Trains

The seagull at Granville Station probably knew he should’ve stopped while he was ahead, but people kept throwing him beautiful warm freshly cooked golden chips, and the pink bits off the donuts, so he kept eating them.

He heard the train coming from a distance and got himself set to take off. He had to get out of the commuters’ way. They weren’t very nice to seagulls. On his reddish little legs with the bulging knees he tried to run down the platform. He spread his wings, but nothing happened. Thinking perhaps he wasn’t getting the right lift from the wind, he turned around and ran in the opposite direction. He was getting desperate but still he couldn’t take off. He was completely puzzled about what was happening to him. After several more goes, he stopped. He was puffed. He tried to get out of everyone’s way as they got off the train. After it departed, the seagull sat sadly on the platform. He had to face facts. Once he was a svelte silver, white and grey that strutted up and down. Now he was too fat to fly.

Several people laughed at him unkindly as he waddled along. Others cruelly threw him another chip. The seagull looked at it for a while, knowing he shouldn’t but temptation took over. Resigned to his fate, he gulped it down in a few seconds, then looked up to the commuters to beg for more.

19 September 2012

******

As I have worked every day of my life since I was fifteen, I went on my first ever holiday with some friends to Singapore. We left by double-decker Singapore Airlines on Friday the twenty-third around twelve, and got to the Aranda Country Club in Downtown East, Pasir Riz by train about five. Just outside the Club grounds were two giant food courts where one could eat, and indeed one did, constantly, for about $3-4 a meal.

One section was Malay (complete with separate prayer rooms for women and men). As I snacked on the crispy roti with curry sauce I watched a niqab-ed woman, dressed in a thickly woven head to toe garment, including socks and gloves, with the tiniest slits in her headwear trying to read a text message. While some Islamic headwear is cultural or fashionable, the niqab expresses the religious piety and obedience to various aspects of Sharia law by the wearer, or so I am told. Her husband sat nearby talking on his cell phone about how hot he was. He was dressed in what a lot of Muslim men have virtually adopted as their global dress code – a Superman singlet, shorts, and a pair of thongs. Unlike women, I guess they are just born holy.

It reminded me of Ireland in the 60s where the Catholic church ruled with an iron fist. The bus conductor would ring the bell twelve times at midday, and everyone’d fall on the floor to say the Angelus as we careered over the mountains. The first time it happened I thought it was to signal a car crash so I was in the brace position.

Above the Downtown East car park was the cinema and the world-renowned Mr Chicken Rice. He prepared the most divine Hainanese chicken I’ve every tasted. I asked for tea O-Kosong (no milk no sugar). It is written as coffee or tea-0 on the blackboard. The waiters were aghast. One young man said, “But your tea will be bitter.” I replied with a laugh, “But it is supposed to be.”

The Liberal-National Party of Australia (the Coalition) recently stated that Australians should no longer be proud of the country we created with our decent wages, high standard of living, unions, social security, medicare, free press, peaceful co-existence and all the rest of the qualities that make Australia a pretty good country to live in. They advocate we accept the same wages and conditions as those in Asian countries, and adhere to the American way of life.  So I asked around to see what those conditions were for ordinary people, in particular, women.

It is mainly women who clean the food court tables. They are very old and very poor. I was told they worked a twelve-day fortnight, more than twelve hours a day, for four dollars an hour. Singapore, like everywhere in the world, is severely divided between those who have, and those who don’t. Although there were lots of posters asking the more financially secure to share and support those who were not, well-off global thinking seems to be more geared to that of the Coalition, and the aspiring mini-moguls who ruled the food court. The kids would grab a toy and walk off with it. When the parents tried to take it from them, they would scream, “Mine, mine, mine, mine.” And they would throw themselves to the ground screaming until the embarrassed parent paid for it in an effort to shut them up, and to save face. I hadn’t realised the mining billionaire influence of Gina, Twiggy and Clive and the Coalition had spread so quickly.

