Sawtell

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A Quiet Day In

Published by Matthew Davidson on Sat, 23/10/2021 - 1:24pm in

I'm back to work on Monday, after two months off recovering from surgery. I'd been overdoing it a bit on the exercise front, trying to make up for months spent flat on my back, so on my todo.txt under "Wed 20 Oct" I'd written "quiet day". It was cloudy, with a little bit of rain, so a perfect day for catching up on light chores and a bit of reading.

Then, as I was doing the washing up, this happened:

I couldn't record more than a few seconds of the storm at its' height, as it required some serious Marcel Marceau work to prevent being immediately blown back from the doorway.

I've never seen hail like it. Normally when a cold front hits moist air, you get a few minutes of hail before the storm loses it's sting and settles down into heavy rain. But on this occasion, the hail just kept coming. Before long, the Aloha carpark was at least four inches deep in it.

As usually happens in anything but the gentlest shower, the storm water drains immediately backed up, and runoff from the hills behind us started to etch a channel through the pack ice.

If you can overlook the shredded foliage and shattered lamps, the neighbourhood began to look positively festive.

As things began to settle down, my phone started pinging. The shopping centre where I work had been closed down until it could be cleaned up and structurally assesed.

Oh, great. I've been off recovering from surgery for eight weeks, and was due back Monday. My imminent return appears to have jinxed the building to the point where the roof caved in. It (the collapsed roof, not my return to work) made the national and international media.

The messages from work continue: Part-timers like myself may be needed to help clean up, or else at the store in town to deal with the overflow demand. Implied: casuals can go hang - no work for you.

(There's a few dozen on the payroll in my department: one or two are full time employees, the rest are part-time - with minimum contract hours that would not cover the cheapest rent available in the area, or casual - with no minimum hours. This arrangement guarantees a satisfyingly desperate servility from the labour force.)

As my friend Ruben observed, the universe is telling me I need a career change.

The next day I set out for a sticky beak around the neighbourhood. There's still plenty of ice wherever it's been sheltered from the sun and the wind. State Emergency Services are swarming about, clearing ice from roof gutters, throwing tarps over shattered skylights and solar water heaters, and demolishing collapsed awnings.

Nature has turned suddenly Autumnal, except that it's Spring, and none of these trees are deciduous.

Nothing like a walk on a carpet of shredded eucalyptus to really clear those sinuses.

The beloved workplace is indeed closed for the duration.

I went out of my way to bump into some of the less laddish of the lads from work. Incredibly, as best as I could make out from the hyper-masculine grunting, it appeared the plan was that we'd be up and running for home deliveries and click 'n' collect within days, and ready for in-store customers soon after.

I had assumed we'd be out of action for weeks, at the very least, while centre management fixed the roof. Silly me. Centre management have no intention of actually fixing the roof, because they have never fixed the roof. In the lightest of showers it is up to the individual stores to position buckets as needed. In extreme cases, where the sodden interior ceiling gives way such as in this staff lavatory earlier in the year, workarounds will be implemented like so:

Disaster preparedness for the twenty-first century: expect the unexpected, but expect the unexpected to occur long after you personally have moved on to another scam, so it will be somebody else's problem. This from the ideology that also brought you a global pandemic. Thanks, neoliberalism!

Meanwhile, there are plenty of opprtunities for freshening stale brands with a logotype makeover.

There's a pleasingly novel copper hue to the countryside.

And water views have never been more open, if unnervingly overlaid with a Brothers Grimm vibe.

Still a couple of months left in 2021. Can't wait to see what's coming next.

The Saga of F-bomb Freddy, Part One

Published by Matthew Davidson on Mon, 11/10/2021 - 1:49pm in

My neighbours, here at the Aloha Home for Deadbeat Divorcees, are a colourful lot. As a rule I've ried to keep out of their way for the last two years. I'm not actually rude, you understand. I smile and nod. I just don't talk, beyond the occasional "good morning", etc. That polite aloofness is how F-bomb Freddy came to suspect me as an obvious snitch.

