment. Having moved state twice now, I completely understand their need to escape and realise other futures. But precisely because I’ve done it twice, I’m also starting to realise that a city in itself doesn’t provide answers to what’s disatisfying about life. This is why Deleuze so famously hated travel; movement in this sense was actually counterproductive to ‘becoming’.
Lately I’ve been wondering if the stronger statement - the statement Michaels makes - is to stay and fight, especially in a place that makes you feel unwanted. Loitering and posing, occupying space, having fun and causing trouble: this is what queer culture has always done. It’s untidy. It messes up a scene that others would rather keep neat, clean and organised. And this is what’s admirable about Michaels’ outrageous memoirs, which are the perfect complement to an outrageous situation. The double meaning of the title beautifully captures the ignominy and indecency of his condition, both medical and cultural.
For a generation coming to terms with unprecedented ‘freedom’ and ‘mobility’, maybe the hardest choice we’ll make will be deciding when it’s time to dig your heels in, to bank on those you’re lucky enough to have close by, and with them, build some infrastructure for liberation where it’s most needed. That doggedness and ingenuity is what I love about the people I’m lucky to have met in Brisbane already, and it’s why I’m looking forward to the next three years. On a wider scale, how we’ll line up on these questions is harder to predict. This is because liberating your heart and your mind has to happen in the most placeless and abstract of locations: in your guts.
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19 Responses to “Unbecoming”
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January 11th, 2007 @ 6:31 pm
I’m always interested in theorising and musing about Brisbane.
I was chatting to my flatmate today about the “One Book, Many Brisbanes” collection, in which a friend of his has a story. We were talking about the decline in inner city life - but there’s a lot of causes for it apart from some existential emptiness - which you advert to when you refer to bland cafe culture - a lot is simply to do with policy driven housing market inflation which Howard has visited upon all of us - though the fairly distinct Brisvegan Paddington, New Farm and West End microcultures started showing signs of cannibalisation by gentrification around 94. Around 99 the game was lost for good.
But it’s funny you should mention the contrast with Sydney. I suspect a lot of that has to do with where we are from. Being a lifelong Brisvegas person I remember thinking when they built places like the James St strip and Watt that the worst aspects of Sydney culture had been imported here - waiters/door bitch bouncers who decide if you can come in for a drink, self-conscious show by beautiful/rich people and wannabes. I’ve never found Sydney a particularly congenial place (and I’m aware there’s a lot more to it than what I’m writing about here) except when I can find Brisbanian parallels (Glebe is very much like the old West End).
Certainly part of the old “grunge” era Brisbane was as Birmingham and McGahan describe it, though I think McGahan (and Armanno) capture aspects Birmingham doesn’t. But that might be because they focus on worlds I was less familiar with - I went to uni with John and I know or knew most of the people he wrote about and lived the same sort of sharehouse lifestyle.
That leads to another segue - and you can find this in creative writing as far back as Johnno (at least) - the sort of privatisation of life in Brisbane town. Reading Christos Tsiolkas years ago made me think this was an Anglo thing - certainly West End and New Farm were distinctive because they had more public cultures from Greek and Italian settlement, the traces of which still persist (just). But our draconian Joh years contributed a lot too. Shops only open on Saturday mornings, pubs closed at 10pm, the town virtually dead on Sundays except for church goers. The underworld that thrived, as an open secret, had its analogue in a certain secrecy to student and artistic cultures as well - again partly driven by the state in that lots of stuff we wanted to do was basically illegal or if not, we’d be hassled extralegally by the omnipresent (at least in imagination) cops and particularly the special branch. Living in a falling down Queenslander on the river at Kangaroo Point for $30 a week in 1988, my flatmates and I enjoyed an alleged drug raid where the “detectives” took much more interest in political posters and texts than any search for drugs.
So the “infrastructure for liberation” was largely private - centring around spaces where bands practiced or art took place and primarily cheap to live in Queenslanders in the inner city. When I was at Uni, any Saturday night you could get the West End ferry across to Orleigh Park (pre City Cat - it was the old small ferry where one of the drivers would normally be drinking a bottle of scotch) and walk up to Hardgrave Road and find a party with people you knew on Saturday nights in virtually every second house. Similarly, most clubs were dreary discos or for the rugby playing polo shirt set, and we Lefties used to congregate at places at the Sitting Duck Cafe on Boundary St or the Zoo - back in the days when the eccentric licensing laws meant that they had to pretend to be restaurants and you got a plate of cauliflower with your cover charge and you had to eat some or they’d lose their licence.
