On the lamb with a dream of a safe place free of culture warriors

The lamb ad had stirred something deep in my soul, a creeping unease with how divided the nation of my birth has become.

It was somewhere around 2am when I lurched back from the edge of unconsciousness, drenched in sweat, panting heavily, clutching my pillow like it was a life preserver. As dreams go, it was one of my weirdest for a while. The day before, the annual Australia Day ad from Meat and Livestock Australia had broken, to much mirth across The Australian’s newsroom. Long gone are the days of humble, hearty messages like “feed the man meat”. This year it was Lamb Side Story, an all-singing, all-dancing spoof of West Side Story, with the Jets and Sharks transformed into the left and right, with some cast members resembling avatars of the outer reaches of the political spectrum, from Richard Di Natale to Milo.

That same day’s newspaper featured a huge shot of Nick Xenophon cutting slabs of glistening meat from a giant kebab skewer, a strange rictus stretched across his shiny face, blade in hand, silencing the lamb. All he needed was some fava beans and a nice chianti.

This all got tossed into the blender of my brain and suddenly in my dream Lamb Side Story was now a full-fledged Broadway production. The South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, had been called in to produce, fresh from their triumph in The Book of Mormon.

I was somewhere off stage, rooted to the spot, as the South Park guys, who had been transformed into South Park caricatures of themselves, were having a tanty as the rehearsal went awry. Xenophon, knife between his teeth and wearing the sacred underpants, kept throwing strips of lamb at Milo, and they were sticking in his blond bouffant and across his unfeasibly large sunglasses. Inexplicably, meat-slathered Milo stepped into the spotlight and started singing a strange mix of “I just met a girl named Maria” and “How do you solve a problem like Maria”. Bob Hawke was skolling from an outsized yard glass and Xenophon was now James Packer, and he was chasing Mariah Carey with the knife, a maniacal glint in his beady eyes.

It was at that point that I woke, soaked, muttering into my pillow: “The horror, the horror.” The lamb ad had stirred something deep in my soul, a creeping unease with how divided the nation of my birth has become. You see, I was overseas for 25 years, toiling in the sweatshops of Asia as the culture wars were declared and the identity politics revolution began.

Unlike all the frogs in the water as it warmed up, I was plunged straight into the boiling cauldron, and it’s a shock to the system. The polarisation, the social media echo-chamber effect, the split down the middle of the media world and the growing, creeping intolerance to points of view other than one’s own.

Fortunately I recently stumbled upon the last safe space in Sydney’s inner west for the grumpy old white male. It’s a watering hole with a splendid view of a cement works and architecture that wouldn’t look out of place in a communist leader’s mausoleum. It’s no place for snowflakes, full of salt of the earth types, old salts from the nearby wharves and the occasional outburst of salty language. Here everybody’s truth is heard, considered and roundly jeered.

The beer is cold, the lamb is rare, the racing and the cricket are always on the television and the clink of glasses is punctuated by the whistle and thwack of dart on board. Everyone’s a winner, baby, that’s no lie. In my safe space I am known as “the world’s greatest journalist”. My drinking companions are, in no particular order, “the world’s greatest and second greatest cleaners”, “the world’s greatest printer”, “the world’s greatest plumber”, a bloke who looks like Donald Trump and a revolving assortment of fishermen with calloused hands, sunbaked squints and all manner of tall tales on ice.

The only trigger warning is when an attractive female passes outside and the cry goes up. “Window one!” “Window two!” “Window three!”. I realise I should strenuously object to this crass objectification of women. I should also eat more vegetables and less red meat, sleep longer, meditate often and not sweat the small stuff. What I do is have another sip of my beer and wait for the next outrageous yarn to be spun.

I could tell you where my safe space is but I shan’t. It would almost certainly be picketed by the same bunch who boycotted Coopers Ale and screamed insults at Milo, culture warriors straight out of the Bill Leak compendium of inner western fauna.

Lamb Side Story is playing on the screen of my mind again. I’m off to my safe space. Make mine a Victor Bravo.