More is never enough.

Roaming out towards the race track at Kranje, I was fascinated by the 30-story apartment blocks, and visited one owned by my friend’s sister. They were beautifully built and well-appointed. The government builds them near the excellent public transport with every conceivable amenity and shop then allots ownership by ballot and need, like schooling or living near elderly parents. Eight thousand were released last week. I think New South Wales built fifteen thousand lots of new housing last year, mainly over agricultural land needed to feed the city. Australians who are priced out of the market remain at home, rent, or couch surf in an effort to combat homelessness.

I went to my friend’s mother’s ninetieth birthday party, which incorporated a nine-course meal. Initially everyone at the party thought I’d strayed into the wrong room so they kept giving me directions on how to find my way out.

Singaporian people were exceptionally gracious to me. Generally speaking, every ounce of diversity appeared integrated and everyone seemed to participate in their society. Their television shows reflected the society they live in quite charmingly. No-one had a heart attack when they saw a Muslim headscarf or thought they should throw them into the sea. Unfortunately one Chinese student made a racist comment on Facebook. He had his scholarship cancelled, and was fined heavily. He also has to work for six years in a Singaporean company in Singapore for next door to nothing to make amends. All that happened to the CEO of Energy Watch here was that he was fired for his racist, sexist comments, which he thought were funny.

The movie The Lady was a very, very sad but lovely Thai, UK, and French production. Most people in it weren’t named for their own safety. Khordokovsky in Russia is Putin’s equivalent of  The Lady. Putin is in the same position as the Burmese Generals. Too late to kill The Khord and Putin can’t silence him but then Putin hasn’t had much luck shutting Pussy Riot up either. Writers and writing seems to have played a large part in both The Lady and The Khord’s political leanings. Pussy Riot sing their own songs.

One day on the platform my friend struck up a conversation with an old bloke from the Mallee district in Victoria. He asked where we came from. My friend said Sydney but Ginny comes from Queensland. He looked at me sourly and said, “Well that’d explain a lot.” I hadn’t spoken at this stage, and after that had no intention of it. I’d already recognised him for what he was. He added, “Well we got rid of that stinking creature up there in Queensland (Anna Bligh). Wiped the bitch out. Got rid of her.” My friend went to catch another train so I got on mine. The old codger got on with me. He said, “I get off at, how do they pronounce it, oh yair. Tampons. That’s its name. Tampons.”  The lovely and well-appointed suburb was called Tampines. I walked away from him and left him there. I am so sick of skinism and faceism, and faceists and skinists.

Singapore has signs everywhere saying deal with others in a kind manner; be gracious to people. Obviously the old white Australian couldn’t read either. Australia, it seems, has two types of travellers. They are “the well-travelled suburban triumphalist” and “the well-travelled cosmopolitan”. (Megalogenis, G. The Australian Moment. Viking. 2012). The former model themselves on the dregs of sports people and their representatives, shock jocks and drunken pub talk, and stick it to everyone they meet because they can. Too many do this by waving the White Australian Union Jack flag in the faces of people whose countries, as former British colonies, were bled-dry by Britain for centuries. They know what the current Australian flag represents – The White Australia Policy. The well-travelled cosmopolitan winces at the xenophobia they encounter and wonders when they will be free of Australia’s rampaging colonial inferiority complex, and complete lack of self-respect so they can join in with the rest of the world. Every day when people heard my accent they told me horror stories of their encounters with Australians. The Gold Coast got the most mention. I spent a lot of time apologising on behalf of the nation. We need to be in Asia, and we are not, not in any way, shape or form, except for making money, and that too smacks of British colonialism. However as America now bars the way at Darwin, we are not so much the lucky country as the gutless country.

