>[!INFO]+ Meta >Area:: [[Neverland - The Lost Continent of Australia]] >Date:: 2013 >Tags:: #text #Melbourne *Perhaps the travails and sometimes the deaths of children are emblematic either of the forfeiting of part of the national future, or of an anxiety that Australia will never truly welcome European settlement ... the figure* *of the lost child may stand for the adult emigrant to Australia, disoriented and vulnerable, and far from all that was consoling and familiar in Britain or Ireland.* -----Peter Pierce[^183] 'Trinaldee!' A curious word echoes through the marbled foyer of a city hotel. 'Trinaldee!' The call comes from a middle-aged man wearing a hand-knitted jumper, standing before the Hugo Boss suits and immaculately groomed reception staff. 'Trinaldee!' In the background you can hear some typical lobby music: a baby grand, twinkles 'As Time Goes By' on automatic player. Everyone smiled kindly on this man with the enigmatic word. Decades ago, this word used to echo through the streets of Melbourne. One of the few people who remembers this cryptic cry, Kelvin Moore, is demonstrating it to the people who now inhabit his territory. Kelvin once used to come here for everything he needed---there was a dentist, doctor, barber, cobbler and career advice. Edith Onians established the Newsboys Club early in the twentieth century to give young working-class boys a good start in life. It has since been replaced by a gleaming city hotel, which offers a similarly comprehensive range of services, though to clients at the other end of the socio-economic range. This act of ghosting a lost past in its contemporary anonymous setting seems a particular Melbourne obsession. Most forms of imaginary community offered by alternative colonisation can be played out across Australia. It's possible to distribute the variety of French culture across the continent, from the Matisse-like aestheticism of Sydney to the Camus-like horrors of the 'dead centre'. But there are also stories that belong uniquely to individual cities. In the case of Melbourne, the city is torn between its ambition to be a world centre, reviving its heady gold-rush fame, and its sentimental attachment to local forms of community, as represented today in the culture of trams. As sentiment is increasingly pushed aside for ambition, Melbourne's soul finds itself in exile, harboured in a particularly foreign form of community---India. Seeking this passage to India are Melbourne's lost boys, haunting the cobblestones of the city's back lanes. Kelvin Moore mourns the loss of newsboys from the city. He remembers the raw life selling papers outside the Waterside Hotel, and the cry heard in the late afternoon around Elizabeth Street, with Rabbit White's boys---'Trinaldee!' Like a linguistic archaeologist, he tries to piece together the sentence from its skeletal remains: 'Final, last, late, extra ... that's what I think it was---Trinaldee!' The newsboys' cry was the city's church bell, there to herald the beginning and end of the communal day. 'Trinaldee' is a password to a world of lost innocence. In the twentieth century, Melbourne produced a stream of popular figures who all seemed fixed in childhood. Media stars like Johnny Farnham, Mollie Meldrum, Daryl Somers and Bert Newton have never lost their boyish air. Pop singer Kylie Minogue seems consigned to never grow up. The city's most glamorous expatriate celebrity, Edna Everage, only ever returns to Melbourne as Barry Humphries seeking a fix of nostalgia for the city of his boyhood. Such immaturity in a city can be read as a sign of failure. You could not grow up in Melbourne. You needed travel to places that forced the issue, such as New York, Venice, Morocco and Rio de Janeiro. In Melbourne, it was too easy just to fit into the system and cruise along. There were people and places to look after you. This innocence came to an end in the rite of passage known as 'privatisation' in the 1990s. Melbourne acquired Crown Casino and the Grand Prix, sold off public utilities, sacked tram conductors, and retrenched 'home and away' football. Melbourne finally grew up, lost the innocence of a quaint Victorian city, and joined the Rolex circuit. While many celebrate this coming of age, something approximating the 'soul' of Melbourne has been sacrificed in the process. Despite the sentimental death of a city, there are a few ghosts around to haunt Melbourne with memories of what used to be. Neverland has itself become a Neverland. #### **Paul Cox's fool by the lake** The easiest place to find Melbourne's Neverland is in the video shop. In the Australian section is a shelf bursting with films set in Melbourne about adults who fail to grow up. In *Sweetie* (dir. Jane Campion, 1989) a girl's life is frozen on the backyard stage and dependent on her father's admiration. In *Proof* (dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1991) the congenitally blind Martin remains trapped within an unresolved pre-Oedipal relationship with his mother, who died when he was a child. In *Spotswood* (dir. Mark Joffie, 1992) a suburban community is cocooned in a time warp with backs turned to the economic realities of the global marketplace. And in *Stan and George's New Life* (dir. Brian McKenzie, 1992), the main character finds himself celebrating his fortieth birthday while still living at home with his parents. While Melbourne itself has outgrown sentimentality, cinema screens continue to uphold the myth of its innocence. *Wog Boy* (dir. Aleksi Vellis, 2000) is about Greek adolescents who buck the system. *Mall Boy* (dir. Vincent Giarusso, 2000) focuses on a boy without a future whose parents are fixed on the culture of the 1970s. And the hero of *Chopper* (dir. Andrew Dominik, 2000) is a bad boy who cannot take any responsibility for his actions. The enduring struggle of Melbourne's Neverland comedies is to fight adult pretensions with childhood innocence. While the natural setting of Los Angeles is *film noir*, for Melbourne it is *film naïvité*. The cinematic Tinkerbell of this generation is Paul Cox, a Dutch-born filmmaker who came to Australia in 1963 to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Dutch provincialism. From the mid 1970s, Cox began making whimsical films about people on the outside of society. By the 1980s, they had developed into an enduring picture of bayside Melbourne, where aging adults strive to protect themselves against the world of experience. The European sensibility of formal beauty struggles against a local greed for material reward. Cox's Peter Pan is the actor Norman Kaye, who is shy of the world yet capable of great interior passion. In *Man of Flowers* (1983), he is Charles Bremmer, a simpleton whose recently acquired fortune has come from his mother's estate. Regardless of his mother's death, Bremmer goes to the mailbox daily to post her news of his life. His quest for beauty is similarly unworldly. Bremmer takes life-drawing classes but draws flowers rather than the naked woman in front of him. He hires the model to strip for him once a week, but he cannot make physical contact with her. This adult pursuit is interlaced with super-8 memories of childhood---a backward boy mesmerised by the breasts of his buxom aunt and flickering light through the trees. But it's a corrupt world that Bremmer must live in. A retinue of people emerges to feed on his inheritance; his psychiatrist, a swimming pool merchant and, finally, the model's boyfriend all lean on him increasingly for cash. In Cox's moral architecture, the vulgar world serves to ennoble Bremmer's innocence. Bremmer steps into his bath while participating in a radio sex show run by a crass Christian American. When Bremmer tells the radio host about his love of flowers, he is dismissed as a weirdo. Poetic sensibility becomes obscene in a world obsessed by sex. This judgment is repeated later in the film when Bremmer confronts David, the boyfriend of his model, after hearing of her ill-treatment. In the scene extracted below, Bremmer visits David's studio, David, played by Chris Heywood, is a failed painter, a heartless man desperate to retrieve his moribund reputation and feed his drug habit. David expects to sell a few paintings to Bremmer by working on his concern for the threatened Lisa. Charles insists on seeing the paintings first. David makes a pitch, 'Nine years ago I was famous. And in another week's time I'll be famous again.' Charles asks innocently for 'real paintings'. When asked to be more specific, Charles requests paintings of flowers, which David takes as a sign of ignorance of contemporary art. > DAVID: But what you've got going on these walls here is a world > revolution in art and you happen to be fortunate from some unfortunate > sexual coincidence to be at the forefront of that revolution. It's at > a very nominal cost. You don't know what's going on in my head. You > don't know about art, so let's not talk about either of those. Just > give me the money and let's keep it all civil, eh? > > CHARLES: I think the first thing a work of art should be is memorable. > You have to be able to imagine it afterwards. Close your eyes and see > it, like a perfect bowl of roses. David provides a spectacle of greed leering behind the mask of fashion; 'world revolution in art' is empty hype for work that has no intrinsic value other than a rumour of fleeting good taste. The two continue their comic dialogue, David pressing the hard reality and Charles blithely expressing his sensitive feelings. David's cynicism grants honour to Bremmer's otherworldly hankering for the beauty of nature---a taste that would seem quite vapid without its antithesis. Paul Cox's worlds rest on a maudlin opposition between innocence and experience. His films stage a moral victory of the sensitive European soul over the crass American opportunist. Despite its simple-minded morality, or perhaps even because of it, Cox's cinema provides a focus for community action in the real world. The real-life action occurs in Albert Park, the setting for Cox's film *My First Wife* (1984). In 1993, the new state government, led by enterprising businessman Jeff Kennett, decided to use the park as the location for Melbourne's Grand Prix, a prize international event that guarantees its host city brief exposure on the world stage. Besides the glory of the spotlight, it promised material rewards in increased tourist revenue. During the early battle against the development of the racetrack around Albert Park Lake, Norman Kaye and Paul Cox were presented as the main focus of opposition. The *Age* coverage of the issue featured a photograph of Kaye and Cox drinking coffee. Titled 'Fighting to save Melbourne's soul', the article begins, 'Norman Kaye is visibly shy, sensitive. Even when among peers he tends to stand alone ... For many, Kaye embodies the cultural spirit of Melbourne.'[^184] Another article, by Anna King Murdoch ('The race to ruin a city's poor old soul'), features a cartoon by John Spooner of a young girl riding a bike alone along the lake. In arguing the lake's importance, she writes: 'This is the place that has inspired some of film---maker Paul Cox's most mysterious imaginings. As he is one of the great interpreters of Melbourne's romantic spirit, we are lucky that he caught forever the relationship of birds, poplars, cloud and light over Albert Park Lake.'