Benjamin Law

Originally published in The Monthly (Aug 2011)

Here is how you cook a pig’s uterus. First, visit your local abattoir’s Vietnamese section, where they will happily take requests for ‘special offal’ – which includes intestines, gall bladders, warm blood and reproductive organs. Sows’ uteri come blanched, with a similar colour and texture to tripe: creamy and soft but with a cartilagey bite. Braise them in pork stock, along with smoked ham bones, onions, garlic and wine. Simmer on low heat for two-and-a-half hours, add peas and butter, and serve with jus. The uteri should now have the texture of squid, with a slight crunch.

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Originally published in The Monthly, November 2010

From the outside, the Snoezelen Room at the Gold Coast’s Mudgeeraba Special School (MSS) doesn’t look like much. The room’s padlocked entrance is almost creepy, resembling a fire exit that’s been bolted up. As she fiddles with the large master locks, head of curriculum Nicole Belous explains this actually used to be a garage. I think to myself that if I were a kid being led into this room, I’d probably be freaking out right now.

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Originally published in The Monthly, July 2010

Someone should make a reality TV show called Tuckshop Ladies. The drama would be explosive. Elimination episodes would take place at Parents &Citizens’ Association (P & C) meetings, where parents and tuckshop convenors would battle it out in the style of the Jerry Springer Show. In one episode, the entire tuckshop staff would be made redundant; in another, an irate parent would hurl abuse at the new tuckshop convenor for taking pies off the menu. The stakes would be high – some tuckshops have annual profit margins of $500,000. There would be tears, award ceremonies and, of course, cooking.

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In retrospect, we had been adequately warned. Days before we arrived at Wooroolin’s Peanut Pullers and Backfatters Ball — an annual Bachelor & Spinsters’ event in rural Queensland — I’d spoken to one of its organisers over the phone. “B&S balls used to be a big thing in rural areas,” Jodie Butcher told me, “so all the single farmers and farmer’s daughters could meet someone. It was a proper sit-down meal in a hall, then you’d have a dance.” When asked exactly how B&S balls had changed, Jodie laughed. “Over time,” she said, “I guess it’s gotten a little bit … feral.”

As such, the invitation for Backfatters featured a sketchy illustration of a giant peanut happily having sex with a pig up the rear. I understood where the committee had gotten ‘peanut-pullers’ from: Wooroolin, a township with a population of roughly 200 people, lies just outside of Kingaroy, and the entire region is known as Australia’s peanut farming capital. ‘Back-fatter’, I discovered, refers to the local piggeries. Jodie told me that a sow at the end of her breeding cycle will become so enormous that locals call them backfatters: “It’s the committee taking the piss — that all we’ve got out here are peanut pullers and backfatters.”

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It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a warehouse. A muscular Pacific Islander man reverses a packed forklift through the gate, when a bikie named Terry – tattoos, goatee, belly – rushes out to direct him. “Over here, Pete!” he hollers, gesturing like an airport tarmac guide.

In a few hours, 4000 to 5000 people from all over the Logan shire – an area that houses nearly 200 ethnic groups – will be lining up outside to receive bags of free groceries: 70 tonnes in total. The queue will be so long, it’ll stretch beyond the oval-sized car park and into the streets. Today is Free Food Friday, an event that The Tribe of Judah – an unlikely mélange of Christian church, Harley motorcycle gang and charity organisation – holds several times per year.

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People might flock to the Gold Coast to feel alive, but it is increasingly also a destination for the dead. Drive inland, away from the scorching beaches, breakneck theme parks and thumping nightclubs, and you’ll eventually hit the quiet, bushy hinterland that locals affectionately call “the green behind the gold”. One of the suburbs here is Mudgeeraba, a place that is becoming widely known for its cemetery.

