(I’d like to thank my parasocial friend Tim Dennis-Jones for helping with his comments and suggestions for this episode.)
Memphis – home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks.
Perth? Home of Dennis Lillee and the Americas Cup.
I spent a very enjoyable few weeks in the city working with the insurance company HBF a few years ago. Locally the name of the company stood for ‘Home By Four’ and indeed it was hard to secure a berth in the lift at that time as everyone left their desks. And why not? Rather than being behind the times, it rather looks as if they’d got the hang of quiet quitting before the rest of the world cottoned on.
It characterises a certain WA mindset. Australia has its own thing going on, for sure, but WA has its own agenda within it entirely. The starting point, rather like Scotland with North Sea oil, is that since WA provides the backbone of the economy – digging up the minerals and exporting them to China – they can do as they goddam please, thank you. “Don’t give a fuck about the ACT”, indeed: the ACT being Canberra, aka the federal government.
First song on this setlist sets out that WA pov perfectly. It’s kinda ironic and probably also not at all. If you’re not Australian you may miss out on some of the references here, but if you’re familiar with England vs Scotland or the Midwest vs the US coast, or any of numerous other intraregional rivalries, you’ll get the idea readily enough.
WAXIT by Dennis Cometti:
Don’t want a share of the GST, I wanna buy a ute and two jet skis
Don’t give a shit about the NRL, Take your politicians and go to hell
We’ve got the beaches, we’ve got the mines, We live our life three hours behind
We get lotto on rotto, Watch WAFL on the telly
Moondyne Joe could bash Ned Kelly
Waxit
We’ve got the sharks, we’ve got the ore
The ACT doesn’t own us anymore
Don’t give a fuck about the ACT, Leave us alone, we wanna do as we please
Don’t want your schooners, Don’t want your pots
Federation was a joke, we gotta turn back the clock
We’ve got the beaches, We’ve got the mines, We live our life three hours behind
The time has come for us to settle the score
