The late Dr Hal Colebatch and I had at least one close friend in common, as well as many friendly mutual acquaintances. We also had one close ex-friend in common, who chose unilaterally to fall out with each of us separately (myself in 1998, Hal in 2012). I am fortunate that I had the opportunity, several times during the past few years, to spend a few weeks working in Perth and reacquainting myself with Hal over a long lunch at his favourite Italian restaurant in the Nedlands shopping strip.

On the weekend, I finally got around to reading Steadfast Knight, Hal’s biography of his father, Sir Hal Colebatch, a two times WA Legislative Councillor, long serving state minister, one time Senator, two times WA Agent-General in London, and briefly, in 1919, Premier of Western Australia (Hal himself was the son of Sir Hal’s late life second marriage).

Having gotten to know Hal fairly well over the years and our long lunches, there were some passages of the biography towards the end where I had to wryly smile and see Hal’s unique personality shining through.

A few observations in the biography prove particularly salient to life today in Melbourne, on the other side of the continent from Perth, and the other side of the world from Sir Hal’s two postings as Agent-General for his state. In 1927, relatively early on in his regime, Italian Dictator Mussolini granted Sir Hal a private audience whilst he was visiting Italy. At that time, many people, both inside Italy and elsewhere, saw that regime as full of energy, determination and effectiveness. The trains ran on time after all (actually, this is, I believe, a myth stemming from the wife of the British Ambassador observing Mussolini on the platform when he was summoned to Rome to first form government).

During his second term as Agent-General, Sir Hal visited Italy again in 1939, and found Mussolini’s achievements of the 1920s seem to have collapsed and popular enthusiasm for the regime had been lost. The general aspect of the people ‘had changed from confidence and hope to poverty misery and despair’.

My mother, who was born in 1937, remembers the night curfews of the fascist regime, and finds the recent introduction of the 8pm to 5am curfew in Victoria to be rather reminiscent of that time and place.

I am not going to trivialise things and make robust comparisons between Premier Daniel Andrews and Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a thug and a committed opponent of democracy. Chairman Dan, as we now call him, might be a member of the socialist left, but I would be extremely surprised if he did not have the rudimentary commitment to democracy which all sane and decent Australians hold.

Sadly, Chairman Dan does have a serious autocratic streak, which is becoming more and more self-evident with each passing day, and which does not bode well for the health of civil society or the functional workings of parliamentary democracy in this state, and this is something which I feel needs to be unpacked and discussed.

He has, prior to this crisis, achieved a lot as premier, which resulted in his resounding re-election victory two years ago. His work to remove level crossings and to spend on infrastructure has won him considerable popular approval. This has made his position as state premier almost unassailable.

And this is the rub. He seems to have a strong preference for governing by decree, without answering to anyone or being accountable, except at the ballot box once every four years.

Several months ago, he took steps, when the branch stacking scandal inside his party (which, no doubt, I am confident he would have been aware of, if not complicit in, for many years) finally saw the light of day, to have the state party’s democratically elected officebearers at all levels suspended for the next three years, to be replaced by administrators appointed by the federal executive of his party.

This means that all the members of the Victorian Branch of the Australian Labor Party have been disenfranchised from selecting the people who are to represent them in elections, and from running their own party. This leaves Chairman Dan without the internal party mechanisms to hold him to account.

He has also, since the pandemic crisis began, been ruling through a crisis cabinet, a smaller group of ministers than those who comprise the regular state cabinet. Decision making is confined to this group, rather than to the broader cabinet or to his parliamentary party room.

The technocratic decrees which have emerged, via either his police minister or Chief Health Officer, are based on various emergency powers contained in certain pieces of state legislation and vested in these officials. Those are powers which could, in most circumstances, be considered draconian and should be used sparingly, if at all.

Such powers have led to the night curfew, compulsory wearing of masks, closure of most businesses, the suspension of the right to protest, and the general limitations on the freedom of movement of most people in most circumstances.

Despite the early adoption of harsher measures than other states, it appears, due to the sad and tragic mismanagement of hotel quarantine in this state compared to elsewhere in the country, that Premier Andrews has presided over a disaster greater than elsewhere in the country.

Two months ago, we had 7000 cases in Australia and about 100 dead. We now have 25000 cases and over 500 dead. This is no laughing matter. The people we love are hostages to this plague.

These are extraordinary times, and I concede, reluctantly, that such coercive powers might need to be used in the public health crisis caused by the pandemic.

However, Premier Andrews is seeking to extend the sunset clause on the legislation which enables these emergency powers from the six months which is about due to expire for another 12 months.

That’s right. Not for another 6 months, or for another 3 months perhaps. For 12 months.

In that time, the rule of law will continue – all the draconian powers which could be used (and potentially misused) by the police minister and the Chief Health Officer will be legitimised through an Act of Parliament.

However, where would the role of parliament be during that 12 month period of technocratic rule by decree? There would be little need for it to meet, except to pass supply bills for the government, and it could otherwise be prevented, legally, from meeting.

I do not trivialise things. The Weimar constitution was eradicated by an Enabling Act at a time of supposed national emergency. Premier Andrews does not embody the evil of the perpetrators of that. He is merely a technocrat who does not like to be held to account, either by internal critics in his own party nor by opposition politicians. It is far easier for him to rule if parliament does not need to meet.

But that he is merely a technocrat and not a would be despot is beside the point. When we give up our liberties uncritically to someone, regardless of whether they are trustworthy or not, we have no guarantee that those liberties will be returned. It is important to scrutinise and be critical of Premier Andrews’ power grab, simply because whilst he is not a totalitarian opponent of democracy, no one is to be trusted with such power. He is not something wicked which this way comes right now, but there might be someone else so wicked in future. We have the lessons of the past in other countries to guide us as to what we should avoid for our future.

Thankfully, the state opposition seems to have grown a backbone on this issue, and is attempting to limit the term of any extension of such powers. Whether the cross bench in the Legislative Council is willing to oppose a 12 month extension is another matter. I hope, for the continued health of the parliamentary democracy in this state, that it does so, and that the parliament is recalled frequently to review such emergency powers, before they are renewed.

I’m the sort of person who tends to cope better than most with the lockdown which has been caused by the current plague. Living in a house with large front and back yards suits me, and in early February I had the foresight to get my NBN installed and my internet plan upgraded to unlimited data.

In the age of Ubereats and Netflix, coping with a lockdown is not so difficult if you have sufficient space to prowl in.

I am currently rediscovering SBS On Demand, which seems to have many more shows to interest me than either Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney+ or Apple TV+.

One in particular I am enjoying greatly is Kirsten Dunst’s latest work, On Becoming A God In Central Florida, about the misadventures of a widow of a man who had gotten inveigled in a multi-level-marketing scheme called FAM (short for Founders American Merchandise) which bears more than a passing resemblance to Amway.

It is set in 1992, which is quite appropriate, because it was around the end of that year or the start of 1993, during what I call my ‘airport summer’ (I spent five months as a shift worker at the airport) that I had my own personal brush with multi-level-marketing.

I got a call out of the blue from a perfect stranger, who used his association with an acquaintance of mine from uni whom I had not spoken to in a couple of years as an introduction to what he called ‘a business proposition’. I suppose from what I know now, he was the ‘upline’ to George, my acquaintance.

Out of politeness and some sense of loyalty to my not-quite-friend George (well, I did feel that I did sort of owe him a favour), I agreed to meet them some summer afternoon for a chat. I am to this day not sure that the word Amway even came up, so I am not 100% sure what exactly they were trying to sign me up to.

I do know that it was some sort of multi-level-marketing scheme, and that they used phrases like ‘they were looking for sharp people’ (‘sharp’ being something which comes up time and time again when MLMs are being pitched to the punters). They also explained how it was a great way to distribute all sorts of quality products.

I was more interested in the idea of access to quality products than I was to the idea of actually going forward with signing up other people – I really do not have the sort of thick skinned personality which would make me good at sales.

The upline, who did most of the talking, kept throwing lines at me about what did I want the money for, because I was definitely going to make a lot of it, so I needed to think up front what I wanted it for. I have since heard that this sort of sales pitch is frequently used to keep people off balance and to stop them from focusing on what the short comings of the MLM might be.

They also, I recall, played me some of motivational tape of a husband and wife who were involved in this MLM and who had been failures in life previously and now had become great successes such that they were called ‘diamonds’. Unlike the motivational tapes featured on ‘On Becoming A God In Central Florida’, this recording did not sound particularly inspiring.

