A state with a hole in its heart
Can South Australians raise our eyes beyond the competing instincts to tear ourselves apart or assert our superiority, asks Richard Zachariah.
Not quite Florence, but wherever you are in Adelaide, the Hills are a comforting presence.
South Australian patriot Max Harris described Adelaide as “Florence on Torrens” – if only he was right.
Imagine all that Medici money washing around Bank Medici in King William Street: no need for the CBA or NAB, the submarines not required, Rundle Street in a Renaissance, the new Royal Adelaide already operating around the clock. The Medici’s private army could handle knockers from the east (keep the lights on – or else), and what a sponsor they would be for the Crows, even Port. They would scare everyone off the park and Danger would be back.
Jay Wilson Weatherill would give anything for the Medici’s patronage. Just dreaming about it would make him feel better, like when his Treasurer fantasizes that the $300 million State budget surplus was real and not earned by selling off taxpayer-funded property. But that’s the North Terrace dream-world – a lovely place if you’re looking for a second reality but, in the meantime, we have a date back on planet earth.
Adelaide is not Florence, nor is it Edinburgh just because we have arts festivals. I have recently returned from the Scottish capital – we wouldn’t want its roads. Getting to Barry Humphries’ marvelous Weimar Republic cabaret show was a live threat to my borrowed car’s undercarriage.
When the deluded Scottish nationalists swept the polls in 2011 they promised not to lift council rates for five years, an immediate passport into power that leaves holes in the road a family car could disappear into.
Jay wouldn’t get away with that – we need our roads patched.
And anyway all comparisons are odious. Florence’s glory is in the past, its air polluted by toxic gasses. There is no political silver bullet in the here and now either. In Sydney Mike Baird went from politician of the year to lemon of the decade while Dan Andrews stumbles around Melbourne in bifocals attempting to unionize everything, including volunteers. Everyone’s got problems – look at Malcolm.
Our dilemma in South Australia is more personal. It’s the hole in our heart
In Australia the political movement is drift then standstill, with politicians stranded on the cliff face of an impossible climb. No-one is paying tax or at least the right people aren’t paying the right amount. Governments haven’t got the funds, and that is true of most western governments. The Liberal’s objective of ‘jobs and growth’ is a joke until the tax delinquency is corrected.
Our dilemma in South Australia is more personal. It’s the hole in our heart, an inherited defect bred by seemingly opposite emotions – lack of self-esteem and smug self-satisfaction. I write of ‘our’ and ‘we’ because I have been a South Australian since arriving from Sydney in 2008. I also claim a father and grandfather being born here and a great grandfather who adopted it after avoiding border protection at Largs Bay in 1855!
So can I go on?
Esteem can be fragile. The Sydney journalists’ joke – “what is the definition of optimism? Adelaide Airport: 38 gates” – can floor some, but why not be of the Barnaby Joyce school? “Let the city folk and elite giggle at me, that way they don’t see the tackle coming.”
Not long after arriving I remember singing the praises of South Australia at a dinner after a magical trip to Kangaroo Island. Following my rapturous descriptions of SA’s well-kept secrets the hostess took aim at me and said loudly that Adelaide “didn’t want either spruikers or tourists thank you very much”.
Admonished, I headed to the Hills for the next eight years living on a farm with grapes and horses, both in serious oversupply. Now I am on the plains and, on the eve of summer, taking life seriously, having fun. We all should. We have been told from afar that it’s a great place to live. Joe Aston, the acerbic Australian Financial Review columnist, summed up after spending Christmas in Adelaide: “It’s a 50-minute drive south to Port Willunga, one of the most spectacular beaches I have ever seen. Perched high above the shore is the Star of Greece, whose balcony affords us commanding views of the coastline. We order Hendrick’s and tonics and Primo Estate’s JOSEPH d’Elena pinot grigio, grown just 12 kilometres down the road.”
Why haven’t our tourism whizzes used the normally caustic Joe to our advantage? Next question.
Spectacular Port Willunga. Photo: Brendan Read
Has anyone ever asked why the winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M. Coetzee chose Adelaide as a place to live and write after leaving South Africa with the world at his feet?
And the Hills are awaiting the return of that prodigal talent, Hannah Kent, the smash hit novelist who’s coming home to Aldgate after signing a $1 million book contract and a few years in Melbourne’s literary inner circle simply looking forward to “a bigger vegie garden”.
Perhaps the answer is in the words of another writer Robert Dessaix who, when defending “being a dilettante and the desire to leave Melbourne and live in quieter Hobart or Adelaide” said: “Melbourne has become so intolerant of anyone not on the make. Just like Sydney. So I no longer felt at home here. At this time in my life I want something gentler.”
And the benefit of living in a Hobart or Adelaide was “that they know they’re of no account so the communities then take on an informed interest in the rest of the world”.
So we live with our eyes wide shut – our hopes and dreams like everyone else’s.
For me, walking or driving around Adelaide, the Hills are a constant comfort. On the horizon is hope – it’s most often there if you look for it. And a hole in the heart is easily fixed last time I asked.
Journalist Richard Zachariah is completing his third book, a sometime romantic social history about the death of Victoria’s rural ruling class. He has lived anonymously in the Adelaide Hills as a farmer for eight years and is now a plainsman.
