I have just returned from a rock-n-roll thunder tour of the world that took in Tokyo, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Rome.
I have not visited any of these cities in forty years, so the changes were amazing.
First, what had not changed. Everybody smokes, everywhere, thank god.
Tokyo has barely changed as an experience, except that it has gone from horrifyingly expensive to spectacularly cheap.
Amsterdam, London, and Paris have been polished by globalisation to the point of becoming parodies of themselves.
As a tourist, there is always the danger of being caught in the slipstream of presentation of place over genius loci.
But I have enough friends in both cities to get beneath the surface, and all agreed that these great global metropolises had become like musicals about the places they once were.
Rome was much better. Lifted from the fifth of yesterday, but still grungy enough to offer a real past expressed legitimately. Even writing in such a way about Rome makes me feel like some global wanker.
It is the sheer depth of Roman history that cannot be burnished into a living postcard.
Though it must be said that the difference between 5 billion humans in the 1980s versus 8 billion today, plus low-cost airlines, makes the tide of humanity an irresistible force everywhere, with charges to match, even for stone cairns once great.
What strikes me returning home is how much more Australia has changed, only in reverse.
Globalisation has not polished Australia; it has roughed it up.
This is not all bad. When I first left home, I had never eaten a Thai meal. Now, Hellbourne unquestionably has the highest quality and greatest array of cuisine in the world.
A few days in London will explain to you that this matters. Blighty is trying, but its globalised food is as bad today as its indigenous food was forty years ago. A few more days in Paris or Rome, and you’ll understand a level of culinary boredom long forgotten in Australia.
That sad and squashed thing on your plate reminds you that meat is a precious commodity.
But, beyond food, the forty years of Australian progress are clearest in two negatives.
Uber is a lot cheaper here than everywhere else I visited, thanks to our burgeoning underclass. This holds true of all other low-value services. From a pedicure to a massage.
As I explained long ago, the anus of the Australian services economy grasps the wealthy of Australia within a jingling embrace of infinitesimal grooming.
But everything else is paralysingly expensive. The average life here is priced as a tourist trap in the great cities of Europe.
Given wages never matched these price rises, this is a material fall in living standards.
One other feature stood out. Everywhere I went was safe.
In Europe, there was barely a Cockney or Gypsy or an African hawker that threatened. Tokyo is like some giant, crimeless utopia.
But not Hellbourne. The moment I hit the crumbling terminal, there were warnings everywhere.
Fantastical machines rooted in concrete, somehow denoted as the automated “Border Force”, have supplanted the nimble immigration officer.
Hostile bogan customs officials made the UK border look like it’s still in the EU. Though at least we were no longer sprayed with Mortein in the aircraft cabin.
The Uber ride home was like galloping atop a camel through some Arabian gauntlet, the air thick with a chemical unknown.
To wit.
Victorian magistrates have declared the state is in the grip of a “significant crime wave” as they express frustration about the rise in retail crime, repeated adjournments and a “rampant” surge in vehicle thefts.
In rare public interventions in Victoria’s crime crisis during open court, magistrates Brett Sonnet and Leon Fluxman have both referenced damning police statistics released two weeks ago during proceedings and criticised delays in the justice system.
During proceedings in Court 3 this week, Mr Sonnet issued his candid comments about the explosion of crime during his time presiding over cases in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, citing crime statistics that showed an increase in burglaries.
“Truly, Victoria is in the grips of a significant crime wave. You can’t say anything more,” Mr Sonnet said.
“Issues of theft of motor vehicles can no longer be described as prevalent; they’re rampant.”
Every city I visited had a stunning underground, spectacularly safe, and my teenage kids were astounded at the breadth and safety of their freedom of movement.
Returned to Hellbourne, for all its “Big Build” and other symptoms of Victoria disease, the passage out of the airport was the most fraught of the trip.
And at home, my kids immediately ducked for the cover of their bedrooms to avoid the broadswords of the once safest streets anywhere.
It’s like the great cultures of the world had so much pride in their figments that they froze them in enormous snow globes.
While Australia had so little regard for itself that it threw the baby out with the bathwater.
