The completion of the Bogan councillors’ wish list is well under way. The councillors’ bank accounts are flush and it looks like they stand a good chance of a decent holiday this year. In the meantime, the same councillors are sweating it out in a WW2 POW camp in 1943. The camp is tenuously linked in time with a Jimboomba playschool that is having enough trouble of its own. The manager of the playschool, Abigail Broadwithers, stands at her office window observing the children and questioning the newest addition to her staff.
Abigail Broadwithers: Tell me, Ms. Shizeknicker, do you not discern an oddness about the childrens behaviour? Why do you think they all seem to be attending to the old play house in such an excitable manner?
Arnell Shizeknicker: I believe half of da children are attacking da play house and da udder half are defending it.
Abigail Broadwithers: But why should they do that? They have always played together nicely in the play house.
Arnell Shizeknicker: Dey no longer consider it a play house. Dey now refer to it as ‘Stalingrad’.
Abigail Broadwithers: Most extraordinary. And what is the business with the rocking horse in the sandpit all about?
Arnell Shizeknicker: I’m not really sure but dey insisted it should be dere. Of course, it sank in the sand and wouldn’t rock so dat caused a few tears, but I was able to find an old door to put under it as a firm base and dey seem happy wid dat.
(And so they are. The door conceals the entrance to Tunnel Dora that has been excavated to a point just short of the compound fence. A team of six infants have been toiling for two days with buckets and spades to bring themselves within inches of freedom. Each night their worried parents wash the mud from the children and wonder about the playschool activities. When assured by the playschool staff that it is normal for little children to get a bit mucky, some parents are mollified but another wonders why she is cleaning mud from her child’s ears and nose that the child says was deposited there during a fall. What kind of fall rams mud so far up a kiddies nose it has to be dug out with a teaspoon? The playschool management do not know, but they promise to keep a close watch on the situation.
A second tunnel, Tunnel Dorothy, is not doing so well. It was started by the Russian defenders of Stalingrad but was accidentally collapsed by an enthusiastic attacking force of Waffen SS. The leader of the Waffen SS attack was Ober-ointment Lucy Potter and she was the one who got mud up her nose.
Later in the day, just after nap time, the escape committee are in full session and differences are being thrashed out. The undisputed boss of the escape committee, three-and-three-quarter-year-old Suzy Simmonds - otherwise known as ‘Big X’, is laying down the law.)
Big X: My Mummy thaid, If you don’t do what I thay, you won’t be my friend – tho there! I am the Big Ekth and that meanth you mutht do what I thay!
Lulu Larkel (The Scrounger): What about my weg? Wucy cowapsed our tunnel and she hurted my weg.
Big X: That wath jutht unlucky. Luthy wath not being nathty
Lulu Larkel: Unwucky? She awmost broked my weg!
Ricky Rider (The Forger): I think Tunnel Dowathy is too close to Tunnel Dowa. It should weally go in a diffewant diwection.
Big X: What doth directhion mean?
Lulu Larkel: I should wike to pway another game now.
Big X: Yeth, we’ll pick a really nithe game. What game thall we play?
Lulu Larkel: How about The Invasion of Crete?
MEANWHILE, TWO METRES AWAY IN 1943.
(The Bogan councillors are settling in to their hut and are discussing the confusing situation.)
Mayor Porker: We can only assume some criminal gang intent on destroying Bogan Council has kidnapped us. They will possibly hold us for ransom and that could be a bit of a problem.
Axeman: Why would it be a problem?
Phil Shidehawk: Can you see the CEO organising money for a ransom? We can’t even get him to cough up for business lunches.
Grimy Hobo: Can you blame him? The last time Bean put in a docket, it was $2,450.00 for a fish and chip supper.
Phil Shidehawk: Well that did include travel and overnight accommodation; it was the chip shop on Lady Elliot Island.
Mayor Porker: We just have to face the facts. We’re on our own in this.
Winnie Quark: But surely, everyone in Bogan will notice we’re not around? Nothing will get done and residents will be up in arms.
Mayor Porker: That’s unusual for you, Winnie. You’re not normally into heavy irony.
Winnie Quark: Irony?
Grimy Hobo: God help us.
(Suddenly, the councillors are astonished to see an area of floor boards near them begin to bulge and split. With a splintering crash, several boards jut upward around the shaft and blade of a battered shovel. The shovel is followed by the grubby head and shoulders of a man. He is dressed in a threadbare RAF uniform. After gazing about the hut, the airman climbs out of the hole and is followed by a second airman. The two mud smeared diggers stand silent and confused.)
Mayor Porker: Sean…Dicky…how the hell did you get down that hole? Where have you been?
Dicky Mower: You’re asking us?
Sean Bean: One minute we’re in some kind of hospital and then we were dumped in with a weird mob of Poms calling each other “old chap” and talking about “wizard wheezes” and shit like that. The bastards put us to work in an escape tunnel. We’ve been digging this bloody hole for two weeks.
Lizzie Borden: That’s impossible. You were carried out of here only yesterday, more dead than alive. What’s going on, Porky? I’m starting to panic!
Dicky Mower: It’s happening again isn’t it? Why is it always us?
Mayor Porker: It’s got to be something to do with Bogan, and Jimboomba in particular. For some reason we seem to be forever dealing with a sort of fracture in the Universe. I don’t know why it happens but we’ve had enough experience of this rubbish to know we can’t fight it. We will just have to deal with it and if that means digging our way out of the shit, then we had better get started.
NEARBY - SIXTY-SIX YEARS LATER.