[^185] Though angry crowds gathered in protest, it is the lonely dreamer who provided the focus of social dissent. Despite the utter hopelessness of its cause, the Save Albert Park Committee persists. In the meantime, most of Melbourne's public facilities have been sold off to overseas companies. Public good has become private gain with virtually no popular resistance. The mantle of Peter Pan now passes on from Charles Bremmer to Malcolm. #### **The trams of Malcolm** The film *Malcolm* (dir. Nadia Tass, 1986) is set on the other side of Melbourne's Yarra river to *Man of Flowers---*in the city's working class north rather than the bourgeois south. Despite this distance, the characters of Malcolm and Charles Bremmer have much in common. Each lives in a house provided by his dead mother and neither engages in sexual contact with women. Though Malcolm lacks Bremmer's disgust at this world, both have dreams that are shown to be out of touch with economic realities. The cinema of director Nadia Tass and writer David Parker has no place for the wounded European sensibility. Failure to grow up is less obviously a judgment on the world's lack of sensitivity than it is a device for comic action. The film begins with Malcolm's joy ride through Melbourne in his do-it-yourself tram. The happy Gunzel (the city's slang for tram enthusiast) shows little regard for social structures: the hero without a surname merrily changes destination titles on the tram as he weaver across official routes. As a result of his lark, Malcolm is sacked from work and forced by his mother's friend, Mrs T., to advertise for a boarder. Frank, a professional small-time criminal, answers the ad. At first Frank is panicked by Malcolm's strange ways---a tram set runs throughout the house collecting groceries. But Malcolm is like a puppy inventing ways of pleasing his new master. Knowing Frank enjoys robbing banks, Malcolm constructs a remote---controlled toy car equipped with camera, microphone, speaker and gun. From his bedroom, he successfully steers the model robber into a bank, but lacks the criminal mind to know what to do next. Frank enters the bedroom, sees what Malcolm is doing, grabs the microphone and successfully intimidates the guards. Frank's girlfriend Judith happens to be in the shopping centre and discovers their mock heist. She confronts the pair back home. In a brilliantly underplayed scene, John Hargreaves as Frank uses his wiles to win over the cautious Judith, played by Lindy Davies, to his new alliance with the inventive Malcolm, as acted by the doe-eyed Colin Friels. > JUDITH: What in God's name got into ya? > > FRANK: He did it himself. > > JUDITH: Crap Frank, you're a bloody liar, I heard you, both of you, > talking all through the shopping centre, calling each other by name. > You're bloody hopeless. > > FRANK: I come in the middle of it. He worked the whole thing out > himself. > > JUDITH: Frank, not for a moment did I think you had anything to do > with it. But he sure as hell didn't arrive there by himself. > > FRANK: He did > > JUDITH: And what about that gun. You coulda killed someone. > > MALCOLM: They were blanks, Judith. > > FRANK: Were they? > > JUDITH: You're both hopeless. You're turning him into a bloody crim. > > FRANK: Ah he's no crim. Didn't even care when he lost the money. > > JUDITH: Try telling the cops that. > > FRANK: Cops wouldn't know where to start lookin', he never left his > bedroom. > > JUDITH: They're not total idiots, they find out sooner or later. > > FRANK: Well if you're so worried about it, why don't you help him? > > JUDITH: What? Help him rob banks? > > FRANK: Yeah, not a bad idea. > > JUDITH: Sure as hell wouldn't make a big a balls up of it as you do. > > FRANK: Well do it. > > JUDITH: Nuh. > > FRANK: He'll get caught. > > JUDITH: You just said he wouldn't. > > FRANK: Nuh. Not this time. This is the point at which innocence turns to crime. The reason Judith finally agrees to help is not greed but a maternal responsibility for Malcolm---to protect him from getting caught. Her concern provides him with a shield against the moral implications of his actions. The major point of tension in the trio is Frank's short-lived jealousy when he discovers Judith teaching Malcolm about sex. But he needn't worry, Malcolm shows little inclination for mature relationships. Malcolm's obvious mate is Jenny, the girl next door for a boy at home. But she disappears from the film after an evening of Malcolm's obsessive tram talk. Malcolm, Frank and Judith continue their ways until they reach Lisbon where they enjoy the fruits of their crime---an appropriate destination not only as a tram city but also as the heart of *fado*, the popular lament for a lost world. *Malcolm* is remarkable for its decision to leave the innocence of its main character quite uncomplicated by moral questions. He is granted the same kind of license to act beyond the law as Peter Pan. Indeed, like Peter Pan he is capable of flight, albeit with the assistance of gadgets rather than fairy dust. Unlike Peter Pan, however, he lacks an enemy whom he is destined to kill. The real enemy was soon to emerge outside the world of film. During the nineties, the innocence that Malcolm represented was destroyed by government decree and the inexorable progress of rationalisation. Amid familiar tales of retrenchments and closures, a myriad of minor scenes poignantly captured the death of Melbourne's soul. There were three especially poignant scenes that I was able to witness. They help remind us that there are still spectres of local identity left in the wake of ubiquitous corporatisation. #### **Last of the gatekeepers** In 1998, the last of Melbourne's manual railway gates ceased operation. In the week leading up to their