George did say something which struck me as rather bizarre, that there was a guy involved in the MLM in the USA who was so persuasive that he had been able to persuade several people into committing suicide. Looking back in retrospect, I am a little ashamed that I did not feel disgusted at that, but when we are younger, we do not quite value human life as much as we should.

Anyway aside from a follow up meeting with George, where he got the general gist that whilst I might be interested in the products but not in becoming a recruiter of more people into this chain, nothing more came of it. Sleep deprived from shift work I might have been at that time, but I was still ‘sharp’ enough to see something which was really not for me.

In the weeks or months after that, I got approached by two other random strangers (a taxi driver and a security guard) about their business idea, but thanks to my experience with George, I was able to politely decline without investing more than twenty seconds of time in doing so.

Even my brother got approached twice around that time. Once by the daughter of his former (not very good) driving instructor who was looking for ‘sharp people’ (that phrase again), and once by one of his own uni friends. We are a polite family, I suppose, because my brother went to a group presentation on the say so of that friend. At that one, the presenter started talking about how you needed to decide what you were going to do with all that money – like buy your dream car.

I am proud of my brother’s level headed response. “I already have my dream car – a 1977 Kingswood”.

The presenter dismissed that with “Yeah, that’s the 20 year plan.”

Happily, I have not been approached since then, except in 2005 when a newly married close friend tried to get me along to a presentation on a business proposition (his new wife’s brother was very high up in Omega Trends, an Australian splinter from Amway which is now defunct). Happily the friendship survived my declining the opportunity to attend the presentation.

Quite separate to that, there was a rather silly fellow in the office who invested years and years (at a time when 99% of people give up on their MLM scheme inside 2 years) in trying to sign people up to Omega Trends and retire early and wealthy. I suspect that if he had invested half that level of energy in his actual job and in trying to get ahead in that, inside of skiving off every chance he had to scout ‘prospects’, he might have retired a couple of rungs higher, and not have had to use his superannuation to pay off all the debts he had incurred.

Since then, like the fascination with a slow moving train wreck, I have read the Amway expose ‘Merchants of Deception’ and recently become a fan of the hysterically negative Married To An Ambot blog.

So I know enough about multi-level-marketing schemes and how they function such that I can take a knowing chuckle every few minutes whilst watching On Becoming A God In Central Florida. The use of the term ‘Just Over Broke’ for job is familiar to me and where, without irony, one of the supporting characters and his son do a ‘FAMbot’ act is equally amusing.

But the pilot episode has one of the best scenes in it. The still living husband, against Dunst’s orders, decides to ‘retire’ from his job, under the misguidance of his upline. He shows up on his last day of work in a tuxedo and tails, makes a bit of a dick of himself as he walks out, and then gets into a hired limo to be carried off into his bright future. After changing into his own car, he crashes into a swamp and is eaten by an alligator.

Alligators eating people alive aside, this sort of scene is apparently something which really happens when people get too carried away with the potential in their MLM scheme. They do walk out of their office in a tux and drive off in a limo. The MLM itself is what eats them alive, not an alligator, which I suspect is allegorical.

I hope George did not stay long in that MLM, whether it was Amway or something else. He would have been two years out of uni with an accounting degree when he approached me with his ‘business proposition’. By now, almost 30 years later, I hope he has been able to have a successful accounting career.

On Saturday, whilst binge watching some TV, I discovered a new show on Apple TV+, a gentle sporting comedy called ‘Ted Lasso’, about an American gridiron coach who is hired to coach an English Premier League soccer team.

The new owner’s motives for doing so are somewhat Machiavellian – she got the team as part of her divorce settlement from a philandering husband and wants to get her revenge on him by slowly destroying the team, and what better way to do so than by hiring an American who knows nothing about soccer.

Towards the end of episode three, Ted is sitting at lunch with a sports reporter from The Independent, who is writing a detailed piece on him. The restaurant owner keeps bringing out hot dish after hot dish for them.

This did really remind me of what I miss most right now. Eating in restaurants, preferably with a friend for company, and with red wine. I really miss eating in at my local Thai restaurant Bangkok House, where I have been going since it opened 9 years ago (a real family affair with the owner’s aunt in the kitchen and her husband or eldest son helping out with waiting tables), or even the other Thai restaurant in the area, Avondale Thai (another family affair where the owner’s wife is the cook).

