Kevin Rudd - masked hero or super dud?

When Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham City, he donned the identity of Batman and proceeded to clean up the corruption that had infiltrated every last corner – from organised crime running the streets to the police, courts and corporations. Our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has been tasked with cleaning up Australia after 12 long years of the Howard Government. And the same way that Batman became a symbol of hope for Gotham residents who had grown used to things being terrible for so long, Rudd’s entrance brought its own form of joyful optimism: a fresh take on the environmental crisis, peeling back the previous government’s industrial relations laws and finally saying sorry to the Stolen Generations. But while it’s nice idea that one masked man can single-handedly sweep away the rotten corruption of an entire city, that’s a comic book fantasy. Will Rudd really live up to all the lofty expectations we’ve placed on him? [Read more]

Walking on thin ice

Everywhere you look you are slapped in the face with beauty. Your senses are electrified in one synchronised motion. Colours look brighter; touch is heightened. It’s warm and comforting. You remember the intensity of this by the way it feels, not by the way it happens. One smoking glass pipe holds the key to it all – methamphetamine, better known as “ice”, so called because in shards it is crystal clear.

By Erin Bell

“It hits you instantly where your heart beats straight away,” says 19-year-old Bruce.* “You are really alert and talkative and you just want more and more. At times it can completely take you over and you can end up in a place where you have this very skewered sense of reality. You know what you’re doing but you don’t consider the consequences because you’re so off your face.”

Bruce experimented with ice before it cornered the mainstream market and he has been a recreational user ever since. “I discovered ice under really random circumstances. One day I skipped school with a friend and went to her brother’s house. He was an ice addict. He offered it to us and we tried it. Ice was something I had wanted to try for a long time, and I was really excited about it,” he admits. “I started using ice when it wasn’t a widely publicised drug. Had I known more about it, I never would have tried it.”

At $50 a hit, the effects last him all night. And, given its 80 percent potency compared to speed’s 20 percent, it is known to inflict users with an intense charge that lasts up to 16 hours. The substance can be swallowed, snorted, injected intravenously, anally inserted or smoked through a pipe. Bruce prefers to do the latter before he goes out clubbing, taking it with a cocktail of coke and ecstasy because he doesn’t like taking ice on its own.

But ‘Ice Addict’ is an ugly term that Bruce doesn’t want to be labelled by. After all, he has come from a normal middle class background. He grew up in the southwest Sydney suburb of Casula, lived a typical daily existence, attended government schools and avoided the popularity game. He now works full-time in sales.

Read the full story in Corker Issue 2: Winter 2008. It also features interviews with two nurses who work in hospitals in Sydney’s west.

*Names have been changed to protect their identities.

Image by Marie Sinclair

Who the bloody hell are you?

Do you have to love cricket, Kath and Kim and beer swilling to be a fair dinkim Australian? Or can we finally relax into the multicultural community we really are?

By Kate Gauthier

It’s interesting to speculate at what point after arrival does a person become accepted as a fully-fledged member of the community. My experience as an ex-pat in New York for six years made me realise what my immigrant dad was complaining about all those years. Americans would feel free to bitch in front of me about “wet-backs” and other immigrants “ruining this country” to someone who was basically another immigrant.

But because I was white and English speaking, they didn’t see me as such. I was immediately given the keys to the city and considered one of them, albeit a resident with a weird accent, and a penchant for potty-mouthed truths and beer swilling. It reminded me of the time when, as a teenager, I was told by a quickly discarded north-shore friend that it was OK that I was half wog because I didn’t look like it.

I often compare the behaviour of Strayan ex-pats overseas with immigrants in Straya. In NYC, many Australians will only socialise with other Aussies, so much so that locals coined the term “gum-nut mafia”.

And yet Australians have the gall to complain about people of Vietnamese background who congregate in Cabramatta. Honestly, haven’t these hypocrites ever been to Earl’s Court in London? The ground is thick with Aussies hanging out exclusively together on their European gap year. Do we expect Aussie and American workers in the oil-rich Arab states to live exactly as the locals? No. They submit to the local laws but within their own compounds they live as western as they can get away with. Why then do we have a double standard when it comes to others integrating into our culture?

Nowhere is this hypocrisy inflicted with such venom as on the newest and most vulnerable members of the Australian community – refugees.

In October 2007, former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said that Sudanese refugees were not integrating, citing instances of young men drinking in parks late at night and getting involved in fights in nightclubs. I would have thought this shows they are assimilating pretty well into our culture, these being the favourite activities of many young Aussie men.

The response from the African community and the broader Australian community was mixed. Some rallied around the Sudanese community, and many journalists wrote opinion pieces attacking Andrews’s comments. One letter to a newspaper stated, “I am not Sudanese. I am Australian.” This echoes the sentiments of many immigrants (or even their children) who are frustrated at being constantly identified as being other than just plain Australian: the Chinese-Australian, the Greek-Australian. Have you ever heard of anyone described as an English-Australian?

Read the full story in Corker Issue 1: Autumn 2008

Image by Kate O’Brien