I’m living in Australia at the moment, but I’m not an Australian. There’s always been too much about the country that makes me feel like I don’t want to join it, or identify with it. 

There’s the racism, in particular.

I’m not talking about the stuff where someone is making conversation and asks a person who is black or Asian, “Where are you from?” Because there’s a possible sub-text of, “If you’re not white, you’re not from here” about it. But it can also be a well-meaning but under-informed person who means, “I think you look fantastic! Where do they make more people like you?”

My point is, it’s always a clueless question to ask, and sometimes there might be a negative racist meaning to it, and sometimes there might not be. But my sympathies aren’t always with the person taking offence. A little bit of polite person-to-person education goes a lot further, and does more good, than all the offence-taking in the world.

Anyway, when I say Australia is a racist country I’m not talking about that kind of thing.

Rather, it’s about the deliberatively, knowingly genocidal history of what has been done to the Aboriginal people. And the incredible, shockingly callous endorsement of that genocide by a fuck of a lot of Australians, once you get them in private. They don’t even need to have a drink in their hand. The day after I arrived in Australia, some quite wealthy, educated guy said to me, “oh, Abos: they should have put out more poisoned flour sacks.” 

Then I was in a Post Office and I saw a police notice. They wanted to know if the public had seen some offender. The ad said, “non-Australian appearance”. What that meant was that he wasn’t white. Then I was talking to a cop, who said it was a pity we’d moved out of the old days when they’d just take Aboriginal young men down to the station and “give them a bit of a flogging”. He was a young cop. By “the old days”, he’d mean “about five years ago”. 

It’s about the fact that life expectancy for Aboriginal people in their own country is fifteen years less than any other statistical group. Fifteen fucking years. 

And so on. And their media is run almost entirely by Rupert Murdoch, and leans so far to the right it’s lying on its side. And “lying” is the word. “Bullying of people who dare to speak out” are also the right words to describe Australia’s craven, contemptible media. 

So I don’t love Australia. I love many Australians, and like a lot of others. But the vibe of the place: No, I don’t love that. 

Now a group of right-wing nutters and church-ridden homophobes are trying to stop marriage equality from coming to Australia. They’d decided to put the issue to a postal survey, which is calculated to favour the group most opposed to gay marriage, that is, the over-65s, while cutting out the group – just about everyone 30 and under – who most favour gay marriage. 

Knowing that no one in that group uses postal mail, or checks their letter box, any more. It’s a “survey” where the homophobes get to have their thumb on one side of the scales. 

So … I’m going to have to become an Australian citizen. Not because I love a sun-burned country. The truth is that I don’t. But I approve of love, and if people want to marry the person they love, I’m not going to let a bunch of heartless bigots keep them from having that right. 

Update:

In the end I couldn’t do it. 

I can’t join a country that does to its indigenous peoples, and to refugees, what Australia does.

So I let same sex marriage win without me.

The Government did its best to bias it in favour of the lunatics on the Christian Right, which includes more than half the current government, but polls started to make it obvious that the goodies were going to defeat the bigots by a humiliating margin. So I don’t feel too bad. But I hope Australia sorts out its racism problem. Soon.

I’m in Dublin. I had an idea, after my father died earlier this year, that I should go to Ireland, to see where I came from, at least genetically.

Statues commemorating the Irish Potato Fame. The starving, beside the Liffey, in Dublin

Both of my parents were of almost entirely Irish stock. Though the people who were my ancestors left Ireland during or shortly after the Famine, they continued to marry other Irish expatriots over the next several generations. Although there’s the occasional Welshman or Scot in my traceable ancestry, it’s basically all Irish men and women.

I’ve always been grateful to my ancestors for leaving. Ireland is still disfigured by the Catholic Church, essentially a corporation for the enabling and protection of child rapists, and for the torture and enslavement of women, the Magdalene Laundires episode being only one example of this.

I’d been in Dublin for about six minutes when I encountered a march of young women demonstrating for the repeal of Ireland’s stupid, cruel and life-threatening ban on abortion.

I make a lousy nationalist. If I’d been living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, I’d always have voted to be part of the United Kingdom. Not out of nationalism: I’d don’t give a fuck what Cromwell did to the Irish three hundred-odd years ago. Or the Elizabethans before that. (Both sides seem to have forgotten the Scots invasion, and the land theft, famine and massacres under Robert the Bruce’s brother Edward, because that doesn’t fit the narrative.) 

I’d have voted to be in the UK because I didn’t want to have the cops, directed by the church, tell me what I’m allowed to buy in a bookshop. I’d have wanted to be able to buy contraception, which you could then do in the UK but not Eire. I’d want a woman to be able to get an abortion if she has an unwanted pregnancy. Fuck nationalism: I only care about human rights. 

So it was sobering to be reminded that Eire’s abortion law is still the one dictated by the Church. Rapists, torturers, murderers and their enablers, still claiming moral authority. Sooner that’s dumped into history’s Dead Joke Box the better. 

Anyway, the pain I cause is consensual, intended to help, to lead to pleasure and other kinds of growth, and never to cause harm. Ireland is full of the traces of the domination of an organisation that seeks no consent, and is entirely indifferent to the pain, suffering, harm and death it causes.

By the way, I’m thinking about pain because after Eroticon, and after seeing Gretel off on the place back to her native land, I went to Dublin and got a cold. My head hurts. Really hurts. My bones feel like I’ve been beaten up, apparently in my sleep, by the secret police. I need to cough all the time, and it hurts like hell to cough. I’ve got chills. God, I’d love a hot flush. 

On the other hand, I’m outside a pub on Talbot Street, drinking coke and watching pretty girls go by. So … silver linings, that’s what you have to look out for.