This morning I faced two challenges: getting up on time and buying a jacket before joining the Urban Issues walk.\u00c2\u00a0 The sun warmed me enough that I felt I could cope without a jacket, but I’m glad I persisted and finally found a 55-dollar jacket at the Myer basement after finding Target all out of jackets and all the boutiques stocked with 25%-off reduced-price 299-dollar sportscoats.\u00c2\u00a0 Necessity has forced me into youth fashion, a jacket with a stretch collar and rectilinear hem lines.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I got to Collins Street Baptist just before ten and found nobody there, so I sat down on the steps and waited.\u00c2\u00a0 Just after ten, Brent came out and greeted me; the group that had booked the walk hadn’t shown up yet.\u00c2\u00a0 We talked and I learned that the founder of Urban Seed studied theology in R\u00c3\u00bcschlikon in the eighties.\u00c2\u00a0 R\u00c3\u00bcschlikon is also the Swiss town that hosts the IBM research labs where the scanning tunneling microscope was invented, so both Urban Seed and my visit to Melbourne owe a direct debt to R\u00c3\u00bcschlikon.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
The group did arrive, a wee bit late, but coming all the way from Castlemain that was understandable.\u00c2\u00a0 They were a group of TAFE (Teaching and further education) folks that were in social work studies.\u00c2\u00a0 They seemed to come from a wide variety of backgrounds and later in conversation it turned out that at least some had been through rough patches themselves, which I’m sure gave them an impetus to study social work.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brent started off by briefly describing Urban Seed, which I won’t summarize myself.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re interested to know more, the website will do much better than I could.\u00c2\u00a0 He did this on the steps facing Collins street, a thoroughfare with posh brand shops and expensive cars passing by.\u00c2\u00a0 We started walking and he told us to look hard at the surroundings.\u00c2\u00a0 Two turns later, we stood in a side alley where refurbished apartments faced a dead cinderblock wall.\u00c2\u00a0 Ten years ago, living in the city meant you were poor.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, it means you’re cashed up.\u00c2\u00a0 At eye level on the apartment block a large sign proclaimed that the area was under video surveillance.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Would you have felt safe there?\u00c2\u00a0 The majority of our group felt that the sign made us more insecure than the surroundings themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 If there’s a need for video surveillance, then surely it’s dangerous, right?\u00c2\u00a0 I also felt that the high windowless and inhuman brick wall and the dead-end alley made the location feel dodgy.\u00c2\u00a0 Small alleys are cute if you can tell people live there; they are eerie when they’re bled dry of people.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
We took a short walk to the even more dehumanized alley that leads to the Cafe Credo at the rear of Collins Street Baptist Church.\u00c2\u00a0 The alley feels a bit more homely with the graffiti art on one wall, but the visible pipes and gratings and lack of windows give it a mechanized vibe.\u00c2\u00a0 Brent explained the dilemma the church faced during the heroin crisis which peaked in 1999.\u00c2\u00a0 One reason the users shot up in that alley, besides its seclusion,\u00c2\u00a0was that there was a water tap, and they needed water to shoot up.\u00c2\u00a0 The church first took the tap away, but the users merely proceeded to draw water from dirty puddles, so they put the tap back in.\u00c2\u00a0 Brent went on to tell how the one thing the church could do was provide a community for these marginalised people.\u00c2\u00a0 I learned that one of the biggest problems for people in secondary and tertiary homelessness is loneliness, and having a group to regularly meet can make a huge difference in keeping these people in society.\u00c2\u00a0 (Primary, secondary, and tertiary homelessness differ as follows: the first means a total lack of shelter, the second means reliance on short-term solutions such as government shelters, and the third means reliance on medium-term solutions such as staying on a friend’s couch – another thing I learned today.)\u00c2\u00a0 The Cafe Credo\u00c2\u00a0responded and still responds to the drug problem on the harm reduction side, complementing the government’s supply reduction efforts but often running into frustrated police officers in the course of events, because the supply reduction didn’t work.\u00c2\u00a0 The supply seems to have more correlation with the opium harvest in Afghanistan (which plummeted during the early Taliban rule and has reached a new high this year) than with efforts toward controlling imports.\u00c2\u00a0 An Afghani farmer can feed his family if he grows opium, but not if he grows wheat, which adds another component to the difficult question on how to act effectively and wisely in this matter.\u00c2\u00a0 And finally, it seems that while some efforts on the supply reduction and harm reduction sides can accomplish something, the demand for the drugs seems almost impossible to reduce.\u00c2\u00a0 A venue to escape our world, be that through drugs, TV, celebrity cults, or adventure vacations, seems to almost be a basic human necessity.\u00c2\u00a0 Alcohol alone causes an enormous amount of harm in society, and yet it is legal.\u00c2\u00a0 Heroin is not, even though it changes the personality less than alcohol (but it is more addictive).\u00c2\u00a0 Illegality leads to a black market, driving up prices and leading to a cycle of for instance prostitution for money for drugs in order to flee the misery of prostitution.\u00c2\u00a0 Legality, or semi-legality as with cannabis, leads to more controlled drugs, making the habit less lethal, but also to stronger drugs, making the habit more addictive.\u00c2\u00a0 There really seems to be no clear, wise answer to these issues.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
