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When you buy something new, wrapped in plastic, foam and cardboard, you seldom think about that object’s history. The history, that is, of the natural elements found in the ground, the oil and gas that becomes plastic, or the people who probably worked for as much as I pay for a packet of gum to make it. One of the things people like about ‘new stuff’ is the fact that it doesn’t have a history. There’s something exciting about opening a new appliance or wearing a new top and knowing that you are the first one to use it. New possessions give us a kind of status. But increasingly, old things seem to be doing the same thing.
As far as I can see, until fairly recently there were people who were into antiques, and there were people who bought everything new; those for whom the 1950′s world of brand-spanking new white goods and “everything that opens and shuts” still hasn’t worn off. But I wasn’t aware until maybe five years ago of a large crop of people, particularly of my age and socio-economic group, that lived and breathed for the iconic second-hand. I love going to markets, scouring op-shops and decorating my place with oddments from other decades. But so do a good half of Melbourne’s population. And that collective group seems to describe their love of old things as a passion for ‘vintage’.
What exactly makes something ‘vintage’? Going for the good old dictionary definition, there are three main uses of the word. The first is in winemaking. Vintage specifically means ‘what year/season’ the wine was made. Secondly, it’s used in relation to something that is representative of either the best or most typical of a product, or to describe something of influence and importance in an era ie. something ‘classic’. Lastly, it simply means old-fashioned or ‘dated’.
Most people I know seem to use the word vintage in its third sense. Unless we happen to be vintage clothing connoisseurs, we won’t know the name of that specific shirt cut, or where it originated and what exact year and by whom it was made popular. It seems that if anything is more than twenty years old, it’s ‘vintage’. And vintage has become unbearably trendy. Using the very word in relation to yourself, if you’re between fifteen and thirty at least, seems to identify you as a specific ‘type’ of person. Describing your dress sense as ‘vintage’ says: “I’m arty, not mainstream”, “I have good taste” or “I’m not just a generation Y with no concept of history. Look at me, I’m wearing it.”
Vintage has also become both ‘arty’ and ‘enviro-friendly’. And since enviro-friendly and arty are now the coolest things to be, recycling fashions rather than buying into new ones must be the hallmark of ‘cool’, right? Eek. This is all starting to sound a little pretentious. And nobody wants that. But if this is true then I, unfortunately, have fallen prey to pocketing the identity that goes along with being a vintage-lover. Arty-enviro-friendly-wanker. It’s attached to my 1950′s high-waist dresses, my little sixties neckties and scarves, the old brooches and handbags. It is manifest every time I enter an op-shop or manage to wake early for the goodies at Camberwell Market. Oh dear.
But is there another reason that I like vintage stuff? I hope so. I mean, I like old things aesthetically. But I hope I don’t just acquire dated paraphernalia because it’s cool, or even pretty. What’s more important than the objects themselves, to me, is the history that lies dormant within them. What crazy party did this shirt attend back in the eighties? Did the person wearing it get lucky that night? What mother sat brushing her little girl’s hair with this mirror and comb set? Who sat frantically writing a last minute assignment at this desk before me? What woman in the 1940′s took this handbag around the streets of another city, another country even, guarding her precious ration card while soldiers marched the streets?
One of the first things I remember doing in a creative writing class was writing about an object, using it as inspiration. “Objects tell stories.” It seems to be one of the central tenets of writing. People have written entire novels based around objects. Metaphorical objects, objects with special powers or with monetary or other value, but also just ordinary objects, ones that we buy and use and that outlive their use or season, only to be picked up again later under a new light. Aside from liking vintage things for their aesthetic value, there is something powerful and mysterious about holding in your hand, or wearing on your body, the things that coloured the life of another person. It’s like a hand-me-down with a history you get to create yourself. My possessions become not just things to give me status, but things to remind me of a life before me, of other places and other times, of people here and gone.