(It is a fine day at Jimboomba Rotary Park and, like most new events organised by local authorities, about six people have turned up to watch the principal local councils compete in a Community Challenge Match. The slimy looking individual standing on the hastily constructed rostrum is Tarquin Otter-Filch, the CEO of Stripland Farmland Acquisition and Compact Development Company. He and the competitors are well aware that this farrago is just an excuse to hand out holidays to councillors in payment for services to be rendered, so he is anxious to get it over with as quickly as possible. Ever ready to take advantage of any situation, Otter-Filch has already calculated the number of housing units he can cram onto the Rotary Park block and is anxious to resume a promising discussion with the local lady councillor.
The woman is a bit of a puzzle and was, like most women, taller than Otter-Filch by at least 10 centimetres and yet within a few moments she appeared to be shorter than him and fluttering her eyelashes like feathered farts. Not only had she been most receptive to the idea of redeveloping Rotary Park, but she was also uncommonly interested in testicles. She had asked Otter-Filch repeatedly if he had seen any big ones lying about anywhere. Overall, Otter-Filch has high hopes of the young woman and he distinctly feels his star is on the rise. But, business before pleasure, as it were. Otter-Filch opens the competition and sets the wheels in motion.
The first event of the day is face painting. Action Man sits in front of Elastic Lass with his brush raised in readiness for the off but, naturally, there is nothing he need do because Elastic Lass will make all the changes to her own face using her special abilities in physiological rearrangement.
To their right are the couple from Ipswich Council. Both are from the Ipswich Department of Mines and were responsible for recent negotiations with North Korea to lease vast galleries of disused Ipswich coalmines to the North Korean firework industry for the underground testing of new products. The negotiations were hastily ended when the Federal Government intervened and suggested that the North Korean ‘fireworks’ might be a bit more complicated than roman candles.
However, the Federal Government were reluctant to let significant trade dollars go and offered the North Koreans an alternative site at the old British/Australian Maralinga testing grounds. They did this on the basis that Maralinga was fucked anyway and North Korean fireworks could hardly make the situation worse. It took a quiet but very firm instruction from the UN to finally end the negotiations.
On the Bogan team’s right are the Scenic Rim contingent. This duo are a healthy couple of farm girls employed as Council Sheep Dip Tasters and they both have extensive experience of creative face painting. Like most Beaudesert woman, they make up their faces to be a reasonable representation of a sheep’s arse. This doesn’t make them look particularly pretty but it seems to be the only way a Beaudesert woman can get a rise out of the menfolk in that part of the world. This couple will be stoic adversaries in the contest.
And finally, the pair from the Gold Coast Council. They are an unusual product of a far-reaching Gold Coast equal opportunities employment policy. This policy is the brainchild of a young consultant with a brand spanking new sociology degree from the Bond University and an uncle highly placed on the Gold Coast Council. She was called in to review the council’s human resource system, which she then decimated and rebuilt from scratch.
She called her new employment policy the ‘50/50 System’. In effect, it meant a strictly 50% female, 50% male work force at the Gold Coast Council. This caused an unexpected furore when it was realised that 230 women would have to be dismissed to make way for more men. But that was not the end of it. The 50/50 System also required a 50% homosexual rate, which caused further difficulties when 110 gay men and woman were threatened with the sack to make way for heterosexuals. Further more, 50% of employees had to be physically disabled and 50% had to be mentally challenged. Half of the proposed workforce would require a university education with half of those needing a sociology degree. This, unfortunately, conflicted with another stipulation in that 50% of the staff should have an IQ of 100 and above while the rest would have to be below average intelligence. The IQ level was measured by the New Idea Magazine ‘R U Smart’ test but there was no way they could find enough sociology graduates with a high enough IQ to make the 50% quota. Eventually the consultant reluctantly adjusted the cut off to an IQ of 82 in order to get her sociologists in, but that was not an ideal solution.
It became increasingly complicated and difficult to incorporate all the groups and sub-groups that had to be represented on the Gold Coast Council but then the young consultant had a masterful idea which led to her lionisation by the World Sociology Movement. Her idea was ‘Representation Day’!
Each working day of the year was allocated to a particular group. ‘Muslims Day’ was followed by ‘Baptists Day’ and then it was ‘Gay Mens Day’ followed by ‘Gay Womens Day’ then ‘Epileptics Day’ followed in turn by ‘Females Day’ and ‘mens Day’. The list went on. Where possible the 50/50 policy was applied but where it was not possible then the Representation Day closed the gap.
Representation days simply meant that on, say, Gay Mens Day everyone was required to act the part of a homosexual male and be super sensitive to the needs of others whilst mincing about in pink trousers. While on Heterosexual Mens Day, even raving arse bandits had to eye up the girls, attempt to rape them and make all sorts of obscene comments - just like the usual behaviour of a heterosexual male. Coloured Brethren Day was particularly popular and the Council Meetings were a delight as the councillors, all smeared with burnt cork, opened the meetings with wild eyed, spirited renditions of ‘Camp Down Races’ and ‘Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber’.
The policy was diligently applied and considered a triumph for Sociology but it might, perhaps, go some way to explain the parlous state of the Gold Coast at this time. It might also go a very long way to explain why modern sociological ideology has totally fucked society in general.
And so, we meet the Gold Coast team. One is from Ashgrove and is a totally blind, black, gay, Jewish water meter reader with Parkinson’s disease. He is unsuccessfully attempting to pick up a brush in order to paint the face of a stone-deaf, one-legged Muslim woman with a cleft palate. The Muslim woman is traditionally dressed, with only her eyes showing through the narrow slit in her yashmak and she is employed at the council as a Media Liaison Officer.
The teams are ready. Tension builds to the point of bored lethargy. Let the games begin.)
TO BE CONTINUED.
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