Last week I returned to Australia to find that indeed in triumphant PoliticalWorld there is one bitch down, and only a couple more bitches to go. Then we will be back in a Gold Coast-type amusement park where you can visit tatty StepfordWorld to see women adoringly wait on their men and obey their every command, HowardnHyacinthnHansonWorld where everything is white and nothing ever changes, and more scarily BlokeWorld where our lives are dictated by blokes, bloking; a world where you can stick it to everyone, no probs. Obviously they didn’t read my missive telling them that they had to stop living in white ghettos and learn how to assimilate like the rest of Australia has already done. We just need a flag that represents who we are now, not who we were then.

On the flight back I helped the mostly Indian women by minding their babies while they ran to the toilet so their husbands could sleep and eat undisturbed. Next time I must order the vegetarian Indian. The kindly woman next to me kept offering delicious morsels from her tray.

However it is the tiny wisps of smoke, and the smell of chestnuts roasting in their soft shells on small charcoal burners along the street near the train station that lingers most in my mind about Singapore, together with the baffled face of our taxi-driver after my friend yelled for him to ‘chuck a you-ie at the lights’ but then I only had time to scratch the surface.

23rd March 2012

**

At Clyde Station, the middle-aged man dressed in his work clothes of singlet and shorts unstrapped a tiny blonde curly headed girl from her pram, and lifted her out. She put her arms out to me to put her up on the seat where she wriggled around to get herself comfortable. She had a chicken nugget in one hand, and a milkshake in the other. Her cheeks were bright pink, and she had blue blue eyes.

“Can you sing me Lady GaGa and Justin Beiber?” she asked me.

“If you sing with me,” I replied.

We launched into Baby, Baby, Baby, whipped it like Willow, then a couple of Indian men in the carriage joined in with us for some GaGa. The little girl clapped her hands as she sang along.

“She goes to kindy a couple of days a week,” her grandfather confided.

“Gee I’m glad to see the arts are still represented there,” I observed, tongue-in-cheek.

“Is that what you call it?” he responded tiredly.

When an Asian mother came into the carriage with her tiny child perched up high in a chair, followed by an Indian woman with a baby, the little girl was overjoyed. She stretched her hands out to them.

“Hello, hello, hello,” she called out excitedly.

I’d noticed at airports little kids would race up to each other, greet each other like long lost friends, before they’d sit in a row along the wall to await adult instructions. I also noticed they never left a mess. They carefully picked up everything, and put it in its proper place.

The grandfather answered his cell phone. “Yes, I’m bringing her. She’s on the train with me.”

The little girl stretched her hand out to the phone, “Is it my mother? Is it my mother?”  Her grandfather handed her the phone. “Hello, my mother,” the little girl addressed the mouthpiece loudly and confidently. “Hello my mother.” But the call had already been disconnected.

“You’ll see her soon, don’t worry,” her grandfather told her, as the rest of the carriage ached to make things right. He turned to me. “I’ve been her carer since the day she was born. I had to take her to work today because I couldn’t get a babysitter.” The little girl showed me two grazes on her knee as proof. “She’s going to stay with her mother. I’m looking forward to a couple of days break. I work as a landscaper, and the heat is killing me.”

The little girl cuddled up at the side of me, wriggled around for a few seconds, then fell asleep. I put my arm around her to stop her sliding off the seat.

“I grew up in Wentworthville,” her grandfather gestured towards the people in the carriage. “I don’t know if it still exists. All we had in them days was a couple of Maltese, not like it is now, Asians everywhere – overrun with immigrants.”

The little girl slept at my side until I had to leave the carriage, then I rolled her gently over to her grandfather.

“She’s a good little thing,” he said proudly. “She’s no trouble at all.”

“Have a great few days off,” I said as I grabbed the front of the pram for the Asian woman, “and a wonderful new year.”

I helped pull the pram off the train, and then made my way to the escalators. An elderly Muslim woman was trying to step onto the escalators. She’d put her foot out, then frightened she’d step back, much to the chagrin of the young woman with a child in a stroller.