So when your second-hand accoutrements foster creativity and imagination and you throw in the eco-friendly factor, maybe the obsession isn’t so pretentious after all. Well at least I’d like to think so, since I’ll be at Camberwell Market rain or shine next Sunday.
Your week is filled with factory-fresh Mercedes and traffic lights routinely set fifty feet apart. Silky wet tram tracks, clamouring children, a bevvy of hurried umbrellas. But today is quiet, you’re half asleep—lacy shop fronts and flourishing billboards curtsying to a nonexistent audience on the footpaths below. You might see somebody different here today; a shabbily dressed musician busking on the street, a beat-poet girl writing in the park, a few joggers blasting indie from their ipods. But in all likelihood, there’ll still be the women.
“What do you want with those shopping bags, Carmen?” (paper, cardboard, plastic.) “I use biodegradable ones now.” Because, at last, being environmentally friendly has caught up with the upper-middle class, who don’t start trends; (far too busy, they merely follow.) Except for perhaps, those recurring slate grey fisherman’s pants and crocodile print boots;
“Well like Jean said, you simply can’t get them anywhere further east than Camberwell.”
But you’re not impressing us one little bit, Jean darling—with your handmade jewellery and vintage designer purse. Postmodern fashion died in the arse in the nineties and you’re nothing more than the wealthy dregs of its remnants. Today it’s especially prominent;
“Size thirty-three point five, thankyou.” Like we’re in Paris or Denmark; “forgive me, sometimes I forget what country I’m in!” Arctic white teeth flashing.
“Oh! That some of us should be so lucky.” (Tongue clamped between your own teeth as you mentally subtract that sum into English.)
And at the counter; “Are you sure that’s the final price?” All bargaining and batering like we’re in Malaysia or Singapore and she’s struggling to feed her sobbing malnourished offspring wasting away at home.
“In this economic climate you have to watch every cent you spend.” Insurance banker husband, hefty paternal inheritance, crown jewels aside; “No, we really can’t afford that today.”
“Well, better keep those credit cards in their wallet then, darling. Those shoes simply don’t fit and I really don’t have the time.” (You have till five, actually.)
Five more robotic hours, to think about tonights frozen food, Penelope’s childhood and how, five years ago, you would have given anything to live here.
“But now she’d much rather be north, or north-west. It’s this suburb, see. It’s just no good anymore.”
It never was going to suit you anyway. You’d be much better off in the North. Yes, in the shabby cafe’s with ochre crockery and wooden utensils off Sydney road, or in the musty shops on Smith street, damp like you’re grandmother’s closet. You always were a a sucker for nostalgia, for it’s fleeting back dissapearing around a street corner, it’s fading footsteps on a grey footpath leading to nowhere. Nostalgia grows so much better in the North.
“It’s just the right climate, and besides, out here we really don’t have the time.”
You’d be much better off to take that vinyl suitcase and you’re fluffy beret and sit yourself down on the 96 tram (if you can find room).
“We don’t have much space here, as you can see, our schools are full to the overflow.” Spoken as though her precious antique tea-cups might spill and break if another Hawthorn barrister impregnates his russet-haired, slim-thighed secretary. Disaster!
“Xavier wouldn’t know what to do with itself!”
It’s amusing, really—the thing’s that scandalise here. Take heed of the thing’s you simply can’t get away with. No midnight visits to safeway—floppy moccasins and cloud-print pajamas, just for some tim-tam’s and a carton of milk.
“They don’t bat an eyelid at that in the North, can you believe?” But here, like Enid said, it’s simply not done.
So traipse back up through that glorious mecca of cautious consumption to your hatchback parked in the no-standing zone, pay that tiresome ticket and be on your way.
