COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
STRANGE WEATHER - It's midnight, and I'm lying in bed listening to the huge sound of thewind in the trees, while the house creaks and rattles. The weather seems to be cycling on a five day pattern; an easterly gale, humid and heavy, moderates and swings gradually to the north and as it does the temperature rises over a couple of days until the air is like a furnace and we lie panting, waiting for the next cool westerly change. When it comes we resume our normal activities, and the exhausted fire crews across the state can relax.
Our hot nights are full of uneasy sleep and midnight anxieties over our finances; our days with doing what work is on hand and phoning our other self-employed friends and discussing the economy: "How's it goin' Col? Much on?"
"Stuff all mate."
The last two great cycles of activity have swept over us with a four month period between crests, the pre-Olympic rush and the usual pre-Christmas rush. Now we wonder: is the downturn short term or longer? Six months or eighteen?
I go up into the hills to see my friend Rob. I've lost the keys to one of our cars, the old Toyota, on the stone platform below the cliffs while diving with the boys at Cape Liptrap. Rob's house is approached down a track lined with Toyota wrecks. At the end of the drive the house is nestled among dark cypresses, and next to it is the one Toyota that still works. It's a wreck too: unregistered (and I suspect Rob hasn't kept up his licence), it serves for a weekly run into the hamlet of Dumbalk for supplies and to visit the neighbours.
His cousin in the hills runs him into Foster or to Melbourne, 180 kilometres away, in her good car.
We search the wrecks for a key that might fit, or a set of locks we can swap over. No luck.
We go into the house and have a cup of tea. Rob tips the water into the kettle from a twenty litre container which he fills at the neighbouring farm once a day. The guttering and tanks on the house have rusted away. While the kettle boils he plays me his latest compositions. In the dark living room is a piano, racks of amplifiers and old reel-to-reel players, keyboards and an ancient Mac Classic hooked up to it all through a tangle of cables in the gloom.
I rescued the Mac from a dumpster a couple of years ago and bartered it for some guitar repairs. Rob is a luthier as well as a composer.
I like Rob's newer stuff. He used to be a classic ballad writer, 'seventies style. He has always been a master arranger and orchestrater, but the ballads often seemed emotionally monotonal, especially after his wife left.Now, he's begun a cycle of long almost symphonic pieces which he continues to add to, night after night, until he feels it's done. In day he occasionally works in his shed painting furniture, which Andrew, who has a tiny business making preschool equipment, brings up to him. He does guitar repairs too, but that has slackened off over the past few years as venues for live music, traditionally pubs, have converted over to poker machines.
Also recent changes to the tax system have meant only the very energetic can run a legitimate business; the paperwork has been too much for Rob and many others.
Rob's neighbours are mostly single and mostly middle aged, like him. Betty is closest. She ran a left-wing book shop in Melbourne years ago. Rob taught her how to catch the possums which were raiding her fruit trees, and we suspect they've replaced road kill as her main source of protein. Betty can be fun, but tiring. She is sure her phone is being tapped. She married a young Indian guy ten years ago, but he disappeared. We didn't check her freezer.
I have heard it said that the unemployment and under-employment rate for males over forty-five in Australia is about fifty percent.It's hard to say, as we tend to only see the people we know, who are usually like us. The ones doing it tough tend to stay indoors. There are no angry demonstrationsin the streets. Most take their problems to be a personal failure, I suppose. Some must be doing well, as the economic figures show we've never had it so good. Someone called the consumer, a rare beast among my friends, is doing well. My friends tend to be producers, and I don't know many of them who feel too secure.
It would be nice to be able to blame someone for the whole mess. Once, not so many years ago, it would have been relatively easy. I was a member of the counterculture, and we knew who the enemy were. Now I go fishing with the boys and wonder where all the fish have gone. We're all sure the weather is changing for the warmer, but my old hippy friends who can afford it are putting air conditioning in their houses. Why not solar cells on the roof so they can generate their own clean power?
We try to read the economy, but it seems as turbulent these days as the weather and not much more predictable. With each storm that sweeps through it a few more are blasted, struck by lightning, cast up on the beach. Hell, whole shining corporations come crashing down, whole countries who misstep, misread the tea leaves, don't appease the right gods. And we survivors say "It least it ain't me", and then lie in bed on the hot nights trying figure out how to keep it that way.
I'm e-mailing my friends Les and Gillian. They are off somewhere, maybe in the States, maybe Majorca, maybe up theAmazon doing some recording. They have an office full of young people in Melbourne pumping out multimedia, and I occasionally contract to them making hardware and installing it for them.
In the 'seventies Les lived in the Dandenongs, a semi rural area in the hills to the east of Melbourne. Rob, my Toyota resource, lived there at the same time but they never met. Like Rob, Les was a musician/composer. In the 'sixties, when Rob was a bass player in a cool jazz band, Les with playing Hammond organ in a wild rock outfit. When I met him, he was fixing up a run down mansion in a Melbourne suburb, painting and renovating other peoples' houses by day to earn a living, composing at night. He was a pioneer of multimedia in the 'eighties. When multimedia suddenly took off, Les rode the wave and I went with him. Since then he's been up and down and almost out a couple of times.
Les was a brilliant pianist, able to play complex improvisations reminiscent of Keith Jarret. Overwork has given him repetitive strain injury in the wrists, and he can't play any more.
Les and Gillian work eighteen hour days for months on end, and their focus has paid off with some major clients and great projects. The price has been high for them personally, and has been a scarifying experience for those of us who have worked for them over a long period. But it has kept a lot of people, myself and my subcontractors included, afloat through tough times. We depend on Les and a couple of others like him for our survival.
Because Bill Joy is right, the future doesn't need us. We're hardly needed now, and every year our toe-hold in the good life crumbles a little more. Some of us, like Rob, have already tumbled into the void.
LLOYD MORCOM is a small manufacturer living ten kilometers south of the southernmost town on the Australian continent.
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