closure, I was pleased to see a notice at the crossing, advertising a 'Wake for the Gate' at the local Railway Hotel. I decided to support the neighbourly venture and go along. I had grown quite attached to the gatekeepers of the Upfield line. Their modest performance made a touching opening to each day. First a bell would ring to indicate an approaching train. Then looking down the track you could see, one by one, a succession of figures emerge from their smart wooden boxes, shoo away stragglers, and heave shut the gates. The train would pass and then it all happened again in reverse. If Melbourne weren't so modern, it might have made a tradition out of these forlorn figures. With some smart uniforms and fancy footwork, the northern suburbs could have had themselves a tourist attraction to rival London's Beefeaters. More practically, the boxes might have been marvellous residencies for poets---think how conducive a train timetable would be to regular metre. But as with everything, efficiency triumphs and Melbourne shivers again with the cool winds of economic change. I turned up at the Railway Hotel hoping to revive a few embers of sentiment from their retrenchment. How would the gatekeepers look back over their working lives? It was a distinctively inner suburban bar, quite unlike the liquid supermarkets called 'Irish pubs' that have now begun to appear around the area. Faded photographs of faded football stars hang on the teak veneer walls. The jukebox in the corner hasn't been updated since Meatloaf. It feels tacky, but familiar. And it's empty. I ask the Greek man behind the bar what had happened to the wake. 'I don't know. Someone else organised it. Some other bloke came and went earlier.' I have a beer. Nothing happens. I won't give up. There is one final opportunity to bid farewell to this 'could-a-been' tradition. Boom gates had been installed in all the crossings except for Brunswick station, which was due to change over that Friday. I find out the time of the last train---7:09pm. Perhaps there'll be a small vigil outside the box. I get there a little after seven. The crowd is conspicuous by its absence. At the top of the steps, the door is open. I clear my throat, hoping not to appear like some crazed Luddite. No doubt the man elected to perform the final closing is feeling the weight of the moment. His reception is blank: 'What d'you want?' The guy is young with a day's growth. 'Just wanted to see the last operation of the gate.' He looks at me strangely. The weatherboard shack has been his workplace for almost two weeks. He says he can't wait to go back to a more modern signal box in Richmond. I choose not to stress the sentiment of the occasion. There are enough traces of previous operators to give the illusion of poignancy. The equipment is solid wood and metal. A hand-operated telephone used to communicate to the next station has a 'Dial a pizza' notice sticky-taped to it. The newest acquisition is an electric clock, which has the words 'Stolen from Brunswick Station' written on its rim. It's easy to imagine how other quaint ideas might have been cooked up in this cosy little scene. The bell sounds. An electric light flashes. The gatekeeper taps through some Morse code and pulls at the wheel that opens the gates. For a moment, we are transported back to another world---a mechanical world. It feels real, like a documentary. Then it's done. He slings a Nike sports bag over his shoulder and shuffles home. #### **Pied Piper as Magpie Messiah** It is a Melbourne weekend, the last for the winter and, I guess, the millennium. On that weekend, there are three rites of passage designed to banish the old century and herald the new. At 3am on Sunday, the public transport system is officially carved up and sold to three overseas corporations. What was free public space now becomes a contested ground of marketing and customer services. But this isn't the most dramatic passing. Saturday afternoon, as we knew it, has come to an end. Melbourne's winter culture has been dominated by the action on the football ground. The suburbs fought it out as Lions, Tigers, Demons, Dogs, Swans, Kangaroos, Bombers, Blues and Hawks. Each had their own ground, decked in their own colours, peopled with familiar faces. After this weekend, there will be no more 'home' games in Melbourne. Two football grounds are closing in order to increase profits. In their place is a new multi-purpose stadium, in which even the weather is controlled. While the closure of Waverley Park in the outer suburbs attracted a protest crowd of 72,000, the demise of Victoria Park milked the greater volume of pathos. For 107 years, Collingwood had played at Victoria Park. Even when this working-class club was in poor form, visitors found it difficult to win here against such a fiercely parochial crowd. Yet Collingwood supporters understood the vanity of victory. For many years, the team followed the same script. During the home-and-away season, they would play superbly, thrashing the opposition at home to rise to the top of the ladder. Despite this good start, Collingwood would inevitably fail where it counted, at the official finals venue, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. So predictable was this phenomenon that a word has evolved to describe it. As regular as blossoming jasmine, Melbourne's spring would bring on the 'Colliwobbles'. You could rely on the 'Magpies' to flounder when it mattered. It is the story of the underdog---the story of its working-class supporters, traditionally Irish Catholic, with recent injections of Rembetika Greeks. But not in 1999. For the second time in the club's history, Collingwood was looking to win the 'wooden spoon', the bottom