"ambient stress"

A few notes after a surprisingly very relevant and important talk at Sticky Institute.

• small town dissatisfaction
• defamiliarise your city

This year I’ve met a lot of people who were once the weirdos in small towns and now in Melbourne they find themselves in vibrant and creative circles, often leaders in their fields. At this talk Maddy Phelan, co-founder of Totoro’s tea house in Newcastle (as part of Renew Newcastle), was talking about how to survive in towns full of bogans and stay enamoured with your city (among other things).

Holidays are good for getting down about your situation. Free of uni (or whatever) now, all you have is heaps of time and less to do with it. No longer can you stay chatting in the caf for hours upon hours or sit there by yourself in hopes – realistic usually – that someone you know will saunter past. There you will remain. Maddy recommended being a flaneur (or flaneuse, if you’re from RMIT). This goth boy said he found a great old house with a virgin lemon tree in the backyard one night out with his friends. Others climb fences, sit on rooves (roofs? How about rooftops) & play guitars. Some of us have to – or is this a choice? – sit on the steps of Fed Square alone with our parker pen slipping from our hand from the grease of the Lord of the Fries burger we had for dinner. This itself isn’t enough to fall back in love with the city. No, it’s more about walking down that road you see from the train window and sitting in that park again finally and ambling through lush opulent streets of Hawthorn royalty, about being on foot rather than public transport, being brave enough to eat alone, to be seen alone.

As for bogans, well we’ll never really escape them. As minister for the environment Peter Garret once sang (yes, remember that? He was a musician) “this is Australia”. Small town dissatisfaction on the other hand I get. It’s easy to get frustrated when there’s no support for young creatives, the wider community doesn’t get involved and nobody turns up to gigs. There can be a lot of apathy in young people in the country. I wish I could come up with a viable strategic plan to go back to my home town and change something somehow. Make the town less about 40 yr old conservative white people (read: Rotarians) and give the young people with something interesting to say a chance.. Maybe..

I guess the good thing about being a weirdo from a small or isolated town is that when you do move to a real good place you usually don’t take it for granted. Usually.