Monday 25th of November 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

the shire: like west berlin, with more bibles & more suspicion …..

the shire .....

from Crikey…..It’s a very strange experience, telling people that you’ve just been to the Shire. They reel back in horror.“The Shire! Why would you want to go there?” It’s as if you said you had travelled to Mars, via Mount Everest. “But it’s only 20 minutes south of the airport,” you tell your friends, who shake their heads sadly.“I’ve never been there,” they say.The Sutherland Shire’s biggest problem, apart from its public image, is geographical isolation. Tightly enclosed by the Georges River to the north, and the Royal National Park to the south, you don’t often drive through the Shire to go somewhere else. Its most famous suburb, Cronulla, is a bit like pre-‘89 West Berlin (without the galleries) - you have to really want to go there. This kind of isolation has created a uniquely self-referential culture that is deeply suspicious of outsiders and actively tries to keep them out.Ask a local where they are from and they will puff their chests out and snort, “The Shire!”, daring you to make a judgment. It’s not just a municipality, it’s a mentality.When the Ten Network leaked the news this week that it was making a drama/reality television show about it, we all knew what that meant: Aussie beach culture, xenophobia, misogyny, boorish lower-middle class aspirations. I’ve never seen Jersey Shore, but I know the genre - create a few stereotypes, amp up the “satire” and then leak it to the media, who will find plenty of locals to express their outrage. Ten have followed this to the letter.What we do know about the Shire, according to the last census (2006), is that the locals are mainly Anglo-Celts, live in conventional family structures and have an above-average median household income.With three-quarters of the residents declaring a religious faith, it is also Sydney’s second-largest Bible belt. Locals also have an above-average rate of home ownership - according to Property Observer, Cronulla’s median house price for the year to January 2012 was $1.25 million; units, $480,000.These good, God-fearing types vote Liberal and Scott Morrison, the member for Cook, knows how to keep them happy. As the Shadow Minister for Immigration, he regularly makes statements about border protection and keeping out asylum seekers.In 2011, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, he made comments in shadow cabinet suggesting the Coalition should take advantage of the electorate’s growing concerns of “Muslim immigration”,“Muslims in Australia” and the “inability” of Muslim migrants to integrate. We got the message - yet another Shire resident who doesn’t like outsiders.For the rest of us who don’t live in Godzone Country, there are two cultural reference points for the Shire. These are the 1992 reality television show Sylvania Waters and the December 2005 Cronulla riots, when violent clashes between the locals and gangs of Lebanese men dominated the headlines for days. It came to a head on Australia Day when groups of Shire men, many of them brandishing Australian flags, fought the outsiders as if it was Custer’s Last Stand. To this day, I carry an image of Shire residents with Southern Cross tattoos, walking around with banners saying “We Grew Here, You Flew Here”.Sometimes misspelt.Cronulla is famous for its glorious beach, a magnificent strip of white sand that stretches right up to Kurnell, the site of Captain Cook’s first landing in 1770. It is the only well-known Sydney beach that is also on a train line; Manly, Bondi and all the northern suburbs are hard to get to on public transport, which dissuades visitors. But Cronulla’s railway station, a pleasant five-minute stroll to the beach, could not be more convenient. Maybe a bit too convenient.Right next to the Shire is a large group of suburbs that lack many of the advantages of their closest neighbour. South-west Sydney, much poorer and more multicultural, is the heartland of Sydney’s Muslim community, much of it Lebanese.  On the weekends they pack the Cronulla trains, dubbed by comedian Vince Colosimo the “Middle-Eastern Distributor”.Combine sun, sand and stubbies with a few ethnic tensions and you get the Cronulla riots, and a faint siege mentality. But on a sunny weekday, with only lifesavers and toddlers on the sand, the beach is aspectacular Australian landmark.I won’t be watching The Shire, because life is too short to watch reality TV, which I think sucks up your brain cells. But I do hope it contains the Shire’s best joke, from Oliver Phommavanh:“Our suburb celebrated Australia Day with a riot. I caught up with guys I haven’t seen since high school.”

bring on the blonde hobbits .....

One could be forgiven for understanding why Channel Ten did not choose to set a new reality television series on, say, the north shore.

