Ballardian

by Simon Sellars

Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”

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J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
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On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing news. Under cover of night, a street in the northern suburb of Mill Park had been gripped by vigilante attacks. Cars had been torched and threats spray-painted onto vehicles and walls: ‘No more burnouts’; ‘You’re next’; ‘Tell your mates I know where they live’; ‘Any more and you will pay’; ‘We have had enough of this shit’. A series of news photos laid bare the currency of autogeddon, snapshots of vehicular expulsions littered about this quiet suburban enclave like the sigils of an initiatory consumerism. In the aftermath, residents told reporters of a long-standing hoon problem (’hoon’ being Aussie for ‘hooligan’, with an automotive twist), with young petrol heads using the street for late-night drags and the obligatory, ultra-offensive round of tyre-squealing burn outs. Clearly, the burnings and graffito were the work of local vigilantes, fed up with their street being desecrated by these so-called hoons.

Autogeddon: Mill Park’s scorched-road policy. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

This was chilling stuff — apocalyptic reportage that bled car-crash fiction into reality. Flung headfirst into the uncanny valley, I was struck by the similarities with The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), the Peter Weir film set in the fictional Australian country town of Paris — it’s a Ballardian film of the first order. In this Parisian/Ballardian community, the locals manufacture road accidents, luring travellers to their death, or — if they survive — to a date with the town doctor, who performs medical experiments that turn accident victims into ‘veggies’: brain-damaged reflex mechanisms no longer capable of independent thought, only a group (re)action. Meanwhile, the crashed cars are scavenged for parts: old ladies polish carburettors as if they were prize jewels; the village idiot wears radiator emblems around his neck; and the mayor steals the best stereo systems for himself. In the background, the youth — Parisian hoons — rev their hotted-up cars in all-in drags, performing burnouts and generally disturbing the peace; this behaviour is tolerated by Parisians, with the hoons perceived as a kind of byproduct of the town’s peculiar economy.

However, when the hoons overstep the line by destroying the mayor’s property during a late-night drag, he orders the cars of the two gang leaders to be burned in a public display of humiliation, assisted by a vigilante squad caught up in forces its members don’t fully understand (they provide the support for the mayor’s reign, oiling the mechanism that powers the town’s closed-loop economy in support of vague rhetoric and empty civic pride).

‘You can’t burn a bloke’s fucken car!’. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (1974; dir. Peter Weir).

That’s it — that’s the moment.

As we watch the burnt-out shells of cars smouldering in Paris’s main street, their drivers shackled and stripped of their metal skin, we feel the warning signals rippling out through the ocean of deep time, 33 years later, homing in on the events of Mill Park. The Cars that Ate Paris ends in civil war as the hoons take revenge, coming back bigger and badder than ever with lethal, spike-encrusted vehicles, destroying the town hall and other cornerstones of Parisian society in an orgy of tyre smoke and gear-crashing destruction.

After Mill Park, would Melbourne’s suburban badlands erupt in a similar fashion?

The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least ten miles to its south and west, a zone of motorway intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras… I welcome the transience, alienation and discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’ (1997).
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An ‘unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse’ — here, Ballard could be describing the events of Mill Park, a similar catchment area dominated by the vectors of speed (the suburb is bifurcated by Plenty Rd, an enormous dual carriageway) and ‘the instant impulse’. According to Wikipedia, ‘Mill Park is not short of fast food restaurants, with McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, KFC and Pizza Hut all within proximity of one another’. That’s a strange aspect to highlight, but one that the author obviously felt was significant enough to include.

Noble Park Maccas, the scars of autogeddon clearly visible in the foreground (photo: Simon Sellars).

As I was attempting to digest the significance of the Mill Park attacks — as hard to swallow and keep down as a Big Mac — another outlying region, Noble Park, erupted in violence. One Friday night, in the shadow of the Noble Park McDonalds (or Maccas), the meeting point for what is by all accounts Melbourne’s biggest illegal drag meet, the newspapers told us that 1500 spectators lined the Princes Highway (’some with babies in prams’), watching rice rockets and muscle cars put the pedal to the metal for a few hundred metres, culminating in smoking orgiastic burnouts for the crowds:

Friday’s crowd was incensed at a police cordon and the use of anti-hoon laws to confiscate cars, and rampaged through a business at the intersection, looting and trashing. The McDonald’s restaurant, which has no official link to the drag racing but which is viewed by those attending as its spiritual home, was not trashed.”

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Michelle Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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When the police — just 50 of them, severely undermanned and disorganised — arrived and attempted to break up this scene, they found they were no match for the huge crowd, which, recognising its superior numbers, went in hard, driving the cops back…and then some. Presumably hopped up on a fuel-injected perfume of burning rubber, hoons and spectators alike went on the rampage, destroying the nearby Blockbuster video store and attacking traffic signals. Remarkably, the Noble Park Maccas was saved from harm, watching over the protagonists like a benevolent dictator (a worrying detail that could just about supply the basis for an entire separate essay).