of the ladder. The team that would make this happen is its antithesis---Brisbane. The Queensland capital had no tradition of Australian Rules football. It was colonised by the Australia Football League for the sake of television spectacle, to be watched by sports potatoes in the southern states. Worse, when a football neighbour of Collingwood, Fitzroy, fell into receivership, it was 'merged' with Brisbane, which promptly stopped winning games. They were last year's wooden spooners, but this year's premiership hopefuls. Worse still, the man who turned Brisbane's fortune around was Leigh Matthews, who had previously coached Collingwood to its only premiership in recent decades. In front of its diehard supporters, in its last home game ever, Collingwood lost badly. Immediately after the final siren, the ground's speakers blast out the Brisbane theme song. It is a version of the old Fitzroy theme song, which was to the tune of the Marseillaise. In the 'original' version, the call 'Marchons!' was neatly replaced by the chorus 'Fitzroy!' While it would have been sensible to substitute this with the name of the new club, the merger conditions meant that the title 'Brisbane Lions!' had to be used. The result is un-singable, which is not really the point any more: Brisbane supporters are more likely to get off the couch and put a pizza in the microwave after their win than to punch the air with the crowd. The response is understandably hostile. Moans of humiliation echo around the crowd and the administrators cut the song out of pity. In its place, they play a rock anthem specially written to appease their disenfranchised supporters. The forced confidence of 'The Black & White Army' only deepens the wound. > Week after week, day after day, > > We live and we breathe the Collingwood way. > > We are at every game, day or night, > > Waving the flag, our blood's black and white. > > Mother to daughter, father to son, > > The choice is here, the tradition lives on. > > We're dyed in the wool, completely one-eyed, > > And we say, > > We are the black and white army, > > We say 'Go pies!' > > ... in the wind or rain, win or lose, > > We're still in the members, how about you? > > They took us away from Magpie land, > > 'cause no one could beat us in front of our stand, > > But we don't care, we'll go anywhere, > > And we'll say ... In filtering tribal loyalties through customer relations, this mock anthem attempts to sell the expulsion from Victoria Park as yet another challenge to the underdog club---Collingwood had to leave because they were too good. No doubt the management are hoping that this will make it easier for the supporters to continue the fight elsewhere. The crowd at the far end of the ground suspects a swiftie from their bosses. Behind them is a tiny stand filled with less than a hundred anonymously suited people. Whether they are sponsors or not, they are certainly a different class. One diesel-powered voice booms out to his mates: 'See up in there, the toffs!' And then he berates them directly, 'One good thing---they'll be able to pull *this* down ...' Like an ancient rusty sword, he brandishes class rivalry, '... then you'll never know what it's like to be in a *real* football ground. You'll know that all you did was take space from the *real* supporters.' As he is scolding the sponsors, the club president starts addressing the crowd. Eddie McGuire is a double-breasted game-show host who provides the people's face for the Australian Republican Party. He offers the soothing face of an average bloke, useful for forwarding the interests of his many business involvements. McGuire is a Pied Piper figure in the demise of innocent Melbourne, luring crowds with promises of personal wealth and success into the world of exploitation and hyper-consumerism. In many ways, McGuire is what many people had to vote for in November, when Australians made the decision whether or not to cut ties with England and become a republic. 'McGuire the Messiah' comes the sarcastic cry. This is too much from the sponsors, who loosen their ties and scream back 'Shut up'. Drowning out the president's address, the Rabelaisian howl continues 'I'll never fucking shut up!' Flanked by his sponsors, veiled Emirates stewardesses, McGuire leads the crowd in the final performance of the club theme song, 'Good Old Collingwood Forever'. Of those four words, on this occasion, only 'Collingwood' rings true. As a further act of crowd appeasement, the club flag is lowered and given military escort out to McGuire in the centre of the ground. He promises to raise the flag on the new ground, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in the 'new millennium'. Finally, to cool the crowd down, an electronic screen suspended in mid air by a crane shows a video of the club's proudest moments. To the accompaniment of the schmaltzy 'Con Te Partiro' ('Time to say goodbye') by Andrea Bocelli, the crowd watches slow-motion footage of their heroes rising in the air to take spectacular marks. Over the tenor's soaring voice, we can hear the roar of the crowd recorded from that time. Despite the artifice, this for me is the most moving part of the whole event. The mud at our feet, the flushed bitter faces of the crowd, the screen glowing in mid air and the echo of distant triumphs---it circumscribes a mythic theatre I can imagine nowhere else. It isn't like a movie, or a rock concert, or a book. It is like ... football at your home ground. I remembered my own weekly ritual, the Friday morning reading group when a few hairy scholars would gather together in someone's university room to pour over works by dead German males. One idea that lingered with me came from Heidegger's later