“Make up your fuckin’ mind, you stupid idiot,” she screamed at the elderly woman.

I took the elderly woman’s arm to hold her back from the escalators. The young woman shoved the stroller on, then holding it with one hand she gestured rudely at both of us. She grinned around to get approval from her fellow commuters.

I took the elderly woman onto the escalators. She held on tightly, terrified. My mother was the same on an escalator. I walked her over to the side of the platform so she could get her bearings. With no common language, we shook hands then I joined the others at the turnstiles to get into the mall.

30th December, 2010

**

At Bankstown Station, I waited for a train to take me to Lakemba to meet up with my mate, Davo. We were going to eat at a wonderful restaurant there called Jasmine in Haldon Street. Its streets are full of Middle Eastern women in a wide variety of head covering including niquabs. They were usually holding the hand of a young boy.  The Asian chickie-babe, teetering on killer high heels, dressed in tight short shorts and barely there tops also walk down Haldon Street. It is interesting to see how different women respond to the dictates of our patriachal world.

A very young Australian girl was standing on the platform with her mother. Her feet were shod in rubber thongs. She had braces on her teeth, proudly displayed love bites all over her back, neck and breasts, a tramp stamp, and a very small child strapped into a pram. The girl had given the child an ice block. The girl’s mother, lined and grey in her mid-thirties, was dressed in shorts as well. Her stomach covered in sagging tatts fell over the top of them. Both puffed on cigarettes. They tried to blow the smoke onto the other people waiting for the train. They grinned at me to draw me into approval of their behaviour.

When they didn’t get a reaction,  the young girl’s mother turned her attention to the child in the pram. “Look at the feral cunt,” she announced loudly enough to get maximum attention. “Look at him! Talk about stupid. He’s got ice block all over him.”

The young Indian student alongside me looked at them, eyes like saucers. The elegantly dressed young Middle-Eastern woman on my right concentrated very heavily on her University textbook. Others began reading anything at all while more began to move away from them.

The young girl turned the pram around to see what the tiny boy was doing. “Y’stupid feral cunt,” she screamed at him. “You’re just like y’father. Can’t be trusted to get anything right.”

“Well he got you fucked up first time,” her mother shot back, pleased with her flash of wit. She smiled broadly at me, or rather my white face.

The Indian student smiled nervously at them, shocked to his core. He seemed to be unable to stop staring. Both women rounded on him. Someone had finally snapped at the bait.

“What are you grinning at, four eyes?” the mother snapped.

“Yair,” the young girl snarled. “We’re real a trayins. Not like youse. If youse don’t like how a real a trayin is then fuck off!”

“Yair,” the mother joined in. “We’re full anyway.”

“Yair,” the young girl grinned as she came up close to the Indian student. “Fuck off. We’re full!” she shouted in his face. It was nearly buried in her wobbly breasts that almost fell out of her skimpy top.

They both grinned at me, as if I’d agreed to their behaviour, and approved of it because of the colour of my skin. When they didn’t get a reaction, they turned away. The young girl bent down to the tiny child, snatched the ice block off him, and threw it on the tracks. The train pulled into the station. The child began to scream. The girl and her mother pulled the pram into the train. The last words I heard as the doors shut were, “Shut the fuck up, you stupid fuckin’ feral cunt!”

As the train pulled out, those remaining on the platform exhaled, some smiled at each other, others looked up from their books,  a few high fived. They’d survived another encounter with the real Australia.

(With thanks to the policies of neo-con Coalition PM John Howard, and his cohorts)

11 November 2010

**

At Parramatta Station an old man with a thick accent approached to ask for two dollars. I only had one dollar in change so another young woman gave him the rest. He didn’t say thank you and I didn’t expect him to. He was already ashamed of himself.

The young woman told me she originally came from Fiji, and she was on her way to Harris Park to visit her son. She travelled every week from Liverpool to see him. It took her several hours but it had taken her over three years to get this far. Her parents and his had arranged their marriage. She came to Australia with her husband, unable to read or write English let alone speak it. She lived with her mother-in-law. All his relatives were lawyers.

