only child

“Australia is like an only child,” says my good woman, sometime after midnight. It takes me all of three seconds to see that she is right on the money. As usual.

I arrive at my good woman’s house at seven. A phalanx of females fills her kitchen. My good woman is serving cherry sponge. Her friend Mirta, her daughter Tina and my good woman’s daughter Sasha surround a laptop planning the girls’ trip to Europe in July.

Across the table is Anna, a visiting fifth-year medical student from Norway. Her mother and my good woman were friends before the great Serbian diaspora—to Canada, Australia and Norway—during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Anna’s semester in Australia begins the next day.

Mimi the small-brained Turkish swimming cat preens on the windowsill. Djole, my good woman’s son, is holed up in the farthest corner of her small house.

“Leigh speaks only English,” my good woman tells Anna. The conversations around the table flip from Serbian to English. Anna speaks English with a hydrid Serbo-Norwegian accent unlike any I’ve heard before.

Tina and Sasha will begin their five weeks’ in Europe in Paris. Coincidentally I have my Paris le plan pratique with me because I’m reading a book called Buying a piece of Paris about a Melbourne woman’s attempt to buy a Paris apartment. I’m tracking her across the city.

Eventually the itinerary and dates for the trip are concluded, the sponge is consumed, and I am left alone with my good woman in her newly refurbished and repainted guest room. We talk for hours about how childhood influences determine the resultant adult, about the lack of respect for education and teachers in this country compared to the esteem for teachers, known as professors, in eastern Europe. Finally we arrive at the state of the Australian polity.

     

I aver that Australians expect far too much of government. Everything that goes wrong is the government’s fault; anything that needs doing is the government’s responsibility. A prime minister presiding over a hung parliament is unreasoningly held accountable for promises made impossible by her lack of a majority on the floor of the house.

“Australia is like an only child;” says my good woman, “self-centred and incapable of acting in the interest of anyone but itself.” She has such a sexy mind.

Rock on.