As I generally don't talk to them, I rarely learn my nighbours' names. When I have to think about them, I use the names I've given them myself for internal reference. As tenancy here is overwhelmingly a matter of unfortunate circumstance rather than choice, a lot of people have come and gone: Boom Box Barry, Zen Ken, Breaking Bad, the Care Bear Kids, Surfing Steptoe, Thumper and Boyband, and so on.

The most memorable, by sheer dint of his desperate need to make an impression, was F-Bomb Freddy.

Freddy was one of those farking people who farking says farking farking all the farking time. His body language strongly suggested that he'd spent some time in prison; that or, less likely, an elite boys' school. Ever-mindful of social rank, he spent half his day swaggering and strutting about like a cockerel, and the other half slinking, glancing nervously over his shoulder as though fearing that he was about to be caught out for whatever past imprudent act was currently preying on his mind.

He occupied what had been the manager's lodgings back in the days when the Aloha was a motel, and had absorbed some of the proprietorial manner appropriate to the tenant of the largest unit in the facility. He always seemed to have a flatmate, but the cohabitation rarely lasted more than a few months before disintegrating into a fistfight in the carpark, followed by a shower of personal effects from the balcony. Yet somehow another flatmate arrived to take the last one's place before you knew it. Each had a shaved head, little in the way of teeth, and a baroque efflorescence of tattoos.

His only constant friend was Mayor McWheeze, who occupied the unit directly below mine. When Freddy wasn't patrolling/slinking about the perimeter in shorts and thongs, or skimming leaves from the common swimming pool to (in his mind, at least) earn his keep, he was holding forth to McWheeze.

Mayor McWheeze was a stupendously unhealthy man; one of those who prefer to approach the art of not dying at the highest degree of difficulty possible. He was almost perfectly spherical in shape, with a voice which started low down - somewhere about his navel - before rumbling up a congested windpipe, doubling back in frustration at a slack, toothless mouth plugged by an omnipresent smouldering cigarette butt, and at last gently seeping out of his nose like politely-suppressed flatulence.

In order to keep a firm footing on the wobbling tightrope which was all that separated near-death from actual death, McWheeze rarely left the table he'd set up at his front window. From behind flyscreen, he had a magisterial view of the only entrance to the complex, and took a keen interest in comings and goings, cheerfully saluting all in a manner which made one feel disconcertingly like Patrick McGoohan in the Prisoner.

In his own mind, Mayor McWheeze was the bright shining star at the centre of a seaside Bloomsbury set. In reality, his days were overwhemingly occupied in dispensing homilies to soothe the wounds from whatever slings and arrows F-bomb Freddy presently felt most outrageous. From upstairs I was mercifully spared the details, receiving only the gist via the to and fro of bitterly spat obscenities and mollifying emphysemic rumbles.

At the start of my tenancy, I wasn't much bothered by Freddy's alarmingly powerful stereo system. As a rule, Australians don't like to know more than a few dozen songs, any of which you can hear any time of the day in any suburban shopping mall. Conspicuous consumption often manifests as hi-fi equipment, so having one's bones rattled of an evening by the bass notes of the same songs over and over again must be accepted as merely the price of entry to suburbia.

However the verve with which Freddy enjoyed the Great Australian Songbook was somewhat disquieting. It had never occured to me that it was possible to whoop and yee-haw in exuberant joy along to the works of Billy Joel, Dire Straits, and the Eagles. Yet somehow Freddy managed to do so. With, it seemed with each passing week, increasing frequency and intensity.

I like to think of myself as a tolerant sort. I thought it not unreasonable to surmise that perhaps Freddy was nursing a broken heart and, having been spurned by some lady — or indeed gentleman, he was proving to himself that he had much left to live for, including slapping a thigh and hooting like a klaxon whenever Greatest Aussie Pub Rock Favourites Vol. 1 worked its' inevitable way around to Working Class Man.

