79103852
Elsternwick 12:00pm Thu
Back doing my one day of teaching again after three weeks off. I’ve actually found myself almost looking forward to coming back. I think that sometimes it’s possible to take a task that seems unattractive and just decide to enjoy it. There’s a lot that I love about coming in to teach. The kids are always a great laugh, and I love coming up against their little personalities, even the difficult ones. The staff here are really nice, the surroundings are good. I think my main reservation about teaching has always been that I didn’t really do it very well. I’ve come to the realisation, though, that even though I still think there are lots of people who take to teaching more naturally than I do, I’m actually not too bad at it. If I was to set aside the little bit of time that it would take each week to make sure I had the resources that I needed to make the lessons interesting, I think I could do pretty well. There’s always the temptation, though, to just show up and put the kids through their paces, flick over to the next page of the tutor book and spend half an hour going through the same things as the week before. I think it’s this minimal approach that I find depressing, because it’s pretty difficult to tell from week to week whether I’m making any difference. There are two main objectives, I think, when I start teaching someone. The first is to get them playing the instrument to some degree. The second is to expose them to music and make that a part of their lives. I’m not sure that the minimal approach to instrumental tuition really satisfies either. It makes a quantum difference just to write out a few pop songs for the kids to play and sing along with, and it’s really not much effort on my part. Even in terms of the first objective, just teaching them to play the instrument, a little preparation time can make a big difference. One theory sheet can be the difference between a child learning the notes or not learning the notes, and it would probably take me ten minutes to put one together.
All of this combines to be another pointer to a fact which has come up again and again in the past few months. The only way that a busy life can be both successful and enjoyable is if I divide my time up in some sort of disciplined way. I tried about a month ago to get something happening, and it worked pretty well, for about three days. Then something happened and it didn’t start up again. Like most worthwhile things, though, it usually takes a few attempts to get them started. The engine which drives my life is like the one in my old Corona. On a cold morning, when it’s been sitting in the driveway for a while, it seems like it’s never going to get started. The reassuring part, though, is that once it purrs into life, it can run like a dream.
Cycled from Brunswick to Caulfield a couple of days ago, as a sort of test run to discover the practicality of cycling to and from uni this semester. It’s become apparent that my swimming regime is not going to be sustainable during the busy uni times (no matter now well regimented my timetable might be). Cycling to and from there would be a good way of getting regular exercise without sacrificing a great deal of time (since it takes almost the same time to cycle there as to catch the tram/train combination). The terrain is mostly fairly flat. The traffic is dense, but not insurmountable. I expected it to be a fairly light workout. It wasn’t.
I got there okay, in reasonably good health and good spirits. On the way home, I rode into a headwind which was a bit unpleasant, but nothing too crippling. I made it into the city without complications. The troubles set in when I faced the hills of North Melbourne. The suffering was made worse by the fact that I’d never realised the hills were there. Certainly, I’d driven up and down them lots of times, but they always seemed like gentle slopes, just enough to add a bit of character to the area, certainly not enough to make me think twice about cycling through it. It might have been the fact that I haven’t done any significant cycling for about six months, but my journey up some of those hills had me reaching for the granny gear, and then reaching in vain for one below it. It was as depressing and humiliating as it was exhausting.
The conclusion of my experiment was that I should begin by cycling one way and catching the train the other. It won’t save me much money in the beginning, since I have to buy a concession ticket for my bike on the way home, but it will give me some exercise and get me in training for the time when I can take the two-way trip without excess suffering.
Time to get some lunch.
78649584
Brunswick 4:47
The coffee is painfully hot. The espresso machine has been left dormant for too long, the owner drumming his fingers on the counter and watching the door. The piped music sounds too loud, bouncing off the bare linoleum in the cavernous spaces between tables. The discomfort in here comes from him being angry about me being aware of his pathos. What happens when a customer is an unwelcome visitor because he only highlights the absence of other customers?
