SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Confusing autumn for Australian women

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33538, 20 May 1974, Page 6

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Confusing autumn for Australian women

The butcher has oxtails and the greengrocer has chestnuts and toffee apples. And suddenly it’s really late autumn.

I can understand about the apples and the chestnuts coming into season. But is there really a breed of tailless animal running around the beef pastures all summer? Where do the oxtails go in the summertime? No, don’t bother to answer 'that ‘question. In fact, forget it. Let’s just stick to the lovely simplicity of the fact that it’s autumn, and the ■ butcher has oxtails and the ■greengrocer has chestnuts land toffee apples. Not to •mention Brussels sprouts. And along with a good comforting dish of braised oxtails — with brussels sprouts — and perhaps a pile of hot chestnuts' popping out of their skins we could do with a little simplicity in our lives at the moment. Before the double dissolution of Parliament a series of advertisements sponsored by the Government started appearing in Australia’s newspapers. They ranged ifrom the informative —

i simple factual stuff on how Parliament works — to the Iconscience tickling — under a picture of a child putting litter in a bin the caption: I “Advance Australia. Care.” CONFUSING

Perhaps the most thoughtprovoking was a picture of a fisherman huddled in touchling solitude on a river bank. When he was young, reads 'the caption, Australia was

very quiet. Now it’s very,; very noisy. The message is noise pollution. But life in Australia particularly in this year of 1974 hasn’t just become very noisy. Somehow it seems to have become very, very complicated. And confusing'. And what advertising campaign is going to rid us of that?

! Take politics for instance. I Actually faced with reams lof ballot paper and four ref'erendums — referenda? — a good many Australians might cheerfully take politics at the moment and drop it in the nearest pond. Now politics used to be a compartively simple business. Like drill sergeants and strict tempo dancing you had your lefts and your rights. There wasn’t much up the 'middle and down the sides. But now scattered through the country it seems we have something like 19 political parties or splinter groups, not to mention a few odd independents and a bunch of West Australian secessionists.

Change your State and you might find yourself standing up for “God Save the Queen” again after you’d got used to “Advance Australia Fair."

What can you eat? Well, if you’re pregnant, watch it. There’s a very good chance that a month or so after the baby is born some expert is going to discover that what you thought was a reasonably good, balanced diet was all the time potentially damaging to the child’s brain, heart, liver, lungs, teeth and some bits and pieces you didn’t even know it had.

And no matter what they say and how many night bottles it means don’t give it its first solids too early. A fat baby makes a fat adult, and fat adults, says a Melbourne doctor involved in physical fitness, might very well be taxed heavily “as potential burdens on the community.” A guzzling childhood ends up in middle age as obesity and chloresterol and the coronary.

Should you have children anyway and how many? Having had them where do they go while you’re working? Should Australian winemakers be allowed to call their sparkling wines “champagne’.’? Should beer drinkers be allowed to drink on the pavement and motorists be allowed to drive their cars anywhere they like? How rich should you be to be considered rich? How much does a family need to live on? And between the high cost of living and the high cost of dying where do you stand anyway? Is Australia really a nation of snobs ultra class-conscious ana working on that old Australian ideal of a “fair go” for everybody? What’s a fair deal for children, for workers — and women?

Ah, women! There you have perhaps the most confused of all. Somehow in these confused and complicated times it seems an unnecessary complication that women have been discovered to be women and not, as a good many of them had supposed, people. It would certainly have simplified the election campaign if the socalled “women’s issues”— child care, education, abortion, the cost of living, adoption, family life and the rest —could have been seen as the people problems they really are. But perhaps, with a militant female minority to woo and the realisation that women too have a vote, that was just too simple.