Gail in the pool. (Not her real line.) |
We didn't say cool, either, except to comment on temperature. Cool was a daggy word in the 70s, Fonzie said it. If you did anything Fonzie did or said and you were over the age of 12 you probably also had a pet rock collection. Cool and cool talk was the previous generation's affectation. Like every generation that turns teen we needed to do it the right way.
It's like the forks, mentioned below. American culture was a big bag of dag. It was sitcoms and disaster movies. It was people being too obvious and loud. It was crassness and money and tropical shirts. It was wasteful military imposition. It was laughable anti-communism. No one cool was American. If we happened to like something or someone American (Talking Heads, The Ramones) they weren't American, they were good. There was a difference. America was The (hated and hateful) Eagles and all that west coast corporate tranquiliser music. And when it wasn't that it was yobbo garbage like KISS or mainstream drain clogger like Meatloaf or the soundtracks to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Every new thing that came out of America felt out of touch and past it, like grandma lollies that had been bought with sixpences or shillings.
Also, Townsville was military. It had almost always been military. During World War II it was so military it had been overrun by Americans in uniform. My aunt married one and went off to the south where the hellish country music was made (unlike the feeble imitation of it we were proud to serve up locally).
They came over to visit when I was eleven. The first I saw of them was my aunt who had once been Australian. She stood arms akimbo in Nanna's living room with a big gold toothed smile (both my parents had a few gold teeth, too), hair up in a beehive. She saw us and said in a big friendly fanfare: "Well, hah, boys! How y'all doin'?" I think I'm making up the last bit but that was the impression. Venturing further into this place, running the hair tousling gauntlet, I saw a strange man at the table who looked like the then and almost eternal Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke Petersen at the table speaking American. He was telling us how he brought his own coffee and percolator with him because he was sure we didn't have them.
Anyway, looking still further I saw two kids of around my age, a boy and a girl. They were dressed and scrubbed to a museum finish, looked dazed to be there. And they were watching Andy Pandy. They were far too old for it but as was explained later they were just amazed that witnessing tv without commercials. I sat down and tried to engage them in conversation but the situation was too weird for all of us. We bartered a few mumbles a piece and let Andy do the rest.
We didn't thaw until thrown into the pool. At the moment of impact with water life crashed through and we were all kids again, splashing in a pool. My cousin Cherie called me something I can't remember but it was a friendly taunt. I remember it because it was so alien sounding. In moments like that the unity we'd all found with a little chlorinated water shattered and these new friends were transformed suddenly into beings that had broken through a tv screen into reality. It would all return to normal after a breath or to but those strange rips in reality became more frequent until it felt like the integrity of our biosphere was threatened.
One other thing separated us from childhood. As an eleven year old my swearing was quite self-consciously limited to archaisms like blazes or blasted. I'd also say things like good god or for god's sake. Cherie at one point asked (she was in the pool at the time): if you don't believe in god why are you always using his name. I said it was because he meant to little to me that he may as well have been a swear word.
Neither of us was quite getting the meaning of profanity or atheism but the moment but there was a moment of silenec that I remember as eerie. I can't recall who else was there but I still feel a sense of unease. Her family were religious and mine was not, apart from mum, in any genuine way. I felt at the time that religion was as dead as short back and sides and needed only to drain fully from the rest of the world in time. I was wrong about a lot of things.
But my point in revisiting this is that it illustrated a fundamental difference between our cultures. At school the kids who professed any serious religion were considered freaks. America, by association, with its loony fundamentalists, eventually seemed like toddler with its finger on the nuke button.
We spoke without intercultural stock phrases. It was never stated as such but this was a way of keeping ourselves ourselves. No, so cool, awesome, dope, or whatever else that felt like bending over for the empire. We might have been the last crop that did so.
I have no problem with yerngstars around me saying comment-airy rather than comment-ree or pronouncing schedule as skedule. They can do what they like. If someone tries to correct me on anything like this they get a serve. But my seventeen year olds in The Monsoons need to sound middle class, non-American and aspirantly adult.
So there yuz farkin go.
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