I fear that I shall vent, this evening. A few days back in Canberra, and my wits are at their end. The place drives me to intense distraction. Not that I’m complaining.
Cyndi noted last year when she and Bob were here that in this wretched city, everyone moves at the same pace - the vehicles all do, too, regulated closely by constantly changed speed limits on wide avenues and thoroughfares that appear to be designed for speeds at least 50% greater than those posted. Then, speed cameras are places in subterfuge all around the town. Everyone, virtually, gets tickets; there’s no alternative, other than to drive at ridiculously slow speeds, in which case yobos in pickups and SUVs haul up right behind you and, if it’s night, turn their high beams on and try to run you off the road.
A couple of weeks ago, when collecting Paul from the airport, I was apparently going 92kph (about 50mph) in a zone suddenly posted 80kph, so a ticket awaited me when I returned to Canberra. A fine of $125 had been levied by speed camera - with no accompanying proof, of course. It was a stretch of road that in any other country on the globe would have a posted speed of at least 110, but discretion is not part of the calculation of the local-government employees who are charged, essentially, with raising a random tax to make big roads on which they can raise more random tax.
My friend Brendan told me this evening that he recently got a ticket, also $125, for going 69kph in a 60kph zone – this amounts to going 5mph over the speed limit. Is a $125 fine for that conceivable anywhere else in the world, save Singapore? The whole thing is made more creepy by the dehumanized technologies in use here, and by the adoption of legislation that frees local governments from any obligation to prove anything. The tickets come in the mail, with no human witness involved in making a judgment, at all - other, presumably, than in some office where some pathetic creature decides that driving 5mph over the limit, while keeping your eye on the road rather than the constantly changing speed-limit signs, warrants branding someone a tort faiseur.

In Victoria, plans are under way to implement random drug testing of drivers, to augment the long-standing practice of random breathalyzer testing, in which scores of cars are channeled off a road into some large parking lot, where all drivers must submit to a test, and where all drivers of cars with, say, a broken turn signal, may be given a ticket for lack of roadworthiness.

In general, this country can really give me the pip. The values that occasionally peeked through the mire of bourgeois complacency and torpor in the mid-1970s – led by the great prime minister Gough Whitlam, before a parliamentary coup with assistance from American spy agencies forced him from office – are long gone. In the place of a cosmopolitan openmindedness that valued intelligence and creativity as much or more than filthy lucre have come greed, aggression, smugness, and more greed. Sounds like the US, but it’s not quite a tawdry as that. At least we retain something of a free press here, despite the arsehole Rupert Murdoch and his mates, who are compliantly, and fearfully, aided by the Howard government, which is intent on pushing out any discerning and dissenting voices. They have help in this. Some papers, particularly The Australian, are hell bent on kissing the conservatives’ arses and doing their muckraking and dirtbagging for them. Today in parliament the leader of the opposition Labor Party accused a journalist at the paper of calling his office and threatening his staff because one of them had dissed an article she had written. It seems plausible.

But as I was saying, anal retentiveness also holds much sway. Often one seems to be in Singapore, only with smugness replacing the more severely punitive aspects of Lee’s vision of polity and comity.

Speaking of which, I’m really fed up with driving around Canberra’s centrally planned streets and suburbs, culminating in “town centers” with no “there” there, just such result of visionless town planning as artificial lakes that attract virtually no human beings, but plenty of ducks.

Before I came back up to Canberra, I went to Harry’s first swim meet, which was a scratch event - that is, it consisted only of heats designed to permit competitors from the various clubs to establish benchmark times for future competitions.
Harry had set a time of 35 seconds for 50 meters, but had never competed before, and was very nervous. He thought he might slip or fall off the blocks, and later admitted that he almost did, while climbing up on them.
With all that, and without a warm-up of any kind, he swam the 50 in 38 seconds, which placed him about midway in the whole section of about 35 swimmers (the best times were just over 30 seconds). Unfortunately, however, he came last in his heat, which is all that he used to gauge his performance and overall worth.
Neddy, however, forgot as soon as the boys hit the water what kind of cap Harry’s club wears, and strained expectantly to follow his brother’s fortunes down the pool. He cheered as the race neared its end, thinking that Harry was in the lead. He was quite sobered to learn a little later that he had been backing the wrong horse.
Still, I’d have to say that Harry did well, considering that my best times, to date, are 30 seconds in freestyle, over 25 meters, and 35 in breaststroke. Today I struggled to outpace a 9-year-old in the latter. I’d given her 5 seconds start, so as not to make it too obvious that I was using her for comparison; I finished about 4.5 seconds after her.

I drove up by the coast, around the southeast corner of the country. The road east from Melbourne is largely though quite boring gum forests, but when you arrive at the southeast corner, the road readily accesses the beaches, including one that is 80 miles long. I had a pleasant sit on some rocks looking back to the west as the sun set, with the beach all to myself as far as I could see in either direction. South is the Tasman Sea, and Bass Strait; Tasmania is 200 miles away.
Then it was dusk, and I drove further east, beginning to head north through temperate rainforests and more gums that closed in on the two-lane highway. The air was full of bogong moths, which are a variety that one can eat, but no thanks – not while whizzing along just below the oddly low speed limit. To the east was the ocean, or an illusion of it, through the eucalyptus boughs.
Fortunately, no kangaroos jumped in my path, and no wombats, which do a car even more damage, crawled across or idled on the roadway.