Glass in the grass: An Australia Day sequel

There was not much left of the torched wheelie bin – just a solidified puddle of red and black plastic fused with broken bottle.

The glass was the thing. Vicious shards of blackened glass from beer bottles that had shattered in the conflagration were strewn through the grass over several square metres. I shuddered to look at it.

It would be a bastard of a job for the council workers to pick it all out of the grass and if they missed just one bit and some hapless sportsman slid on it, they’d be seriously injured.

It was the Monday of the Australia Day long weekend and my old mate Eric the council ranger had bought me out to show me the site.

There were two torched bins on the oval and a third in a nearby picnic area, near the barbecues, around which dozens of beer bottles and mixer drink cans were strewn.

Somebody had written ‘Muslim Free Zone’ with a texta on a picnic table. A flock of ibis were picking though the overflowing bins.

Eric said he’d got a call from a bloke he knew who’d seen it happening early on the Sunday morning.

“He was leaving the club, over there. Reckoned they were pissed, shitfaced, ugly drunk, when he saw them torch this one. Pretty frightening he reckoned. Mick must be about 70 now and he didn’t like to say anything to them.”

“Geez, they’ll have to go over it with a fine tooth comb,” I said.

“Dunno what the maintenance people will do but I reckon it’d be safer to strip off the whole surrounding area and lay new turf,” Eric said.

I took photos from various angles. In terms of tracking down the culprits there wasn’t much to go on. I picked through the bins near the picnic area and found a couple of receipts for hamburgers from Harry’s Cafe de Wheels up on the highway. With any luck I might be able to persuade them to let me have a look at any CCTV they had from around the time of the receipts’ date/time stamp. Maybe I’d get a car rego number and a portrait.

At the club, the bloke behind the bar told me he’d seen the flames when he went out to get something from his car.

“They were chanting ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi’, he said, and added: “I think they were the same young men I saw walking down the path there towards the barbecues. Half a dozen girls too. There were maybe 18, 20 of them. A couple of them had Aussie flags and they were carrying slabs of beer, eh. You know, my parents have a holiday place up the coast, got it out for holiday rentals, but couple of years ago it got trashed on the Aussie Day weekend so now they book it out themselves so they don’t get yobs in.”

“So what about the cops, any luck with them?” I asked Eric.

“Are you kidding? Australia Day, they’ve got their work cut out. Apart from RBT, they’re dealing with nasty stuff all over the place. Something like this doesn’t have priority. That’s why I rang you.”

I could see his point. He gave me the disk from a video surveillance camera just down the road. It was one of those spiffy solar-powered ones they can strap high up on a power pole and move around from place to place but it had been set up to catch hoons doing burn-outs on the road through the park, and all I could hope for was that it might have caught their cars on the road or maybe a distant shot of the idiots wheeling the bins onto the oval.

Back at the Brushtail Cafe, I recounted the tale to Old Possum and Stan the retired colonel.

“Yeah, Australia Day has become Bogan Day, a sort of modern antipodean version of All Fools Day and it’s John Howard I blame,” Old said.

“The whole promotion of Australia Day was just part of his strategy to win the bogans back from Pauline Hanson. He turned it into an official day for the racist and the brainless to get absolutely shitfaced and get ugly about Muslims, the same way they once bitched, at various times, about Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese … in fact whoever was the last group to arrive here. It was never like this before Howard.”

“Time was, people used to respect the flag”, sniffed Stan.

“Now you have these young idiots wrapping themselves in a flag they never sacrificed a thing for and bringing it into disrepute.”