Comedian, poet, writer.

A Moment   S Sorrensen    (Nimbin GoodTimes)

I’m stopped at a red light at Lismore’s only set of traffic lights, the only car at the intersection. The engine turns off. What? Oh, it’s a modern car, borrowed, and modern cars decide when the engine stops and starts.

Back up the road it also decided I was following too close to a truck carrying doomed cows, so the car braked itself. Scary. I mean, thoughtful, sure, but who’s in charge here?

There’s no traffic, just me and a crow sitting above the red light. No-one drives through the intersection. I watch heatwaves wriggle off the bitumen. I’m not hot though. This car has air-conditioning which it adjusts automatically. It’s actually a bit cool for me, but who am I to argue with the car? 

A  car pulls up beside me. Now we have traffic. It’s a modern car, a white plastic box with wheels. It looks like a Honda Civic, which looks like a Suzuki Swift, which looks like a BMW Generic, which looks like the drawings my son used to make of cars when he was four. The box sports a MG badge. 

Really?

When I was younger, MG was an exotic brand, the cars distinctive and sexy, a teenage boy’s wet dream, designed by older men morphing their remembered dreams into sensual curves and tail fins and chrome that sparkled like Christmas.

Now cars are designed by AI, which doesn’t have dreams (wet or dry). Cars are designed by a very smart machine which is a genius at maximising return from minimum expenditure. But it doesn’t do soul. Goodbye human flourish; hello bottom line.

Modern cars are boring, despite touch-screen suspension adjustment. That characterlessness is, of course, hidden by the advertising hype: beautiful people with cool haircuts and clear skin driving effortlessly around a perfect environment urban or rural while other beautiful people with smiles as wide as highways are attracted to the driver because the new car has universal connectivity which is all we want with an inbuilt streaming service so you can watch movies at the red light as the car plots the quickest way to the nearest Macdonald’s ordering your usual for you bypassing the planet-warming traffic jams caused by all the people in their new cars trying to find some meaning in modern life where human activity has been reduced to begging with our thumbs where everything is supplied except meaning by buying into an AI-driven fantasy algorithmically crafted for corporate exploitation of us the desperate citizenry.

Cars are turning on us. They don’t need us. Or want us. Cars used to be driven by people. You decided where to go, when to change gears, whether you wanted the lights on or drive by moonlight, whether you wanted the wipers or prefer windscreen raindrops painting an impressionistic Molesworth Street.

The car did what you wanted. You were master. You had skills; you could use a clutch, reverse park.

Not anymore. Cars drive people now. More and more they’re telling us what to do. And they’re getting rude. Not just an alarm or flashing light now, the car just won’t let you do stuff, or it just takes control.

One day soon, your car will pull up outside your house. You’ll walk towards it. It’ll open its window just enough for you to throw in your phone (which is all you are now), then the car will close its window and drive off to wherever, to do whatever. You, you can stay at home and bet on the footy. (Ask Siri to turn on the telly.)

The traffic light turns green, the crow flies up Ballina Road, the car engine starts itself and off I go, following the cows.

A Moment    S Sorrensen

For something that is so important in our lives, something that dominates our emotional and, often, physical wellbeing, we know bugger-all about love. 

Well, maybe I shouldn’t say ‘we’. Maybe it’s just me who finds love confusing but intriguing. Maybe there are people who have got love sorted. Good on ya.

But not me. 

I’m sitting in an old metal chair sipping a Japanese vodka (love this vodka) and watching the sun set behind a trio of pine trees I planted more than 30 years ago. There is a Norfolk pine, a hoop pine and a bunya pine. They’re very tall now (time will do that with trees) and, in the buffeting southerly, they are dark silhouettes dancing as the sun yellows behind them.

The old metal chair, part of a garden setting of four chairs and a table, used to sit in my parents’ garden in Brisbane for as long as I can remember. I don’t recall the chairs ever being sat in, except once I sat there with my first girlfriend. We held hands across the table.

