CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Australia’s beleaguered Aboriginal communities are particularly vulnerable to an array of social issues, however, nothing compares to the rise of flawless and very impressive wheelies, which seem to also have firm grip on the Indigenous youth.
“They’re deadly” says local jarjum, Braith Bridley (12).
“My cousin, Jai did two whole laps of our block the other day”
“It’s fun as”
However, many of the local police view impressive, 30 metre-long wheelies as a gateway to other anti-social activities, like being loud and telling people to fuck off.
Sergeant Nate Fromere from the South Betoota Command, says the kids could be getting up to worse things, but it’s still something he keeps an eye on.
“I suppose it’s not that bad. But what does it lead to?
“It leads to other stuff that kids find fun because they are desperately under-stimulated in a town plagued by alcohol and drug abuse and are looking for boundaries. That’s what”
“I mean, the last thing I want to do is take in a local kid to the cop shop for something petty, like not wearing a helmet, or fucking around in front of traffic. But if they cause a stir, then I guess I only have one option…”
“Place them in the judicial system at an early age and make it very hard for them to get out”
Dear Sirs,
As a Western Australian whose several as-yet unpublished volumes of mental health records include such recommendations as “Has an unorthodox and somewhat confused understanding of reality”, “Appears to offer great promise for detailed study into the manifest expressions of delusion”, and “Unresponsive to existing electro-shock treatments – suggest the hospital immediately purchase a larger Van der Graaf generator if treatment programme is to have any possible likelihood of success”, allow me to cut straight to the chase and tell you precisely what feet the cause of this social disruption can be laid at; Pneumatic tyres.
I confess that I was heavily seduced by pneumatic tyres when a travelling salesperson first introduced me to the concept some years ago at the Roebourne Hotel. All this talk of so-called “smoother rides” and “much greater reliability” swayed my normally sound judgement, although having been propped up against the bar for six days already before he introduced himself to me probably didn’t help either.
I bought a set on impulse, and fitted them to a camel I’d recently purchased. They were rubbish.
Watching that camel slipping and sliding all over the place in one God-awful panic was admittedly for the well-oiled others present a bit of a lark to watch, but it jolly-well didn’t make me laugh as I had a load of mining timbers I’d been contracted to get through to the Lalla Rookh mine, and I couldn’t even get my camel down the main street without popping wheelies and doing unintentional doughnuts. It was a shambles and a complete bloody mess let me tell you, and whichever fucking idiot was responsible for the advice that you should lower the pressures to 18psi when travelling on soft sand should be found, flogged, and have his first-born killed – I tried it and it was a fiasco; the camel got bogged, died, I had to walk out of the bush by myself, and years later I had the embarrassing experience of reading that a prospecting party had, in their travels, come across a camel skeleton with wheels attached to its feet and figured it was an elaborate hoax left there by unstable pranksters.
Anyway, I’ve drifted a bit off target here because I wanted to point out that back in the old days we never had any of this socially disruptive “wheelie” nonsense. People rode penny farthings and devoted all their energies to avoid going tits-up just riding normally. One Italian chap I knew who self-styled himself as Mario the Magnificent – and who claimed to have worked in a circus before escaping to the colony to avoid creditors who he said had “large knives and little patience” – once tried to do a penny farthing wheelie in St George’s Terrace in what was possibly a sad, futile attempt to revive his circus career. He’s buried in Idiot’s Corner at Karrakatta Cemetery, and I still pop the odd flower on his stone whenever I’m passing that way. He was an odd chap.
Once penny farthings ceased to be fashionable, and this foolish business of macadamising roads took hold in a big way, it was inevitable that with this pneumatic tyre nonsense you would have the missing piece of the puzzle for total social breakdown.
My advice to anyone concerned about this insidious practice would be to tear up the macadamised roads in these communities, issue only penny farthings to anyone wishing to cycle, and shoot any travelling salesman offering great deals on pneumatic tyres.
Social disruption is never inevitable. It just takes common sense and the willingness to apply a firm hand.
Regards
Ron Muppet