Larvatus Prodeo

I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.

Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.

The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.

Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column – whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten – in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.

Continue reading ‘Cities and suburbs and transcending the dichotomy – creatively’