Last year, my mother died. I had a difficult and, at times, distant relationship with her, but the brutal immediacy of her long dying dissolved the superficial barriers between us and I felt her love. When all else had gone – her prejudices, her memories, and finally even her persona – there only remained love. And I loved her in return. I must have always loved her, because I don’t think love can be one way; it takes two to love. Love is a reaction. Chemistry. 

‘No way,’ you say. “What about unrequited love?’

Once white, I have painted the four chairs four different colours. I’m sitting on the red one, which matches the red sarong I wear. (Yes, I’ve always been stylish – ‘artistic’ my mum would say.) In reality, my sarong is no longer red, but splashed with purple and yellow paint.  I’ve been painting the bathroom, which I built more than 30 years ago.

I love my shack under the cliffs. ‘Hmm,’ I hear you murmur. ‘Does it love you back?’

This is my work sarong. After three decades, I figured the bathroom needed a do-over. Okay, I’m not one for rushing maintenance. I mean, entropy is the natural way, right? The universe is exploding and paint peels and my mother died. Nothing lasts.

I left that girl with whom I held hands sitting in these chairs all those years ago. A new world, far different from the one I was in, beckoned to me from a northern jungle. I chucked my shoes and broke her heart. 

My mum’s love created love in me. I never really understood that until I had a child. I loved him unconditionally with the love my mother gave me. I still do. And if I love him, he must love me, right? 

Last year, not long after my mum died, I tracked down that first girlfriend. It had been decades. I apologised to her for being hurtful and, well, ignorant. (I thought love could die.) The love that was dormant in me, smothered by layers of… of… stuff, woke. Love doesn’t die. I never really understood that until my mother died.

The sun, poking its fingers between the pines to stroke the old metal chairs, kisses the western range. It’s day’s end. I love this moment. I love this place. I love this vodka. I love my mum, my son, my first girlfriend – and my bathroom. 

And it’s all the same love. 

The arrow of time points you and me, the planet and the universe to a natural oblivion. Nothing lasts, except love.

Love is the only thing. 

A Moment   S Sorrensen

The news is always bad. Gaza, the referendum. It’s heart-breaking to hear children screaming louder than exploding bombs. It’s painful to see Dutton trying to do sincere.

The news makes me depressed, and when I’m depressed I find refuge in drinking. I’m not talking kombucha; I’m talking a lively Hunter Valley shiraz with subtle cinnamon notes.  

Drinking gives respite. Spending time with friends also depressed by the news and also sheltering in a lively shiraz is happy time away from the awful reality. We tell stories, make jokes, make incredible sense, shrink the universe to a spinning galaxy of luck and privilege, and stumble to bed.  

Next day, the stories and jokes are forgotten as sobriety winces at me from a rising sun, but the bad news lingers like a headache, exacerbated by my compulsive online look at The Guardian or Al Jazeera or ABC News. (Despite its attractions, I avoid getting my news from social media – I’m not yet convinced reconciliation is divisive, wind turbines kill babies, smart cities are stupid or the world is flat.)

The depressing morning news only encourages another evening’s respite with a lively shiraz. But alcohol is a depressant. Adding cinnamon-noted depression to your bad-news depression just makes for a more complex depression requiring even more lively respite. Oh dear. What to do?

Maybe, if the news is depressing, just turn it off, right? The bad world disappears, right? It’s just noise. So, this morning, I woke up, made coffee, grabbed my phone and didn’t check the news. I listened to JJ Cale instead. 

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

I’m in Cessnock, which is in the Hunter Valley, which is a huge coal pit with a grapevine around it. Over 10 million tonnes of coal a month pass through the Port of Newcastle and out to the world. Ugly. Immoral.

No, wait. Today, I’m not doing negative. It’s lovely. The pretty Hunter vineyards have trendy restaurants and chic bars and organic cuisine and EV charging stations and lively shiraz and happy people — it’s a wonderful world. 

Without news, I’m re-crafting my own special, um, reality. I’m almost feeling happy. (Yes, in Cessnock.) The sun is shining, potential afternoon rain tinting the few clouds. (Or is it coal dust?)

Walking down Vincent Street to the coffee joint, I avoid looking into the newsagent’s — a headline might jump out at me: ‘Oil company CEO to host climate summit’ or ‘Trump re-elected’. That would puncture my bubble.

