Tiresome orthodox election posters begin to festoon the nation's highways and byways. As we write commuters on Hindmarsh Drive can see companion portrait posters of Malcolm Turnbull and of Zed Seselja set at amusing angles, as if they are lurching, perhaps even drunk.
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But now, exploiting this season's election ambience, Birdlife Australia has just created 10 unorthodox and anything-but tiresome online election posters. Today's column's poster (like all 10 of the series it features the fine artwork of Julian Chapple) urges the enfranchised to vote for Reg, the Regent Honeyeater.
Back to those brand-new artworks in just a moment but first, as this street-art-celebrating column's shy tribute to the wonderful Muhammad Ali, to a long-established street art portrait of him on a wall in Los Angeles. It is the work of Mr Brainwash. We cannot be sure that this is the artist's true name, but we do know that the cat in the picture (lovingly referred to by locals as the neighbourhood's "graffiti cat") rejoices in the one true name of Qip.
But quickly back, wiping away an unmanly tear at the thought of the great and lovely man's departure, to election posters. Although, quickly as we return to that topic, we are sluggish by comparison with Ali who in his athletic heyday used to claim, plausibly, that he was so fast he could flick his bedroom light off at the wall but be in bed before the light went out. Try this at home, readers.
But back to Birdlife Australia's election posters. Instead of festooning conspicuous outdoor places (in the way that, for example, Malcolm Turnbull and Zed Seselja are), they are, Birdlife Australia's Margaret Quixley points out to us, festooning social media. They've only been up for a very few days but she says that already "the response to them has been quite incredible". When we mused to her that it's a shame that the real ballot paper on July 2 won't give us a choice of candidates as worthy and as beautiful as these she laughed that that was exactly what people are tweeting on Twitter!
She explains that the 10 species are all variously struggling and battling and that by voting for your favourite (each poster comes with an explanation of how the species is faring and of what kind of action it needs) you will help raise of awareness of it. Then, she hopes, we will all spruik the state and the needs of our chosen avifaunal candidate to the human candidates that want to butter us up for our votes.
All is explained and the 10 posters are displayed, with how to vote instructions, via the Birds Australia website. http://www.birdsyoulove.org/actnow/ Margaret Quixley tells us to notice how the portrayed birds, all of them wearing some human garment or ornament, are dressed by the artist to say something about them and/or what is environmentally important for them. So for example our Regent Honeyeater is a bit bejewelled, as one might expect of a regent.
Alas, though, that species is now drifting towards extinction as its habitats, the box-ironbark forests of the east coast, are cleared apace by the thrust of civilisation. Thus, Reg is the candidate to vote for in the cause of "threatened species recovery planning", while a vote for the seaside-dwelling hooded plover is "a vote for coastal coexistence" and for the Mallee emu-wren (a poor flier, wishing it had Muhammad Ali's turn-of-pace, living in combustible habitats) is "a vote for better fire management".
And, hey guys, while on the franchise it seems a shame, as unimpressive Australian of the Year and former Australian Army chief David Morrison continues to fail to impress, that the nation can't vote to choose its Australian of the Year. His choice by the guys that chose him is bewildering.
His now famous latest idea is that we must stop calling men and women "guys" (as in the way in which a man and a woman going into a restaurant together get welcomed as "guys" by the waiter) because this somehow discriminates against women.
He is being silly. The worst thing about it is not that it does any discriminating against Sandra (it doesn't) when she and I are greeted with a "Hey guys!" but that it is a mindless Americanism, one that Australians have mindlessly adopted.
This columnist winces a little at "guys" but it is the wince of someone who wishes we didn't take so much of our vocabulary from third-rate US popular culture. Young and youngish Australians these days commonly refer to someone they dislike as a "douche bag" (another Americanism) when there is a whole arsenal of better and more nuanced epithets. They include Australia's very own "drongo". David Morrison is, to me, a drongo.
Quite when or why Americans started calling males and females guys is not clear. We know from the 1955 hit musical movie Guys and Dolls (starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando as guys, and Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine as dolls) that as recently as the mid 1950s American popular culture didn't always need a single catch-all word to catch both of the sexes.
And yet, once upon a time (from the 1940s), males and females who loved jazz and beatnickery were called by the harmless catch-all Americanism "hepcats". Would David Morrison, this discrimination-seeking missile, have objected to that word as a speciesist discrimination against dogs and all other non-cat domestic pets? Was it a slap in the face for goldfish?
