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Middle Class Princess
February 20, 2004, 9:55 p.m. My father and I were sitting in the footpath-dining area of a restaurant in Enmore today, eating dinner because it was just the two of us, and we couldn’t be bothered to cook. A kid went past, singing the Australian national anthem at the top of her lungs, and we looked at each other and laughed. “That’s why I love kids,” Dad told me, and I said I actually found it rather annoying. “I don’t want kids,” I said, and he told me he hadn’t wanted kids until he was thirty, when he was suddenly struck by his own mortality. “Perhaps I will be struck by my mortality at thirty,” I replied, “but hopefully by then my name will be printed on the cover of a few bestselling book, and they can be my children. My legacy.” By the way, thanks to everyone who put up their hands to read the first chapter of The Eldritch City. To treat myself for finishing the first chapter, I wrote out a Lord of the Rings fanfiction idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now. It’s Éowyn and Faramir in the Houses of Healing. So if anyone wants to read that, drop me a line. And while I have been holed up writing like crazy (seriously, I wrote 11 pages of the fanfic in one sitting, but I was double-returning every paragraph), a minor stoush has been going on between two of my favourite Diarylanders, Tithonus and Caraxus over differing opinions on the riots that just recently occurred in Redfern. An Aboriginal boy died in a rather horrific accident – impaled on a steel pike – and he was apparently being chased by police at the time. The Aboriginal community, in anger and grief, rioted. Really, it just makes me sad. That someone, no matter what their race, could be a drug dealer and petty thief at thirteen. That someone could die in such awful circumstances. That a community could feel so disempowered that they feel the only way they can express themselves is to riot. I don’t know how to change these things. I do know that there is no one to blame here, and that we have two choices: maintain the status quo, or fix things. Only, like I said, how do we fix things? I am at a loss. What do I know of cultural conflict, or poverty? I’m as white as uncooked dough – I come from sheep-farming stock for heaven’s sake – and although I have an Irish surname, it’s been a while since anyone in my dad’s family attended a Catholic Mass. My parents were working class, but I am definitely a middle-class princess. All I can say is that I hope there is a solution, and that we can find it. But has there ever been a displaced section of any society that has found their place in it?
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