LOOKING FOR AUSTRALIA Part 7

MELBOURNE LOOKS PEACEFUL ENOUGH

After getting back on the Great Ocean Road and climbing toward a battleship-grey sky north of Apollo Bay and wrestling my machine through miles of heart-rate raising convolution on the cliff-tops, the road eventually straightens out on a plain that flat-tops to the long drop into the crashing sea far below. On my left is the Great Ottway National Park and on my right is the Southern Ocean. I pass through the picturesque little towns of Lorne and Anglesea. At Torquay the road swings almost due north to meet up with the Princes Highway.

This is prime farming country but evidently very dry judging by the fat rolls of hay scattered about the fields. Sleek, fat cattle graze, safely guarded from hunger no matter how long the rain holds off. My mind flashes back to the saddening sight of starving, skeletal cattle I'd witnessed during a dry season in Laos several years earlier. Almost too weak to stand up, they munched futilely on dry, dead grass. Unable to afford the luxury of hay, their impoverished owners could only watch and wait and pray to Buddha for the rainy season to begin. Anybody with any familiarity with Buddhism would know Buddha was not a god but simply a philosopher who died 2,500 years ago. But that doesn't matter to people who may not be a lot better off than their cattle if the rain arrives late. And some people still don't quite get it why the third world wants to relocate to the first world.

The size of the city of Geelong hints to me that my bush odyssey is nearing conclusion. On the other side, a fast expressway whisks me through sunny countryside to where I can see Melbourne hulking in the distance.

This is the first time I’ve hit Melbourne from this angle and I’m not entirely relaxed, faced as I am with navigating my way from the south of the city to where I’ve chosen to stay in North Melbourne. So far so good; I’m cruising around a sweeping curve of expressway and the city is looming ever closer. All I have to do is choose the right exit. That could have been it, I think, looking over my shoulder with a pang of self-recrimination. No doubt it was. I’m sensing what it must be like to be in a space capsule bouncing of the earth’s atmosphere in an attempt at re-entry at too shallow an angle. My own consequences admittedly may not be so dire but I definitely don’t like the way the city, instead of continuing to get closer, is receding into the distance behind me.

I have to get off this speed-way or I’ll bypass the city entirely. The first exit I see, I take. I’ve at least stopped the involuntary exit from the city but I haven’t got a clue where I am. It seems a simple matter at first of orienting myself but the more wrong turns I take, the more flustered I become, until I’m not entirely sure which way is up and which way is down.

 More through good luck than anything else, I’ve gotten to within striking distance of where I want to be but I don’t know it. It’s only when I admit defeat and make a distress call to the mate who’s agreed to put me up for a couple of nights that the feeling of so near but so far strikes me. My destination is only five minutes away but the way I was going at it, those few minutes may have become hours.

Because my pal who I haven’t seen in a few years now works from home, and can’t spend any time away from his computer for the time being, he apologises for not being able to show me around. I say “no problem. I’m perfectly happy to nose around on my own.” So, after a shower and a feed, I’m ready to fill what’s left of the afternoon with exploration. I very thankfully leave the bike and strike out on foot. I’ve got my bearings now. All I need to do is head in the direction of the city’s towering office-blocks.

Within a few minutes, I’m walking past the expansive old markets, quiet now with no indication of the hustle and noise that would have predominated in the early morning. A lot of history there, I think. I can cover a lot of distance this way, musing over unfamiliar sights. It’s only when I backtrack that I realise just how much pavement I’ve trodden. I’m soon in the centre of the city.

 As is almost second nature to me, I’m surveying the racial changes wrought by mass immigration. The Sydney equivalent of where I’m standing now in the central business district is now an all Asian affair, almost indistinguishable from say Hong Kong or Singapore. I compare and contrast. From careful observation I have to conclude that white faces are still in the majority here BUT the Asian faces, mainly Chinese if my time spent kicking around Asia has taught me anything at all, form a very large minority. I’m standing like Socrates rooted in the snow, only I’m on a busy street corner, deep in thought, combing through memories for references. I think I have it. This is almost exactly like Sydney was when Asian immigration really started to skyrocket in the mid to late eighties. However, that’s not to say it’s going to take Melbourne thirty odd years to catch up. No way. It will be fast-tracked. Sydney is perhaps a giant racial Petri-dish – a kind of test case to see what can be gotten away with, and it’s been gotten away with glowingly successfully. Gently, gently, don’t scare the horses, hose the boobs with never-ending torrents of propaganda, ridicule and excoriate any who dare to object and use the hegemony of liberalism/leftism and the new religious fervor of multiculturalism to point and accuse of the worst sin imaginable: RACISM. Now that the process has been perfected, Melbourne, followed by every other Australian city, will be cake-walks. The last strong holds of Australia, the country areas similar to the ones I’ve been exploring, will then be stormed.