I think this is also one reason why the rave scene was big in Brisbane in the early 90s - people were used to taking over spaces that were unused and marginal and doing so illegally or extra legally.
In some ways the advent of the Labor government took a lot of the soul out of oppositional art and politics in this town. Nobody knew quite how to behave if suddenly we weren’t being surveilled, and co-optation begain to blunt the hard edges of power/resistance which brought so much creativity to art and politics and life. So, for example, while in the late 80s, there were at least three pubs with dedicated lesbian nights, by the mid 90s all was dead. Things were back underground but without the edge, and life was harder for lots of reasons too.
This is all connected, I think, to what are two truisms in Brisbane life - if you’re “from here”, there is but half a degree of separation and if you’re “not from here”, you find it very hard to break through into the small town overlapping circles that still dominate the show. Many of which can be traced back to a group of people sitting on a beck deck somewhere looking at a mango tree, or getting fiercely trashed in a Vietnamese restaurant.
That was something of a segue!
January 11th, 2007 @ 9:09 pm
Oh Mel, what a find! That book was so central to me, and it’s so long since I’ve read it, and now I realise I actually lent my copy to someone over five years ago and I don’t know who! You know, Michaels is the main reason that I felt like I could work as an academic (well before my current bout of interest in colonial issues, I reviewed “Bad Aboriginal Art” for an art magazine back in 97), and some of that must have to do with his deliciously snarky assessments of the Qld environment that I grew up in.
Re: the question of movement, I think it’s important to remember that Michaels was driven by the anthropological impulse, to learn from inhabiting the cultural script of the Other, and this sharpens one’s sense of how to stay and fight conformity. And for me Deleuze, whatever his many contributions to a general ethic of becoming, lacked this crucial impulse. And you know, I think if one wants to be in for the long haul, you need this kind of nourishment, especially if you live in somewhere that is not Paris. As you suggest, the answers to the experience of Brisbane are not necessarily to be only found in Brisbane.
January 11th, 2007 @ 9:26 pm
This makes a fascinating read.
Brisbane has come a long way over the last 10 years or so. It’s got its own sense of charm. You just have to look very closely to find it. 
January 11th, 2007 @ 10:48 pm
You’ve always had to!
I think Deleuze is definitely on to something. Though they’ve largely been inchoate, those sort of reasons have kept me here for the last few decades.
A lot of people who do leave come back. Brisbane is that sort of place. It gets its hooks into you, and you don’t realise that til you’ve gone.
Thanks for the post, Mel. I’ll attempt to track down Michaels’ book. I’ll also ask my flatmate, who worked in the Queensland AIDS Council in the 80s if he knew him. Brisbane being what it is, I’d not be surprised if that were the case.
January 12th, 2007 @ 12:28 am
Trackback:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/12/warning-contents-may-offend-people-from-sydderney/
January 12th, 2007 @ 8:45 am
One question - why is it such a tragedy that gentrification has made places like West End or New Farm less “gritty”. Why do things have to be “gritty” to have value? If organic change moves us along to a slicker and more streamlined existence, why not embrace the change? After all, what is there to say that the grittiness wouldn’t return when the timing is right? Aren’t the ability to adapt and constantly looking forward the dividing line between unproductive nostalgia and constructive evolution?
January 12th, 2007 @ 9:07 am
When I first left school, and had my first attempt at university, Eric Michaels was one of my tutors. I remember being shocked by his transformation as HIV became AIDS. He was definitely a hell of a lot crankier–as one might expect–when he was dying. (Very glad I never had his snarkiness vented towards me, although I witnessed some memorable expressions of it).
I remember his mystification at why anyone would watch videos; he maintained that there was far too much to watch on television already. That statement has always stuck in my head because its how I feel about PayTV, there’s so much to watch on free-to-air already–although I am assisted by recording technology to fit it all in. I wonder what he would have made of today’s post-broadcast era?
Just after he died, I remember Toby Miller–also a one time tutor of mine–expressing outrage that the university’s parking administration were chasing him for outstanding fines, right up to the end of his life. I’m not sure that’s so much about Brisbane as bureaucracy, though–an awful universal scourge.
January 12th, 2007 @ 2:53 pm
This is beautifully thought out piece of analysis. You have my sympathies.
January 12th, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
Thanks for this. My partner refers to herself as having escaped from Brisbane in the late seventies. She returns a several times a year to visit her mother, so is still quite familiar with it. I’ve sent it to her to read; I think she’ll find it thought-provoking.