What does one do in Cessnock? Coffee and pie, of course. 

In a little café I find a table and order both. As I sit down, my hand automatically reaches to the rear pocket of my jeans to extract my phone. It’s an automatic thing, a fluid well-practised motion: sit, phone, news.

But wait. It’s no-news day, so, just in time, I stop myself reaching for my phone as I sit – and I sit on it.

A young woman appears with my coffee and pie. I smile at her, pretending I’m not an idiot sitting on his phone. But looking at her, I see a TV behind her, lurking next to the pie menu.

Oh no. The news has found me. 

‘3 degrees global heating predicted’ says the banner running across the bottom of the screen. 

Nowhere to hide. The grapevine cannot conceal the coal pit. 

Three degrees? The crisis is real. And there’s not enough shiraz in all the Hunter to drown the sorrow. What to do?

Nowhere to run.

I rescue my phone from under my bum. I look up ‘People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port.’

Okay. I’m going to Newcastle for that. 

I order a kombucha.

A Moment  S Sorrensen  (Nimbin GoodTimes, November)

‘Wow, look at that,’ she says stopping in front of a huge brick and wood house with a large deck and swimming pool extending towards her. 'It's beautiful.' 

She rocks on her Crocs, pacifying a child strapped to her chest. 

The man, whom I assume is her partner (just an assumption, I know), nods as he also stops to look into the property where a large statue of Ganesha squats on the perfectly trimmed lawn surrounding the pool. The statue squirts a stream of water from its trunk into a garden pond where bright-green plastic lilies float.  

‘Wow, yeah. Wow,’ he says, knocking a shell from his Crocs. (Yep, he is her partner.)

A gust of sea breeze pushes the plastic lilies to one side of the garden pond. I smell salt and a whiff of rainforest.

The thing is, the house is awful. Ugly. An on-trend early-century architectural style lifted straight from some magazine. And it’s enormous. 

The child is not looking at the house. She is trying to fit her fist into her mouth, which necessitates her closing her eyes, apparently. 

Looking at the house, the trio has their backs to something that is truly beautiful: Mission Beach. Crystal-clear water blueing as it stretches from coastal rainforest to Dunk Island and into a hazy horizon. 

The huge ugly house is separated from the beach by only a few-metre remnant of the original rainforest. 

This house is one of many in a line of houses set close to the water, with a sandy walking track for the public running through that thin strip of remaining forest between houses and beach.

All the houses are new, awful and gigantic, each with its own style showing no harmony with the houses around it. That’s not surprising, because these houses also have no rapport with the environment they’re in. They could have been lifted from inner Sydney or Melbourne or Las Vegas. These are the houses of the newly-arrived rich.

The child squirms and cries out. (I think she may have cried out ‘wow’, but that could just be me trying to make a good story.)

Years ago, when I was at Mission Beach, I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. The lush rainforest grew right down to the beach. Set among the forest were some small wooden houses where families lived. They fished, had fires on the beach. They didn’t have statues from Bali or a swimming pool or a lawn. They had a sandy track from their home through the forest to the beach. 

Those locals have long gone. The small, low-impact houses with their rusty water tanks are gone, replaced with an ugliness that is infecting every beautiful coastal area in the tropical north with a noisy, look-at-me insensitivity, whole mini ecosystems buried under the third toilet. 

These beautiful environments have become an acquisition, not a shared existence; an investment and a pretty view to fill the windows. The windows stay shut, of course – air-conditioning. The new settlers know this place is beautiful (they’re people), so they want a part of it (they’re rich), but they don’t know how to be a part of it. 

I’m going for a swim. From the water, the beach still looks beautiful, the thin veneer of rainforest mostly hiding the disfigurement of wealthy disconnect. 

I walk past the trio. The woman turns to me. 

‘Hi.’ 

‘Hi.’ 

The child has just fitted her fist into her mouth. She looks at me, her eyes bulging wide in triumph (just an assumption, I know; could be panic). 

‘Wow!’ I say.