After night-fall, I again explore the city, this time by way of a pub crawl with my old mate now leading the way. It took him longer to twig to what’s being done to the country but after seeing the light and being converted he has as much of a blood-pressure problem as I have.

 “They use the rolling waves of immigration con pretty consistently here. You know, it used to be the Greeks who no-one liked, then people got used to them and pretty much accepted them as Australians,” he explains after the first couple of pots. “We’re all just hopelessly racist so the same thing is bound to happen with every new wave of immigration, they keep telling us. Bastards! What they avoid like shit on a sandwich is that the Greeks were a lot more like us than Asians ever will be and they wanted to be Australians. No-one was urging the Greeks to pretend they’d never left Greece and to just keep living accordingly. The Greeks did it hard – there were no massive multicultural grants to one and all then. I’d say that’s part of the reason not even the bloody Greeks like the Asians. And another thing …” He was getting wound up. “When we had the Greeks as our so-called “new Australians” we weren’t in danger of losing our entire fucking country.”

While we were trekking from pub to pub, the little pubs of Melbourne with their little beers, I noticed an odd thing. There now seemed to be more Asians out and about. Were the Asians of Melbourne nocturnal creatures?

The next day, my mate’s back at the keyboard and I’m strolling down Swanston Street. I see a big crowd gathered further down the street. Is it people picking out good positions early for a Carols by Candlelight turnout? I wonder. I can hear a lot of sirens close and distant. As I continue further along the street I’m seeing more and more parked police cars. A helicopter is chop-chopping above. What in Christ’s name is going on? By time I reach Flinders Street I discover that the crowd has grown because it’s prevented from going any further. It’s the same on the other side of the street outside Flinders Street station. The crowd there is prevented from crossing to our side of the street. Coppers are everywhere. No-one seems to know what’s going on so I ask a cop. “There’s been an accident,” is the stony-faced reply. Must be one hell of an accident.

BUT LOOKS CAN BE DECEPTIVE

It’s only later in the evening while watching TV back at my mate’s place that I learn the truth. A man thought to be an immigrant or asylum seeker from Afghanistan has driven a car full-bore into a crowd of pedestrians. Many are grievously injured, probably traumatized for the rest of their lives and one will later die of his injuries. No mention is made of it being a terrorist act, or even a hate crime or even of the sub-human causing the mayhem being Muslim although his being Afgahnistani would have to be a strong indication. The socialist Victorian Government, locked in its straight-jacket of political correctness, is craven beyond belief.

Meanwhile, out in the western suburbs amongst other areas, South Sudanese and other African gangs continue to repay Australian kindness by terrorizing the hosts while politicians and police play a merry game of semantics. What exactly is a “gang”? Who’s to say these so-called gangs are not just groups of over- exuberant boys? Police find their feminine sides while standing idly by and watching “community leaders” try to reason with savages reveling in criminal behavior. On reflection, it may be that Melbourne is catching up with Sydney faster than first thought.

I’d originally intended to take the more scenic route back to Sydney via the Princes Highway but that would mean slicing through the city to reach the southern side. However, still slightly traumatized from my earlier disorientation, I decide to hell with it, I’d tear straight up the Hume Highway, now renamed the Hume Motorway. 

It’s in the outer northern suburbs that I start seeing a lot of shops bedecked with Chinese characters instead of English letters. These are evidently the areas that will soon be the southern Hurstvilles, Chatswoods and Randwicks, Sydney suburbs colonized by the Chinese.

Free of the city, I breath fresher area and look forward to my last day free of multiculturalism. I’m in a long stretch of Australia between two major centres of infestation. I’ve decided to get it over and done with. I’ll do it in one hit. That though will entail a lot of short breaks. I take my first in the town of Glenrowan, Ned Kelly country. In a Melbourne museum located in the old Treasury building, a curator had told me that Kelly, the iron-clad bushranger, is Australian history’s most famous identity. “How’s that,” I asked. It turns out more ink has been spent on him than any other Australian. Glenrowan though is little more than a tacky Ned Kelly theme park.

Across the border and clear of Albury, I let the Bonny do the talking and it’s howling. On the Victorian side point-to-point speed averaging cameras target all vehicles, but on this side, they are only concerned with trucks so I take full advantage. Besides, I’m now realizing the reason for the new moniker of “Hume Motorway”; it’s now as good as any Autobahn I’ve seen in Germany. The turbulence is bashing me as I swoop past cars like they’re parked. I should know better but I like being on the edge. It’s a predilection so old there seems little chance of it changing. Only ten hours will elapse between the two centres of social engineering. I’ve enjoyed my visit to Australia, the Australia I remember, and the company of Australians – being amongst my own kind. Should I live long enough, the memory of it will provide a pleasant refuge if and when all is lost, when the multicultural utopia is fully realized and for an Australian, "Australia" is not worth living in.