Anyone who wants to wank like Barners and the Bolter should smile ...

For reasons that are too obscure, even for the pond, the pond found itself in Port Kembla yesterday.

Port Kembla, do a Greg Hunt on it here, has fallen on hard times, and the times are no more evident than in Wentworth street. There are still three pubs doing a trade, but the street is for the most part full of derelict buildings and boarded up shop fronts.

It was that way the last time the pond visited Port Kembla, and it was the same way in August 2011, when David Humphries visited, and wrote Wollongong mulls a future as the new Newcastle:

Wentworth Street takes its name from one of the state's grand dynasties, a family of inauspicious origin followed by august achievement. Looking down Port Kembla's main drag, it is easy to see the history of this steel town as a reverse of its namesake. 
It is lined with moribund old pubs that once teemed with men from the steelworks across the hill, coming off night shift and hitting the early openers. Tough men. Hard workers and hard players, flush with the best wages the south coast offered. Their own little united nations, drawn from 20 and more countries - fathers and sons, raw-boned country lads wanting a sniff of the big smoke, the labour overflow from Sydney, the reffos. 
Now, it is as bleak as a north England mill town. Half the shopfronts are boarded up, the occasional hooker saunters hopefully by, but Wentworth is otherwise empty and forlorn.

The pond didn't sight any hookers, in fact hardly sighted anyone at all in the street.

Bizarrely the few shops that remain open are mostly devoted to weddings or to hair styling or to dog grooming.

The few people in the street who were out and about exuded the look of people doing it tough. Shabby, cheap clothes, and a beaten look, of the kind you find in those who've been knocked down so often, anywhere looks like up ...

There's a Macedonian tinge to some of the buildings and the signs in shop windows, though a Czech flag also flapped by, attached to a mobile scooter wheelchair.

It was, as Humphries says, as bleak as any north England mill town, or the bleakness you can see in American towns where the dreams of the major industries have turned to sawdust.

The street, the town, the people and their situation in the town is for the most part ignored, and invisible to most.

After all, if you step just down the road, you find the suburb of Warrawong, which has all the necessary signs of civilisation, including a mall with an Aldi.

But how does urban blight become invisible? You could, a few years ago, wander around inner Newcastle, and find even stronger signs of urban blight ...

Well partly the blathering of idiots and fools should be given credit, including Barnaby Joyce's outing on ABC radio.

The pond has already noted how ineffably stupid Barners can sound when he opens his mouth, as he did on ABC radio. Cue Barners:

One member of the radio talkback panel, academic Christopher Scanlon, suggested there was a visible class system in Australia because tradespeople were easily identified because of there high-vis work gear. 
But Mr Joyce hit back: “They probably earn more than you.” 
Mr Joyce took a swing at the station, saying it attracted “elitist” listeners and wouldn’t be popular on building sites. 
“I would presume that on many worksites at the moment that people with tool-bags are probably unlikely to be listening to this program, even though it’s a great program,” he said.

How dumb can you get?

Do the math. The station attracts elitist listeners. It attracted Barners. QED Barners is an elitist. The only way to undo this formula is to say that Barners is too dumb to realise by calling others elitist he was calling himself an elitist, and QED someone that dumb can only be an aspirational elitist.

But why trawl over stupidity yet again?

Well because little Sir Echo, aka the Bolter, felt he needed to make a contribution.

Now we already know that the Bolter is an elitist and a shameless snob. He loves his opera and classical music, and he has mysterious friends who think nothing of dropping a bottle of Grange around the house so the Bolter could sample it. And this:

Room service? Two more bottles of Grange. And fast, before the boiling seas reach the penthouse. (here)

And this, a poignant tale of a cook using a thousand dollar bottle of Grange to cook spaghetti bolognaise:

Reminds me of when I was a minder for a belly dancer and watched a rich Lebanese businessman in Adelaide tear up $20 bills to sprinkle them over her as confetti. The band spent half an hour picking up the pieces and sticking-taping them together, because this was in fact their tip. And their reminder of place. (here)

Say what? A reminder of their place? As in the lumpen proletariat place that musos often find themselves in, victims of class in a stratified society?

No, no, no, because you see:

Joyce is right. To some extent, the class system we have is more one of taste than of income. Without doubt one of the biggest bogans I even had misfortune to meet was the host of a party in Toorak. The very walls - expensively decorated with tat - screamed bogan. 
Among the true gentlemen I know are a taxi driver and a builder. One of the greatest ladies I ever met didn’t even have the money for airconditioning. She left me a bust of one her favourite composers, minus the tip of his nose, and it sits above my CDs in the cupboard on my left as I write. 
Again: judge the individual by the content of their character and not their class ... or “race”.

Where to start?

Well of course there's the pre-emptive caveat designed to get the Bolter out of any unseemly trouble.

To wit "To some extent".

How "extent" is the "some extent"?

And then there's the befuddlement. Barners actually said there was no class system in Australia. So the Bolter says Joyce is right, and then says "to some extent, the class system we have ..."

Which is to say Barners wasn't right, he was wrong, we actually have a class system, which even needs a precautionary "to some extent".

Or that Bolter  was a fool for mishearing and misquoting him. Or that the Bolter is a devious, manipulative fraud, who'd go along with the demonstrably false and stupid, because that's what Bolters do when in company with manipulative right-wing politicians  ...

