Author: Geoff Ebbs

Coles West End at the West End markets has just undergone a revamp.

Ice under the veggies, self-serve nuts and pulses, an olive and a fish display and lots of timber shelving in the fruit and bakery all conspire to appeal to the healthy, fresh vibe that we West Enders love.

Manager Mark Van Den Boogaard with all the staff unveiled the new look at Coles Marketplace at 7:30 on Wednesday morning. The veggie and the deli staff have the most dramatic changes in their area though the layout of the supermarket as a whole has changed to accommodate the focus on fresh food close to the entrance with the toilet and laundry gear at the far end.

Mark thinks that the olive and the fish bar will mean the most to the West End customers, giving them a market-like experience in keeping with the area.

Acutely aware that lots of West Enders view the major supermarket chains as a predatory  competitor to small business and minimize the amount of shopping that they do there to support the locally owned business, I asked Mark about the local purchasing policies of Coles.

He quoted the official press release, showcasing Maleney Dairies as a local provider. “We want to promote as much local food as possible.” Given that Maleney is a couple of hours drive away, I thought, I’d check … there are no metropolitan fresh food producers that Mark buys from.

Mark is aware that some people are angry that Coles has driven the price of milk down to $1 a litre, driving many farms off the land. “The reason that we have suppliers like Maleney Dairy, is so that those customers have a choice,” he said.

Mark has not heard any criticism of the increasing appearance of Coles brand products on the shelves and feels the criticisms of supermarket trading practices are beyond his capacity to change. They are clearly beyond his authority to comment on, as well.

They are also beyond the scope of a short news report. Suffice to say that you can run into prominent figures in the local traders and community associations, national figures fighting for the rights of farmers and organic food suppliers in the aisles of West End Coles any day of the week.

Mark and the team have put in the effort to present their food in a manner in keeping with what they see as the ethos of the area. As long as we keep shopping there, they know they are onto a winning formula.

We hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet we let the greater criminal loose
Who steals the commons from the goose

The fight by the rich to take the common assets of the people and control them for personal gain is as old as money itself.

High profile examples in Australia include the gift to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation of the Sydney Showgrounds. Clive Palmer’s current request to turn the Bimblebox Nature Reserve into the vast China First coal mine represents a similar challenge in our own time.

Not all examples of the encroachment of private ownership onto public land are so visible, though. The alienation of the public from riverbanks, for example, happens gradually and steadily. What is, in law, a public asset becomes inaccessible and enjoyable only to a few.

The recent victory by Gully Watch over an attempt to have the river end of Sankey St closed and passed into private title is one victory against this general encroachment. Well done to the team that fought that battle and to Helen Abrahams who lobbied so effectively on behalf of the residents.

In some cases, private owners simply want to keep the public away from public land near their property so that they can enjoy exclusive access to the natural assets which they believe that they should have privileged access to.

This certainly seems to be the case at the end of Boundary St where some “unallocated public land” (read The Commons) is to be closed off because of complaints by neighbours that it was being enjoyed by the public.

Newman forbid!

Disclosure of interest: I am the publisher of Westender and a resident of Riviera Apartments at 5 Dudley St (known to the locals as Rancho Relaxo)

Westender is interested to explore community views and the legal basis of this enclosure. Obviously we all want to ensure that the public have access to a public asset. The question appears to be is that best served by having it open, or closed?

We welcome your views and expertise.

Here is the letter I sent to my neighbours asking for their support.

Hello neighbour,

In addition to our citizenship, our humanity and many hopes and fears, you and I share the commonwealth of this nation. Some of this is managed and provided by the government – roads, running water, well managed parks, sewage, fire and police services. Many things, though, are simply ours to enjoy: the sea, the air, the river that runs past our homes. This common wealth is part of the environment that nurtures and supports us. We must cooperate to preserve these common assets.

There are two blocks of land, known officially as no.s 1 and 3 Dudley St which are part of this common wealth and that you and I, as neighbours, share.

• Some of us have used this space to develop a community garden so that all of us might enjoy shade, free food and access to heirloom seeds.
• Some of us have used this space to park our cars.
• Twice in the last six months, ex-residents of number 5 Dudley St have used this space to celebrate a 21^st birthday and a graduation.

Apparently these uses of the common land have offended some of you.

• Someone has been pulling plants out of the community garden.
• Someone else has registered an official complaint and caused the land to be locked up so that it will be no longer commonly accessible.

This makes us a poorer community.

There are many things that neighbours may not like about each other.

• Renovations that wake us all every morning at 6:30am for 6 months
• The Labrador that poos every day in the most inappropriate places.
• Fertile tom cats that spray, fight and kill wildlife
• The boat shed wedding parties that broadcast bad music

Unpleasant as these things are, we take them in our stride as part of the awkwardness of being members of the human family. We respect each other’s right to be annoying. More bureaucracy controlling more aspects of our daily lives does not help us get along.

I will be fighting this closure of the commons. I invite you to join me in maintaining this public asset and working together to make it wonderful.

Geoff Ebbs.

The crowd was of an age that in dictated they had probably bopped along to Russell Morris on their transistor radio in 1969, I know I did, but the chatter in the queue was about his recent songs with their historical bent and blues framing.

When the band came out and started playing the straight blues number Black Dog Blues I worried that we were going to be deprived of the intimate interaction that Der Spiegeltent potentially offers an audience.

I need not have worried. Mr Morris is an accomplished comedian, twisting tales of his grandmother, tales from his grandmother, acid trips, Molly Meldrum allusions and the characters from Australian history into a stage show that goes beyond patter. It is not often you get a belly laugh at a music gig but I enjoyed more than one.

I found myself looking forward to his next little spiele as each song drew to a close.