Just before the baby was due, her mother-in-law told her that she would buy a house for them. When she had her baby boy, her mother-in-law and her husband brought documents for her to sign. They assured her it was for her new house. Later, the nurses told her they had taken her baby. The young woman left the hospital, and quickly went back to try to get into her home.

Her mother-in-law told the young woman she now owned the baby, as the young woman had signed the adoption papers. If she wanted to see the baby, she had to go to court. Her husband told her he had found someone else. Together they would raise the baby boy, as it should be reared, into a man like her husband.

A relative took the young woman in, and she began to learn to read and speak English. Three years later, she had visitation rights to her son. “Soon,” she said, “I will have enough English to get custody. I have got a job, got a divorce, and I am going to TAFE. I will get my son back.”

The train arrived and she got on it. I have no doubt she will make it, but I am unsure about how her son will turn out. We waved goodbye.

8 September 2010

**

At Bankstown Station, Big Whitey, a young agitated  Australian male of average height and an exceptionally wide girth, had dressed in a beer-stained and sloganed t-shirt, shorts, and thongs for his outing. They’d all seen better days.

He pushed a tiny baby in a pram backwards and forwards as he abused the Indian railway employee. The pram blocked the entrance to the train carriage so other commuters couldn’t get on it. Further down the platform an Asian railway employee with a whistle in his mouth was holding his white flag up. It looked more like surrender than a signal to send the train on its way.

The verbal abuse from Big Whitey escalated into shouting the usual white Australian slogans he’d adapted from his fellow Big Whiteys – the radio shock jocks and some members of our parliament. “Fuckin’ cunts; we was here before youse; get back to where youse belong; fuckin’queue jumpers, takin’ our jobs,” and so on. The crowd on the platform turned away. Some raised eyebrows at each other, a few pursed their lips.

I went to get on the train but, when Big Whitey saw the flag and heard the whistle blowing, he knocked me out of the way with the pram, screaming, “Fuckin’cunts! Y’fuckin’cunts! Fuck youse!” as he tried to ram the baby and the pram into the peak hour crowd in the carriage. The pram got jammed in the doors.

The half-naked mother of the baby came to the aid of her partner. “Youse’re tryin’ to kill me baby, youse cunts!” she screamed. Her spaghetti strapped t-shirt left plenty of room for her enormous braless breasts to hang over the pram. Her nipples were clearly visible. The railway employees were trying to prise open the doors to release the pram, one on either side.

“Fuckin’cunts!” Big Whitey joined in with his partner.

From the carriage people began to yell, “Get y’baby out of the pram, you fuckwits!”

But in their rage Big Whitey and his partner had forgotten all about the baby. The Indian man was desperately trying to hold his door back. He looked up at the woman, “Take your baby from the pram, madam,” he pleaded.

“Speak English, I can’t understand ya,” the woman retorted, then she grabbed her breasts and jiggled them up and down in front of his face. “Youse needn’t think youse’re getting your hands on these either,” she snarled.

“Perve!” yelled Big Whitey.

The doors jumped back and the pram was released.

“I’m going to sue youse,” Big Whitey announced as he shoved the pram inside. “Youse need to be sent back to where youse belong. Destroyin’ our woi-a-loife! Y’useless cunts!” The woman gave fuck you signs to the railway employees, “We’ll get youse,” she shouted as the doors closed again.

The Asian employee blew his whistle and waved his flag. The Indian employee looked stone-faced as the train pulled out from the station. The Asian man came up to him and put out his hand. Together they undertook an extremely complicated handshake, ending with much waggling of fingers, then they burst into laughter. I got the next train out.

March 2011

**

At Lakemba Station, the young girl with the angry eyes was dressed in black from head to foot. She spoke from beneath her niqab.  “Your parents have no right to treat you like that,” she protested to the young boy slumped alongside her.

