Lilydale

that there is a world where you could travel where everything looks much the
same, where there is no sense of place. Just the same experience.
The perfect model is the airport where pretty much no matter where you are it
is deliberately the same experience. Many travellers must wonder whether the
plane merely flew around for fourteen hours and then landed at the same place.
It is, generally, an environment of anxiously waiting to miss your flight, amongst
the over-priced emporia which will be the same at the next place you land –
to either a greater (Dubai) or lesser (Auckland) extent. Probably these days
the distinguishing characteristic of where you might possibly be is the number
of heavily armed robo-cops all of whom are over six feet tall and dressed in
black. (Welcome to France, do not be afraid whilst we blow up your racially
profiled suitcase with a potentially sexy accent).
It should be obvious that the only people who experience a place are the people
who live there. You don’t go to experience Venice you go there to look
at it in all its decaying, fading glory. Less than thirty thousand people live
there now and they all live off the tourists. And the number is declining as
there must be a limit to living and working in a place and being photographed
by thousands of people with a combine intellect of a three day old bread roll
has on-going appeal. Once one of the great maritime trading centres of the world
Venice no longer has a purpose as a city apart from being looked at and providing
a challenge to engineers to keep it from slipping under the lagoon. In providing
a spectacle to the touring classes it is no different from Las Vegas who have
their own Venice though it is smaller and without the omnipresent smell of decay
and sewage.
Ironically Las Vegas doesn’t have enough water and is sinking slowly into
the earth as the water table is pumped dry.
There are some of an internationalist bent who quite like the idea of an unvaried
worldscape, where an individual is unaware of geographic, geopolitical and linguistic
barriers. They see the difference as a source of conflict and, most importantly,
a barrier to untrammelled commerce. They desire a world where everybody speaks
English and the Dollar or the Euro is ubiquitous. And of course it is very easy
to travel this way; thousands do, descending like plague locusts from their
buses and boats in multi-hued senior moments on the sights and sites of the
world.
There is an oddness about wanting to go somewhere because it is different but
yet wanting it to be the same. We have vast horizons but we are often just like
our ancestors who never travelled to the next village 20 kilometres away because
it was not like their own village. Which of course enabled free studies of the
dangers of inter-breeding to occur without expense which has given us both the
Liberal Party and Tasmania.
There is a danger of the world descending into anodyne sameness – a pleasant
beige of tasteful busty substances and warm feelings where one there was character
and history. Whilst we rightly decry the vicious destructive actions of often
religious fanatics who destroy history in order to leave only their own distorted
values, the greatest destruction has been by well meaning councillors, politicians
and business men. We are better at destroying places rather than creating them.
Mecca has been destroyed by the Saudi government and turned into a religious
Disneyland in the name of progress. Oddly Jerusalem is so contentious and fought
over that it can never change.
Is there anything left? Do the caring and uncaring eyes of millions of sightseers
gradually destroy the very thing they have come to look at? Are all the famous
places becoming transparent and tending to invisibility in some photonic exchange
where there is no giving but all take? Will people go to see the Mona Lisa and
eventually realise that there is only a frame? Will photographs of Uluru show
only an endless red horizon?
But what has this got to do with Lilydale? It does have a Japanese restaurant
advertising all you can eat for $37.95 next door to an Integrated Holistic Healthcare
System establishment advertising colonic irrigation – a joyful conjunction which
you could probably also see in Tokyo should you care to look hard enough. There
is the usual surfeit of eateries and coffee places as well as the odd empty
shop front which will be, or once were, a coffee shops or eateries. There are
an inordinate number of car dealerships which makes you think that the prime
occupation of the denizens of Lilydale is to drive somewhere else. There are
pleasant green areas where as soon as you sit down the council will come and
mow the lawn with sufficient noise and dust to make you seek refuge in a coffee
house or a chemist to stem the hay-fever.
What I suspect made Lilydale less pleasant than it might have been was someone’s
bright idea of having the main road go through the centre of the town four lanes
wide. This ensured that Lilydale became somewhere you went through to go to
somewhere else.
Or to get your car serviced.