For the first time since George Miller’s Happy Feet came out in 2006, I walked out of a children’s movie deep in thought about the big issues; you know, the environment, economy, the state of the world, that kind of thing. Disney / Pixar’s 3D animation’s Wall-e is thought provoking in a way its medium rarely achieves, not just for its topical warning on environmental ruin, but for the way it imagines the future consumeristic fate of mankind. Wall-e projects the audience forward a few hundred years, to a time when industrial development and pollution have completely destroyed the Earth, causing its remaining inhabitants to take to space to survive and leave robots to take care of the mess. Thankfully, technology has advanced to the point that life outside of earth is fully sustainable inside a giant space ship that not only allows its passengers five star accommodation, but is in fact a giant consumer paradise, entirely owned by one giant corporation ‘Buy n Large’. In the 22ndcentury, humans no longer need to walk anywhere; instead, they zoom around on what appear to be over-sized massage chairs, embedded with all the electronic devices one could ever need. As a result, nobody has retained any bone density, and are reduced to helple
ss obese blobs, eating nothing but fast food and doing nothing but staring at personalised hologram-like screens that conjure up the illusion of anything they could wish for. Humorous, yes, but I couldn’t help thinking about the implications of this not-so-impossible vision of the future.
In his childhood memoir ‘The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid’, Bill Bryson recalls the economic and industrial boom in North America in the 1950′s. Relatively unscathed by the destruction of WWII, the US saw an un-precedented period of prosperity that determined the standard of living expected in first-world countries for the rest of the century. Suddenly, modern appliances were available to the masses, the people ‘were able to have everything they had never dreamed of having… almost ninety percent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners and gas or electric stoves – things most of the rest of the world could only fantasize about.’ Bryson describes the boundless optimism people had in the ability of modern industry; ‘soon, according to every magazine, we were going to have underwater cities off every coast, space colonies inside giant spheres of glass, atomic trains and airliners, personal jetpacks, a gyrocoptor in every driveway, cars that turned into boats or even submarines, moving sidewalks to whisk us effortlessly to schools and offices.’ A new era had arrived – the future. With coming of mass production came its appropriate counterpart; mass media. Mass media meant the saturation of American popular culture began to permeate the rest of the world. The influx of consumer based American advertising imagery coming into the economically unstable environment of Europe after the war gave way to the idea of an ‘aesthetic of plenty’*; belief that such affluence should be available to all. American advertisements promoted the idea of consumer diversity, multiplicity of style and choice, productivity and endless, un-precedented wealth and technological advancement. Those on the receiving end of such a proliferation of new advertising in Europe were enticed into a state of desire. And who could blame them? After one world war, a great depression and the ravaging effects WWII had brought upon almost every country in Europe, it could be said that every one on earth at this time knew what it was to go through some form economic hardship. In first world countries like France, Italy and the UK, food was scarce and bread, milk and meat were rationed for a number of years after the second world war. Homelessness and unemployment were rife and major European cities had been all but completely destroyed. For people living in such poverty, the affluence of America was something to hope for. Luckily for Australia, also relatively unharmed by the war, it was imminently possible. We became one of the first nations with an economic climate suitable to adopting the consumer culture relatively soon after America.
More than fifty years on, the US has for the most part managed to remain the perpetual leader in setting the standard of wealth, success and luxury that make up a first-world lifestyle. And Australia? Well…we’ve spent the last 58 years trying to keep up with the Jones’s. Obviously, other nations have had major input in the world economy and indeed Asia has become a leader in technological developments. But for the Lucky Country, our goal seems to have been to emulate the affluence of the American Dream, which in some respects perpetually remains just out of reach. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying. Despite the continuance of abject poverty in the third world, the last fifty years has seen a continuance in the thriving of consumer culture; we continue to live under the prevailing belief in the aesthetic of plenty. The revolution of the mass media and advertising that began at the end of WWII has become the backbone of our day to day lives. It continues as a strong force that forms much of the pattern of urban life, constantly bombarding us and shaping the way in which we perceive the world. Sure, we may not be under the illusions of any underwater cities popping up and may no longer be enticed by washing machines and vacuum cleaners, but endless forms of advertising continue to lure us into a state of desire for the latest modern commodities. Those of us lucky enough to be born in a first world country in the last three decades have, in all likelihood, known nothing of what it is like to really go without. The consumer culture continues to feed the myth that anything we want, we can have; all we need is a credit card and a trip to our closest consumeristic paradise - the urban shopping mall. The fact it tries to ignore; that the aesthetic of plenty is part-and-parcel with a lifestyle of rapid consumption and obsolescence, generating excessive waste by its dependence on fast turnover, change of model and belief in indefinite expendability. An expendability that Wall-e warns may not be quite so indefinite, if we want to stay on this earth, that is. 