That is not to detract from the music. The band is tight, accomplished and steady. As a blues dilettante I am not qualified to deconstruct the musicality of the first half of the show, but it provided a solid basis for the historical context and the powerful characters that are the subject matter of his more recent material. Morris delivers neat vignettes of Les Darcey and Squizzy Taylor that in one case is an ode and the other a bitter footnote. Other songs deal with the gigantic historical framing of the Depression, the Gold Rush and our convict past.

I would have been perfectly happy with a concert based on this material alone but the duties of a rock legend insist that – to quote Mr Morris – we enter the tardis and follow the time lord back to 1969.

I am the real thing, set the scene, inspiring four women to shed the years and dance as we all did 44 years ago, helping the rest of us take the time journey.

Lead guitarist Peter Robinson has a Mick Ronson like command of the rock format and the big finish and delivers it with an ease and confidence that is too joyful to be described as cynicism but so accomplished that you want to challenge him to take it a little bit further. Bass player Mitch Cairns and drummer John Creech round out a solid and joyful, blues and rock outfit.

A string of hits and an encore later, Russell had us in the palms of his capable hands.

“I know you all want to hear the old stuff but we are a working band and are making a new record so we want you to hear the new stuff as well. This is something Peter and I wrote six weeks ago and we think it will be the break out song on the new album.” In a final tease they then launched into Sweet Sweet Love as the final number.

Satisfied as the tent full of baby boomers were, I’m not sure I was the only person in the room who would quite liked to have heard a new number written six weeks ago and had the opportunity to turn it into the next real big thing.

If it had any of the resonance of the historical numbers from Sharkmouth, I’d be paying my 99c to download it legally.

Premier Newman tonight launched OperaQ’s 2014 program at the Spiegeltent on the Cultural Forecourt at Southbank, a hop step and a jump from Westender’s home base on Boundary Street.

Themed Life Less Ordinary, Der Spiegeltent was the perfect venue and the sultry presentation of La Boheme was the perfect tease.

The news of the night though was the announcement that next year’s Brisbane Festival will be the third city in the world to host the new Philip Glass opera The Perfect American. An ode to Disney, Warhol and Glass himself, Brisbanites will get to see the piece before it is ever performed in America. It has been commissioned for Philip Glass’ 75^th birthday. It will play in London and Madrid before coming to Brisbane.

In a multi-layered, self-referential and possibly-accidental piece of post-modernism, Premier Newman followed the opening number from Rigoletto, described by OperaQ Artistic Director, Lindy Hume as “a representation of the corruption of power based on the sex parties and plastic surgery-enhanced smile of Silvio Berlusconi.”

A smile had been brought to the Premier’s lips by tenor Rosario La Spina’s description of the opera’s central character as “being able to get whatever he wanted and wanting women, well, pretty much all of the time.”

As is fitting in the Spiegeltent, sex was pretty much the topic of the evening. The characters from La Boheme were in the audience, egging everyone on to indulgent heights of enthusiasm and then burst into Puccini’s romantic opera that climaxed with a snow machine blanketing parts of the audience in white foam.

The well dressed and somewhat formal crowd left highly satisfied, thoroughly titillated and nicely warmed by a glass or two of free bubbly.

The light show at the South bank forecourt is a sight to behold, so even if you cannot afford the dramatic and musical events of the Brisbane Festival, grab the kids, grandma or the dog and take a walk down there on dusk.

Griffith was one of a handful of seats that resisted the charms of Clive Palmer. Only 2,200 people voted 1 Karin Hunter, less than the informal vote of 3,300 people who spoiled their vote, deliberately or otherwise. Rudd for the ALP polled 27,800 against Glasson’s 29,000 but The Greens’ 6,900 votes pushed Rudd over the line.

Glasson picked up about 4,500 votes in this election, about 2,300 from the ALP, 1,500 from the LDP and 1,000 from the Greens. The Greens lost another 2,200 votes to Clive Palmer.

This is a remarkable phenomenon.

Palmer United outpolled the Greens across Queensland. As at Monday 9^th September the results were 230,000 votes to Palmer and 125,000 to the Greens. The Greens lost 44% of their vote in this campaign.

Palmer United’s result is the talk of the town this morning. Many commentators expressing surprise that a first time party with so many obvious policy flaws should do so well. The voters on talk back were all saying the same thing, though. I’m sick of the political double speak and those candidates are real people who speak to me about the problems that affect me.

The 6million copies of the DVD he sent out explaining his position was incredibly effective as well. It was mentioned by more than half the talk back respondents that I heard talking this morning.

Palmer did not do well in the other inner city seats of Brisbane, Ryan, Moreton or Lilley. In most of those seats he just about matched the informal vote and was surpassed by the Greens. The Greens put most of their limited advertising dollars into Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan so that may have been a factor, but they went backwards in those seats by 7%, 5% and 4.5% respectively, so that hardly explains everything.

A better explanation would appear to be that the Greens have had two constituencies, the core voters who put long term nurturing of resources above short term economic gain, and a protest vote that has had nowhere else to go.

In the inner city, their core vote is larger, the protest vote is smaller and went largely to the LNP. As you head out to the suburbs and regional areas, the size of their loss and Palmer’s gain increases.

This was incredibly similar to the QLD state election result, although in that election Katter was the new kid on the block who stole the  Greens thunder. See They Rode to Town on a Donkey on The Generator. My analysis of that result is still relevant, although some issues have moved along a little in the intervening 16 months.

Palmer appears to have done a brilliant job of picking one issue that appeals to each disenfranchised constituency and throwing money at them. That this has so effectively disenfranchised the Greens says a lot about their hold over their vote. There is clearly some navel gazing to do.