(NOTE: In two thousand and three (aged 23) I wrote a monologue predicting what an Australian future would look like in twenty twenty three for a spoken word event mouth off. I reopened the file recently. Here is an edited transcript).
I’m an accountant from the future. I have come to deliver a message.
It’s 2023. The world is a very different place…
Right now I’m riding along on my flying bicycle. Cars are too heavy to make fly, but bikes and skateboards are fine. Back to the Future got it about right.
I’m listening to Triple J Mix FM. All the greatest hits from the nineties, the zeroes, the tens and today. Every song in their Interactive Top 10 was from the new supergroup Boogie Sugar and the Flufftones featuring Madonna’s kid and the Minogue twins going at each other with inflatable mallets. Every song has the same four chords in a different order and lyrics out of an English as a second language book. No more maybe’s / the babies got rabies.
It’s all owned by McMicrosoft (everything’s owned by them…except Big Kev’s Goo Remover). Thank god Big Kev clung on with all the might he could squeeze out of his stumpy little fingers. “I’m excited,” he said, “but I’m no bloody sell out! I’m wearing this big silky Australian flag close to my heart.”
The computer generated film clips look like stuff we used to watch on SBS after 11pm. This morning I woke up to my ten year old trying to hump the beanbag. She says Cher told her too. When I rang up to complain, the NBC, sorry, the BBC, I mean the ABC put me on hold and made me listen to an entire episode of The Vicar of Dibley. An automated voice response operator told me in polite terms to get off the fuckin’ phone.
Cinemas come with sick bags. I’ve seen Terminator 8, Austin Powers 7, Star Wars 6, Star Trek 5, Shrek 4, Mission Impossible 3 and how did they get a sequel out of Kindergarten Cop?
There’s a hidden camera in every home for that show ‘Closed Doors.’ You can switch on to any family in Australia and just watch. It’s great. There’s a special feature on the remote control. Usually I hit ‘random.’ Last night I saw these kids in Toowoomba playing Uno. It was nice…relaxing…like the show says, now you really can see what goes on behind “Closed Doors!”
Centrelink of the future! The lines are twice as long. Everyone smokes twice as many cigarettes. There’s half as many jobs. The touch screens take twice as long. Instead of a diary you’ve got to keep a small novelette: It was the best of times…fuck.
They want to know how many evil thoughts you had in a day and how many times you touched yourself while thinking about your allowance.
In 2006 they bring in the Edible Produce Factory Engineer Scheme. (EPFAS.) Read: Centrelink sweatshops. Scientists finally persuade the global economy that the world’s population is getting too big. There’s not enough food to go around.
George Bush orders Australia to accept refugees from around the world. We don’t like to say no. It means we have to produce vast quantities of food, quickly. Giant factories are erected in every capital city. If you’re unemployed for more than six months, it’s off to sweatshops: picking spuds, washing spuds, cloning spuds, genetically modifying turnips into spuds. A lot of the workers wear Nike’s made of leather spuds.
Refugees come from every corner of the globe (even though scientists have since proven the earth is round). Large housing commission blocks are plonked on the suburban landscape like a kid making sandcastles.
No one gets angry anymore. Like a man who has lost his house and his wife, we are dark and silent. America has broken us. Ideas of democracy and freedom have been so blatantly ridiculed, that our hearts cake together like moist ash.
Depression doesn’t evolve very much in twenty years. Sitting at home in a dark flat by yourself smoking the last cigarette is still shit. Beyond 2000 couldn’t predict that.
Schools are all on the internet. They’re still studying Dr Seuss in Grade Three. Teachers carry guns (of chalk). Kids know how to use a search engine before their times tables.
Those lollies that used to be 1c, then became 2 for 5c? Well…they’re more.
It’s $10 for a schooner of New. ($11 if you want it in a glass.)
$20 for a packet of smokes.
$10 of petrol costs $13.50.
Where were you when Dolly Parton died? Did you cry? Did you think ‘hey, we made fun of her big bosoms but she was a real person.’ Where were you when the Pope died? The Queen? The drummer from Queen? Angela Lansbury…Mal Meninga…John Farnham? (But they found him five years later confused in a South American farmhouse.) Dame Edna. Shane Porteous. Adriana Xenides (the first celebrity death in the Big Brother house).
Where were you when Tasmania declared war on Japan? (A price war over woodchips.) When man landed on the moon? (I mean really landed on the moon.) When Michael Jackson cloned Macaulay Culkin? The grainy photos, the seven fingered airbrushed shadow. When they painted Heath Ledger black for the controversial film about an Aboriginal Jesus, directed by Russell Gilbert.
Where were you when they trialled ‘rainbow swirl’ Vegemite to promote the new colour of M&M’s? Or when Dick Smith did that publicity stunt and strapped dynamite to himself and pretended to hijack the biggest supplier of yeast in Australia so he could start producing his own ‘Dick Mite.’
And the revelation that Y2K was a Microsoft hoax. Everyone was cranky and it was in the news for a while before everyone realised – they couldn’t do anything.
America made that earthquake by mining Antarctica (for water). The vibrations forced Mrs Clark in Devonport to spill her cup of tea. The puddle looked like the Virgin Mary. It got in all the papers. My daughter did a project on it.
I can’t believe my grandkids will never see a real dingo…or Ernie Dingo.
No whale, penguin or koala. All they’ll have is haunting footage of one sitting up a tree looking dopey and chewing gum leaves.
Have you noticed how the radio doesn’t play ‘Imagine’ anymore?
There ‘s so many war movies on TV.
Are they trying to tell us something?
END OF PART ONE
Don’t go outside between nine and five.