I miss Indian food. A friend of mine recently moved to Maribyrnong and lives about 5 minutes’ walk over the bridge from Indian Star, one of the longest established Indian restaurants in the western suburbs (I remember going there 20 years ago – take that Aangan and the others in West Footscray village!). Going to Indian Star in late June is probably close to the last time I have been able to eat seated in a restaurant.

Being in full lockdown means I am now working from home every day, not even venturing once a week into the city. This means I have not even passed through Footscray on the bus or tram in weeks, let alone set foot there. And it must now be about seven months (before the pandemic hit) since I last walked down Barkly Street (a pub crawl with one of my friends in early January to check out all the recently opened bars in Footscray). I think it is almost two years since I last ate at an Ethiopian restaurant in Footscray (fyi, there are about 15 of them at any one given time, and at one point, I had eaten in all of them). When this is over, I must go and eat in all of them again.

Sadly, Jim Wong’s closed down late last year, but Poon’s Chinese Restaurant, which has been there almost as long, is still open in Footscray – or at least it was before this lockdown.

I remember walking through Footscray in Grand Final week four years ago, for the first time after I had returned from a month in Italy. Now, it has been so long, thanks to this lockdown, since I have last been there that when I next walk down Barkly Street, it will seem a totally alien world.

Here’s hoping that all those restaurants and bars survive to see me again.

Ok… firstly a shout out to my readers in the Peoples Republic of China. It seems that I have more readers there right now than where I would like them or where I feel my words might make more of a difference (ie in the Commonwealth of Australia).

I like having readers, regardless of their motives.

The great narrative historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, in his history of the 20th century, made an error once, in that he claimed in an early volume that Judge Learned Hand was American Indian. With a name like Learned Hand, perhaps someone grown up on Hollywood Westerns might think that (I have read enough history to see some stranger names amongst American puritans such that I will not fall prey so easy now). He had to publish a retraction or clarification of his error in a later edition of that history.

On page 436 of his awesome (I am not going to be banal and predictable like rote writing book critics who like to say ‘magisterial’) book ‘The Silk Roads’, Professor Peter Frankopan made what appears to be a mistake which even a less clever person like I can pick up. He talks about Egyptian dictator Nasser launching an attack on Israel in 1967. The pattern of the history narrated over the next six years of the twentieth century is based on what his assumption is there.

The problem I have is that in 1967, Nasser did not attack Israel. Israel mounted a pre-emptive first strike on Egypt where it destroyed Egypt’s Air Force on the ground. Israel does mount many pre-emptive first strikes, but few are so serious as to be counted as wars.

But I am probably being pedantic. I am very impressed with the intellect and cleverness of Professor Frankopan. I can excuse small errors in a history which takes in three thousand years.

‘The Silk Roads’ is an extremely thought provoking history of the world, from a different perspective from that which westerners usually see.

Essentially, the world can be understood, in terms of how things move – goods, people, ideas, power. The dynamics which Professor Frankopan discusses are not new, but they are something which he is discussing in a way different to the accepted pattern.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/10/queensland-court-dismisses-student-activist-drew-pavlous-case-against-chinese-diplomat?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Drew Pavlou, the UQ student who has become a high profile human rights activist (at great personal cost) has lost a court case where he accused the PRC consul of inciting violence against him. The case was lost on the issue of diplomatic immunity.

Like most people of my generation, the term diplomatic immunity raises the spectre of the villains in Lethal Weapon 2.

More seriously however, if the PRC consul in Queensland has been inciting violence against human rights protesters, then the issue is one as to whether another aspect of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations has been violated.

This convention not only provides for diplomatic immunity for consuls, but also places an obligation on such diplomatic missions not to interfere with the internal affairs of the host state. Article 55.1 of that convention requires such people not only to respect the laws of the host nation, but places ‘a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of the State’.

I wonder whether the issue as to whether the alleged abuse of diplomatic immunity in this way is going to be explored further. The Trump administration has been closing PRC consulates in the USA. Perhaps our national security will require us to start doing likewise.

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

Friends and foes (alas) alike who have known me long enough will know that I have this tendency to quote T.S. Eliot, an intellectual pretension which I have yet to outgrow (FYI, I am familiar with the TISM song from the mid 1980s which ridicules Eliot, in case you are wondering).

Sitting in my study on a rather cold Sunday afternoon peeping out at the grove of orange trees in my back yard, I cannot help but wonder about the future of many things which are likely to change when we are finally able to venture out of our homes again after this pandemic.

One is the nature of the inner city, to which many thousands of us commute to work in office blocks, and where thousands of people live.

Speculating on this is not highly original. After 9/11, when people in the USA were talking about rebuilding the World Trade Center taller than it had been (I think they actually did), some urban planners were saying that the day of the skyscraper had passed, and that people were more likely to telecommute in future rather than to need to work in large office blocks.

Perhaps the stars were not fully aligned for such a paradigm shift just then. My employer had only rolled out desk top internet access to staff the previous year, and I don’t think the Motorola phone I carried then offered internet (I was only then mastering SMS).

Now however, I am working three days a week at home (I so glad I upgraded to NBN and unlimited data in February), which is less than most of my colleagues, who are only coming into the office to do systems updates. The world of work has not ended – people seem more productive in the current arrangements than they did before.

Which does beg the question as to whether, going forward after the COVID is over, we will still need people to work in office buildings, or whether telecommuting (as the Americans call it) will become the new normal. More broadly, what is this going to mean for inner cities across the first world?

I will talk in terms of Melbourne, which I know well, but what I say probably could be true of most other western world cities, with large white collar workforces commuting to a central business district.

Almost invariably, my familiarity with the Melbourne CBD started in 1991 when I started working in an office there (with few short interludes elsewhere, either in the suburbs or interstate, I have continued to be based in an office in the CBD since then). Before then, my visits to the ‘city’ were more sporadic, and whilst I knew my way around, it does occur to me now that my memories of it pre-1991 are fairly few and far between. I did not have my favourite pubs, bars, or restaurants, or bookshops for that matter.

But I do know well that the city has constantly changed. The most visible and constant change is that of the skyline, where there are many gigantic apartment towers now rising amongst the office blocks and the expansion of the CBD into Docklands and Southbank (I remember when the Allens Lolly Factory with its neon sign still stood on the south bank of the Yarra, a familiar sight whilst I was taking the train home from uni after dark in 1987). When I look at the skyline from around the corner from my home, I marvel at the sheer volume of tall buildings that I cannot name.

Approximately 200,000 people still worked, pre-COVID, in the CBD. You can probably add a few more in the Docklands and Southbank expansion. According to the 2016 census, 37,321 lived in the CBD at that time (by now, you could probably add quite a few more thousand to that tally).

That the number of people living in the CBD is around 40,000 and climbing is itself a major change. I remember in 1984 reading an article in the newspaper which discussed the small community of 500 people then living in the CBD, in loft apartments in laneways. Until recently, the streets at the heart of the financial sector and legal professions, William and Queen Streets, would be deserted after 5pm on a weeknight until Monday morning, as indeed would be the intersecting streets at that end of town.

I remember in the 1990s as convenience stores gradually started appearing in the CBD, and then more recently getting replaced by actual (mostly scaled down) supermarkets.

The city has changed quite a lot, but a lot of this change is tenuous. 57.3% of the city’s denizens are tertiary students, most of whom are international students. Geopolitical fractures accelerated by the COVID crisis could impact on the durability of that demographic.

A large number of apartment blocks have sprung up on fallow land in the northwest corner of the Hoddle Grid. Pundits suggest that when those are completed and full, that corner, taking up some 8 hectares, will have a greater population than several major country towns.

But are people actually going to live in a lot of those apartments? The biggest problem faced by Docklands since it started to develop over 20 years ago is that whilst there have been few problems with selling apartments, it appears that overseas investors have bought a lot of those as a way to park money in a safe jurisdiction, and those apartments have remained empty – adding up to an incredible vacancy rate of about 25% in Docklands. This may have contributed to the low viability rates of restaurants and bars (and retail businesses) in the Docklands precinct. Whenever I walk through, the vacancy rate in shops is highly noticeable.

And there is the problem of cowboy developers, who have built apartment blocks with flammable cladding or other structural issues. This problem, which is not unique to Melbourne, is one which must be preying on the minds of many apartment owners.

As an aside, if you are going to be confined to your home during a pandemic, doing so in a stand alone house in the suburbs is much better for your sanity than a one bedroom apartment in the CBD – after all, the benefits of the latter evaporate if you cannot go outside to bars and cafes and restaurants.

