..Centre and Right’s backbone of Australia.
About two years ago as I waxed loquacious about caravan parks as one model for solving the problem of too many people occupying too much space at too greater cost. If you drive around Australia’s major cities you see good arable land being swallowed up by McMansions for workers and their children - who then clog up the freeways and trains trying to get to jobs and schools that are not close to where they work. They live close by people they scarcely know, commute in the company of people they never speak to and work with people who live in similar situations on the other side of town. Given that a caravan park could offer up to seven times the packing density of a new suburb I thought it might be worth considering for those who didn’t want to live in a multi-story apartment building which often have an unsavoury reputation and where people who once again live close together usually don’t know each other except as the person who walks across the roof in high heels at there in the morning. As with many of my ideas this sank into the deep silent address space of the internet never to reappear. There was, I believe, a reason and the reason is called ‘trailer parks’, that blot on American television, literature and landscape. That other dark littered world where bad, bad people live in immobile mobile homes, the horizontal equivalent of Clichy-sous-Bois with a self- reinforcing ethos of failure, high unemployment and violent crime.
Which, like most other clichés of modern times is probably largely untrue though vicariously entertaining.
It is true that trailer parks do not have the most salubrious of reputations. In fact the term ‘trailer trash’ denotes a whole sub-class of hobo mutants that lead sad and desperate lives, hanging onto the coat-tails of society with the tenacity of fried chicken and tomato sauce to a white shirt. Sustained by welfare and food stamps, fast food, cheap drugs and TV gameshow experiences. I know, having travelled through Queensland’s hinterland that we have our equivalents here. Cluttered acreages that never seem inhabited but which resonate with the desperate scrabble just to stay alive, tattooed and vaguely decent. Curiously tidy, curiously empty and with the feeling of being watched by a thousand eyes.
In cheerful opposition to this generations in Australia, countless thousands in sensible shorts and sandals, have set off for a three month or longer sojourn near the water; preferably a beach but in fact any water will do be it a billabong or a muddy river. In a dry and parched land we long for the sound and look of limitless water as a consolation against the summer grass turning the colour of caramel on hard clay under the eternal baked blue dome of the cloudless sky. They cause temporary traffic jams as they lumber north and south in their Jaycos and Evernew caravans of assorted vintage to annually recreated suburbs and towns. There they set up beside the same people that they have live cheek-by-jowl with every summer since they, or their grandparents, were children.
It is traditional to look down upon upon these groups as somehow being an anachronism in today’s electronic jet-setting age, relics of sepia coloured days with simpler and less sophisticated people. The lumpen proletariat gathered under canvas being allowed to enjoy their naïve jollity to the annual amazement of the newspapers and their photographers. There is an unstated apprehension ‘that they only think they’re happy because they don’t know enough to be unhappy’. Overall there seems to be slightly sneering air of condescension at their peasant ways, their desire to do the same thing year after year. Good heavens, soon they will say that it is traditional!
But I would argue with some authority that the reverse is true. The authority comes with having spent thirty years doing what I first whole-heartedly derided and what they, and now, I so obviously enjoy. The annual pilgrimage to the water to share life with other people whose every word I can hear when the weather is hot and still, whose opinions and drinking habits and other rituals are intimately with me should I choose to ignore the almost Japanese like concept of individual privacy. It is here, along with Australia’s small towns, that we find a true sense of community. True it is a hedonistic community, not formed of hardship, but made of the stuff of getting along and sharing experiences and responsibilities.
I should be honest that I found the first years rather difficult, wondering why I had chosen to live in what I dismissively called the contemporary equivalent of a Middle Age’s village with only slightly better sanitation. Most people have not had the disquieting experience of sitting down on a toilet seat warmed by the posterior of a complete stranger since they left school.
I wasn’t all that well at the time that the offer was made to have a few seeks in a friends father’s caravan (ironically the friends father being called Mr Fathers) and we had a brand new daughter and precious little money. And the people we accepting of me, no matter how hard I made it for them to like me. And, bit by bit, they won me over to an intimate world where I have become a part of a much larger extended family ranging from grizzled veterans of seventy-five seasons to little human commas of three months of age.
If you are as they say ’of an age’ you will remember that as children we would go out and play from dawn to dusk with our parents apparent lack of concern as to our whereabouts and well-being as we roamed the streets or hills of our growing-up. We were expected to turn up reasonably uninjured for meals and that was sole the obligation of the day. Given the paranoid exigencies of modern life the caravan park is the closest you will ever get to this. There can be no better place to grow up healthy and happy. Defined boundaries, many caring eyes and walking pace traffic. So many things to do in an adventure playground.
You may think that all these old folks go there for their selfish pleasure. They don’t; they go there for the kids…………. but perhaps there is no more selfish pleasure