January 12th, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
Mark has probably said a lot of what I want to say. I could add my own nostalgic reminiscences about bygone brizzy - in fact I could probably write a poem about the early-mid 1990s Brisbane of my memory - mango trees casting deep shadows over already over-grown lawns festooned with rusting hills hoists, themselves overshadowed by creaking verandahs furnished with mismatched op-shop furniture and empty VB tallies, and attached to falling-down queenslanders with peeling paint and the fading gentility of v-j walls and ornamental arches and bay windows, clustered together and populated by fluid, interconnected bohemias…but I won’t. It is also slightly disturbing how similar the flavour of my and Mark’s nostalgias are–have I been contributing to the collaborative construction of a cliche without even knowing it? maybe.
But I will point out that most of Brisbane’s (very recently acquired) bland shininess is a result of migration from (ahem) sydney and melbourne. That and the increased affluence of the aspirational suburbs, which makes me wonder how much access to authentic urban grunge is actually to do with a functional modern industrial economy and accompanying class divide…*
And maybe it’s the country girl in me, but my brief stint in Sydney in my mid-twenties, when everything-was-Brisbane’s-fault, almost destroyed me. I didn’t feel like I had the space to ‘become’, because I was too busy trying not to turn into a crazed bag lady what with the poverty, noise, smog, and complete cold indifference of almost everyone I met, even in the classical music scene, which should have been a ready-made subculture for me. So I ran away, and I’ve done much better back home.
Oh, and the Brisbane of McGahan’s Praise is ridgy-didge, not just in the 1980s but well into the 1990s. I was occasionally dole-ridden and white too, after graduating from music into the recession we had to have.
*[although I have been known to mutter 'get the ***** out of my Valley!' at the crowds in the wee small hours]
January 12th, 2007 @ 6:04 pm
PS, pursuant to Deleuze, because from Brisbane the rest of the world is always somewhere else, somewhere out there, I reckon it’s a good place to dig in and think about how you might want to shape the world
January 12th, 2007 @ 10:32 pm
PPS in about 1992 I coined the term ‘foodcourtification’ because I didn’t think ‘gentrification’ was an apt description. I always thought it would become a meme, but it didn’t. If it could do so now I’d be forever grateful.
January 13th, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
I had that exact feeling last night, jean!
January 15th, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Around the New Year I was entertaining desperate thoughts of running away from Melbourne and the ’scene’ in which I’ve found myself trapped, and starting a new life in another city. But you’re right - a new city is not a solution.
January 16th, 2007 @ 9:02 am
You can find whatever you want in this city if you look for it. And if all you look for is gentrification in order to despair about it, then that is all you will find. Go a bit deeper, that underground is still there. It moves and evolves and changes, just like cities, just like people. There is so much more happening here than most people give Brisbane credit for.
January 21st, 2007 @ 12:41 am
Jesus. I’ve had the worst Brisbane City month on record. The people Jean wants out of the Valley, at the moment they are like the rivers in Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty. The great River Of Dooleys with its cascading abuse from on high. The mighty Empire, so thick with knuckleheads its almost a statistical certainty that you’ll meet with trouble. And then there’s the Great Valley Mall, where only fools tread. I wade into Rics, I wade in the Troub, I wade into the Zoo. Sometimes I got ‘upstream’ into Fat Louies (which is more Apocolyspe Now than Lonesome Dove actually). And watching the bands, my mind often wanders, like the cowboys, to thoughts of the next crossing.
January 27th, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
hello, can’t find an email address to contact you with so will go with the public comments; very much enjoyed your 11th January post ‘unbecoming’, any chance I could reproduce it in a small Oz lit journal, famous reporter? (next issue is June, it is both a print mag and and online journal - at walleahpress.com.au)
enjoying your blogsite very much,
Best,
Ralph Wessman
January 28th, 2007 @ 9:42 am
Dear Ralph,
I’d love that - and to have it published by a Tasmanian independent press is very appropriate. I’ll follow up through email.
Thanks for the support,
Melissa
October 11th, 2007 @ 7:36 pm
[...] A key aspect of my online identity that I’ve been made aware of this week is the way that I have used my blog to express feelings of loneliness, isolation and disaffection with Brisbane since moving here. While those feelings have certainly had a real basis at times, particularly early on, it’s increasingly apparent that reading about those feelings on my blog has led people to make gestures and suggestions about my life (from coffee dates to flatmates) based on that knowledge. It seems that sometimes they have been offended when I haven’t recognised these offers as indications of potential friendship. [...]