Personal Queanbeyan recollections

I once watched a documentary film in which a harridan wistfully recalled being told by her mother never to go out with/marry anyone from the end of a railway line, because apparently only dodgy people settled at the end of a railway line.  This woman lived in Cunnamulla, the penultimate stop on a line that terminates in Eulo.  Many people from Canberra scoff at Queanbeyan, but it is the second last stop on a railway line that ends in Canberra, so it can’t be all that bad.

It’s a town, 90% of the time, I enter via a side/back route skirting Oakes Estate and then proceed past the Sunrise motel, subsequently diverting left down another  street to sidestep the centre of town as I head towards “Little Canberra”, aka Bungendore.

I was once registered on the electoral roll in Queanbeyan to help make my vote count more in a marginal seat – but the AEC were onto me, and removed me from the roll, and so doing, I was cast back into the then self government forsaken ACT.

Once I went to see the premiere of a musical in Queanbeyan.  It was also its last performance, but that had nothing to do with its intrinsic worth.  The premiere was ‘savaged’ by a Canberra Times critic, who, to this day, I believe, must have been certifiably deaf.  I also saw Todd McKinney perform his one man cabaret in Queanbeyan – this was post Boy from Oz and pre Dancing with the Stars.  Even back then and even for a show business person, McKinney seemed unusually ‘full of himself’.

Another time, I went on a sort of date (at least I thought it was) to a trivia night (you’re right, what sort of person could think they were going on a date to a trivia night).  Anyway, the woman who invited me, also invited another person, also bearing the surname ‘King’.  This King wore track suit pants (let’s not eschew stereotypes; this was pure Queanbeyan but he was from there).  Apparently they weren’t going out at that stage, but after this night of trivia, they ‘hooked up’ (as they call it in Queanbeyan), and subsequently married.  Whether my presence during the evening had any catalytic effect on bringing them together I don’t know.  However, being present at the start of a relationship is sometimes a bright counterpoint to a work life dominated by the casting asunder of those previously ‘hooked up’.

Avoiding disasters

I seem to have a knack at avoiding disasters associated with holidays.  Whether it's staying at home, when I was meant to be away on holidays, or coming home early from holidays, or at the last minute, deciding to go on holidays, I can think of four instances of missing out on calamaties, associated with last minute vacation change of plans.  Back in 1983, I had a change of mind and left Anglesea early on the morning of the Ash Wednesday bushfires, returning to my place of residence in Melbourne.  That night Anglesea burned, along with half the Great Ocean Road.  Twenty years later, I made a late decision and left Canberra and my Duffy abode (ironically) to go storm chasing, thus missing the Canberra firestorm which scorched parts of the ACT, including my suburb.  Then in 2009, there was the near miss with the marsupial incursion, when sickness meant a cancelled holiday in tornado alley.  However, this a prevented a five week possum home invasion and the mess that would have brought.  But I think Friday just gone is my finest side step of being a witness to tragedy.  No time available to be taken off work meant I wasn't on a plane with friends, to Tokyo, for a three week vacation, that was due to start last Thursday.  After this demonstration of tidal power trumping nuclear power, my friends are heading home two weeks early, shaken, but safe.

A safe place?

Another person was found not guilty of murder in Canberra today, this time a double slaying, which now makes it umpteen (a number greater than ten) who have been found not guilty of murder since a couple of lovers were convicted of the charge, back in 1998, in a crime that was very much de rigeur love triangle gone wrong.  That pair must nearly be out of gaol now, probably cursing their bad luck that somehow they didn't get off when they had their Court hearing.  The most famous case of non conviction was young Mr Porritt (who sounds like a time travelling refugee from a Dickens novel but isn't), who having stabbed his mother 57 times, had the charge downgraded from murder to manslaughter.

We have road signs in Canberra warning of dangerous roads that say 12 people killed along here since 1975, and factories (of which we don't have many), often have signs which detail the number of days since the last industrial accident.  I think in Canberra we should have a sign on our outskirts, just underneath 'Twin city with Nara, Japan', that says 'Canberra - no murders since 1998'.

Paradoxically though, while no murders (with someone convicted of said crime) have taken place over this 13 year period, many people have been killed by others, so the safety of the community isn't quite guaranteed.  But in some way the claim that there have been no murders since 1998 befits the ACT's status as the home of politicians and their art of spinning the facts - as I say, there most definitely has been a range of grisly and gruesome slayings, just an absence in the scorer's column of convicted murderer's.  In terms of homicide and its pre-eminent role in crime waves, it's been so long since a good old fashioned murder, we wouldn't know a crime wave if one came gift wrapped with blue and white check police ribbon.

It has to be said there was a case involving an unfortunate girl who was the victim of foul play and somehow found herself dead in Lake Burley Griffen.  It looked like a murder and no one has yet been charged with the alleged crime.  Even if they did find someone to 'pin it on', it's likely that there would be some bizarre explanation for how she expired in the lake.  After watching Jeremy Wade's program on ABC 2 about freshwater monster fish that are waiting to kill people in our inland waterways, the poor woman's demise seems a likely candidate for piscatorial bludgeoning.

No wonder the good citizenry of Canberra love their Friday and Saturday night crime on the ABC, with its 'Wire in the Blood' and 'Midsumer Murders' - no home grown variety, so they lap it up on the idiot box.  To adapt a phrase out of the Lerner and Lowe's songbook, "Homicide hardly happens here".

I have heard on the underworld grapevine that it is so easy to get off a murder charge in Canberra that hitmen offer discounts.  Of course the upshot of all these 'not guilty' convictions is that some of the Canberra populace, inclined to paranoia, think maybe they aren't as safe as they should be in the ACT, an apparent 'killers'; idyll'.  Thus people are going to bed with anything dangerous they can lay their hands on to protect themselves with, from kitchen knives to large dogs.

There may be an upside to our apparent recently untarnished record: we could mentor troubled cities throughout the world, where murder is a daily occurence - of course our lack of persons being 'rubbed out' may be cold comfort to those on mean streets of cities in 1st, 2nd and 3rd world countries.  We could however, follow in the footsteps of what has been done with Education and Schools, and develop a 'My City Murder rate web site' so we could proudly boast of our wonderful record, and this benchmark might serve as an inspiration to other places so they might strive to better their own sorry murder stats.

Despite all this, things may be about to change; a lot of people have their fingers crossed that an apparent alleged drug execution style slaying, in a fashionable inner south suburb of Canberra, may break the 13 year convicted murder drought.