writings, when he outlines what he calls the 'fourfold', in which mortal, immortal, earth and heaven come together to constellate a primary moment. While not wanting to be too German about it, the demise of Victoria Park provided for me the clearest instance of that fourfold---crowd, heroes, mud and screen. What follows is the *de rigueur* ritual of any Melbourne home-and-away football game. The crowd races on to the grass, freshly ploughed by their hero's boots. This time, however, it is different. Whereas usually the crowd falls into small groups for a frenetic 'kick to kick', this time they go straight to the sacred turf. By the time they leave the ground, most supporters have clods of earth in their hands. Here is privatisation in its raw form: the public body is divvied up by its members in a collective sparagmos. As Australians partook in the great Telstra share grab the year before, now they devour the very ground of Victoria Park. #### **Tram Neverland in Preston** In the penultimate scene of *Malcolm*, a tram disappears over a hill, revealing one of the very few wide-angle shots in film of Melbourne's suburbs. This view of the north is one of the many scenes that were filmed in the Preston tram workshop. Today, the workshop remains one of the few remaining public assets yet to be privatised. It is the home of the W-class tram fleet, Melbourne's tourist icon that has been in service since the 1920s. Today the Preston workshop is like an Atlantis in a world submerged by economic rationalism. To enter the workshop is to step back into the 1950s. Walls display the ornate MMTB symbol and signs quote imperial measures. Workers in beanies take a break to warm their hands over a pot-bellied stove. If called on, they could start building the W-class trams again using all the original equipment, including a bench for silk-screening destination rolls and the original 1920s crane for lifting heritage vehicles. Sixteen acres of tram nirvana. On paper, the appeal of Preston may seem limited to Gunzels like Malcolm. However, the long history of trams as Melbourne's 'urban theatre' is reflected all around the site. The Tudor-style 'Melbourne Room' still features the gaily decorated stage that hosted 3DB's *Lunchtime Funtime* with Bill Collins in the 1960s*.* The remarkable *Transporting Art* series of trams decorated by artists (1978-1982) all originated from Preston's paint shop. Today, it produces cars for the *Trams on Parade*, which has become the centrepiece of the traditional people's festival, Moomba (a local Woi wurrung word conventionally known as 'let's get together and have fun', or more literally 'up your bum'). The man ordained by Nadia Tass as a 'real Malcolm', Norm Cross, still works here. As well as being a walking encyclopaedia of trams, Norm embodies the comic spirit of the workshop. One of his roles as a fitter was to service the tram bells. He recalls one of his impromptu concerts: 'I was playing a tune one day and the boss put his head out of the window and said, "That's a lovely tune Norm, do you know how to play Tom Dooley?" I said "I can't do it," and he said "Well I'm sick of that bloody tune so shut up!"' It is the kind of place where men can occasionally be boys. And trams can be people. Special treatment is given to 'old 1041', the 1973 proto-Z-Class built totally in the workshop. 1041 broke down tragically on its official debut and remains the workshop's Miss Haversham. Norm gives 1041 a friendly pat and a chorus of 'Happy Birthday'. Other veterans are still around. The superintendent is a waxen-haired Brian Carter, a regal kind of bloke who tries to hide his irreverence with little success. One of Brian's proudest achievements was to introduce artists into the workshop. He has a story for each of them. The painter Cliff Pugh he recalls as 'a hard man when he first came in, but then something happened and he was a good as gold.' Brian accompanies 'something happens' with a wiggle of thumb and forefinger to suggest that a trip to the pub helped turn things around. How did it escape the asset-stripping 1990s? Preston has been in the 'too hard' basket for a long time. As a unique asset in the transport system, it could not be sold off to either of the new private operators without granting one an unfair advantage over the other. Under competitive tendering, part of the workshop was given over to a private maintenance business. But without experience in the field they did not last long (their legacy is the flawed braking system that put the W-class fleet out of action for more than a year). Nevertheless, full privatisation seemed inexorable. While Jeff Kennett's surprise loss of government has granted the workshop a reprieve, its future is far from assured. What was once a workforce of nearly 700 is now down to less than 40. In the big picture, it is a dinosaur of economic irrationalism. But in the small picture, they look pretty good.