The Best Australian Humorous Writing Page 10

  Bearing in mind the potentially fatal consequences of proximity to Mr Williams, I am immediately tempted to evacuate myself. My nerves are soothed, however, by the presence in court of a quartet of stony-faced jacks from the Purana taskforce, a body of coppers whose dedication to the eradication of criminal violence is legendary. The merest glance from these gentlemen could peel the rust off an iron bar and their leader, Inspector Ryan, is so tough he makes that Mullett chap from the police union look like a member of the Pussycat Dolls.

  Positioned safely behind the wallopers, I study Mr Williams as he is led to the dock, a sort of glass-walled corporate box at the back of the room. As his nickname suggests, Babyface is not a man of egregiously frightening mien. With his moo-cow eyes, his bland dial and gormless expression, he could easily be taken for a slightly bewildered first offender on a drink-drive charge. But Mr Williams is not here to face charges of blowing above the limit on Pascoe Vale Road. He has taken time off from his busy schedule to explain to judge Betty King why he deserves the court’s mercy as concerns sentencing for the near-total eradication of the Moran family of drug dealers, a crime to which he pleaded guilty at his last appearance before her. These slayings come on top of the bumping-off of a notorious hot-dog vendor and narcotics peddler, a transgression for which he is serving 26 years in the Acacia maximum security unit.

  To lend moral support, various members of Mr Williams’ family begin to arrive, positioning themselves on the seats immediately below him. For the occasion, his former wife, Roberta, has chosen a fetching yellow beanie which she has teamed with a hoodie and yellow-top trainers. She immediately takes the opportunity to address some disparaging remarks to Mr Williams’ current inamorata, Renata, who is seated a short distance away. Renata, who is younger and more blonde, responds with frosty silence.

  The proceedings, what with legal argument about what can and cannot be published, take the best part of the day. To begin, Mr Williams’ silk, Mr David Ross, QC, reprised the circumstances of the murders perpetrated at Mr Williams’ behest. These involved guns of various shapes and varieties, a wheelie bin, large amounts of cash and drugs and statements by the prisoner to the effect that he did not entirely trust the police, that he was taking a lot of self-prescribed medicine at the time and that he was once shot in the tum-tum by Jason Moran.

  Judge King, resplendent in red robe and funky specs, reminded him that she had heard most of it before, but she would be giving his plea all due consideration. With that, Mr Williams was escorted back to Barwon, where every day is, in Mr Williams’ words, “like Groundhog Day”.

  Environment, Science and Technology

  CLIVE JAMES

  On climate change

  In my household, I’m the last man standing against the belief that global warming is caused by human beings.

  Three women with about a dozen university degrees between them have been treating me for years now as if I were personally responsible for the forthcoming death of the planet. They’re probably right. They were right about the cod.

  After it was impressed upon me by my daughters that the number of cod in the sea had declined to the point that there were 20 miles between any two cod, I stopped eating cod, and immediately the cod-stocks began to recover.

  I couldn’t help noticing, however, that there were no complaints about the declining number of haddock.

  Since it was crumbed haddock fillets that I took to eating instead of crumbed cod, by rights there should have been a noticeable and worrying decline in the number of crumbed haddock being caught in the North Sea. There wasn’t, but if there had been I would have listened to the evidence.

  Hard, observable evidence should convince anybody sane. I know the sea is polluted because I can see plastic bottles on the beach. Whether the sea is indeed rising might be a matter for computer modelling, which is evidence only if it suits your prejudice, but you know what a couple of hundred plastic bottles are when they come in riding on a wave like a flock of dead seagulls.

  Where I used to go on holiday in the Bay of Biscay in the days when I could still swim over-arm, the empty plastic bottles on the beach were only a few centimetres apart all the way from France into Spain.

  I marvelled at the perversity of people on board ships who, after drinking the contents of the bottle, would carefully screw the cap back on so that the bottle would float forever, unbiodegradably carrying its unwritten message of human imbecility until the ending of the world.

  Some countries litter more than others. Sometimes the same country litters less than it used to. Australia was a litterbug’s paradise when I first left it in 1961. Fifteen years later, when I first went back, the littering had largely vanished, because a government campaign had actually worked.

  At present, the same global coffee bar chain has cleaner forecourts in the US than it does in the UK because, in the UK, dropping trash is a yob’s right. But wherever you are, in Birmingham or in Birmingham, Alabama, biodegradable packaging in general is clearly a necessary and welcome step, well worth paying for if you’ve got the money.

  The fact that only a very small proportion of the total human race has got the money we can leave aside for now, because this is really about us, the people who can afford to do the right thing after we’ve either agreed what it is or been prevailed upon to do it by a government which has proved its competence in other areas, such as finding a use for the Millennium Dome.

  This week, for a packet of organic tomatoes still gamely clinging to their own little vine, I gladly paid extra because the packaging was almost as enticing as the contents. By means of a printed sticker, the packaging promised to disintegrate at some time in the future.

  It would have been a help if the exact time in the future had been specified—perhaps about the time when the last remnants of the human race left for the planet Tofu in the constellation of Organica—but at least the green promise had been made, and I would be able to put the empty tomato packet into our wheelie bin devoted to compostable matter.