Everyone on the train could hear what they were saying but at the same time they tried to give them the space to say it. An elderly couple across the aisle were among them.

“You have to tell the teachers,” the young girl continued. “You have to get someone to stand up for you.” Her eyes flashed with fire and indignation.

The young boy was pitifully thin. He was dressed in a faded red t-shirt and some jeans that were too big for him. His jet-black hair was cropped short, and a shadow of stubble swathed his chin.  “I can’t,” he said in a soft voice. “They will think I’ve betrayed them.”

“Well, they’ve betrayed you,” the young girl shot back beneath her black veil. “No-one has the right to speak to you like that let alone anything else. Fuck them.”

Everyone on the train sucked in their breath. They expected her to speak like the nun she was dressed as. The young boy hunched in the corner of his seat. It was taking every ounce of his energy to keep himself composed in his young version of a grown man.

“I have to get off at the next stop, Mohammad,” the young girl announced, “but I’ll see you at school tomorrow. We can go to the teachers together. Okay Mo?” She touched him gently as she picked up her bag, got out her cigarettes in preparation for having one the minute she alighted, and left the carriage.

The young boy was struggling to contain himself. He looked at the floor. He tried to look out the window. Nothing was working. The elderly woman nudged her husband in the ribs. When she got his attention she tilted her head a couple of times in the direction of the young boy. The old man levered himself up on the seat in front of him, and made his way over.

“You alright, mate?” he asked in a big buff hearty voice that filled the carriage with kindness.

The young boy looked up uncertainly. He went to reply but words failed him, and to his consternation, he burst into tears. After he sat down, the old man put an awkward arm around him. His wife ratted around in her old black handbag for some tissues.

“It’ll be alright, mate,” the old man told him soothingly. “It’ll be alright.”

The young boy buried himself in the side of the old man. In gulping breaths he cried and cried, at times howling, as the old man held onto him, patting him every so often on the shoulder. His wife looked on anxiously. I came to my stop and, as I got off the train, the old woman came over to join her husband. She pushed the tissues in the young boy’s hand.

Together the old man and woman continued to comfort the young boy as the train pulled out of the station.

20 February 2011

**

I got off at Kingswood Station thinking about the fact that I enjoyed being a modern woman living in modern times. I love a gadget, and today’s technological ease lets me play with it at will. For instance, at the press of a button, my clothes are washed and dried but when I was a kid my mother boiled everything in a copper with Rinso in the back yard. She took it out with a stick then fed it through a mangel before she pegged it on the line. We used to call her Mrs Mangel because the people she put through the rubber rollers of her own personal wringer ended up much like the sheets – standing stiffly to attention, devoid of all moisture.

My food is fresh or frozen, not corned or salted to keep it from spoiling or caged or hung high to avoid flies and dogs. I go to Asian markets that explode with riots of colourful flowers, fruit, and greens that change daily. The people there laugh and talk loudly sharing a delight in life. They are in stark contrast to the bargain-hunting, slightly sour suburbanites that view them with distaste from a distance. Tour buses disgourge Eastern  Suburbanities into the street so they can experience Asia with the trouble of actually going there. They always look slightly scared.

With a flick of a switch television brings the world into my lounge room, and I can talk to anyone in it on Skype. I love walking through Sydney streets listening to languages that chirp like the birds in the trees high above me. People in multi-coloured costumes swirl into cafes like the Kambozza where I eat bright yellow Shan tofu and fried Rosella leaf with my Burmese kuri. I follow it with nga pyaw kyaw pyar yae san (yes I know) and pots of tea. As I watched the people coming and going I realise my swirl needs more work.

“They don’t make the kind of food you and I like to eat anymore, do they?” a woman sitting next to me said dourly, as we caught the University bus. She flicked her head in the direction of a black woman with an enviable and astonishing concoction of silk and feathers on her head that vaguely resembled the colours of the local football team. “You know, like meat pies.”

