Halloween

 

Lawns are being turned into massacre sites. Once more it’s the season of faux cobwebs over fences, but this year the spiders are three times larger than last year, spreadeagled across windows or crawling artistically from letterboxes. It’s familiar weird, but this year feels different. Consumer excess has multiple skeletons dangling from porticoes and eucalypt branches. Skulls emerge from soil requiring the attention of a host of forensic pathologists. By the time the frisky kids in superhero costumes hit the streets on the 31^st, it’s a wonder what they will make of their normally death-denying neighbours who have turned their front gardens into graveyards. It’s a question that hangs in the air, skeleton-like, as I walk the streets on my constitutional. How many gravestones must they navigate in order to ask trick or treat? Gigantic plastic pumpkins on footpaths are another hurdle, several times larger than any known pumpkin and seemingly the results of a nuclear accident, they come in a lurid orange more excessive than the hair dye of the erstwhile American president. What are the young witches and draculas and ballerinas and gladiators to make of their neighbourhood, as each place they visit competes in making their home the bestest horror movie set in the street, dripping with blood. The other week was the referendum. It reminded us that the entire land of Australia is a graveyard, where the dead are many. At least, that was an underlying reality of the referendum, which in simple language terms was about giving people a voice. Remembering those who have departed this life was an essential, though largely unmentioned, reality behind why people said yes or no to a voice. The autumnal resonances of Halloween in our consumer culture have been transformed, necessarily in Australia in October, into a springtime funtime for children and occasional adults. They run the odd side, the even side, more interested in treats than tricks. Neighbours oblige. They dash unthinkingly over the land of roadmap grids and ‘creepy’ front gates, over the land where (see above) the dead are many.  The tricksters and treaters seem capable of believing anything, even that consumption is eternal, that cobwebs will be rolled up and stored for next year and that their cut price skeletons will find a home in an op shop. Yet behind all the friskiness and ‘scariness’, oh so spooky, other matters are waiting to meet them. Matters that the calendar in days following has already had in mind long before the frivolous decades of K-Mart craniums. Questions, like what exactly is our relationship to all the living and the dead? Can they be bought? And anyway, what is a saint?