What is going to happen to the CBD if a large number of those 200,000 office workers stop commuting in each weekday and work from home instead post-COVID? What if, at the same time, the boom in international students finally comes to an end? The viability of retail in the CBD will be diminished, as will that of the various restaurant precincts. We could be looking at Melbourne CBD (as indeed any other similar inner city area) turning into a modern ghost town.

At the risk of sounding paternalistic, and possibly imperialistic, where I live in Avondale Heights was, for a brief moment in time, the very edge of the known world.

In early February 1803, the naval officer James Fleming and the surveyor Charlies Grimes left their ship in the bay, and rowed up the Yarra mouth. They mistook the left hand fork for the main river and led their small party up the Maribyrnong until what is now known as Solomon’s Ford, where they were unable to get their boat over. They explored on foot for a few miles, and then when a storm came camped for the night.

Solomon’s Ford is at the west end of Canning Street, little more than five minutes walk around the corner from where I sit right now, typing these words. As Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘the darkness was here yesterday’.

I have always had an interest in local history, and can tell you who many of the main roads in the Maribyrnong area were named after (mostly early pastoralists who bought the land, either in the 1840s or sometime not too long after, or after suburban subdivision, later local community figures). From an early age, it intrigued me greatly that an imposing bluestone structure with tower, known locally as Raleigh’s Castle, stood on top of the main low hill in Maribyrnong, somewhere close to where Highpoint Shopping Centre is now located. (Sadly it has been gone a long time, and the only traces of Joseph Raleigh now are the main road in Maribyrnong, the oldest of the bluestone factory buildings in Pipemakers Park, and the fact that the suburb of Maribyrnong is still visibly divided between the urbanised eastern half he once owned, and the western half which still partly is owned by the Defence Department.)

Just like Conrad’s character Marlow, I have always been intrigued by maps – in my case older maps of Melbourne. In the 1970s, some maps still recorded the original course of the Yarra River, before Coode Canal was dug in the 1880s, even though it had been filled in during the 1930s. The 1956 canvas map of Melbourne which hangs on my wall still features the West Melbourne Swamp, sandwiched between Dynon Road (formerly known as Swamp Road) to the north, and Footscray Road (then recently rebuilt to run through the swamp rather than to the south of it) to the south.

The existence of that swamp and the now long gone northern bend of the Yarra, to the west of the marshland around Moonee Ponds Creek, created a one mile thick barrier between Melbourne and the village of Footscray, which was starting up in the 1850s on the west bank of the Maribyrnong, just north of the original fork of the two rivers.

On Friday night, I finished reading David Sornig’s book, Blue Lake, which is about this long forgotten swamp, and the itinerant community of Dudley Flat, a humpy town which sprouted up in the Great Depression near the junction of the Yarra with Moonee Ponds Creek.

David Sornig is originally from Sunshine, and much of an age with me (probably a little bit older). He writes of those of us who can remember milk deliveries by horse cart in the early 70s (I never saw it, I only ever heard it, and my mother recently found a horse shoe in her street, just opposite where the diary used to be), and horses kept on outer suburb blocks.

He also through a great deal of meticulous research and humanity brings to life three of the denizens of Dudley Flats from the 1930s, and the misadventures and occasional tragedies which brought them to live in that humpy town on the edge of a city tip.

No book, when you buy it and choose to read it, is ever quite what you expected it to be, and that is probably what makes reading so fun. I was expecting an account of how the swamp vanished and Coode Island first came into being and then ceased to be (as a literal island). Instead, this is just the frame inside which Dudley Flats and its inhabitants are portrayed for us.

Of course, I was intrigued by his attempt, with two friends, to retrace the original course of the Yarra and the outline of the West Melbourne Swamp late in the book. It is very much the kind of thing that I once would have wanted to do, except that aside from the drainage canal parallel to Dynon Road, there is little greenery to see, and much industrial wasteland to discourage one.

Oh, and as a personal footnote. When I look west along Canning Street these days, there is a housing development going up on the valley wall on the other side of the river, just across from Solomon’s Ford. So much for preservation of some semblance of wilderness at what once was the very edge of the known world.

iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. 

Writing at the time the Roman Empire was reaching its greatest extent, in his Satire X, the Roman poet Juvenal denounced the apathy of the people of Imperial Rome. Instead of the civic virtues of the Republic where the people handed out high office and military command, they were now contented to hope for bread and circuses.