[^186] Transport consultants Booz Allen & Hamilton highlight the 'intellectual capital' possessed by 'the trade skills of the Preston workforce'. Gary Vines agrees, 'It's really quite important to keep not just a building, but to retain the feeling about the place, like the skills and attitude.' Part of that attitude is a commitment to the craft of tram maintenance. Ben Commandeur, a plucky cabinet-maker, is typical of the pride about the place. He reels off an endless list of skills that are maintained at Preston. Each has their own mysteries, like the boat-building techniques used to re-roof a W-class tram. Tram activist Roberto D'Andrea sees the Preston workshop as an opportunity to 'instil pride' and 'promote our culture of place'. He laments 'We've had a dearth of good tram stories lately' but hopes that the workshop might gain support from a state Labor government that is yet to find its legacy. The optimism seems a distinct change from the 1990s, when films like *The* *Full Monty* heralded the end of an era. In that English film, Sheffield's ex-steel workers learn to sell themselves on the open market. The film's message to its post-industrial audiences is to forget welding and learn telemarketing. Economic rationalisation is inevitable. However, with hope in their hearts and innocence in their dreams, the Preston workers have put together a proposal for a tram museum. They put before government a plan for the unused buildings to house displays from major tram collections currently awaiting a home. They proposed a living museum, where visitors can witness industrial crafts in action.[^187] While that proposal is destined for a drawing board purgatory, a revival of Melbourne's lost world of trams has come from a distant, ancient world. #### **To Neverland?** At this stage, in the final piece of *Neverland*, we are due for a reality check. There is danger in an uncritical celebration of the idiot as a local hero set against the anonymous forces of international capital. It's possible to reverse this opposition and see the lost boys as frozen in an imaginary world out of fear of making contact with others. For them, the emotional demands of others are conveniently implicated with the big bad world outside. Resistance to the ways of the world is a failure of nerve, not the active opposition to what is perceived as wrong. Melbourne's innocents can be seen as examples of Hegel's 'beautiful soul', which 'lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence.'[^188] Rather than a figure to be indulged, the idiot may be seen as a victim of a postmodern world that lacks a hard reality to break the egg of childish egocentricity. Certainly Melbourne's Peter Pans can be upheld as romantic idealists, but they could just as easily be seen as creatures of a suburban backyard culture---the do-it-yourself ethos that eschews the political yet meekly submits to the dominant order. These figures can be seen as an ideological screen for the endemic plight of the disenfranchised class of the unemployed. Finding oneself on one or other side of the argument is not the point here. The point is that the one who never grows up provides a locus for a broader argument about the place of local issues in a global theatre. The apocalyptic picture of childhood as part of an inexorable decline of public culture is thus tempered with a particular narrative context. The inner child becomes more than a retreat from public culture, it acts as a figure through which local politics is possible. In an opposition that is familiar to the inner child, it distinguishes the little piggies that go to market and the little piggies that stay home. Of course, it would be overreaching the mark to identify this drama as unique to Melbourne. In a world faced with irresistible modernisation, it is left to the village idiot to carry the burden of local identity. His blindness to the symbolic order provides sanctuary from the logic of late capitalism, whose economic trends find little resistance in traditional ways. Better an idiot than a demagogue to carry the focus of popular discontent with the inhuman machinery of progress. #### **Tramjatra** While innocence may have an uncertain future in Melbourne, it may survive on a particularly exotic form of foreign investment. In the absence of natural features, the role of 'tourist icon' has rested with the city's trams. Tram culture flourished in the 1980s, with a series of commissioned artists' trams, theatre in trams, and a tram restaurant. Melbourne's tram system was a cornucopia of public culture. Its missionaries were the tram conductors, whose public role was to sell tickets, manage crowd flows and occasionally cheer people up. There were a few legendary eccentrics, such as 'Frenchy' who could turn the tram into a circus, but most were able to subtly assert public interest by a brief chat about the weather, or a stern warning to delinquents. While reform was on the cards for a long time, the dehumanisation of the tram system awaited the firm hand of state Premier Jeff Kennett. Under his leadership, not only was the transport system sold off but also ticket machines replaced tram conductors. Constant lobbying to bring back tram conductors finally resulted in a hundred 'tram attendants' being appointed by the post-Kennett Labor government. These are dead symbols of the conductor, no longer responsible for a single tram but coming and going with the hope that someone might ask them directions. Under the management of two competing companies, the tram system has been balkanised along market principles. What was the freely shared public space of the tram is now a consumer space filled with atomised customers. Announcements broadcast throughout the company's tram networks thank customers for using their services. Rather than passengers thanking a public system for providing this means of transport, the story is updated to a contemporary consumer ideology in which the individual customer is flattered and fawned upon. Where once trams sported designs by local artists, they are now obscured by wrap-around full-body advertising for banks, FM radio stations, watches and sweet drinks. It is a grim demise of what was once the symbol of Melbourne's soul. But there is the thinnest of possibilities that something like Melbourne's soul might survive. With unfounded hope in their hearts, a coalition of ex-conductors has persisted in championing the 'human face' of the city. Initially, they tried theatrical resistance, such as