Look, to be honest, there's little reason for me to do a year 2004 round-up. It was shit. I spent the better part of it either locked in my 2m by 2.5m office freezing my end off or up to my elbows in muck trying to make ends meet. Was summarily dumped by a girlfriend returning from overseas, spent months eking out a living on the dole, and watched that rat-bastard Howard romp back into power.
And that's not to mention unpleasantness happening to other people, like thousands of innocents dying in big explosions, gunfights or natural disasters.
Shit. Ess, Aych, Eye, Tee. Shit.
Instead, we're going to wander back in our collective minds eye to happier times. Instead, we'll cast our collective thoughts back to a more blissful existence before all this unhappiness cast its shadow. Instead, we'll think about a better vintage, 2001.
Unlike many of you nutters who freaked out about the Millennium and the end of the world in Y2K, I was one of the freaks who nutted out the problem of 2001 being the real Millennium.
It all started with a bang of course, way out in Zone Three somewhere watching what we thought were the fireworks in Melbourne Central going off. You can imagine our embarrassment when we realised it was some ethnic guy over the road letting off rockets from his front yard (illegally I might add, in my best 'disapproving Aunty' tones). Ah well, pretty lights and alcohol.
The year progressed fairly well after that, I had moved out of a flat in Camberwell to get away from this bunch of countrified drunks I had been living with. By way of example, one of them got so blotto in the local that they denied her even water, and just asked her to leave. She was so offended she called ‘000’ to complain, and ended up with a ‘slap on the wrist’ fine for prank calling. Couldn't happen to a nicer person.
Anyhow, from that beer-soaked environment I ended up flatting with PhotoGuy and his psychotic Scots Terrier 'Wally'. Vicious little bugger that one. It had a thing about its ears, if you touched them, it bit you. Fair enough I would say, until it bit a partially blind girl who came around to see the flat. How that nasty little shit made it through the successive drawing of so much innocent blood, I'll never know.
It even bit my fingers up to the knuckles one time. I was feeding it a left-over bone and he kind of sidled up to it, and then in a flash of white pointy teeth moved like lightning. I'm not a violent type of bloke, but I over-reacted and sucker-punched the fucker right between the eyes for that one. Never bit me again after that. Even let me touch his ears.
While living with PhotoGuy (he was a photographer for Holden, only took photos of cars), Wally, and successive canine-frightened housemates, I was offered the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles for a mere $A1k. Having not been back to the States since 1990 I jumped at the chance and flew out in mid-March.
That trip I must have mentioned before. It turns out that it was cheaper to drive to Texas that fly, so I hired the smallest car I could from Avis and took off. Turns out that the guy behind the counter thought I was an “OK, Ozz-tralian dude”, and for the same price gave me a 2.0l sports cars that absolutely flew, instead of the 1.4l hatch I thought I’d hired.
Although it only had 3000km on the clock when I got it, it had 14000 when I returned to LA. You should have seen look on the Avis guys face. Heh heh.
Despite all this good fortune, when I got back to Melbourne the current girlfriend and I broke up. My fault. And it goes to show, karma can take awhile catch up with you, ay?
The remainder of the winter was spent trying to avoid having that damn dog bite me, or any of the friends I had over, celebrating my thirtieth birthday, and getting stuck into several more difficult chapters of the Ph.D. before spending December back in New Zealand.
Of this time, the one thing I really remember is the efforts I was making to compile primary material for the thesis. While the first two years in Melbourne were spent getting up to speed on stuff I neglected to learn in New Zealand, 2001 really was the year I started to understand exactly how 'race-relations' works in Australia.
I was living in Richmond, which you may remember from another post, and was often surrounded by Vietnamese people. Meanwhile, I was gathering untold amounts of 'stuff' about Aboriginal people and the way in which the British systematically dispossessed them from their lands in Victoria. Even though I wasn't to compile this information into a coherent chapter until late 2002, the stuff I was finding was gut-wrenching.
It was around this time I was beginning to understand why some people just block this kind of stuff out of their minds. The Reconciliation Marches of 2000 were long gone, Howard had snuffed out any chance of an apology to the Stolen Generations in favour of 'practical reconciliation', and the Right were happy to continue to cotton-wool wrap themselves away from all this unpleasantness.
Maybe, I thought, maybe it's just too much for some people to deal with. While many of the left seem to wallow in their collective guilt and immerse themselves in means to meddle in the lives of Aboriginal people, many others seem happier to simply block it out.
As I say, a big year.
It's these kind of revelations, the ones that really force you to look at yourself and your world-view, your umwelt, that must be the reason people do humanities degrees. I mean, 2001 fundamentally changed the way I look at people and the world in general.
Sure, you can write it off as 'growing older', or 'becoming cynical', but I used that trip to the US as a means to better see the people themselves, and through them, myself. I used the time wandering around Richmond as a means to really understand how a multicultural society can work as a series of intimately related sub-cultures, and located myself in that society. And I sat in shock as the details of what a benign, but ultimately arrogant power, can do to a powerless people unfolded before me.
And then “the night we all love to talk about” came.
I was asleep and got up to bitch about the housemates making too much noise. My youngest brother was flatting with us at the time, and he and the others there at the time were talking loudly. I got out of bed, saw what was going on and immediately called a number of friends to make them turn on the TV. Not long afterwards that second plane hit. We sat up all night in empathy to watch the horror, while the housemate Maria cried silent tears of sorrow.
I’m more than certain anything that can be said about 11 September has already been written, but as a nod to all those Doomsayers who claimed the Millennium to be the year everything will change, you were right. Everything is the same, yet nothing is the same. And now we live in an age of vengeance.
It’s amazing isn’t it, how the world can turn on a pin? How everything you know can turn 180 degrees like that without you ever having seen the consequences of where fate is taking all of us? How anyone can find these welters of hate to use if given the right trigger?
We all know that the Millennium didn’t bring the Apocalypse, that the Sun will rise again this New Years Day. But on reflection, that year brought untold changes big and small that, to this day, personally affect me very deeply. On top of these are the big-picture changes that continue to force me consider myself a better person because of them, and that force me to constantly consider the way I understand all of you, because I seek to understand at all.
So, my advice is to be nice to your neighbours, pesky bastards that they are. Be charitable to strangers, stinky, loud or pushy assholes and all, and don’t be afraid to embrace change if it makes things better for everyone.
From here in sentimental cheeseville, it’s goodnight kiwi till next year.