  In Cambridge we divide our garbage into two wheelie bins, marked compostable and non-compostable.

  The two classifications don’t apply to the wheelie bins, both of which are made of heavy-duty, non-compostable plastic, but do apply to their contents.

  As the dolt of the household, a mere male and therefore little more than a brain-stem with a bank account, I myself am correctly regarded as too stupid to decide what goes into each bin. My job is to substitute one bin for another in the garden shed according to which week which bin is collected.

  Only women are clever enough to plan this schedule but only men can do the heavy labour involved, employing the brute force for which they have been famous since the cave, when everything was biodegradable.

  A world nearer to a bone-strewn cave is one to which some in the green movement would like us to return. I can say at this point that the eco-wiseacre who has just been elected Australian of the Year foresees an ideal population for Australia of less than a third of the number of people it has now, but he doesn’t say whether he includes himself and his family among the total of those to be subtracted.

  Each time I change the bins I almost subtract myself from the present total of the inhabitants of East Anglia because for evolutionary reasons I am unable to lug one bin out and push the other bin in without impacting my forehead into the top frame of the shed door.

  After the first time I fell to the flagstones clutching my bisected skull, when I jokingly suggested to the three watching eco-furies that if I croaked in mid-manoeuvre they could always recycle me, I was informed that this possibility was on the cards because just outside of town there is a cemetery where they will bury you in a cardboard box.

  There is also a graveyard called All Souls which has two wheelie bins standing outside it, one marked “All Souls compostable” and the other marked “All Souls non-compostable”.

  One of the permanent lodgers in that graveyard is the great philosopher Wittgenstein, whose key principle was
that we shouldn’t be seduced by language. He wanted us to say things so clearly that our meaning couldn’t be mistaken. But he could only dream of that, because in fact we are seduced by language.

  The world couldn’t work if we didn’t spend most of our time being open to persuasion on subjects that we will never personally investigate because we lack either the time or the talent, and usually both.

  Everybody knows there are too many plastic shopping bags. You can see millions of them decorating the hedgerows. Everybody knows that it’s a good sign when a supermarket puts a sign on the side of its plastic bags saying that its plastic bags are recycled from other plastic bags.

  But where most of our recycled non-compostable garbage gets sorted out, hardly anybody knows. I was recently told that most of it goes to China, but I can’t believe that their economic boom depends on reprocessing our tin cans, and that they won’t produce rubbish of their own, and lots more of it.

  There are good reasons for cleaning up the mess we make, but finally it’s what we make that makes us an advanced culture, and only a highly developed industry knows how to keep itself clean.

  At Bhopal in India a chemical plant once killed at least 3,800 people, but that was because it was badly regulated.

  Loose supervision made it lethal. Very few nuclear reactors even in the old Soviet Union have ever gone as wrong as the one at Chernobyl, or even the one at Three Mile Island in the US, but that’s because they have regulations to meet, and the regulations themselves are the product of an industrial society.

  There was a time that Japan’s burgeoning post-war industry was poisoning its own people with mercury. The industry that did the poisoning found the solution, because it was forced to. But a law to suppress that industry would have helped to produce a society less able to control its own pollution, not more.

  As far as I can tell with the time I’ve got to study the flood of information, which is less time than I would like, the green movement can do an advanced industrial society the world of good by persuading its industries to spread less poison.

  Whether or not carbon emissions really do melt the polar bears and kill the baby seals in the rain forest, the pressure on industry and even on government is already helping to persuade Hollywood stars that they should drive hybrid cars, and finally we’ll do what Leonardo di Caprio does, because we’ll be seduced by language, not because we know very much about how carbon dioxide keeps in the planet’s heat.

  The other day I met a carbon dioxide expert who said that his favourite gas has already reached the density where it can’t keep in any more heat, but I did notice that he was sweating.

  It was probably when Sir David Attenborough noticed that the bottle-nosed dolphins were sweating that he finally gave his illustrious name to the campaign against global warming. That would be enough for me even if Prince Charles hadn’t joined in as well, having already placed his order for a horse-drawn Aston Martin.

  But I don’t really know they’re right. I’m just guessing. The only thing I do know is what won’t work, because it shouldn’t.

  We shouldn’t expect the less fortunate nations to cut themselves off from industrial progress in the name of a green planet.

  It wouldn’t be fair even if it was likely, and anyway, we aren’t civilized by the extent to which we return to nature, only by the extent that we overcome it. I wish I’d said that. It was Sigmund Freud, actually, when they showed him the blueprints of the very first wheelie bin.

  When push comes to shove, he wrote in German, this thing could still save male pride even if it can’t save the planet.