Out of this desire to make allowances for a little high-decible self-care, and also a keen interest in finding a reason not to provoke someone who appeared considerably less reasonable, and more practiced in pugilism, than myself, I sought inside knowledge from Mayor McWheeze. One evening, as the keening strains of Sweet Child O' Mine etched visible ripples in the asphalt of the Aloha carpark, I stood by his window and asked, as casually as I could whilst shouting over the din, "What's the story with your mate over there?"

The hitherto relentlessly genial McWheeze turned dour, even going so far as to remove the cigarette butt from his mouth and stub it out. Possibly in an ashtray. It was impossible to tell through the flyscreen at dusk. "He likes a drink. Enjoys a bit of music," he pronounced at length, before lighting another cigarette to signal the end of the matter.

Ah. Jolly good. Just an obnoxious arse, then. "Is there anything you could do about it?"

He drew on his fresh cigarette for as long as his severly compromised lung capacity would permit, and gazed into the delicate tracery of burst capiliaries at the back of his drooping eyelids. "You could try writing a letter to the strata body."

"Right." Thanks for being so helpful. I will indeed correspond with a handful of people empowered to say "Stop it at once, or we shall be forced to ask you to stop it once more." I went back upstairs and shut all the windows.

Later that evening, Neil from the Young Ones, residing a few doors up the first floor landing from Freddy, had the temerity to slink over and knock on Freddy's door. He was tossed back like a leaf in a gale of full-throated farks. As Neil, on his heels and suddenly finding himself back at his own door, slipped inside, trembling, Freddy came out onto the balcony to address the gallery of twitching blinds.

"ANY OF YOUSE OTHER LOWLIFE FARKERS WANNA FARKING GO AT ME, YOUSE FARKING MAGGOTS?"

And thus mollified by the comparative silence of nothing but passing vehicular traffic and the lazy trotting of A Horse With No Name, Freddy returned to his lair.

After an hour or so, with no sign of the festival of easy-listening rock abating, Mayor McWheeze, motivated by some glimmer of community spirit, left his customary seat and waddled across the carpark.

He had no hope of ascending the stairs to the first floor landing, so he stood below, calling with increasing volume and urgency "Freddy… Freddy!"

I couldn't hear much of the resulting conversation over the J. Geils Band's 1982 smash Centrefold, but it was clear that Freddy transitioned from curiosity to shock, to outraged betrayal, and finally an explosion of fire and brimstone farks that had McWheeze skipping back to his flat as though peppered by buckshot.

At this final egregious violation of the sovereign Aussie male's right to feel the bassline of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer reverberating deep in his substantial loins, Freddy seemed fit to rend his garments, had they not been pretty thoroughly rent already. Instead he spun on his heels, and bellowed one final, desperate "FAAAAARK!" to nobody in particular before slamming his door behind him.


The next morning, Freddy was back on McWheeze's doorstep, the two exchanging politely convivial farks like characters in a Jane Austen novel.

There's something deeply disquieting about the aloof cameraderie between Australians who consider themselves mens' men. There's a sense of things understood but unspoken, seeming to hint at dark, soul-eating secrets; of tramatising initiation rites, pacts, threats, and decades-old unspeakable crimes. At least that's how it appears to me.

A few days later, I was sitting out on the landing with my laptop. Kitty, my darling fluffy grey feline familiar, had got it into her head that it was dinner time at two-thirty in the afternoon, so in the face of her implacable entreaties, I had no option but to put myself on the other side of the lounge room window in order to get some reading done.

Zen Ken, a petite, tanned, and alarmingly fit gentleman who eschewed shirts and footwear, and was in the habit of rising early to sit out on the back lawn cross-legged to greet the dawn, stopped by on his way downstairs for a spot of impromptu mindfulness among the stand of banana trees behind the pool. He asked me how I was settling in and what I thought of the place.