All the bus companies are private.
Every shop charges like a wounded cinema.
PART TWO
In Woolies every carrot looks the same and tastes like broccoli. There’s a capsicum every colour of the spectrum, but the only song they play is ‘Piano Man.’ If you don’t wash apples properly your mouth starts fizzing. Where the hell did bananas go?
Everyone’s smoking KFC’s new Chicken Bone Ultra Mild’s and drinking Purple Cola to promote the Barney movie. Mount Franklin lets out a hiss when you open it – excess consumption may cause you to have an early period.
You don’t have to be a girl.
Corn flakes look like Twisties. Twisties come in Sarsaparilla flavour. Milo Pops are great.
There’s only one newspaper. The ABC gets commercials. If nothing else, you can go to the toilet while watching Dylan Lewis’ wallaby documentaries.
Tommy Emmanuel has a pasta sauce. You can get an ‘E’ on Ebay.
It hasn’t rained in five years, but Ian Thorpe’s son…isn’t he a dear boy? Did you see him win that under sevens race at the surf club carnival?
Waterproof laptops are great. I like reading in the bath.
All the high school kids look like Boy George and are getting into the ghetto line dancing scene. They talk like Don Lane and constantly scratch their armpits to ward off cancer from their deodorant.
No one cares in school because uni’s are just for doctors and they know they’ll end up looking after their parents anyway.
In the country, nothing changes. Nothing much ever does in the country. Self mutilation reaches an all time low. Youth suicide climbs to an all time high. Regional areas are full of old people (as are churches).
Self is the new religion. Diaries are the new bible. People like listening to themselves, especially when it’s told by someone else.
Children are taught not to talk to strangers, or certain family members. They learn to fear Santa and like Jesus more when he’s made out of chocolate. Don’t trust priests, question your teacher but obey your parents or there’ll be no more Nutella toothpaste.
Easter Bunny doesn’t exist anymore – he ate all the farmers grass and they poisoned him. The tooth fairy is alive (along with Elvis). It’s transgender and transrace and has very little political persuasion. It leaves mobile phone credits under your pillow.
Coke is in the dictionary, but Mabo isn’t.
No one can spell reconciliation.
Kids talk about The Strokes like they’re The Beatles. They sneer at Crowded House and think Radiohead were taking the piss. They’ve never heard of Jeff Buckley and for some reason they think Keith Richards is dead.
People are getting fatter. Babies are getting smaller. No one owns Scrabble.
We still eat at the dinner table but I know parents who smack their kids and make them watch the news and hold their vomity faces close to the screen. I saw it on ‘Closed Doors.’
People say hello with their eyebrows.
They kiss with their eyes open.
Dentist chairs have seat belts.
Everyone is suing their lawyer.
The rich kid in class has one of those bananas that play a song when you peel it. (That’s where all the bananas went.)
A bush fire victim who lost everything has a vision of what it is like to be truly free. It is so profound he starts up a small but influential cult telling people to burn their houses to the ground and feel truly liberated. He does have a point. It gives A Current Affair something to talk about.
To make the election more ratings worthy, politicians stand along the edge of a pool. Voters ring up and they are pushed in one by one by bikini clad Kim Beazley lookalikes.
An urban myth begins that the graphic designer that made the ‘Australian Made’ logo was actually American. Each time a product uses that logo they have to pay an American company ten cents.
(It’s actually true…)
The baby boomers get older, yet still manage to maintain control of pretty much everything. Gen Xers get bald and fat and less enthused than they are now. Generation Y, thus dubbed because of how many questions they asked and how post-modernly they looked at the world, ask less questions, have more kids and earn less money, except those with IT jobs.
Generation Text comes along. They are the grand canyon where ways of the old world have been lost. They laugh at the eighties and the seventies and the sixties; they talk like cartoons, they don’t have time for irony. Their memories are digital; their eyes filled with flavour beans.
Their minds work in episodes. Their dreams have fine print that they don’t bother reading. They hate and love in spurts and are not sure why. They are angry and sleepy and sick and laughing and shiny. (They are made in Australia.) They talk without listening; they listen without watching, they like movies with pictures and pamphlets with popcorn.
Sex is all there is. Real families are out of story books. Politics is for the over fifties, history is for over forties. The past isn’t worth it. Wars are boring. So is lotto. Life is okay but why would anyone want to live mine? Hey Mum, I can’t believe Astro Boy was set in 1995!
Generation Text are to be feared. They are to be despised. They are to be manipulated, patronised, blown out of all proportion, categorised, stereotyped, distorted like a photocopy of a TV screen. They are to be made to feel like they have no home without a credit card and someone who can reply to their questions within three working days.
They are to be admired, chastised, worshipped, beaten, hugged, stripped of their security and self esteem, stamped on the hand and sent through the revolving elevator to the nature-park casino of life, like a character out of The Sims.
Generation Text will be raised by parents who hate their lives, taught by teachers who hate their jobs and governed by men who love money and hate women.
Everyone will generalise
all the time.
Just like we did when we were that age.
.
IN CONCLUSION
When I was
twelve I made
a pact with
myself to never
forget what
it was like
to be twelve.
I think I forgot.
This is the future.
It will happen the other day.
It will happen so gradually that no one will notice,
e x c e p t y o u
T h a n k g o d B e r t ‘ s s t i l l o n t h e T V.
Mouth Off, 2003
CHECK OUT AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN FROM 2003.
READ ANOTHER OLD SCHOOL PIECE “LOVE” PUBLISHED IN VOICEWORKS IN 2004.
justin heazlewood's fuzzy logic 