A Moment   S Sorrensen  (Nimbin GoodTimes, October 2023)

The world is mad. I’m looking at him as he talks to a woman, who nods as he speaks. I don’t know if she agrees with him. I hope not. I hope she is just being polite. He is enthused, talking loudly and excitedly. I hear phrases like ‘government trick’ and ‘an Aboriginal fella who is totally against it, so…’

It’s a party in the hills. I live in my shack under the cliffs not too far from here, but I do have to drive, so I won’t drink too much. I feel like drinking wine, though. The world is mad. Just one more glass…

I’ve known him for decades. I’ve always appreciated his intelligence and his empathy. But now, he is championing the ‘no’ vote in the Voice to Parliament referendum. 

I take a sip. Hmmm. Lively, without much substance.

Globally, the situation is dire: the climate is changing, population exploding, extinctions increasing, pollution… And I feel the planet’s pain. Why wouldn’t I? Homo sapiens had been intimately connected to the planet for more than 200,000 years. Though mostly wrenched from that intimate connection in our modern life, we still feel the planet’s pain. It unsettles us, makes us sad, frustrated and even angry, whether we recognise the cause or we push the cause onto other targets – like governments or black people or the guy next door with the barking dog. 

In the Northern Rivers, I have always found refuge from the melancholy that the planetary situation creates. It has always been a community sharing a respect for human and environmental rights. Tonight though, I’m witnessing another light of reason dimmed by insidious forces that algorithmically infiltrate a person’s rationality and poison their empathy. 

He takes a break from speaking and wanders over to me, smiling, holding up a bottle of whiskey in offering. I make myself smile back and shake my head no, pointing to my bottle of shiraz. He shrugs and moves away.

I don’t know how to counter the madness. The world is both crazy mad and angry mad. There’s no going back once you’ve dropped down that cyber rabbit hole of conspiracy. 

There are those who don’t want Aboriginal people advising the government on matters that concern Aboriginal people. For a start, it may highlight issues for Australia’s next mining boom, which will be in critical and rare-earth minerals, essential for modern living – and modern war. The USA is detaching itself from China’s huge worldwide control of these minerals. Again, Australia will be the quarry. But that quarry is the land of the Indigenous peoples. Always was. Always will be. 

Mabo vs Queensland in 1992, brought out the fear-based arguments we’re hearing now in the ‘no’ movement. The same arguments were trotted out for the Native Title Act of 1993, and again for the Wik Decision in 1996. ‘They’ll take our land’ etc…But the echo chambers of social media conspiracy didn’t exist then. The people in my community were united in their approval of these acts of Indigenous recognition. 

Now this smallest of goodwill gestures – recognising the importance of listening to Aboriginal people on matters that concern them – has seen the same old arguments dragged out again. This time, however, they’re enhanced by social-media algorithms, making them much more powerful in their ability to turn the frustrations and fears that come from living on a critically ill planet into a negative force that will continue that destruction and serve only the interests of the corporate few. 

I drain the last of the wine from my glass and pick up the bottle. The nodding woman comes over to me.

‘Leaving?’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

She hugs me and says quietly, ‘Thank God there was no Facebook in ’67.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘The world is mad.’

‘It’s the chemtrails, you know,’ she says with a serious expression. 

Then we both laugh.

A Reminisce  S Sorrensen

Her eyes shone, reflecting firelight. The group sat around the fire, talking about the communal vegie garden – Centre Garden they called it – and the planting they would do tomorrow. 

A joint glided around the circle, flaring and dipping, flaring and dipping. The woman with the shinning eyes smiled at me. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head, secured by a stick. Or maybe it was a bone; hard to tell in the flickering light. She sat comfortably on her heels, swaying gently.

Even though we were in the rainforest, I could hear the the sea hissing. I could hear my heart beating. Life was full of promise. 

It was 1976 and I was in Cedar Bay, North Queensland. 

I’d been at Cooktown and had hitched a ride south on a clunky trimaran bound for Cairns. From Cairns, I would hitch up to the Atherton Tablelands where I was living with a tribe of other young refugees fleeing the suffocating culture of mainstream Australia. Things were changing, we felt. The old ways were dehumanising and planet-wrecking. We were pioneers of a new age, we thought. A kinder future. Maybe we were naïve, but naivete can take you places that you would never normally go. Naivete is hope in action.

After some days pushing into the prevailing southerlies, we reached Cedar Bay. A pod of dolphins escorted the boat into a shimmering world of blue water and green rainforest that stopped abruptly at the white sand. I stood on the bow, my hair and sarong flapping in the wind. I was 21.

Even before the anchor was set, I dived into the water and swam to the beach. Two men approached me as I lay, exhausted, on the sand. One was naked, the other wore khaki shorts. They both had long hair and thick beards. The man with shorts had a rack of three knives sheathed in a belt.

G’day. You alright? he said.

I was. I pointed to the boat. I asked him about the three knives he carried. 

I’m a a pig hunter, he said. They damage the forest, so we hunt them and eat them. 

Well, you might, laughed the naked bloke. Not me, I’m vegetarian. 

Where do you live? I asked. 

Come with us, the pig hunter said.

We walked towards the wall of rainforest, following a stream that flowed from the forest across the sand and into the ocean. We plunged from glare into darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I saw elegant open homes set among the trees, the dappled sunlight fingering their roofs. A noisy and naked bunch of young children splashed in the stream. Two women squatted near them, talking. They waved.

We walked to where a fire was being set. People were gathering. The sun would soon sink behind the range.

Around the fire, tomorrow’s gardening plans were finalised and food shared (with a pork option). A guitar and a dulcimer appeared. We sang Bob Dylan songs. The woman with the shining eyes danced, her arms curling like smoke. Music spilled through the trees as darkness inked between the houses where, soon, kerosene lamps and candles created pockets of warm light. Life as art, I thought.

I was in awe that people could live in such a beautiful way. This was simple, graceful, human. It was a masterpiece.

The woman with the shining eyes sat down next to me. She smelled like the sea. She was warm like fire. We sang Forever Young, and I discovered it was a bone that held her hair. 

A few weeks later, the police and navy came to Cedar Bay, arrested these people and burnt their homes.

A Moment    S Sorrensen

It’s hot. I need shade. Oh, there’s a place. A pastelaria, which is a sort of Portuguese cafe. Two older blokes are sitting under the pastelaria’s awning, which extends into a small courtyard. I suppose you get to an age when you can’t do much except hang about and wait for the end. Bit sad, really…

The two older men sit separately and each has a beer in front of him. It’s 11am. One inhales slowly on a cigarette, holds the smoke in his lungs for a long while, then exhales. The smoke drifts languidly into the sunlight, making a faint shadow on the split-stone pavers. 

I was thinking I’d have a café com gelo. That’s an iced coffee. It comes in two cups: your normal café of choice in one and ice in another. You add your coffee to the ice as desired. DIY deliciousness. 

The Portuguese love coffee. At the start of my walk, I wandered into a pastelaria. where two young workmen were drinking coffee and scrolling through their phones, legs jiggling, to start their working day. The coffee is super strong and comes in tiny cups that looked even tinier in their large hands. I ordered one as well – an early morning hit to give me energy to walk a long way so I can, um, walk a long way back. Yeah, it’s sort of pointless, but that’s life, right?

A woman emerges from the pastelaria and comes to my table. 

‘Bom dia,’ she says, smiling.

‘Bom dia,’ I say, practising my new language skills. ‘Super Bock,’ I say, pointing to the beer the older blokes are drinking, ‘e uma pastel de Tentúgal, por favor.’ 

Bugger coffee, I’m having a beer. It’s 11am.

‘OK,’ she says, smiling (at my excellent Portuguese, I reckon).

On my pointless walk today I passed a lot of pastelarias, so named because as well as coffee and beer you can buy a delicious pastry (pastel). And at each pastelaria sat at least one older man, sipping coffee. These blokes don’t look down at a phone, scrolling for distractions, but rather just sit and gaze out into the street, into the heat, into the world. They don’t seem bored or frustrated, even though they obviously don’t have anything to do.

The woman brings my beer and pastry.

‘Obrigado,’ I say.

