Benjamin Law

For many years now, I have loved cunt. Not vaginas necessarily (they’re wonderful and all, but hey: card-carrying homo here), but I’ve always thought the word itself was magnificent. Powerful and versatile, much like the anatomy itself.

Because my mother’s second language is English, I still remember when she first learned the C word. She was watching a foreign movie on SBS when one character accused her partner’s mistress of having one that smelled of eggplants. My mother still thinks the word is magical, but now knows not to use it amongst strangers or with her GP, even if—especially if—she needs to discuss a medical condition.

Of course, some people think the word should be off-limits and never uttered, lest the heaven’s open up and descends with a shower of them. Years ago, my boyfriend made a faux pas by dropping an F-bomb into conversation over lunch and someone’s girlfriend recoiled. “Oh my god,” she said. “That’s so rude! Next you’re probably going to say the C-word!” My boyfriend shrugged. “It’s a word,” he said. “It’s a strong word, but why should it be taboo?” The girlfriend bristled. To which my boyfriend said, “Maybe you could practise saying it to yourself in private. See how it feels in your mouth, so to speak.”

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In the 1960s, I was with my family—Mum, Dad, my brother—working as drovers and stockmen in southern Queensland. We worked as a family unit, droving, fencing, yard-building, wool pressing, cane cutting, 75kg backs on our backs. I was pulling that was I was 13 years old. It was just a different way of life.

On the droving camps, you would go through big stations with 800 head of cattle. At night, all the stockmen would come out and have a yarn with you. Such great conversation! It was a period of rapid transition, both socially in Australia and for us as Aboriginal people. There was a feeling of change, because we were also getting a hell of a lot of information from America on civil rights and the Vietnam War. Music was reflecting that and breaking through. Music had meaning.

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Something weird happened to me recently that involved right-wing conservative columnist Andrew Bolt. Don’t worry, it wasn’t sexual (or at least as far as I remember). Calling it a “fight” sounds too intense; calling it a “debate” sounds too scholarly. No, what transpired was a battle of minds, people. Instead of using our fists, we used our words! Instead of violence, we resorted to intellect! Rather than locking swords, we locked tongues and okay this sentence has become unexpectedly disgusting and I will end it now.

Anyway, long story short: Andrew Bolt wrote a column, I wrote a column in response, he accused me of provoking my readers to violence against him and then called me “a gay with comprehension issues”. Which I actually thought sounded quite cute, like I was someone who had a fabulous learning disability. But what happened next was like a scene from The Return of the King. Darkness descended, orcs swarmed over the hills and suddenly there were screeching wraiths in the air. All I’ll say is there really is no greater hive of scum and villainy than a News Limited website comments page. And once you have Andrew Bolt targetting you, the Public of Australia—Norm from Shailer Park; Beryl from Clapham—begin to bay for your blood.

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Before I start, let’s make one thing clear. I would rather be run over a bus—a bus that was on fire—than marry my boyfriend. Don’t get me wrong: we’ve been together for a decade and I adore the bastard. But the prospect of a wedding—the stress, the cost, being photographed a million times and making out in front of relatives—just doesn’t appeal to me. The average Australian wedding costs $50,000 and if I had that kind of money, I’d rather buy, say, a round-the-world plane ticket. In fact, doing the math, I could buy 25 tickets. I’d bring my friends.

Still, none of this makes me anti-wedding. Because hot damn, I love me a good hitchin’. And it isn’t just the free alcohol. I love the pageantry of the whole thing: dressing up in suits and gowns, adjusting my boyfriend’s tie before we arrive and seeing my friends at their most beautiful. Weddings makes me feel grown up. I weep openly during the vows, and when I see the bride and groom’s families do the same thing, it triggers even more snot-nosed heaving. It is a beautiful thing.