At this point in our own society, where we have abundant wealth and material prosperity, we are also, compared to our immediate forebears, passive and apathetic. Few people, as a proportion of the whole, see any need for civic involvement, whether it is in a political party or in a community group or sporting club. And some, like that recently disgraced state ALP MP, seem to be doing not out of civic duty, but for power and profit, a pathetic form of rent seeking.

We protest less, and we accept what our elected officials say much more. We are becoming like sheep, with our shepherds, as Nietzsche might have warned.

Are we really content, and are we really happy, or have we really reached the point where we do not care? Previous generations cared, but that is because they had skin in the game. World Wars, depressions, conscription, the threat of nuclear annihilation, those were things which threatened previous generations in a very real way. Hence they would get involved in their communities and show civic duty, including getting involved at the grassroots in political parties, community groups, and sporting clubs – the building blocks of civil society.

We rest on what previous generations have created, and we are currently at risk of losing much of that.

Take the political parties. The pandemic means that meetings are no longer possible, and political parties have not yet created rules that permit annual general meetings and internal elections to be held virtually. This plays into the hands of those who control the party machines, who are as interested in actual grassroots involvement as the people in Tammany Hall over a century ago.

The Victorian ALP is an extreme example. Its leaders have acquiesced over many years in practices similar to the Tammany tactics, known as branch stacking. This means that at least a quarter of the current 16,000 members are probably not there for bona fide intentions. The result is that the entire state branch has been placed in administration and the remaining members have been disenfranchised entirely for the next 3 years. Those who have a sense of civic duty are reduced, from active citizens, to passive agents of the party machine.

The Victorian Liberal Party is not much better. It has had some apparent episodes of branch stacking as well in recent years, mostly involving members of various Christian fundamentalist or post-Christian (as I call some American sourced religions from the mid 19th century) congregations. I do not think that the motives of those engineering such membership drives were out of civic duty, but rather out of a desire to wrest control of the party machine, perhaps involving people who might not be most accurately described as ‘liberal’ in their ideas. Nor has the party machine done a very good job of engaging with its current 11,000 members.

These parties were created at the grassroots by people who cared about issues facing the nation. To have them turned into soulless machines controlled by apparatchiks is not a healthy development for our society or democracy – especially at a time where both of these parties have welcomed into their fold with open arms and without scrutiny persons with apparent links to the Chinese Communist Party.

Lockdown also, especially as it stretches on further, threatens the existence of other civic groups, such as sporting clubs and cultural associations. A friend of mine plays hockey each winter. Her hockey competition was suspended a few months ago. When will it resume? I belong to a small Italian cultural group, which tries to hold a couple of activities each year. Right now, even our annual gala dinner at the end of the year is threatened by the lockdown, creating a threat to member engagement.

Creating and building community groups and clubs takes years. Closing them down can take minutes. Just look at the decline of Lawn Bowls clubs around the suburbs in the past thirty years.

The public has for the most part uncritically accepted the need for a lockdown, and placed a lot of trust in their governments. This is the type of society we are now, passive and obedient and uncritical. The debate is not whether lockdown is necessary and whether or not the authority of the state is being misused or not, but whether the lockdown has been handled effectively.

Like the people of Ancient Rome, we have become clients of the state, with Jobkeeper and related ultimately inflationary measures, to keep discontent and disquiet to a minimum. Those aspects of Civil Society which are usually most independent of the state, such as churches and small businesses, have been forced – with barely a whimper – to close down.

Hardly anyone is talking about what all this means for our society going forward.

Some people, mostly economists (and a few amateurs like me), are concerned that the Uber-Keynesian measures being pursued by western governments all over the world, running up titanic and unprecedented deficits and effectively printing money, are going to have major consequences for the financial system and the world economy, to say nothing of our own national economy.

But no one seems to be talking about what the consequences are for the health of Civil Society, at a time when sporting clubs are not competing and the only community groups operating are those who are mostly funded through the largesse of the state apparatus.

Instead, we sit at home, watching our Netflix, and getting our junk food deliveries from Uber Eats, content that the NBN gives us the reliable connections to keep us entertained and fed. This is very similar to various dystopian futures which have been written about or filmed, mostly recently in I, Robot. Is this the kind of future we want for our society?

Bread and Circuses indeed, 21st century style.