Gail Webb, a softly spoken funeral director from A Gentle Touch Funerals, leads me through the company’s cemetery, which ranges over nine hectares. “Quite beautiful, isn’t it?” she says as we walk among the headstones. Here, the burial ground is divided into two sections: a clippered-lawn cemetery to our left, with flat plaques in tidy, graph-like rows, and a monumental cemetery to our right, where a spectacular convergence of money and grief has taken place. Some of the memorial shrines are so large that they double as stone benches.

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At the registration table for Lovelinx, a national conference run by a Christian organisation, an array of educational books and DVDs are on display. Titles include The Battle for Normality, The Courage to Be Chaste, God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door and Healing Homosexuality. Their variety risks being overwhelming, but mums and dads can turn their attention to one clearly targeted book, a practical-sounding volume titled A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

Lovelinx is taking place in The Factory, a church in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs, which used to be a furniture workshop. The two-day conference aims to share the gospel “in the midst of the homosexuality conflict” and comes with the backing of Exodus Global Alliance, an international organisation representing a range of Christian “member ministries”. Exodus claims it is possible for people to free themselves of their homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.

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The story goes like this: Ernest Hemingway, master of literary economy, is challenged to write a narrative in 10 words or less. Hemingway, of course, comes up with a heartbreaker in six. “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” It’s also been strongly rumoured, however, that Hemingway isn’t the author at all and that the story came from a theatre production about him instead. Whatever the case, the creator of the six-word slayer clearly knew that the entirety of human existence is catalogued in the print classifieds, from the barely contained joys of birth notices to the sunny Sunday horrors of deceased-estate sales.

The print classifieds are certainly a rich reservoir for the banal and the bizarre. In any given issue of the Trading Post’s Queensland edition, you’ll find the usual: cars and computers, fish tanks and barbecues, puppy litters and board games. But there will also be someone’s toilet going for $60 (or nearest offer), a 4.5-cubic-foot front-loader kiln, beef calves of various breeds and used women’s hot pants selling for three dollars each, with emphasis placed on the “USED”. The “Other Pets” section is almost exclusively – inexplicably – occupied by pythons.

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Twenty years ago, just past midnight, the American tank ship Exxon Valdez was slicing through cold black water, cutting a course through the Gulf of Alaska. Anyone who was an adult in the ’80s knows what happened next: a misjudged turn, a grounding on the reef and 258,000 barrels of crude oil spilling into the ocean.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s post-mortem on the incident makes for riveting reading, packed with figures and costs that leave you light-headed: damage to vessel, US$25 million; clean-up operations, US$1.85 billion. Yet a central concern of the report is sleep. The evening of the spill, the third mate on duty, Gregory Cousins, was documented as having returned to work after only four hours’ rest, following an already “stressful, physically demanding day”. Fatigued and under-slept, Cousins’ judgement was deemed impaired; he may even have fallen asleep at the wheel. All that spilt oil, and over lost sleep.

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If the huddled group of males gathered outside on the kerbside were teenagers, you’d say they were loitering: hanging out after dark; warming their hands in a circle; talking in low, conspiratorial murmurs. But as it happens, all of the men are in their late fifties and sixties, either already in their senior years or about to collide with them. When I approach them, they acknowledge me with polite smiles at first, until I get closer and they see I’m in my twenties. That’s when the jokes start. “You’re a bit young to be here, aren’t you?” they say. When I make a quip about simply using the right moisturiser, they all start hooting in response, mock-scandalised. “Oh stop,” one man drawls, before shaking his head and lighting a cigarette.

What these men have in common are two things: their age, and the fact that they’re all gay. Tonight, they’re also all waiting for the same thing to begin: a seminar called ‘Getting Ready for Retirement: Age Pension and Your Choice’. Tonight’s talk is one in a year-long series of similar sessions arranged by QAHC – the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities – that specifically caters for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people approaching their retirement years. Upcoming seminars have similarly informative-sounding but vaguely sad titles, such as ‘Wills, Advance Health Directives and Enduring Powers of Attorney’ and ‘Elder Abuse and Financial Exploitation’.

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