I'll miss many things about Sydney- the Chinatown markets on Friday nights, the colossal thunderstorms, the free Wednesday concerts at St James's, the oddly high likelihood that one's taxi driver is a Bangladeshi heart surgeon with a controversial slant on Hegel.
One thing I'll miss with a vague feeling of ambivalence, though, is the Sydney Inner West Hipster: a slightly rosier, healthier creature than the Melbournite versions (who appear to exist on a diet of Ann Demeulemeester, androgynous vampirism and Portugeuse cinema), if equivalently fond of miniature jeans. Many of the university-age hipsters seem to suffer from a hideous longing for Looking Bohemianly European, and have picked up a warped image presumably derived from French movie posters, The Sartorialist and an enormous overdose of Toulouse-Lautrec prints.
Put it this way: if they were aiming to Look English instead, they'd be getting their inspiration from P.G. Wodehouse, and everybody would be wearing monogrammed blazers, ascots and highballs.
Bondi's hipsters are all blonde and wear straw hats and too many rings, and the Eastern Suburbs long-necked freaks of nature somehow slid past hipsterdom into Prowling Indignant Fashionistas In Jodphurs; but the Inner West ones are true treasures. They use old cameras, and wear homemade earrings and red lipstick and canny bob haircuts, and sit in Glebe bedsits under monochrome photographs of the Seine, drinking horrible red wine and arguing incoherently about Camus and Art's Future. All the boys are drastically undernourished and have Moleskines in which they pretend to write poetry. Everybody has at least one op-shop cardigan.
I will miss them LOTS.
I was reminded of this last week, when two of them stood in my lift - boy in op-shop suit and Clark Kent glasses, girl in natty ballet flats and chic blunt haircut with beret - and had an exceedingly pretentious conversation about Modernism to impress one another. They were a couple (you could tell by the matching leather satchels), and by the time they'd confused Yeats with Keats while nodding sagely I nearly had a stroke from attempting not to laugh.
I was also reminded of this today, when a charming kid of about 14, with long lanky hair and obvious aspirations to looking European in calico cut-offs (despite hideous cold weather), boarded my bus and displayed his leg tattoos. Which involved the Louis Vuitton Murakami cartoon logo- and not even in a vaguely ironic way.
Often I find this breed of people completely obscure. This was one of those times. How will I ever discover their secrets overseas? Does Oxford even HAVE hipsters?
I'm going to Oxford.
Yes. That Oxford. The Big Thing With The Dreaming Spires (Shut Up, Matthew Arnold). The place with the Prohibited Mounds and the rowing matches and the ancestral thingamabobs and the Tolkein and the ivy-covered eggheads. The one I poked fun at when last in England for its ridiculous sense of entitlement (to which I will hopefully be immune, since I am forcibly part-time and therefore persona non grata to college accommodation offices. I will consequently have to seek out a nice little hovel in which to hang my hat and burn my food). The place in which Jude the Obscure felt obscure whilst falling in love with his incredibly irritating cousin. That Oxford.
And I still have blue hair and swear like a sailor when startled.
... This is going to be fun.
So, I'm a graduate now. Jesus loves me more than I will know, whoa whoa whoa, etcetera.
Yes, I wore the peculiar hat, attempted at one point to throw it in the air but watched it collide with another person's at a height of perhaps three feet and bounce rapidly to earth, compared my white fur tippet (fake) with my friends' white fur tippets (real and sadly shedding), and curtseyed in five-inch heels without falling off. The University of Sydney wants no more to do with me, and I have the paper to prove it.
(I did at one point cherish the concept of flying kites in the Quad on my graduation day; but the entire experience, as it turns out, was less Dead Poet's Society than mild bureaucratic shambles interspersed with charming moments. Which is pretty much university as a whole, really.)
What was much less Dead Poet's Society was the graduation speech, delivered to us as we sat be-tasselled and prepared to be vigorously, finally expelled from the Great Hall into the Great Big World. A stateswoman in the field of Australia literature- whose theories I know and have a closet full of bugbears about, but whom I am sure is a perfectly nice woman- got up and told us in no discernible order, for about half an hour, that she liked Matthew Arnold, that recessions and hard times need Arts majors (no explanation as to why; they presumably Just Do), that she once taught a prisoner at Long Bay, that anybody who dared tell us Arts majors had no Purpose because they did not lead to a Career were Utterly Wrong, and that she had fallen into the Thames at Oxford once. This last anecdote occurred three times.
As the final contraction before the birth of my post-undergrad days, it was, shall we say, a bit underwhelming. (Did I mention that when she fell into the Thames it was very cold and she was holding a bicycle?)
See, here's the thing (well, one of them). Arts degree-takers have been wrestling with the preconception that their choice does not lead to a Secure Vocational Future, and is therefore an Indulgent But Abstractly Useful Decision (I paraphrase having heard this argument at least, oh, 15,000 times) since the Industrial Revolution. Everybody knows that 'a proper education' these days does not lie in being able to discuss Socrates on one's father's chaise lounge, but in knowing what derivatives trading/commercial litigation/actuarial practise is, and having a savings account to prove it. As far as old hat goes, this is a minstrel's cap with moth-holes in it.
We all know the defences, too. There's the line about art being useful and enlightening in itself (which I agree with, though not with abstract, condescending pronouncements that it is essential to societal/individual/world welfare by people who've only ever seen the real world on the nightly news). There's those, like a helpful uncle of mine, who like to prove that it actually has what he calls 'real-life' impact; he once sent me an overly optimistic article about financial companies looking for Philosophy majors, probably written by the latter. There are ducks and weaves and defensive arguments over lattes and feelings of uselessness in the dead of night after chance meetings with International Relations majors and yes all right fine now if I give you a lolly will you go away.
Not that this debate isn't essential and an integral part of the arts and whatnot. Rather than a trotting out of a horse so flogged it must be nearly glue, though, I would have preferred something more about the world itself, and being newfangled people in it. Something along the lines of J.K. Rowling's excellent graduation speech to Harvard about The Fringe Benefits Of Failure, or Joseph Brodsky's to a similar sort of place about boredom. I am young, daft and entitled, and don't know anything about anything at all (this is what a Philosophy major gets you); instead of giving me Apollo's laurel wreath and kicking me off the ivory tower, why couldn't somebody have given us a hint of actual wisdom, even a horrifyingly depressing one?
The Dame did try, bless her. Apparently the aim of the bicycle story was to tell us to embrace accident, though for the life of me I don't understand why being covered in mud in an English November would incite me to embrace anything, much less accident. (In any case, it seemed to be her own silly fault for not noticing that the Thames had flooded and England has different seasons to Australia; less Embrace Accidents than Don't Be A Cloistered Nitwit, which is a fair enough lesson in itself.)
We're in a recession, there's wars, everything on the supermarket shelves is nasty, kids these days listen to terrible music, a horrible amount of people listen to Rush Limbaugh, and out there for our little hopeful be-hatted selves there's failure, ennui, obstacles, injustice, colossal senses of unimportance and impotence, tragedy, desperation, want and loneliness. The reason I know this, beyond reading the Economist and having eyes and ears and a human existence, is through an Arts education, because the world's pretty much always been like this, and philosophers and artists like to try and muddle their way into knowing about it.
I do wish somebody had stood up and told us what they know about all that, though. There's inspiration to help us out in our new lives, and then, well, there's Matthew Arnold.