‘No money, no grudging; pure fun’ — ‘car enthusiast’ Matt gives it some. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

Everyone knows Noble means Noble Park Maccas,” says Matt, 28, who has been attending illegal street drag racing at the corner of the Princes Highway and Elonera Road, Noble Park, for six years.

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Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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Just as The Cars that Ate Paris predicted, the hoons did return after Mill Park — bigger and badder than ever, trashing suburbia, overwhelming the cops and utterly destroying civic sensibilities, fuelled on by media coverage and trapped in a feedback loop of violent one-upmanship — an ‘autopian’, consumptive, synchronous economy. Like the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come, the suburb of Noble Park was turned into a temporary autonomous zone, where mob rules and the game of ‘hypertrangsression’ ensures chaotic perpetual motion.

Benjamin Noys summarises the process:

Ballard’s recent work…puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture…to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression. This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’… It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’… It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest…”

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Benjamin Noys. ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard‘ (2006).
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Maximally echoing unto infinity, mobile-phone footage of the riot was uploaded to YouTube, sparking a fresh orgy of outrage in the mediascape. More vigilante attacks were threatened. Police threatened to impound the cars of all known hoons. The Noble Park perpetrators were promised they would be hunted down. TV current-affairs programs licked at the aftermath like a rabid dog. And dob-in-a-hoon telephone hotlines were set up, building on the post-9/11 hysteria that Australia has capitulated to so completely, a continuation of a process we succumbed to a long time ago.

It’s a process that maintains a disturbing convergence with car culture. According to Catherine Simpson, Australia has ‘a cultural fascination with road tolls; they are often detailed on the nightly news, as if they somehow signify how “we” are doing against the “enemy”…the rhetoric of warfare was often employed to curb rising road toll statistics. In 1946, the Australian Automobile Association declared…that traffic accidents: “constitute an enemy which takes almost as great a toll of Australia’s already sparse population as did the enemy nations in the second world war”.’

This notion of a faceless enemy, drilled into the collective psyche through popular culture, helps to explain why Australia has been so thoroughly aligned with US foreign policy and the War on Terror — this country is the perfect petri dish for injecting paranoia about the ‘faceless, unknown threat’ of terrorism. But today, as Bush and his war rapidly loses support, it’s becoming clear that Australian Prime Minister John Howard can’t back down for fear of admitting the last five years of unblinking US-aligned foreign policy were built on less-than-transparent foundations. So the machinery of anti-terrorism must continue to churn, as Howard insists on maintaining Australian troops in Iraq; meanwhile, back home, we have miserably failed to find suicide bombers under every bed.

And so we have the ludicrous image of ‘elite terrorism police’ stationed at Melbourne airport: unable to find actual examples of the menace we’ve been so primed to receive, they impotently issue parking tickets instead. As the narrator of Ballard’s Crash observes, while stuck in the frustration of a traffic jam going nowhere fast, ‘The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause’ (p. 151).

Beware the water cops (photo: Sandy Scheltema; from the Age newspaper).

But wait, there’s more: as Australia continues to be beset by drought, terrorist culture gives rise to water vigilantes, with citizens afraid of sneak attacks by members of their community for visibly watering their lawns. And all of it leads to the latest example: these dob-in-a-hoon hotlines, encouraging us to pick up the phone and anonymously ‘dob’ in young offenders in a kind of state-sanctioned vigilantism (’dobbing’ is a very Australian term for turning someone in, lagging, grassing, ratting, informing).

I keep returning to Ballard’s ‘immense, motionless pause’ — as good a way as any to describe the bureaucratic Moebius strip that is the ‘Mill Park solution’. Mill Park’s local council has known about the hoon problem for some time: as the newspaper reports made clear, residents had been complaining long and hard — for the last 10 years, in fact. You’d think the obvious solution would be to install speed humps (’road cushions’) — simple, effective, and safe. But that’s not the Australian way. When residents of a hoon-plagued street in another suburb, Dandenong South, dug up the road and installed their own speed humps, the council removed them within a day, without replacing them with road cushions of their own (and fining the residents to boot!) leaving the problem to fester still.

(Man, it’s hot in here…)

For 10 years Mill Park residents also tried to go through the correct channels, petitioning the council for ‘traffic calming’ measures including the fabled speed humps (’traffic calming’ has been defined as the goal ‘of reducing vehicle speeds, improving safety, and enhancing quality of life’). The council responded with one of the most ludicrous civic pacification schemes in memory. As the minutes for June 2006 outline, this involved a multi-stage ‘Traffic Safety Education Program’, consisting firstly of a ‘mail-out to local residents advising of community concerns regarding excessive traffic speeds and inappropriate driver behaviour in their street, [reminding] them of their responsibility to drive safely and within the speed limit.’

A mail-out — that’ll teach ‘em.

(We’re at boiling point, now).

To enforce the suburban 50km/h speed limit, the second stage involved ‘the placement of THINK 50 50km/h bin stickers on rubbish bins.’

Stickers on bins — those hoons won’t know what hit ‘em.

(Too late: it’s all over. Mill Park bursts into flames).