"It's fine, apart from…" I glanced in the direction of Freddy's flat, "the odd colourful character."

"Oh, I think he'll be pulling his head in from now on," he smiled, "After that letter to the strata body."

Oh, dear God no. I couldn't imagine anything more calculated to elicit Freddy's ire than a window-faced envelope and the use of the menacingly passive voice ("All residents are reminded that…"). Still, it was nothing to do with me.

"Your cat seems to want your attention," Ken observed, and went on his way, accompanied by the hum of finely-tuned chakras. No sense in wasting the best mind-emptying hours of the day in idle chit-chat.

I love a reasonable degree of uncertainty. I'm miserable out in the suburbs, because in the city you feel that at any moment anything might happen. Nothing ever does, but the potential is electrifying. However that's a different kind of uncertainty to the knowledge that you have an explosion coming, and you just don't know when it will arrive.

One morning, while getting ready for work I heard a knock on the door, shortly followed by the unmistakable "whomp" of a sheaf of paper hitting my doormat, and seconds later the beeping of a reversing delivery van, long gone by the time it took to walk the length of a very, very small flat.

The contents of this A4 window-faced envelope were at least a hundred pages thick and it was addressed to Freddy at unit 21. Mine is unit 20, where the line of rooms runs out, so it wasn't at all unusual for lost postmen (and once, a pair of police officers in armoured vests) to ask for the location of 21, over at the opposite end of the landing, next to unit 12.

I had so far managed to avoid any interaction with Freddy beyond nodding hello, but in the circumstances there was no alternative to being neighbourly. At least it clearly wasn't from the strata body. No consortium of landlords would take the time to devote over a hundred pages to anything.

The door was answered by a young man I'd never seen before. Did Freddy keep him in a cupboard?

"This is for here. Postman left it at my place."

"Oh, right. Thanks."

Crew cut, tattoos, crumbling teeth: Freddy definitely has a type. I never saw him again.


Freddy had just bought himself a new ute (the Australian term for a sedan-sized truck Americans would call a "pickup"). Gleaming white, like something out of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Gallactica. Lord knows how he could afford it; Freddy didn't seem to work.

I grew to love the absence of that vehicle. Freddy's unit being at the entrance to the complex, it was parked at the very front, and could be seen from a hundred metres away. When returning from work of an evening, my heart always sank to see it. I don't know why. In retrospect, it's clear that as he had no need, or particular desire, to go anywhere, it's absence could only mean that he was out purchasing a carton of cans of rum and cola, prior to filling a rotisserie of CD platters with the fruits of the bargain bin, cranking up the volume, and hitting the "shuffle" button.

Returning home one evening about a week after my little chat with Ken, I heard Freddy already in full swing before I saw his ute. I didn't know if Freddy was partial to any drugs other than rum and coke, but at the very least he was definitely one of those people who use alcohol to get wound up rather than to wind down. Quite apart from giving we mild, decent alcoholics a bad name, that class of drinker scares me.

I hurried up to my flat, keen to remain unobserved, though I'd hardly made it through the door before robust exchanges of opinion began echoing across the car park. By the time I'd served Kitty her dinner, the arguments that Freddy was simultaneously conducting with multiple interlocutors, like a chess grand master, had reached record-breaking intensity.

I drew the blinds. My neighbours all had curtains and/or venetian blinds, but my unit was kitted out with roller blinds. These were wonderfully low-maintenance, but had to be raised to at least half-mast if one wanted any fresh air or natural light. Positioned as I was at one end of the top row of units, with three big windows, it was rather like living in a giant illuminated fishbowl. When signing the lease, I reasoned that if somebody had any desire to watch me doing the washing up, or to stand out on the landing, nose pressed to the glass to enjoy the spectacle of an old wreck sweating and snoring though a humid summer night, that was very much their problem. This opinion had been under review for a while now.

The agitation outside was starting to sound as though an element of physical contact had worked its' way into proceedings. Concern for the welfare of my neighbours led me to open the front door and take a look.

Freddy was standing near the top of the stairs leading to his door, and I was relieved to see that it was unlikely he'd just pushed someone down them, as he was vigorously summing up his assessment of the character of Boombox Barry, for the latter's moral edification.

On noticing me framed in the light of my doorway, resplendant in business socks, boxer shorts, and burger-flippers' polo shirt, he swung round and thrust out an accusing finger.

"And YOU! If you've farkin' got something to say to me, whyn'tya come over here and farkin' say it to my face, ya cat-farker!"

The customary colour (a kind of mottled green-grey) drained from my haggard face. Oh, brilliant. He thinks it was me that made that farking — sorry, I mean that blasted — complaint to the strata body.

Freddy leaned over the railing, and dropping his vocal pitch for dramatic effect, announced in a low rasp, "I've got my farking eye on you, ya c**t!"

Unlike most of my neighbours, I lack any of the zest in my emotional repertoire that would enable me to respond with matching vigor, and so somewhat at a loss, I took a step back and closed the door. Freddy moved on to his next target without missing a beat.

Kitty had finished dinner, so now it was cuddle time. The fact that Freddy had chosen to make a point of Kitty's existence (and also, in passing, his unsettling explanation for why he thought anybody might want to keep a pet) unnerved me.

Being six foot two, and typically sporting pretty threadbare attire, I've had the luxury of living my adult life without much regard for my personal safety. I've strolled merrily late at night through some notorious precincts with blithe unconcern about being singled out as a target for assault and/or robbery, and am well aware of my privilege in that regard.

By drawing attention to Kitty, Freddy had struck at the heart of that complacency. After nearly fifty years on the planet, my major moral obligation was to that adorably vexatious ball of fluff. She was also my sole motivation: after a number of very difficult years, I was managing to keep it together for the sake of Kitty. And we were very happy in that condition. We were very nearly one person, except that no one person, at least in my experience, cares for themselves as Kitty and I cared for each other.

And that dim, foul-mouthed, petulant man-child was somehow cunning enough to identify her as my critical vulnerability. In doing so he had upset everything.

Continued in part two.

I'm on Holiday!

Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 02/02/2021 - 6:57pm in

Today was a day off from work after five long, tiresome days in a row. Slept in till 10am and skipped breakfast so that I could justify the indulgence of a pizza picnic down at Bogan Bay.

So, on my day off I walked back up to work and bought a five dollar cheese-smothered flatbread and a six dollar bottle of bubbly. I was planning on a five dollar bottle of red, but this is the kind of wild extravagance I'm now allowing myself.

You see, I'm on holiday.

I had an epiphany last week (sitting down; I always sit down when I'm having an epiphany as it's less potentially messy than standing up). I don't need to live in this awful place any more.

I have enough savings to get me back to Sydney. There is nothing I have here that I can't get in Sydney, and plenty there that I can't get here. Yes, the latter includes Covid, but Covid is going to be with us for another couple of years (at least - on and off), and while it's nice to have the luxury of not having to wear a mask, and feeling free to cough without burying your face in your armpit, it's not worth the rest of what living in Reejnal Straya entails.

I don't want any of this. I don't want to trudge to and from my part-time near-minimum wage job over pedestrian-de-optimimised terrain in permanently mouldy safety shoes and mud-spattered trousers. I don't want to deal with squat, stout old men, who wear shorts and thongs all the way through winter as a declaration of cultural identity, and greet me with a toothless grin and "G'day, big fella!" before asking where the eggs are (aisle 11).

I don't want to feel I have to sleep with a kitchen knife by my bed when one of my neighbours who has been simmering for a while seems to be approaching boiling point. I don't want to have police in body armour, bristing with holsters containing implements of varying lethality wandering up and down the landing outside my flat/cell.