Nothing has really happened on the north shore since the ''Granny Murders'' in 1989-1990 and that demographic is not what Ten's chief programming officer, David Mott, is looking for, dead or alive. SBS has both the near-dead and dead firmly in its grasp.

The announcement that the Shire was to be the setting of at least three new shows, The Shire, Puberty Blues - The Series and, for God's sake, Being Lara Bingle, was met with typical bravado from bloggers. Bigfoot of Sydney wrote: ''Yep, we're doomed.'' Roaster wrote: ''Every time I see something like this, that Mayan end times prophecy seems both plausible and more appealing.'' Cap'n Morgan put it thus:

''Great, like I need another reason not to watch Channel Ten. I grew up in that shithole of complacent privileged whitebread conservatism and got the hell out as soon as I turned 21. So I really needed to be reminded of why I left.'' Fleur Elise hit the nail on the head: ''TV, we can no longer be friends.''

True-blue residents of the Shire would be mortified to think they were becoming the Bollywood of the southern hemisphere but that is the price for being in the most desirable place of the whole wide world, north or south of Tom Ugly's Bridge.

These shows are trying to cash in on the unbridled charisma and insane controversy that lives and breathes in every five-bedroom house - with two garages, with ship marina - in the Shire. Even the poor have pools with diving pools and huge inflatables with stubby holders and ashtrays.

The Shire promises to be ''a glimpse behind the curtain [or through the venetian blinds] into the heart of Australia as you have never seen it before … It will leave no stone unturned,'' according to Mott.

The mayor of Sutherland Shire, Carol Provan, wants to install a boom gate at the border of the region to halt production of The Shire. She was inundated with calls that left hundreds of voicemails with one message: ''Carol, I can't believe that this is going ahead.''

Lara ''Bloody'' Bingle, the sixth contestant eliminated in Channel Nine's celebrity show Torvill and Dean's Dancing on Ice, will bring her considerable skills to working out why she ever left the Shire in the first place for Kings Bloody Cross.

Zoo Weekly will reach into its archives to retrieve pictures of Bingle before she was a model, over which she has already sued. Her famous shoot for Tourism Australia on Fingal Spit even kept boatloads of refugees from our shores. There were hardly any illegal boats entering Australia while her ad ran. These new shows may do the same thing. Bingle's blue-eyed stare is like the approach of a high-speed stolen car at night with full LED beam.

Puberty Blues will show how a pretty brunette with a punning wit and a sharp blue tongue can make it big in Britain and marry super-barrister without borders Geoffrey Robertson. Kathy Lette promises the coming TV production will ''reveal all the shaggin' wagons, abortions and burst condoms'' of that particular reckless period.

I cannot wait any longer for more Shire time. All Shire, all the Shire time. In a step towards Arabic reconciliation, there will be Shire law. There should be a whole TV channel devoted to all things Shire - the Dharawal people and their sacred sites near the Novotel Hotel and Kiora Mall; the white settlement that was quickly followed by the Arabic incursions during the alleged Cronulla riots, leading to the state of emergency under Mayor Provan.

Puberty Blues will recapture the idealistic dreamy period when girls were proud to be called ''mole''. The Shire Channel will compete with the Oprah Channel for the older mole audience. The stars of the Shire will become household names far beyond Tom Ugly's Bridge. Kasey, the 24-year-old nightclub singer, will become as famous as Jersey Shore's Snooki. Fame for the blonde Hobbits of the Shire will follow as sure as night follows day, for the entire population of the Shire, grommets included, because there, in reality, everybody is a star and thinks they are from Godzone. They think the rest of the world owes them a living and they will finally get the sort of recognition that those bastards in town have ''denied us since Adam''.

In time there will be calls for separation from the rest of Australia, Fair Go will become Fair Stay, Dark Go. Residents will demand royalties from the shows, appoint their own royalty and Queen Lara Bingle will marry a Hawaiian Ironman winner in a truly white wedding.

Shire police will give the Miranda warnings to outsiders: ''Get out of the Shire immediately.'' The Shire will become self-sufficient when gold and uranium is found in the Royal National Park and babies born in the Shire will be given the title of prince and princess - be their name Kylie, Shane, Wayne, Kyle or Kane, and the reign in the Shire shall be plain.

Exposure? It's A Shire Thing