Turning up to work on Straya day: un-Austrayan

Well the Aussie cricketers mightn't have but I did, although I knocked off at four in order to observe the religious holiday. What Straya Day means to people depends who those people are - Big Day Out Day, Invasion Day, White Supremacist Day, or for NZ's Sky Sport, Drag Out Old Highlights Of Australia Losing At Sport 'Cos NZers Are Bitter And Pathetic Day. My relationship with my own patriotism has ebbed and flowed - probably at its lowest ebb during the ethnic beach-brawling, flag-bedecked bogans punching people at the BDO for not kissing the flag, Johnny Howard in power and never likely to leave period of Straya's recent past. In fact he didn't look like leaving, so I did. Now I miss the place like an absent organ. And while what Straya herself means to me has changed with time, distance and perception, what Straya Day means to me now is what it has done for most of the last ten to twelve years. For me, Straya Day is Getting Slashed Watching Cricket And Listening To The Triple J Hottest 100 Day.

The role of the Hottest 100 can't be underestimated here. It's been the soundtrack to many memorable Straya Day celebrations. And by many I mean not very many at all, because I've been doing some mental archive plundering over the past hour or so and I can't actually remember what the fuck I was up to for Straya Day for much of the last ten years. But I know I was somewhere, and I know I was listening to the Hottest 100 - ever since 1995, the first year we had the 'J's in our little rural bolthole - they wired up the big coathanger about the time they set up the first ever round of the Unearthed comp, won by Lismore's own Grinspoon. (Well, OK, half of them are from Port Macquarie and the drummer's originally from Blacktown, but they went to SCU at least.) This tends to suggest the 'Getting Slashed' part of the equation was pursued very effectively.

So by default, the best ever Straya Day celebration was the only one I can actually remember...

Straya Day 2002: Live from Chateau Dodgy v2.0
Chateau Dodgy 2.0 wasn't hard to find. It still isn't. Tens of thousands of irritated, gridlock-sensing UQites trolled past it daily in buses and cars, swearing at the muppets merging in front of them as two lanes converge to one like glaciers in a turf war on the entry to the roundabout on Sir Fred Schonell Drive. On the walk from CD2 to campus, you'd usually level-peg if not beat any car you started alongside. CD2 was in the fairly ostentacious Santa Lucia complex near the corner of Uncle Fred Road and Laurence St - pebblecreted carpark, grandiose automatic gate, leafy palms, white stucco'd walls and terracotta tiles, superhot ballerina chick in flat 8 who wasn't having any of us.

It was OK though - we knew our role. We were there to bring down the tone of the place. 'We' were Dr Craigos, Your Correspondent, Craigos' fucking enormous beer fridge, our dilapidated brown couch whose floorpan was held together by a bus stop sign nicked from out the front of my old flat in Randwick, and the mighty Brown Hornet (here seen with Craigos and our good friend the King of Seed, gone rural somewhere out the back of the Glasshouse Mountains.) We'd reluctantly had to abandon Chateau Dodgy I after Doug Dickhead Real Estate had sold the place out from under us (as detailed in previous media commitments.) CD2 had proximity, it had space, it had a balcony perfect for kicking back, drinking beers and ogling the American exchange students over the way who liked to get semi-nekkid and flounce about the place (a throwback to our blonde exhibitionist neighbour from CD1), and most importantly, it was a strategic fifty metres crawl from a couple of takeaway joints and a well-stocked bottle shop.

We'd been at CD2 a year by the time Straya Day '02 rolled around. We'd been casing likely locations for the Big Straya Day Pissup and had been eyeing off Guyatt Park for a while. It had BBQs, plenty of seating, plenty of shade, was within staggering distance of both CD2 and the bottle-o, and most importantly, had a good deck with consistent pace and bounce. We'd tested the wicket already several times over the past year, particularly after the owners of the apartment block asked us to stop belting the ball around in their undercover carpark. Tony Greig wasn't likely to get his keys into the concrete but the wheelie bin at one end made for a decent set of wickets - particularly bowling to Craigos, who was and is a bit good at the leather and willow arts. The best method to combat his superior technique and greater experience, I found, was with a lot of sledging and the occasional bit of cheating. And an agricultural cow-corner swipe across the line that would have made your average number eleven throw up a little in his mouth.

Anyhoo, it wasn't going to be the usual mano e mano duel. We had company. Did we ever have company. And, let me tell you, the people who were there! Completely escape me. I blame the tyranny of time, the passing of the seasons, and the bottle-o over the road for having a special on 5L party kegs of Tooheys New ($21 cold - cheaper than the carton price for stubbies!) of which many - MANY - were put to rest over the course of that summer. But you lot know who you are and you know if you were there. And if you can't actually remember, we'll pencil you in for a Probable Attendee.

Let's see what we do remember. I know the countdown started at ten, and the cricket - the actual cricket, the Australia-NZ ODI from Adelaide - at one. We sank beers until two or three and wandered down to the park to wreak havoc; in our absence, the Baggy Greens began a tradition which continues to this day, of losing fucking horrendously on Australia Day (all out for 165 chasing 240-odd, says Cricinfo) but we weren't arsed with that. We had beers to drink, meat to burn, Australian music to crank and chin music to serve up.

This, my friends, is Australia. Or, indeed, Straya.

And things might have got a bit out of hand late on, and I may or may not have responded to Adam and Wil's 'hilarious' playing of Outkast's 'Ms Jackson' as a 'joke' number one song with a terrible amount of restraint - kicking seven shades of shit out of my cheap-arse portable stereo to the amusement of all concerned (not laughing so much two years later when the same bunch of jokers turned up at the pointy end of the countdown for real with the teeth-gnashingly tedious 'Hey Ya') - but we managed to find the batteries in the esky where they'd ended up and get the thing operating again to hear the real number one of the Hottest 100 for 2001, Alex Lloyd's 'Amazing'. (No, apparently he is. And you just thought he was fat, overrated and minging.) How about that. An Australian Hottest 100 number one on Australia Day, and fuck me, it wasn't fucking Powderfinger. And we sat back, drunk on joy and patriotism (and $21 party kegs of New) and thought, man, is this a fucken awesome fucken country or what. And you know, one day, that song of Lloydie's, I reckon that'd work really well in a Ford Territory commercial.

I have no idea how the night ended. Scratch that. I know how the night ended but I have no idea how it ended that way. The night ended on the brown couch with myself and a bunch of equally wasted randoms watching a German schlock-horror movie on SBS called Killer Condom, about a condom with sharp pointy teeth and a carnivorous attitude:

Set in the seedy parts of New York City, Killer Condom follows gay detective Luigi Mackeroni, who has been hired to investigate a series of bizarre attacks at the Hotel Quickie in which their male guests have all had their penises mysteriously bitten off. While at the crime scene, he enlists the services of a beautiful young gigolo named Bill and invites him up to the crime room. Before the two men engage in sex, a carnivorous, living condom interrupts them and bites Mackeroni's testicle off. Now on a personal vendetta, Mackeroni begins his lone quests to not only bring a stop to the rash of condom attacks, but also face his true feelings towards Bill the gigolo. Soon, the detective learns that the pernicious prophylactics are actually genetically-engineered creatures, part of a vast conspiracy of a religious cult bent on ridding the world of sexual deviants...

The most worrying thing was it made perfect sense at the time.

Happy retrospective Straya Day everyone.
The Doctor is OUT to put yesterday's Coopers bottles in the recycling bin.