a 'Full Monty' of conductors on the steps of the General Post Office. But lately, they have attached themselves to what had been another fading element of the city's calendar---Moomba. Traditionally, Moomba was a working man's festival, with floats representing different occupations and popular heroes elected as Moomba Monarchs. The festival had fallen under the shadow of Melbourne's annual 'international' arts festival in October and the many other festivals that have since been created promoting fashion, comedy, film, and food and wine. But something hopeful evolved in the twenty-first century. In 2000, the city had its first 'Trams On Parade' down the city's central thoroughfare, Swanston Street. Each tram staged a mini morality play. A vegetarian tram had puppets representing bloodthirsty butcher, victim cows, and puppet mince extruded from the rear. A corporate tram contained men in black suits marching in time. Ex-conductors donned their old uniforms and mingled with the crowds. Their role had evolved from practical links in the transport system to expressive agents for the spirit that seemed stolen by privatisation. In 2001, the parade was based on the principle of 'tram as temple'. Here conductors played the role of Egyptian slaves, hauling a pharaoh's carriage along the tracks. A Buddhist tram was gaily decorated in gold with Nirvana on the destination roll---monks sat in the interior silently meditating as it passed the crowds. Then in a burst of colour came a dance troupe of young Indian women doing dances from Bollywood films. They heralded the gaily decorated Durga tram, dedicated to the many-armed Hindu Goddess of Bengal. Durga has become the patron goddess of tram conductors, with ten arms performing all the required functions. Druga was part of an ongoing series of partnerships between the two tram cities, Melbourne and Calcutta. The project's title *Tramjatra* is a Bengali word meaning 'tram journey'. It is designed to weave a cooperative solidarity and cultural exchange between the only cities outside Europe whose tram systems are more than a hundred years old. In Calcutta, Melbourne's eternal connie Roberto D'Andrea organised a series of events to promote the use of public transport. D'Andrea launched a tram devoted to fresh fruit, and another decorated with Indian and Australian cricketers. A musical tram featured singer Usha Uthup, accompanied by state transport minister Subhas Chakraborty. *The Times of India* published an article quoting D'Andrea on Tramjatra, 'We are a *pagla* city making another connection with a *pagla* city.' 'Pagla' is an Indian version of the village idiot, a love-intoxicated mystic. Melbourne's W-class vintage trams are sometimes referred to as the city's 'sacred cows', lumbering beasts who are exempt from the normal practices of consumption---cows are not eaten in India, just as the old trams are exempt from the usual course of technological upgrades. In Melbourne, Tramjatra surfaced as a series of artistic interventions. Architect James Legge commissioned works from Calcutta's Pandal makers, who fashion canvas and bamboo replicas of iconic temples for festive occasions. The Melbourne icon he chose was the Vault, a modernist sculpture by Ron Robertson-Swann which was removed from the city after a public outcry and has since become a symbol of the city's philistinism. Visiting Melbourne were several Calcutta scroll painters. Their patuas are brightly painted images made with poster colours which are traditionally used to ornament the performance of ballad-singing. Dukhushyam Chitrakar sung Melbourne's tram system Tramjatra reflected Melbourne in a spirit of spontaneous devotion totally at odds with its current direction as an international city. Via a marvellous cultural detour, it connects the lost world of working class camaraderie with the traditional village life of Bengal. In Calcutta lies Melbourne's Prester John, and the hope that one day its soul might return. Other such therapeutic global relationships are beginning to emerge elsewhere in Australia---between Perth and Durban, Hobart and Reykjavik, Bendigo and Guangzhou. Each 'stranger city' offers a detour back to the local forms of community that had been ironed out by successive waves of standardisation---from federation to globalisation. Alternative colonisation is not only a speculative journey into the past. It also takes us into a future where the lost worlds of community can be re-imagined. This is a global future, in which a league of folk cultures---such as Shinto, Pagan, Viking and Phoenician---provide a new energy for an expressive movement that breaks through the ever tightening network of capital. It just takes a leap of imagination. # **[PASS THE PIPE]{.smallcaps}** The real and imagined stories of alternative colonisation presented thus far have been filtered through one person's set of desires and fears. Unlike academic histories, 'what if ... ?' studies lend themselves to a broad range of voices. They draw from individual imagination more than institutional archives. Their ultimate medium is not the conference monologue; these 'pipe dreams' realise themselves in playful conversation. Like a masquerade, the creation of speculative histories is designed to bring people together---to present on a public stage the fantasies that are usually kept in private thought. The end result is, I hope, a renewed sense of collective possibility. In order to 'pass the pipe', a number of publicly engaged writers were invited to propose a vision, dream, nightmare or alternative history that responds to the question of what Australia might have been like if not colonised by the British. Below is a selection of these contributions.