Of course there's a reason for the Bolter's reticence. He works for a tabloid which pitches itself to the great unwashed, and frequently uses class warfare to bolster its credibility with its audience.

And then, in typical Bolter Grange style, there's the conflation and confusion of class with bogan and with taste.

As if upper class tat screams bogan, when what upper class tat screams is upper class, well off bogan (go on take a look at the upper class tat they sell in the fashion shops in Toorak village).

Boganism as taste says very little about class or caste.

How can the Bolter compound this crime? Why by talking of "true gentlemen" and "greatest ladies" in the manner of those fatuous fops who always insisted on talking about women as "ladies".

It was once one of the great touchstones as an indicator of class:

In more recent years, use of the word lady is even more complicated. The American journalist William Allen White noted one of the difficulties in his 1946 autobiography. He relates that a woman who had paid a fine for prostitution came to his newspaper to protest, not that the fact of her conviction was reported, but that the newspaper had referred to her as a "woman" rather than a "lady". After the incident, White assured his readers, his papers referred to human females as "women", with the exception of police court characters, who were all "ladies". 
White's anecdote touches on a phenomenon that others have remarked on as well. In the late 19th and early twentieth century, in a difference reflected in the British novelist Nancy Mitford's essay "U vs. non-U", lower class women strongly preferred to be called "ladies" while women from higher social backgrounds were content to be identified as "women". Alfred Ayer remarked in 1881 that upper middle class female store clerks were content to be "saleswomen", while lower class female store clerks, for whom their job represented a social advancement, insisted on being called "salesladies". These social class issues, while no longer as prominent in this century, have imbued the formal use of "lady" with something of irony (e.g.: "my cleaning lady", or "ladies of the night" for prostitutes). (more for Greg Hunt here)

And then the final flourish, which urges people to judge not by class - suggesting Barners got it wrong - but by the content of their character, whatever that might mean.

Be a lover of opera, a lover of chipped busts of composers, a lover of Grange, a climate denialist?

And then that final denialist flourish, the reference yet again, for an interminable zillionith time to "race", using inverted commas.

Yep, not just race, but "race", because the Bolter is obsessed by race. But the only safe way to constantly blather about race is to be a "race" denialist, in much the same way as the Bolter is a climate science denialist.

What's most perplexing is how this denialism leads the Bolter to say Barners was right, when everything in and by the Bolter suggests that Barners was profoundly wrong.

As for that walk down Wentworth street, it reminded the pond of the tale told by Damon Young in Instructive lesson in class at the auctioneers:

I walked into the auctioneers, looking for a stained pine bookcase with a cornice and German fountain pens. What I found was fear. The proprietress looked at me as if I was about to pilfer the till. I'd just been jogging in the rain and was wearing two hoodies - one paint-stained. Under my beanie was a freshly shaven head. I looked like a thug, obviously out of place among the Victoriana. 
This is class at work. Any mention of class in Australia is likely to provoke cries of ''class warrior'' or ''chardonnay socialist'', as if class were invented by communists or idle wankers. Behind the vitriol and mockery is an ideal: Australians have freedom, mobility and opportunity - the oppression of other countries or eras is long gone. And because of this, attempts to improve inter-generational poverty or deprivation are misguided: class is a thing of the past. 
With the exception of much of our indigenous population, we have a high standard of living, relative to many countries: low infant mortality, long life expectancy, low levels of crime and so on. 
Yet in my middle-class neighbourhood, in the genteel auction rooms, scungy clothes and beanies are an exception. I looked lower class - someone from the ''criminal suburbs'': areas of socioeconomic disadvantage, where crime is more frequent and danger perceived as greater. 
A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics article, Who's Afraid? Feelings of Personal Safety, concludes that ''adults living in areas of socioeconomic disadvantage experienced more crime, and felt more unsafe compared with adults living in less disadvantaged areas''. And women generally feel less safe than men. 
It's no coincidence that I'm a young man: we're disproportionately more likely to be involved in violent crime than women and particularly middle-aged, middle-class women. 
This isn't to say there is no violence, coercion or exploitation among the upper middle classes. But research continually finds clusters of disadvantage: problems of physical and mental health, crime and deprivation, going hand in hand with very specific locations, ethnicities and education. With these come what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called a habitus: all sorts of unspoken cultural markers, including clothes, gait, gestures and accent. 
So, grimy and sweaty in the auction room, I brought the appearance of disadvantage with me: the impression of lower-class male crime, antisocial behaviour and danger.

And if you happen to have strayed from Mosman into Wentworth street dressed in your favourite Chanel, you will bring the appearance of advantage with you.

The pond has walked both sides of the street. Spent early days in a Nissen hut, and other days as an inner city elitist with a taste for the finer things. But if you start off in a hut, and attend school in second hand clothes and borrowed tattered rags, you never forget the markers of class. The markers you can still see in Port Kembla. Or in Mosman. Or Toorak. Or in everything the Bolter scribbles ...

Such things are obvious to those who want to see. But not to fools like Barners and useful tools like the Bolter, ready to assert black is white if it helps him score another bottle of Grange ...

But there is an upside. Here's a warning you can find in Wentworth street, and it surely applies to the Bolter and Barners, expert wankers: