September 24, 2007
David Burchill has in an essay the Review on Divided Nation issue of the Griffith Review. Entitled 'Trying to find the sunny side of life' he reveals a pattern of marginalisation shaped by history, flawed policy and personal incapacity in Sydney and finds hope in the remarkable resilience of people under enormous pressure.
It's a familiar story---as the booming economy gives rises to a cornucopia: a horn of plenty and W
And yet the monsoon clouds were already gathering on the horizon. Burchill says:
In Sydney – an increasingly fractious town wracked by drought, heatwaves and traffic snarls – the apparently weightless property market had begun to reacquaint itself with the force of gravity, and people were watching their real estate magic puddings unaccountably beginning to shrink. Housing affordability had already a hit a historic low, while over the decade from 1995 housing debt rose from about 40 per cent to about 70 per cent of households’ disposable incomes. Almost two‐thirds of private renters had fallen into a state the statisticians define as “housing stress”.
He says three times within the space of a year or so, young men – men with different causes, and from different backgrounds – took to the streets to throw things and words about, attack property and police alike, and generally raise the social temperature. For the first time since the days of the Rum Corps, Sydney had become a riotous place to live. So we have the Macquarie Fields riots.
The events in Macquarie Fields, like those in Redfern before and Cronulla after, aroused such controversy in large part because rioting in suburbia seemed – at least prior to the overheated social temperature in Sydney of the last few years – to be strangely out of kilter with Australian mores.
|