I nodded in acknowledgement to say I’d heard her. I didn’t agree her. I refrained from comment. Many people assume that because I have a white face I will automatically agree with anything they say. I haven’t eaten white people’s food since I left home at fifeen. Indonesian food saved my life. I also stopped using that pink Cashmere soap which burnt my skin about the same time. Never used soap since.

As the woman continued to chat to me I mentioned I was looking for somewhere to live. She gasped when I told her I was thinking of Cabramatta (dangerous – Asians); around the Western Sydney (dangerous – Blackfellas); Granville (dangerous – Muslims); Lakemba (dangerous – Muslims) or Auburn (dangerous – Muslims, Blackfellas, Maoris and Asians). She shuddered when I told her I was currently living in Harris Park (dangerous – Indians). I told her I had talked to two young white boys there. They were taking their American pit bulls for a walk to scare non-white Australians.

“You need to live in a place where there are only just people like us,” she hissed.

I knew what she meant – one of the Whites Only areas that dot Sydney, but I don’t want to live in a white ghetto. I don’t want other people to live in African-style apartheid either. Never in the history of the world has there ever been a wall of any kind that worked. I don’t want to live in a place where class, wealth, religion, dress codes, skin colour, fear, and jingoism dictate who I speak to or associate with. I don’t want anyone else to live like it either.

Back in the day, most people in the Outback came from dozens of different countries. Your value wasn’t placed on the colour of your skin but on the calibre of the work you put into your job, and the community. If you were drowning would you accept being saved by a blackfella in a boat, or are you going to tread water chanting “Ozzie ozzie ozzie oi oi oi” until John Howard rowed along?

I want people to live the lives they want to live in peace with their fellow humans.

We have approximately one thousand months to live – one thousand months!

I want to live it well. I want to walk and talk with people, eat adventurously, and talk to whoever I want.

I looked sadly at the woman with her tightly permed hair, and the tensed terror in the lines around her mouth.

I could think of nothing more deadly to life than to live it so scared stiff of anything new you’d board yourself up in a Whites Only ghetto with just a meat pie to eat.

I prefer to take my chances. (18 August 2010)

**

A country couple announced to the man alongside them that they’d just come in from out past from Nowra.

The man replied, “Jeeze, you’ve got a lot of problems out there with them queue jumpers.”

The country couple stared him down then each filled him in. “No we don’t. The refugees are terrific people. Most of them have jobs, and once our community realised the churches who sponsored them had dumped them, and made off with the money, and the refugees didn’t know what was what in Australia, we banded together to teach them. Not English so much but simple things like what day you put the garbage out, how to hang your washing on the line, no on the fence and so on.”

The man they were talking to had to rescue himself, so he asked, “What about the boongs?”

The country couple replied somewhat sadly, that no matter what they did, nothing improved. “We build houses, they wreck them. They don’t go to school, they don’t work, they don’t participate in the community at all. Their community is drunk and violent. You can’t get anywhere drunk, can you? It’s very sad.” They got off the train.

8 September 2010

**

She was terribly tiny, barely coming up to my elbow. We had run into each other again on the train.

“How did everything turn out?” I asked, picking up the threads from the best part of a year ago.

She looked stricken, and I knew I’d put my foot in it.

“We split up,” she replied.

“I am so sorry.” I knew she had desperately wanted a baby with her husband.

She struggled with her thoughts for a long time before she continued. “You knew we’d sold our house to travel down here by car. I didn’t want to sell. I loved my house. But he wanted to be with his mother. When we got to the unit we were going to rent, I picked up my purse to go to the boot to start getting our stuff out.” She stopped for a second. “Then he rolled down the window and said, ‘Our relationship isn’t working.’ He drove off. He left me on the footpath.”

I hugged her for quite a long time. Trust would take a lot longer to regain.

8 September 2011