My rant tonight is a positive piece about the tiresome and often negative world in which we live. I rewarded myself, after a hard days work of cleaning windows/glass doors, with a visit to Collaroy beach, my local and quite a lovely open beach. I moseyed up near the lifesavers, found me a plot of golden sand and proceeded to read the paper and amuse myself by people watching. The older lifeguards were overseeing the young guys and girls who every so often were sent on a dash out to sea on a rescue board or across the sands on the buggy or out for a swim with a rescue belt across their shoulders. Their red and yellow caps made them instantly recognisable against the ocean and the sand. When not engaged in possibly saving lives they threw Frisbees around or wrestled each other to the sand in that particular way that young males of any species do. Collaroy is for argument sake, a fairly blanc mange area of Sydney, homogenous and pasteurised almost, with a mostly upwardly mobile, WASPish kind of demographic as well as a scattering of ageing surfers and north side doyennes. But, after about an hour on the beach, I turned in the general direction of laughing and loud voices to see at least 50 - 60 people, maybe more, but a great group of people, young and not, Muslim and not, African and not whom I assumed to be refugees, and was consequently right, descend on our little northern beach. With great gusto many of these people ran to the surf, to the panic of our life guards, and then ran back out just as quickly, because as I discovered earlier, 18.5o is not very warm by any measure. Another group of mostly teenage boys started a game of touch football and were quickly joined by some of the men/boys already on the beach. There was another group of mostly men, kicking a soccer ball around. Slowly but surely, Muslim women covered by their hijab struck up conversations with other women on the beach and men were drawn like moths to the games of football. I offered to take a photo for a young women and her daughter and pregnant friend and struck up conversation about this little dark skinned doll who put out her hands to walk to me and let me snuggle and cuddle and goo and gaa, as is my want to do when around bubbas. I realised that despite government warnings, despite Jackie Lambie and her ilk, despite warnings of doom and gloom, despite racist bogans, despite gratuitous newspaper headlines, we are mostly still a warm and welcoming country with hearts and towns big enough to accommodate anyone, and that made me very happy and very proud.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 11:14:38 +0000