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Longing for a lover can inspire beautiful art. At the start of the 1900s, it compelled Proust to write his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. By the end of that same century, it inspired Everything But the Girl to write a lovely song about how the deserts miss the rain. In reality though, missing someone can be pretty unbearable. When you’re in a long distance relationship, you realise a desert waiting for rain would feel torturous. Your entire existence would be reduced to drought. You would die of thirst. You would shit sand.

My boyfriend and I have always spent long periods apart, on and off. When we first started dating, he embarked on a six-month exchange to Hong Kong. For the past 18 months, I’ve split time between Australia and Asia for work, leaving for months at a time. More opportunities came up this year, so we finally packed up our apartment and caught planes in opposite directions. He flew to North America; I headed back to Asia. “International power couple!” my friends said merrily. I felt the opposite of that. I felt like a kid in squeaky shoes and a helicopter cap, waving sadly goodbye to his best friend at the airport again.

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There’s a particularly gruesome horror movie out there called Hostel. Some of you may have seen it already. Like most movies featuring gratutious torture, I refuse to watch it (severed achilles heels—sounds like a lark!). But from what IMDB tells me, it’s about a small group of backpackers travelling throughout a Slovakian city “with no idea of the hell that awaits them”. Needless to say, the film deeply upset the Slovekian tourism department.

Besides the senseless violence—severed fingers, brutalised corpses—my main gripe with the film’s premise is this: Aren’t backpackers’ hostels horrifying enough already? Do we really need to imagine guests being cut up and left to bleed, when most of us find giant bloodstains on our sheets upon arrival anyway? Do we need to see someone disembowelled in a hostel, when Balinese food poisoning does the same thing? Is there not enough horror already in backpackers hostels without making it worse?

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Keep It Tight

No less than five members, no more than 10. Too few people and you may as well be lighting candles, laying out yoga mats and passing around hand mirrors. Too many, and it ceases being a bookclub and officially becomes a party. Unless, of course, that is exactly what you planned all along, you diabolical scamp.

Talk To Your Local Bookshop

Bookshops run their own clubs, but they’re also invaluable if you’re starting your own. Smaller independent bookshops will often have staff members who specialise in clubs. It’s worth making an appointment with them to see what they can offer you. Depending on the bookshop, some can even host your book club in their café, or hold mini presentations of new releases that might suit you for next month’s title. Some shops can organise discounts if your members buy a minimum number of books too. Just ask.

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Edited version originally published in frankie #43 (Sept/Oct 2011)

Lock your doors, my fellow Australians! Shut your blinds, crawl into your bomb shelters and sandbag your daughters. For there is a collective menace lurking our island shores, and they come to ravage our country, take our jobs and plague our communities with crime, disease, headscarves and delicious ethnic food. Their transport of choice? Loathsome ocean-faring vessels of sophisticated design—‘boats’, they’re called—and when our federal politicians’ highest priority is to stop them no matter what, you know we have a problem. God help us all.

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We were part of a gang who all knew there was a world out there. Only a tiny pocket of it was in Sydney. Sydney had been pretty boring. I’d been at East Sydney Tech doing dress design, and it was a very old-fashioned type of design school where they wanted you to make little shirts, and it wasn’t at all inspired. It’s an inspirational place now, but it really wasn’t in the early 60s.

Me and my girlfriends knew what we wanted was in London. It was a need to express ourselves and we just wanted action. Heading to London was just the thing. You didn’t fly then, so you had to get a boat—six weeks to London—and sailed on the high seas. There was no stopping us.

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I moved to Sydney when I was 16. It was like I was being pulled by a magnet to explore a future I had in my mind at school: to venture into the city, as a country boy, in the search for a music career.

I liked the whole variety of Sydney: the trams; the double-decker buses; people from all walks of life. There were about eight cinemas in the city. I’m a movie buff, so I had all these movies to go see. And I’m a big milkshake drinker, and there were milkshake bars everywhere. And hamburgers! So all of this was tripled and doubled and you-name-it, especially when you come from a town where you had one or two cinemas, and one or two milkbars.

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