What can a gallery do to contain the fear of Corona Virus. ? 

How can a pubic library function without the public?

And how can a pub survive without pub bands, pub culture and a beer garden?

Just as six oclock closing was introduced as a war austerity measure during the First World War, public galleries museums and pubs, have been closed for the duration. Faster than you can say “Robespierre’, Music venues have been rendered dead by the administrative weight of Public Safety. And now libraries, disotheques, dwarf throwing and public bathing has been banned via the eviscerating incubus of plague – borne puritanism. 

FUN as we know it, has been SHUT DOWN!

The public have been isolated, dis- enfranchised, dislocated and disrupted. In grim despairing lines they file past Centrelink rendered un-employed, under-valued and un-fulfilled. Only the thin ribbon of toilet paper protects humanity from a descent into pure barbarism.  Tax dollars  earnt and superanuation un-requited, under-nourished and under-performing. 

As a society, are we  spent? Is this the edge of the abyss?

And from the abyss the certainty, that Chaddy is no longer a place of worship.

That Barnaby will no longer be able to bend the force of mighty rivers.

And not everything in the Catholic Boys Daily (the Australian)  will be counted as FACT.

Irony is in abundance

A Neo-liberal Federal government has gone socialist. 

For now . All of us may be poorer people, but closer in our poverty to humanity. 

All of us may be unemployed. Super may plummet and just become ‘average’.  Worse of all, our ability to feel superior may be quashed. 

And Housing, the great bastion of the Australian economy is no longer inviolate. 

Is this the apotheosis of the twenty first century? Have we endured  forty years of neo-liberalism to arrive at this point?  The blackness, of puritanism and wowserism triumphant. Closing pubs, Clubs, bawdy houses, and footy ovals. Even beaches, fer chrissakes are cordoned.  Has it come to this.? Will things get worse? It was bad enough with Hannah Gadsby being wheeled out as the exemplar of contemporary humour. Where humour is so cleansed by overt political correctness to be rendered “un- funny”.  But can it get any blacker? In the words of Eric Oulthaite, “is it so black that even the white bits are black”? 

Is there hope?

Is there salvation? 

Is all fun abolished? 

We ask ourselves, bring us the restoration? 

Relieve us fom this  sad requiem. 

Yet, there is hope. We can still enjoy the art of living. Will we let Wowserism ride roughshod?

Are we not Cavaliers?

Did we not crate Covid 19 to defeat consumerism?

Did we not vanquish patriachal fundamentalism with marriage equality?

Will we not prevail with humanism as a tonic for these diminished times?

There is comfort in knowing from hereon, it’ll only get worse. That life will be less a procession than a dole queue. And the robodebt of existence will become a runaway train of pain.  That as the ecology morphs into a dystopian sludge of fire and pestilence our stockpiles of toilet paper will protect us.  WE WILL have certainty again. That’s what the market needs. Certainty that it’s all going down. From hereon, the all ordinaries index will be just… ‘Ordinary’. The cockroaches will win. And the world will be cleansed once again, by the third mass extinction. 

Which is encouraging, because in the wash out, we’ll all be equal, and the cycle of things can go onwards as if nothing ever really happened. 

There’s  poetry in that. 

We live in hope.