We three older blokes sit and look at another older block cooking at a fireplace in the courtyard. He sweats through his flannelette shirt. The man puts a large dried and salted cod in a wire grill and places it on the coals. This is Portugal’s national dish. Bacalhau. Occasionally, one of the older blokes says something and they all laugh. 

The courtyard fills with the aroma of bacalhau cooking. Beyond the courtyard, Europe is cooking, but here in Southern Portugal the wind off the Atlantic Ocean offers some relief. 

The pastel de Tentúgal is wonderful. I can’t help but moan and roll my eyes with delight as I taste it. The two older blokes look at me and smile. One raises his glass to me. The pastel has an egg-custard centre wrapped in layers of super-thin dough baked golden brown. 

‘Isto é delicioso,’ I say.

The women cackles from inside the pastelaria.

One of the blokes says something – and we all laugh.

I should get going. I have a long walk back to my house among the olive and carob trees. I got stuff to do. But I like sitting here. With these older blokes. Just… sitting.

Then I realise: It’s not that these blokes are past it and can’t do anything; no, it’s that they’re wise and know there’s really nothing to do.

I’m staying. 

A Moment    S Sorrensen

There is something uplifting about being in a church. The doorways and windows all point heavenward in that classic pointed church-window shape that brings to mind a bishop’s hat. Or a penis... 

Oh, sorry about that. That’s just my Catholic mind. But this is a Uniting Church church, decommissioned now. I don’t know if there is a paedophilic history to the Uniting Church. I mean, the Uniting Church doesn’t even have much history, only being formed in 1977. And I don’t know if the Uniting Church has bishops with funny pointed hats that require specially shaped doors to accommodate their passage. But it seems to me that there’s a lot less pomp in the Uniting Church than in the Catholic. It’s more Parramatta Road than Oxford Street. 

I’m standing on the raised floor where pastors have stood and addressed congregations of the faithful for years. I can hear the echoes of their many words that have embedded themselves in past congregations and in these wooden walls. Now, microphone in hand, I’m adding my own.

The congregation I’m addressing though is not Uniting Church faithful, but a bunch of North Coast people who have come to this funky new venue in Nimbin for a Sunday session of songs and jokes (not hymns and sermon). My job is to deliver the jokes. To spread the word, man. The good word. 

And the faith here is not in a God made in man’s image (Xenophanes, 580BC) but in people. Yes, people. Full stop. We who are gathered here are celebrating our humanity. We do not celebrate God, fear, faith, scripture, commandments, heaven or reincarnation, no; here and now we celebrate each other’s life in holy communion on a perfect winter’s day in Nimbin.

‘G’day people. Settle down. Good to see you.’

I have suffered at the hands (literally) of religion. I have been confused by the institutionalised distortion of a beautiful story. A story that is so human, but so dangerous to the ruling institutions.

The beautiful story is of a man preaching love and peace; of a man who chucked bankers from the temple and who said, at his big gig on the mountain, that rich people would not get to heaven; of a man who helped the sick and homeless; of a man who embraced those outcast by society; of a man who pointed to his heart when asked where heaven was; of a man who died to show that accepting your mortality is the key to liberation. (And let’s not forget, got more wine when it was needed.) 

Even though I’m saying ‘man’, these actions are more those of a woman, I reckon. The wisdom is feminine. I think he was a woman. That makes sense.

The distortion of this beautiful story reverses the feminine wisdom to create macho institutions promoting the opposite: wealth is virtue, peace needs war, death is not real, heaven is somewhere else. They’re using Her name in vain. Bastards.

I’m talking beautiful nonsense here on the stage, but it’s more honest than all the scriptures. And it brings more joy. There was more wisdom in the chit-chat by the chai tent before the show than in any proclamation from any religion. The truth is all around.

The jokes are going pretty well. We’re having a laugh. A baby cries. A phone causes a quick and embarrassed reaction from someone in the back row. The church itself, a beautiful building, seems to be enjoying itself. Soon the walls will resonate to live music. Then it’s wine and bread in the pub.

I give thanks to people in this loving church on this lovely Nimbin Sunday.

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