Community, hope, love and all that jazz…

My ori­ginal plan for Sunday the 18th of Decem­ber involved the Walker St Com­munity End-of-Year picnic, com­plete with jump­ing castle for the kid­dies, and that’s how it ended up…

But let me step back a moment in time…

This morn­ing I awoke reju­ven­ated and amazed that we were really about to do this thing.

I wrote my speech, put together a bunch of last-minute things, mailed them to Matt for print­ing and headed in to town, hand­ing out flyers on all three car­riages of the train on my way in.

The mar­shals meet­ing went well and we were fine until vari­ous things fell apart at the tech­nical level with the sound equip­ment (note to self: learn more about the musical end of things so I can do a check­list for that too…) and the weather threatened to de-rail us altogether.

The crowd was small, to say the least, and at first I was wor­ried: 50 people and no sound system. Hmmm. But in the end, the rally was 250 people and a sound system that did well enough, even if the Turk­ish drum­mers did go home due to weather. Penelope Swales was superb, Vardos were superb, Serene Tef­faha was good and Maur­een Postma was lovely. Chan­nels 7,10 and 2 inter­viewed me and I didn’t um or ah through my speech, although no one applauded where I thought they might. Prob­ably because more than two thirds of them knew me and had heard it all before.

The most amus­ing moment was the NUS woman asking me if she could speak and me saying “sure, if you’re going to talk about har­mony and peace” and then her saying “war on terror” and me saying “no, sorry, that’s not what this fest­ival is about”. She was utterly shocked, I think. 

When we went to walk off, the social­ist altern­at­ive phalanx actu­ally took their little red flags and depar­ted… I was quite stunned. They didn’t want to belly dance down the street? Are you kidding? 

But we did, in the rain, arabic music blar­ing from our little truck… about 200 of us, bedraggled.

We had a ball… and the ban­ners were exactly right.

Then the picnic, which was, I think, the best bit of the day in the end. About 400 people through the day, from all dif­fer­ent back­grounds. Nor, a woman wear­ing a hijab, from the More­land Peace Group, with her five chil­dren and her Anglo hubbie who was a con­vert to Islam; Bahram, the gor­geous guy from Iran, about to start his PhD in archi­tec­ture at Mel­bourne Uni; a guy from India, forgot his name; a Cath­olic woman who talked to me aboout her Croa­tian her­it­age, four gen­er­a­tions back and how she never really thought of it that way until I spoke at the rally; Megan, the Anglo (?) woman from Bal­larat who came down for the picnic because she heard about it on JJJ. And people really did move from blanket to blanket, chat­ting and meet­ing people they’d never met. And the music: the amaz­ing Umanee and the glor­i­ous sing­ers from MUCS and Second Floor.

The sun finally came out at the picnic and fizit and her crowd had an enorm­ous fris­bee game going for most of the day… and sil­verblue did face-painting… 

On any reg­u­lar day, I can’t ima­gine any­thing more won­der­ful than lying in a park with my head on Matt’s thigh listen­ing to gor­geous folk music and talk­ing about polit­ics, so the end of the day was just joyous.

I staggered home, exhausted, around 5.30… soaked in a bath and then went three doors up to the rem­nants of the Walker St com­munity BBQ… where I was offered beer and red wine and home-made sushi and a gentle welcome.

I love my life. 

Offi­cial thanks to the people wot need thank­ing will be in love_diversity as soon as I sober up again [EDIT: now here]. In the mean­time, thank you every­one! You are all incred­ible. I love you all. Blessed be.