Summer of my discontent made inglorious bummer: heat beyond the pale
Relentless sun, coconut-oiled sands, stinking heat, festive bushfires – bah, you can keep it.
I have always worried I am a bad Australian. Like a relaxed Englishman, an uptight Italian or a polite Frenchman, I fail just too many standard tests of national character. Sporting prowess is one.
Not only can I not bat, bowl or field, I cannot jump, run, slither, crawl or fall over gracefully. I have the eye-hand co-ordination of an earthworm.
But at least this is an involuntary lapse, like having been born in Launceston. It’s the conscious mortal sins against the great Australian creed that give me most anguish.
Notably, I really do not like summer. I know the three of you reading this are lolling lovingly beside a pool mainly filled with the urine of impolite guests, luxuriating in heat that would baste a turkey. You are sipping a glass of tepid froth that three minutes ago was a cold beer.
But in the nicest possible way, and struggling very hard to be nice, you sicken me. Each of you is nothing more than an antipodean heat walrus. If I had a harpoon and the strength to wield it in this stinking heat, I’d puncture your zinc cream.
Like a reverse romantic, summer was my first hate. In my Melbourne childhood, it snuck up on you like a dodgy charity can-rattler. One minute it was scented spring, the next the pulverised topsoil of the Mallee was being blown into your teeth by a superheated nor’westerly.
Which was just survivable, except for your idiot relatives proclaiming, “Isn’t this warm weather lovely?” It’s not warm, you geriatric cretins, it’s a sulphureous blast from the tonsils of Satan.
Then, to rub it in, you had the emphatic endorsement of the weather collaborationists on the evening news: “And it’s another beautiful 140-degree Fahrenheit day here in Melbourne, with the night-time temperature dropping to a balmy 110.”
These blokes were not just forecasters, they were world-class psychological sadists. Particularly when those beautiful white-hot days sparked the inevitable bushfires. Then you would have some idiot simultaneously exalting in the thermometer-busting heat and bemoaning that half the state had been incinerated.
It is amazing I am not even more bitter and twisted than I am. I could have ended up a Collingwood supporter.
As punishment for failing to appreciate good Victorian summers, I eventually was forcibly removed to Perth for 12 years. Western Australia takes reverse heat psychosis to a new level.
The west is just so hot that nobody dares admit the fact. If you actually accepted that the average summer temperature approximates the core of a nuclear bomb, everyone would run screaming to the South Australian border. Then back again because even immolation is better than a Saturday in Adelaide.
As a solution, the sandgropers simply have abolished the notion of heat. It is never hot. Even as the windowpanes melt, they assert the Fremantle Doctor will save them.
That fickle breeze usually arrives about midnight, wheezes uncertainly for a couple of minutes, then expires in the glowering combustion.
But West Australians remain loyal to their sandy purgatory. No one has airconditioning. By definition, if no one has an airconditioner, it cannot possibly be hot. No wonder these guys invested with Alan Bond.
In all my life I have found only one use for our appalling summers and festive forest fires. They scare the living daylights out of visiting Britishers.
We once had an eminent Oxford professor at Melbourne Uni who, while evaporating in sweat, listened in terror to reports of piffling bushfires somewhere near the Murray. He asked how close they would get, and we assured him Collins St would be gone by evening. He left on the next plane.
In all honesty, though, the thing I hate worst about summer is the beach. The UN should look seriously at the scenes of horror on our gritty, sweaty, coconut-oiled sands.
I accept that a lot of people like to swim. I do not. It is cold and clammy, and when you emerge and lie down you end up like an uncomfortable sand-coated lamington. With jam if you cut your foot on a piece of glass.
Besides, there are dangerous things out there: like sharks, jellyfish and homicidal toddlers being taught to surf.
But even accepting the theoretical admissibility of swimming, what is the attraction of lying down in human pods on superheated sand basking in carcinogenic tanning oils with a towelling hat over your face to avoid seeing what you are doing to your body?
And how do people have the shamelessness to expose their bodies in public like that? I don’t mean the teenage boys wearing cockatoo smugglers and their female companions wearing G-string bikinis that would have seen them sacked from any decent strip joint in decades past.
I mean people like me. As an ageing Australian male, I am ashamed to be in company with myself when I’m in the shower. I can only imagine the self-confidence or cruel exhibitionism that prompts less than lithe Australians to parade their guts, goitres and grotesqueries in front of their fellow beach citizens. For god’s sake, there are children present.
I do admit that my horror of the beach has two very personal drivers. My complexion is precision-made for the County Galway of my ancestors. It can withstand temperatures anywhere up to the mid-20s with ease. Beyond that, it’s sunburn, blisters and frozen nitrogen torture on my increasingly bare scalp.
And then there are thongs. Please, I have a refined aesthetic taste. I read Yeats. Can there be anything uglier than a pair of thongs, other than a pair of thongs containing the ugly feet of some bomb-diving hoon from Dee Why?
Besides, I remember wearing thongs when I was four. For a fastidious preschooler, the inability to control the influx of grimy grit was intolerable. “I love the feel of sand between my toes.” Fie! Vulgarian. Queenslander.
Whenever I mutter to one of my many enemies “Have a happy Christmas”, I add a silent malediction: “And a bloody long summer too!”
Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.
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