* The term ‘aesthetic of plenty’ was coined by Lawrence Alloway, founding member of a group of artists and philosphers known as The Independent Group.
Eleven days since my last entry. Not because I’ve had nothing to say. My head has been pounding with thoughts, running all through the night til those thoughts manifested themselves in bizarre dreams. In the last week I dreamed that I married my best friend from high school. I dreamed I was pregnant. I dreamed my dad, my mum and I had a screaming match about the aforementioned two events. I dreamed I saw about a hundred versions of my dog Oscar running down the street, but they had blue, grey, white and black coats. I dreamed I forgot to open the shop at Eastland and slept all day. In the end I decided to run away.
Sometimes you get to the end of your rope unexpectedly. On Sunday, I thought I had a good couple of metres to go, but the frayed ends suddenly began to unravel in my hands. I realised I needed to escape. I had to get far away from the frantic pace of the metropolis, from crawling up and down the traffic-ridden highway to work in every stifling, enclosed zoo of consumerism in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. In those regulated climates, it doesn’t matter what the weather is outside because it’s always a mild t-shirt and jeans appropriate 21 degrees. You substitute daylight for fluorescent lights, fresh air for the air-con, real nourishment for the food court, genuine conversation for a mass-produced ‘how’s your day been?’ and in the end you start to rot away. You close your eyes at night and all you can see are a thousand shoe-boxes in numerical order. That’s when you realise you’ve forgotten what it looks like outside.
Later, when the crawling traffic begins to fall away behind you, and you begin to pass fence posts and cows and hills, you start to feel it. A little more alive, that is. Like perhaps somewhere, there still does exist a space where you can breathe a little more freely, where you can think, or you can choose not to think. Where you can just be, for a little while. 
So I went to the beach, because I wanted to remember what it felt like to be free. I let the salty breeze tangle my hair and I didn’t worry about what it looked like. I lay on the damp sand, reading about the Source and the Divine and the Great Mother.
I rolled up my jeans and stuck my feet in the icy waves, feeling the cold ache right to my bones. I thought about the tides and the moon pulling them back and forth and how the earth both changes and remains the same and will always be that way. I hopped across rocks in my sneakers and didn’t worry when 
I splashed into unexpected rock pools; miniature universes of their own.
I picked up crabs and watched them scuttle across the palm of my hand. Slowly, my imagination began to crawl out of it’s hiding place. I turned to face the wind with arms outstretched and imagined it ripping me off my feet and carrying me away. I smiled at the feeling of sand still stuck between my toes at the end of the day; a souvenir, a clue.
I stood at the cliff’s edge, I looked across the ocean out to the horizon and let myself be enveloped in its endlessness. I contemplated my own insignificance in the grand scheme. I thought about religion and power and organised societyand suddenly they just seemed like words instead of great hulking oppressors. They seemed, for an instant, unreal, laughable; non-existent except to those who choose give validation to them. All at once I realised I could choose not to. I thought about the rules people make for themselves, rules they try to impose on others through creating a God made in their own image. A discourse that has been constructed to control and demean, to destroy souls. I thought about the way nature quietly resists that control. I thought about how it both comforts and threatens humanity. I thought about how mostly, humanity threatens it. Enough thinking.
I drove home along the coast road, listening to The Cranberries and watching the wind tearing and buffeting the bushes outside. I heard it’s faint roar outside and felt safe in the snug warm space of my car.
* * *
“I am piecing a potion to combat your poison.
She is risen. She is risen.
boys I said
She
is
Risen.”
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