I don't even want the things that I could get here if I had a socially-inclusive wage. I'm a Dickensian street urchin pressing my nose against the shop window and being slightly revolted by what's inside.

In the dying days of my marriage, my wife insisted on taking me and our joint credit card out for a weekly "date night", at one or another restaurant in Sawtell. This consisted of her buying the most expensive cocktails on the menu and I gingerly sipping the cheapest beer on the menu, while she gleefully recounted all the personal failings of, and wrongs done to her by, people most of whom I'd never heard of. Then the vodka would kick in, the snarl would settle on her pretty face, and she'd move on to the main menu of my own inadequacies. Not wanting to Make A Scene, I just just sat there and took the abuse and wondered "How is this fun for you?"

On the rare occasions I walk down First Avenue of an evening I can't see how the majority of the conversations in the self-consciously funky cafes and restaurants are any less mean and rancorous. It's some consolation, however, to know how many of the local restauranteurs buy their exotic and expensive delicacies in kilo bags from the frozen department of the local supermarket.

Anyway, that sort of negativity is now a thing of the past. I will be out of here at some point in 2021. I can do it at any time. It would be nice beforehand to get some ducks in a row, peas in a pod, pecks in a bushel, etc., but none of that is strictly necessary.

So that frees me up to look at this place anew, as someone with no skin in the game. I'm just passing through, on a working holiday. Maybe Sawtell will again, as it did in 2004, appear charming.

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Nature is ghastly and has to go

Published by Matthew Davidson on Fri, 15/07/2016 - 5:34pm in

I had to consult the local GP co-operative multiplex today, and as it was bloody cold indoors (defined hereabouts as anything below 20℃), and I had a teensy hangover, I resolved to set off early and have a restorative picnic lunch of fried chicken at Bogan Bay before my appointment. I set up camp at a picnic shelter, opened my laptop with a view to pursuing my lower higher education over lunch, and tentatively nibbled on a soggy chip. Almost immediately I was joined by a magpie.

Magpies are quite intelligent birds. I had been in this situation before, and I'm sure the magpie had been in this situation before. I therefore reasoned that repetition of some terse, likely recognisable phrases ("bugger off!", etc.) would clarify my position vis-à-vis the magpie's implied food redistribution proposal. The magpie remained unconvinced, so I began waving my hat at it, and then chasing it round and round the picnic shelter, until finally it perched on the barbecue in the middle of the shelter and made a great show of minding it's own business. Satisfied, I returned to my study and my junk food. The magpie began loudly warbling.

Soon I was surrounded by half a dozen magpies making menacing advances. I am not easily riled, but I have to say that being thus unfairly outnumbered I was positively livid. I began remonstrating with this gang in no uncertain terms, waving my hands about for emphasis. Which is how a nearby kookaburra, evidently watching proceedings with interest, came to see it's opportunity. It swooped into the now crowded picnic shelter, plucked the greasy piece of fried chicken from my hand, and sailed upward into the treetops to savour it's prize.

I like cities. I like slate paving stones, generous blocks of sandstone and granite, the odd bit of marble, and some concrete and glass if you must. I like street corners that have crossing lights, socialists, scientologists, and schizophrenics. I like wildlife — well, pigeons and rats — to be suitably circumspect and skittish when going about their business. The sooner we get this place comprehensively paved and fitted out with newsagents, railway stations, pubs, banks, dirty book shops, and cheerfully cheap asian eateries with plastic furniture, the better.

Thursday, 3 September 2015 - 11:35pm

Published by Matthew Davidson on Thu, 03/09/2015 - 11:35pm in

One thing about living in Sawtell that gives me the warm fuzzies: When walking along the side of the road, drivers will occasionally stop and ask for directions. Of course this happens everywhere, at least in my experience. (Perhaps I'm just irresistibly attractive and approachable.) But in Sawtell, the driver who pulls up next to you is more likely to ask where you're going and offer you a lift.

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