  PAUL MITCHELL

  Contact

  Did you get my email? No, where’d you send it? To your work address. I’m not on that address. Are you on your home address? Yeah, but I didn’t get a message. I got your text. I didn’t send a text. Yes you did. The one about your message. What message? The one you left on my work phone. Oh, but I left one later on your home phone. I didn’t get that one. Have you had your mobile on? Yeah. Did you leave a message on it? No, but I sent you a text. I didn’t get that text. Was it the one about your email? No, that was the one about my phone message. Which one? The one on your home phone. Oh, I only check my home messages from my work phone. Can I leave a new message on your mobile? Yeah, but don’t use my work mobile. Can I text to that one? Yeah, text to it, but don’t call, you can call and text to my home mobile, but remember I sometimes turn it off. Can I come to your home? Text me first to see if I’m there. Or email me. Okay, I can do that from my phone when I get to the door. It’s been good talking to you. Great to catch up. Talk to you soon. Yeah, okay. Wait on … What? I’ll take a picture. Can I pxt it to you later? Yeah, but not to my work mobile. I’ll email it to your hotmail. Cool.

  KAZ COOKE

  Planet Earth: Beware of the chimps

  Some stuff you just know is going to be good. Watching Amanda Vanstone block and parry Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report until he doesn’t know whether to smile or scream (I wish they’d bring that back), eating at a third generation Italian restaurant, seeing a BBC natural history documentary.

  The second series of BBC’s Planet Earth is running on the ABC, and next Sunday the focus is on jungles. I don’t know how much this series cost, or how many camera folk were paid for months to stake out places where no complimentary shower cap can be found (middle of the Congo, anyone?). It’s so brilliant, I almost don’t care how it happened.

  Incidentally, I can hardly believe there was talk recently that the ABC natural history unit might be disbanded. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. It feeds into history, geography, national pride, conservation, and tourism. Has anyone checked out how popular Animal Planet and similar cable stations are going, and how much product they need? Please don’t leave it to Bindi Irwin’s manager. If the ABC could regularly make stuff like Planet Earth I’d pay a licence fee and stop whingeing about that uber-amateur Collectors program.

  Planet Earth puts the audience in a meditative state and then amazes and educates it. Accordingly, the music is sometimes a bit like the calm Enya-esque stuff piped into a salon when you get a facial, and then uses the whole drum section when the elephants heave into view. The music is all original and played by an endangered species called a real orchestra.

  Even with the exquisite high-definition photography, it’s hard to feel empathy with, or sympathy for the insects. Even an ant that has parasitic fungi growing out of its brain. Yeah, yeah, I know the spiders are crucial to the food chain, plus they can abseil. But euwww. It’s unfair, but cute wins, especially the wide-eyed colugo, like a possum with a flying cloak—although the English call it “the flying tea-tray”.

  Although the quintessential narrator, David Attenborough, doesn’t stomp the point, we all know that the biggest threat to all these places, and to all these creatures is us. What’s climate change going to do to a place that has 2 metres of annual rainfall? Indonesia, Malaysia and Pacific islands are ripping down forests, is Papua New Guinea far behind? What about all those countries in Africa that need money and roads? Logging companies will promise both.

  As we cut up the toast soldiers, knock off the tops of the boiled eggs and sit down on Sunday night to watch Planet Earth with our children, we can’t promise them any of the stuff on this episode will still be around when they grow up. Incidentally, if you are watching with the kiddies before bedtime this Sunday, you might wish to turn it off for about five minutes after the chimp posse attacks a neighboring clan. The sight of them in victory eating the recognisable extremities of a youngster is … let’s just say, pretty indelible.

  It’s this scene which brings to a gibbering halt my ineluctable musings over the similarities between creatures and humans. Dominating “bully boy” capuchin monkeys could remind you of the recent Australian cricket team. The prancing, sex-craving, costume-parading birds of paradise are reminiscent of Prince on stage. A dowdy but powerful female looks a suitor over, gives him a withering glance
and sweeps away. Hello, Judi Dench. Pitcher plants (LA nightclubs) lure and gobble up gangly insects (starving young socialites). A frog in the darkness surrounded by diverse calls can hear only the warbles of its own kind (Tony Abbott). Slimy, bottom-feeding parasitic fungi; that ex-boyfriend who … okay, this is getting kind of personal.

  Thanks to this team of camera and sound folk, editors, producers—and the BBC having the money to do it—we can now “be” so close to an elephant we see every wiry hair on its crinkle parchment hide. That’s why, in this episode, we see right into the eyes of those chimps, read their faces, can’t dispute how similar they are to humans. Further evidence is their after-school nit check, their binge-eating of figs, and the unprovoked pre-emptive territorial attacks, right up until the “hey, you can’t eat that guy’s arm!” cannibal bit. They are not us. Will we protect their habitat and let them live anyway, even though they can’t fund a lobbyist?

  The following week, Planet Earth is going to take us underwater to see a flashing electric clam, sneaky sea snakes (try saying that after an eggnog), surfing dolphins, “rampaging” starfish and the “head-butting pygmy sea-horse”. I don’t think you can see better-crafted television than this. Not that includes headbutting, anyway.

  The ABC closed its Natural History Unit in 2007 without a public announcement.

  BARRY COHEN

  Modern telecoms run rings around me

  When she told me her name was Blackadder, I should have fled. But always the adventurer, I pressed on.

  “What I require is a mobile phone. I don’t want it to take photographs, tell the time, play music, provide weather forecasts or make coffee,” I said. “If I can make or receive calls and record messages, that will do just fine.”