Last week, the UK’s Channel 5 television network announced that they were dropping the long-running Australian soap-opera Neighbours, putting the show’s future production in jeopardy. The program has been on the air for thirty-six years, and is an Australian institution—it seems every Australian actor has passed through Neighbours at some point, either on their way to international stardom (Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie) or onto the conveyor belt of domestic television obscurity.
The news prompted a number of hyperbolic reactions in the Australian and UK press, citing the desertion of our national soap-opera by the British as a metaphor for the deeper decay in Australia’s international appeal. Writing in London’s Sunday Times, columnist Caitlin Moran claimed that Australia as a destination was not “aspirational anymore,” and that for Britain’s Generation Z, the country has become “that place with all the dead reefs and offshore refugee internment camps, where the entire country often turns into one big barbecue.”
This is a bit like blaming the box office failure of the latest incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile not on cultural shifts in media consumption, movie-going especially, or the film’s impoverished script and diminished cast (when compared to the 1978 version starring Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, David Nivin and the imperious Angela Lansbury), but rather on Brexit, the gutting of the National Health Service, and the punitive Nationality and Borders Bill.
While Moran’s article speaks more to the quality of the Sunday Times than it does to the challenges facing Australian tourism after nearly two years of closed borders, it was a reminder of just how far away from much of the world Australia actually is, and how disorientating this remoteness can be (for people on both sides).
Two sonnets by S. K. Kelen from his latest collection A Happening in Hades capture the stupefaction in the moments precisely after this distance has been crossed. There is nothing quite like touching down in Australia after a 20+hr flight, it feels as if you have landed in a different world. In Kelen’s poems, the speaker disembarks at Sydney airport where “People speak slightly differently” and “football players you’ve never heard of / headline the national team”. The dreaded flight is so long that during the journey the world has “tipped into a new Age”
S.K. Kelen is a former winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and has over ten collections of his poetry to his name since first being published in 1973.
Parallel Worlds (Earth No. 47)
Sometimes slip into a parallel world,
then the one after that, it often happens flying.
It’s a whole new universe when you land
and disembark. Sydney Airport Earth No. 47.
People speak slightly differently,
the airport’s festooned with bright advertising
campaigns for brands and products that didn’t exist
a week or so ago, football players you’ve never heard of
headline the national team. Everywhere a raw nervousness,
the talk gets giggly about a new war, the time to hate,
and who to hate, keep in mind the terrorist thrill,
sexy and mysterious. Join the fight to save Propaganda.
Make do in this tiger-free dimension—at least a while—
hotter here than the last world, things fall apart fast.
Parallel World Two (Earth No. 48)
And disembark. Sydney Airport Earth No. 48.
I grew blasé, details were different, but each world’s
Fundamentals were pretty much the same, a stasis of constant flux:
Humans mistreating Nature (and hoping to get away with it),
Love and entertainment, war an politics, eating, creating and destroying
So we can build, a race to top then the end we were too mesmerised
By reality stars’ voluptuous flesh and eyes to see the forests die
And the oceans rise. Cataclysm made clear: from moment to moment
The universe changes. The change started when I flew in
From God-knows-where and God-knows-when.
The world suddenly tipped over into a new Age, something different.
It was the day after tomorrow the collapse began, the structures
Built and evolved over aeons faded and the striving died, replaced by
Grey resignation and regret that spans the globe. And life is quiet.
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Author: Thomas Moody
