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Schoolchildren line up for free issue of soup and a slice of bread in the Depression, Belmore North Public School, Sydney, 2 August 1934 (From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales www.sl.nsw.gov.au)
Schoolchildren line up for free issue of soup and a slice of bread in the Depression, Belmore North Public School, Sydney, 2 August 1934 (From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales www.sl.nsw.gov.au)

BooksApril 8, 2020

Lockdown letters #13, Renée: Suffer little children

Guest writer
Schoolchildren line up for free issue of soup and a slice of bread in the Depression, Belmore North Public School, Sydney, 2 August 1934 (From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales www.sl.nsw.gov.au)
Schoolchildren line up for free issue of soup and a slice of bread in the Depression, Belmore North Public School, Sydney, 2 August 1934 (From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales www.sl.nsw.gov.au)

‘Yes, it’s endearing that the PM said that the Easter Bunny is an essential service but I wondered how many kids had a hope in hell of seeing three good meals a day let alone a chocolate egg.’

Read more Lockdown Letters here.

Bob Dylan’s latest, Murder Most Foul, is an interesting and enticing listen. I’m never going to get a handle on it until I have more than two listens. Nick Bollinger is a good guide though. I think of the string of assassinations, JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobbie Kennedy and remember Dylan in 1963 with his prophetic ‘The Times They are a–Changing’…

And there was Woodstock.

I’m the wrong generation for Dylan. I’m not a boomer, I picked him up from my sons as I did The Beatles and Joan Armatrading’s ‘Down to Zero’, and The Band. In the ’60s I began really listening to lyrics. I loved Elvis but the lyrics were pretty ho hum even if ‘All Shook Up’ is a good metaphor. Kris Kristofferson’s early lyrics, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ and ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’, were more like the poems from the poet he was meant to be when, in 1958, he won that Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he also played rugby.

My sons and I disagree over my liking for Doctor Hook and, like everyone else in Aotearoa and the English–speaking world, they hate ‘Sylvia’s Mother’, which I think is one of the neatest pieces of satirical theatre in pop history. But, as Phil O’Brien on RNZ Saturday Night requests says, when his listeners get excited, “it’s only a song people, only a song.”

I hate housework.

I want to whine I’m too old, too short, too busy, whinge about not being able to see properly, but my mother’s eye is upon me. Rose, although she’s been dead for 50 years, still lives in my head. She says, “Stop your grizzling, just do it.” She was always on about soap and water. “Soap’s cheap. We might be poor but we can be clean. Have you cleaned you neck? Down there?” Which was the closest she came to saying that we all had bums and other things that needed to be kept clean.

I’m also thinking about the mid ’80s when Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble persuaded the Labour government to go feral which paved the way beautifully for the National Party, under the financial regime of Ruth Richardson, to nearly finish off the working class by choking the unions.

I never picked fruit for a job but my brother and sister did and my two uncles stole fruit during the ’30s and delivered it to us. It was one of the few times that Rose didn’t growl about manners. She made a cup of tea for Orm and Cliff, took the lid off the old wood and coal stove, got the long fork, made them some toast, then the three adults simply watched us three kids hoeing into peaches like there was no tomorrow. I don’t want kids to go through that kind of thing again but they will and they are. What seems hard for people – boomers, Gen Y or X or anyone – to grasp is that if you start low down in the social scale then when everything else turns to shit, you’re still there at the bottom being pushed even deeper into it.

Yes, it’s endearing that the PM said that the Easter Bunny is an essential service and I loved it while at the same time wondering how many kids had a hope in hell of seeing three good meals a day let alone a chocolate egg.

And Pell walks free. Suffer little children.

I was out peering at Old Port yesterday and a woman passed, stopped, called, “You okay Whaea?” I said I was fine, yes thanks, I had help with shopping, and she told me her name and said, “I’m passing two or three times a week, if you want anything done, just sing out.”

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I guess there’s always the fact that the human spirit of kindness will triumph over most things, especially on a one to one level. When we become ‘they’ we cease to matter. ‘The homeless’, ‘the elderly’, the ‘boomers, ‘Gen X’, faceless, less than human, just blobs. This suits big business and financial interests – they don’t worry about blobs.

I set off for the walk today, yellow beanie (thank you Norma), yellow top, navy pants, bright blue and yellow spotted Munro socks (thank you Caro), navy track shoes with bright pink laces and soles and my yellow and black vizstick. When you’re old – go bold.

Four strawberries from the bins and six smallish ripe tomatoes off the wild one.

Keep going!
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

BooksApril 7, 2020

Lockdown letters #12, Morgan Godfery: Decay, domesticity and doomsday prepping

Contributing writer
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

‘Paint is peeling from the old truck workshop walls. Some days you can taste rust on the autumn wind, like swallowing iron and blood and pollen.’

Read more Lockdown Letters here

IT’S GONE BELLY UP FOR THE WORLD.

I bet the doomsday preppers are feeling smug right now, locking down in their DIY bunkers. The ammunition merchants and the tin can stockists are the gods of the new world. “I told you so.” Yeah, good. OK. Stop saying it. I’m not giving you any credit until the zombies arrive. This isn’t the apocalypse until Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher returns from the dirt, her corpse wriggling through the top layer screaming “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY”. The trading boards would light up, stocks shooting through the roof in London, New York, and Hong Kong. CEOs across the finance capitals would dust off the ouija boards, summoning Joan Quigley – Ronald Reagan’s personal astrologer – and begging her restless spirit to reach out to the old man. Mr President, is neoliberalism dead?

YOU BET.

It’s hard to move about Kawerau without meeting a ghost. I mean, the town is built over top of half a dozen old pā – and at least as many battle sites – but more haunting than that are the 20th century’s rotting industrial sites. Tasman – the largest pulp and paper mill in the southern hemisphere – is running, but on skeleton staff. The old industrial quarter in the town centre is abandoned, partly because of the lockdown but mostly because industry is, well, dead.  Paint is peeling from the old truck workshop walls. Some days you can taste rust on the autumn wind, like swallowing iron and blood and pollen.

Other than ‘rona coming for people in the thousands – death – this is what I fear most: decay. In the 80s and early 90s the fourth Labour and National governments took out the country’s industrial base, removing subsidies and protections and demanding that pulp and paper workers, sawmill workers, manufacturers, and every other export industry compete with low-cost labour in the developing world. The owners of capital were free, both here and overseas, to chase that low-cost labour as well. The result? A booming consumer economy delivering cheap-as-chips products, from wine to furniture. The other result? Tens of thousands of people were thrown off the job.  

In a world where borders are closing, global supply chains are collapsing, and countries are turning inward to meet their internal needs it seems like the worst folly, the dumbest decision ever taken, to destroy this country’s industrial base.

GRANT ROBERTSON IT’S TIME TO DIG CAPITALISM’S GRAVE.

There are very few jobs left around the house for Nan and I to do. We’ve done the gardens, the lawns, the hedges, the eaves, we’ve stacked the wood, I’ve chopped kindling, she’s rearranged the kitchen, I’ve straightened the photos, I’m vacuuming like a madman. I’ve cleaned the bath that no one’s using at least several times now. Domesticity is a comfort, but it’s also a distraction. From politics. From the online. And it imposes an order on a world that’s collapsing. The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, is in ICU, after all, perhaps soon to join Mrs Thatcher.

WHO ELSE IS DOOMSDAY PREPPING? 

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