After a quick visit in the Cafe we walked through a short corridor next to the church and emerged on bright Collins Street next to a pearl shop.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve never walked such a steep social gradient in such a short time.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
The group left again after some wrap-up questions and discussion, and when I hung back to chat with Brent he suggested I eat lunch at the Cafe Credo.\u00c2\u00a0 He took me back there and introduced me to some of the people there; I drank tea and chatted while he left to get some work done.\u00c2\u00a0 I met a lot of interesting people there – Naomi, Andy, Dave, Paul, Sarah, two-year-old Isabella, Neal, Damian, Rae, the boss’s daughter, whose name I never found out, and a few others whose names I don’t remember.\u00c2\u00a0 Before lunch we sang some songs and prayed.\u00c2\u00a0 I sat right next to a guy who couldn’t sing and most of the songs were unfamiliar to me.\u00c2\u00a0 Wait, let me rephrase that: he could sing, but he couldn’t carry a tune.\u00c2\u00a0 Or rather, he could carry a tune, but it didn’t match with anyone else’s.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter: joyful noise, with me\u00c2\u00a0fully part of it.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the lunch table the discussion began with talk about getting a busing license, which confused me until I straight up asked and was told that they were talking about a busking license.\u00c2\u00a0 “Busker” is an Australian term for a street artist, and here they need a license to perform.\u00c2\u00a0 Neal wanted one to play the bongo in Melbourne (and he’s a good bongo-man).\u00c2\u00a0 Damian was talking about the St. Kilda council getting on his case because of a painting on a meter box in a park advertising the laughing club that he runs as meeting at that meter box.\u00c2\u00a0 They get together and laugh – he demonstrated one laughing “exercise” to me and while I think I’m a bit too inhibited for that sort of thing it does look like enough fun to envy the uninhibited.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
After lunch I helped clean up a bit and carried a few metal scrap items around with Dave.\u00c2\u00a0 They were to go in a van, but when I went outside one time after cleaning to see if the guy was ready to load the metal, he’d already loaded it and left and suddenly I found myself locked out without having said goodbye properly to anyone except to Brent, who was just then talking to a group of schoolboys.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I walked out onto wealthy street and had a tea in a coffee shop housed in a bank.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, I took a tram to St. Albert Park to pick up my jacket.\u00c2\u00a0 I trusted the electronic signage too much that said the next tram was 112, so I ended up getting on a tram number 31 and wondering why it crossed Spencer instead of turning left.\u00c2\u00a0 Two stations later the driver walked through the tram and told me it was the last stop.\u00c2\u00a0 I said I’d thought the tram went all the way south to St. Albert Park, to which he answered that I needed to get onto 112.\u00c2\u00a0 “I’m not on 112?\u00c2\u00a0 I thought this was 112.”\u00c2\u00a0 Before I could get off and walk back the short distance to Spencer he said he’d drive me there.\u00c2\u00a0 So I had a tram chauffeur me two stops, only to turn around right thereafter and go back to the final stop.\u00c2\u00a0 I was blown away.\u00c2\u00a0 This driver really went the extra mile – under no obligation at all.\u00c2\u00a0 If all the drivers in Melbourne offer that sort of customer service, I’m moving there!\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I quickly retrieved my jacket and then sat on a bench by the lake and wrote postcards in the sun.\u00c2\u00a0 When the sun vanished and the wind picked up I appreciated having two jackets, but even so I soon felt uncomfortable and left.\u00c2\u00a0 I stopped in the public restroom where the writing on the wall said “Smile! You’re on C.C.T.V”\u00c2\u00a0 After having Brent make me aware of all the security cameras in Melbourne, I found that quite appropriate.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
From there I took the tram to Richmond to meet up with Tim and Viv and their darling daughters.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s nothing like fellowship with friends to combat the inherent loneliness in business travel.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe not only drug addicts need a Cafe Credo for community.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe there ought to be one for businessmen as well.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I faced two challenges: getting up on time and buying a jacket before joining the Urban Issues walk.\u00c2\u00a0 The sun warmed me enough that I felt I could cope without a jacket, but I’m glad I persisted and finally found a 55-dollar jacket at the Myer basement after finding Target all out of jackets and all the boutiques stocked with 25%-off reduced-price 299-dollar sportscoats.\u00c2\u00a0 Necessity has forced me into youth fashion, a jacket with a stretch collar and rectilinear hem lines.\u00c2\u00a0 I got to Collins Street Baptist just before ten and found nobody there, so I sat down on the steps and waited.\u00c2\u00a0 Just after ten, Brent came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}