The hoons return, bigger and badder than ever before. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (dir. Peter Weir, 1974).

Faced with this sequence of events, you have to wonder if Mill Park is being used as some kind of exurban laboratory. Perhaps you could even identify the stages in the chemical process: sell cars as indestructible and sexy (how many recent car ads show vehicles morphing into Transformer-style robots? It’s a whole new genre in advertising); transform a suburb from isolated enclave to chaotic catchment area via inadequate traffic management, so that it becomes overrun by drivers and their indestructible attitudes (according to the council minutes, the streets off Plenty Rd have been increasingly used as ‘rat runs’ by motorists wanting to escape the traffic lights and interminable traffic jams of that monstrous thoroughfare); ignore residents’ complaints when the rats overrun it, or soft-soap them with Band-Aid solutions; sit back and watch the fireworks finally explode; move in with ’solutions’ that promote divisiveness, mistrust and a ’soft fascism’ perhaps best articulated by Ballard in Kingdom Come:

‘No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want. Your job is to set the stage and create the climate. You steer them by sensing their mood. Think of a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. They decide where they want to go.’

Cruise chuckled… ‘How do I control them, impose some kind of focus? The whole thing could start to go mad.’

‘Mad? Good. Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no one is really looking’.”

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come (2006; p. 146).
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Just like Paris, just like the satellite suburbs in Kingdom Come, Mill Park is a self-regulating system: auto-violence fuels the economy; the economy is auto-violence. Inescapably, through blatant inaction and a covert escalation of hostilities, the Mill Park councillors lit up the cars in Mill Park just as surely as the mayor of Paris did in Peter Weir’s parallel film world (where the mayor didn’t actually light the torch, but remained a malevolent presence in the background, pulling the strings).

To what end we can only speculate, but drip-feeding an approved ‘terrorist culture’ into local politics in response to the anarchic ‘horror’ of vigilantism seems to be an end result. By dobbing in a hoon, we have one more compelling reason to mistrust each other, to see ‘how we are doing against the enemy’ — safely, anonymously, and with the cloak of government sanctions to protect us.

There’s one final, Bizarro-world parallel: the image of the dobber picking up the phone to inform on the evil hoon (who, of course, is a product of the system). It’s a mirror of Paris’s mayor, in the film’s denouement, encouraging the previously ineffectual protagonist, Arthur (crippled by road trauma early on, but intoxicated by the thrill of violence in the end), to kill the leader of the hoons, who no longer serves a purpose save as a very public sacrifice.

As the Melbourne-based Fossil blog notes:

The Howard Government’s national security hotline (DOB IN A TERRORIST, 1800 123 400) received 42,000 calls in its first two years, between December 2002 and December 2004. Clearly there are a lot more dobbers than terrorists. In 2005-06, following the “support the system that supports you’’ campaign, Centrelink [the national organisation responsible for social-security payments] received nearly 120,000 calls to its dob-in-a-dole bludger line, alleging overpayments. About 2 per cent were genuine ['dole bludger' is Aussie slang for someone cheating the welfare system].

This is by no means an exhaustive list but if you wanted to you could reach for the phone right now and dob in: a hoon; a drug dealer; a drug cheat (sport); a water cheat; a “dodgy seafood retailer’’ – yes really; a litterer; a rubbish dumper; a wife-beater; an illegal immigrant; a “scammer’’; a dodgy cab; a dodgy taxpayer; a burglar; a backyard mechanic; a cockfighter; a dogfighter; and a software pirate, RRrrrrrrrrrr.

That’s a lot of dobbin’.”

Indeed it is.

Up against that critical social function, traffic calming — ‘enhancing the quality of life’, in other words — just doesn’t cut it in this day and age.

Simon Sellars.

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..:: REFERENCES
Ballard, J.G. (1973) Crash.
————- (1997) ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’.
————- (2003) Millennium People.
————- (2006) Kingdom Come.

City of Whittlesea (2006) ‘Ordinary Council Minutes’, June.

Coleman, Michelle (2007) ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ’. The Age, January 16.

Crawford, Carly (2007) ‘Dob-in-a-hoon hotline’. Herald-Sun, January 7.

Crawford, Carly and Cameron, Kellie (2007) ‘Mobs go on wild rampage’. Herald-Sun, January 14.

Elder, John (2007) ‘Vigilantes emerge in times of fear’. The Age, January 21.

Fossil blog (2007) ‘Are you a dobber?’. Fossil, March 14.

Inguanzo, Shaun (2007) ‘New humps for hoons’. Star News Group, 28 February.

Noys, Benjamin (2006). ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’. Ícone 9: 29-38.

Oakes, Dan (2007) ‘Car burns as hoon street anger bubbles over’. The Age, January 3.

Russell, Mark (2007). ‘Elite cops hand out parking tickets’. The Age, January 14.

Simpson, Catherine (2006) ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road’. Australian Humanities Review, Issue 39 - 40.

Weekes, Peter. ‘Sign of the Times — Water Vigilantes’. The Age, January 14.