78649557
Dromana 1:55pm Sun
I’m just back from a quick trip back to Adelaide. Having Gran there (96, deaf, blind, and without any family in the same city) means that there’s some sort of obligation for me to get over there as often as I can. It’s been six months since the last time I was there, which is longer than I would have liked. It’s difficult though, being both so busy and so broke.
Six months living in Melbourne has been enough to shift my perspective on Adelaide a little. When I lived there, I used to think that Adelaide was a city more-or-less like any other, and Melbourne was just a bigger version. There’s an extent to which that’s true - certainly, the two places are more similar than, say, Tokyo and Buenos Aires - and Melbourne and Adelaide both provide for a fairly typical Australian lifestyle, but I now realise that it would be wrong to imagine that there aren’t significant differences.
I had a pretty long talk with Beth about those differences, and she was, not surprisingly, talking up the benefits of life in Adelaide. They’re pretty obvious: cheap property prices, having the hills and the coastline close by, having less crowding and traffic. What is it, though, that prevents Adelaide from being a sort of promised land as far as the Australian city lifestyle is concerned?
Unemployment is a big thing, I suppose, and there’s no doubt that a lot of people leave Adelaide to find work. I’m convinced, though, that even if you did have a good job in Adelaide, there might still be arguments in favour of living in Melbourne instead. Of course, that depends on what’s important to you.
Jo and I were struck by the emptiness of the streets in Adelaide. Not just empty of cars and traffic, but empty of people. Adelaide is a much smaller city than Melbourne, of course, but I don’t think that the lack of population alone can account for the eerie desertedness that tends to pervade the place. And in a way, I think the same things that work in Adelaide’s favour as a place to live can also work against it.
The large cheap houses and general low density of living contribute to a very wide urban sprawl. What that means is that people tend to be living further from any sort of social centre. Where I live in Brunswick, I’m surrounded by shops and cafes and football grounds and gymnasiums and railway platforms and all sorts of other places where people, for one reason or another, get out of their houses and gather together. In Adelaide, your nice big house is likely to be surrounded by other big houses, and little else. The spread of the population is such that commercial centres can only survive by servicing a huge surrounding area. These big centres (which exist in Melbourne too, but which are relied upon less) are easy to get to by road, and they’re surrounded by huge carparks. The areas in between those big retail centres (amongst which you could include the city centre shopping district) are almost bereft of any sort of commercial development. Parks are abundant, and they are certainly a big asset to the city, but with those aside, people are less inclined to regularly get out of their nice houses with their big backyards and mix with other people in their local neighbourhood, simply because the “neighbourhood” as such doesn’t really exist for most residents. If there’s nowhere to go for a relaxed coffee, no train to catch, no gym or swimming pool within cooee, they tend to take care of their own needs within the comfortable confines of their own homes. That might make Adelaide a boomtown as far as lifestyle television goes, but I think it comes at a cost to the liveability of the city.
Well-planned big cities (perhaps including Melbourne) tend to create some sort of community by cramming a lot of people into a small space and seeing what happens. Small towns tend to create some sort of community within themselves through some sense of shared experiences (and often values). Adelaide, it seems to me, can tend to fall in between. People aren’t sufficiently in each other’s pockets to be forced to get along. They don’t tend to share enough in common with their neighbours to befriend them by default. They don’t tend to congregate all that much (apart from the occasional festival or big sporting event - the success of these big events in Adelaide might be partly due to the novelty of having so many people out of their houses at once). So although there are relatively few actual gated communities, relatively few freeways, and relatively abundant public spaces, society in Adelaide is, by comparison with Melbourne, quite individualistic and quite conservative. I think that has come about more by accident than by design, but I can’t see it changing in the future.
Melbourne bears fewer hallmarks of rampant individualism than many of the places I visited in my travels. There’s a sense here that life has yet to retreat behind closed doors, and perhaps it’s that fact that I find appealing. I don’t know how long it will last.