The Full Catastrophe Page 9

  A few weeks into our stay, our air freight arrived and we were so excited. But our thrill turned to dread when we saw the first container with the familiar sticker: Sydney storage. It was fabulous to have a step ladder, garden tools, all our photo albums and boxes of memorabilia, such as dance trophies and soccer ribbons, and all the other stuff we didn’t need in London. But that was the good news. The packers also included two of our garbage bins full of garbage. There is nothing like months’ old Sydney garbage to make you feel at home.

  We put the garbage out and took a brief holiday in Italy before my first assignment. That was all great until we returned to Heathrow and were forced to go through a fight at immigration as Jason still didn’t have his visa. This time it took longer because now they were angry. How did Jason have the temerity to leave the country before getting his visa sorted? They held him for two hours, threatening to deport him to Australia and leave me with the three kids. Finally, they let him in and the next day he schlepped to the UK border agency in Croydon.

  My first story was in beautiful Dubrovnik. It was the height of summer and, apart from a couple of stories and radio interviews, we journos spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen, sitting around the hotel pool drinking beer. I couldn’t have been further away from Jason, the two babies still in nappies and the dramas at the school gate. On about day three of the gruelling Croatian schedule, I received a text from Jason. It was just four words, all in upper case: ALL THREE HAVE NITS. I glanced at the text, picked up my bottle of Peroni and took a swig.

  That’s my catastrophe – it’s nearly ten years to the day since I was posted to London. I want to pay tribute to all the other mother correspondents, Zoe Daniel, Mary Gearin, Barbara Miller and Sophie McNeil, Sophie having won a gazillion Walkleys while being the Middle East correspondent, and she has two toddlers. Bravo!

  The Smashed Avocado Catastrophe

  Bernard Salt

  EVER BEEN CAUGHT in a maelstrom of social media outrage? I have, and all because of a single paragraph within a single column that I had written in The Australian Weekend Magazine mentioning the term ‘smashed avocado’. You know the issue. Every Australian knows the issue. The term ‘smashed avocado’ has entered both the vernacular and Australian folklore. It has come to symbolise intergenerational tensions and spending priorities.

  It’s a bit like the phrase that John Lennon used in 1968 at the age of twenty-eight: ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty.’ Lennon’s advice was to the then young baby-boomer generation, even though Lennon himself was born prior to the postwar baby boom. It came to symbolise one of the key issues of the sixties and seventies, the intergenerational battle between the young and the old (defined as anyone aged thirty-one and over).

  It would appear that every generation or so, there is a market for someone somewhere to say something that ignites and/or inflames simmering intergenerational tensions. Apparently, talking about ‘smashed avocado’ in a column was all the incendiary that was required to cause this generation’s intergenerational and indeed global outrage. The reverberations of which – rather like the 1883 explosion of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa – may still be heard thousands of kilometres from the site and the time of the original eruption.

  Let me tell you how this particular catastrophe unfolded.

  I am a business consultant by profession. I have written weekly columns for The Australian newspaper since 2002. Over the years, my columns – specialising in quirky and wry observations of social behaviour – have gathered quite a following. One of my favourite topics is the ageing of the baby-boomer generation, as that is, after all, my tribe. One of my columns, for example, talked about the game baby boomers play in social chitchat situations where they try to one-up each other with how successful and ‘global’ their kids are.

  ‘My son’s based in London. Not sure what he does. Something to do with high finance. Flies all over the place. Earns a squillion.’

  ‘Really? My daughter’s based in New York. She’d love to come back to Australia but there’s nothing for her here.’

  Nicely played on both counts. I especially like the New York riposte, which projects the idea that this baby boomer has been so successful as a parent that they have catapulted their daughter somewhere far more important than Australia.

  Do you see now how skilfully the game can be played?

  I had been out to lunch at a hipster restaurant in Melbourne with another person my age, and what struck me at the time, as indeed it always strikes me in these situations, was not so much the fact that the cafe’s clientele invariably comprised young people (say under the age of thirty-five), but that the hushed boomer conversation centred on ‘How do young people afford to eat out?’

  The amusing aspect, I thought, wasn’t so much that boomers were hanging out in hipster hotspots, although that in itself was column-worthy (older people ‘clinging on to youth’), but rather the moralising by the middle aged about the behaviour of youth. ’Tis an issue that has been the stuff of intergenerational tension since the time of Plato.

  In that instant I thought it would make a great column. I’d describe the way baby boomers quietly complain to each other about how they can’t read the menu because the writing is too small. They complain that they can’t hear each other speak because the music is too loud. And, of course, they can’t sit on milk crates because that means their bottom is lower than their knees and they can’t get back up again. And then they whisper to each other – because you could never say this out loud – ‘Look at all these young people eating smashed avocado. Shouldn’t they be saving for a house?’ I thought this would be a marvellous parody of the kind of middle-aged moralising that has beset humanity for millennia. There is a kind of post-conceptualising calm that envelops a columnist once a column has been vigorously conceived; I felt that glow before I’d even written the piece.

  The column was published on Saturday, 15 October 2016, about six months after I had started writing for the magazine. I don’t think the audience quite knew my sense of humour; that I write satirically at times. There was nothing unusual about the online response to my column on the Saturday or the Sunday. It was an amusing column about baby boomers, I thought.

  And then it happened.

  At 6.27 am on Monday a news organisation – I don’t think it was being malicious – tweeted that on the weekend Bernard Salt said that he had seen young people eating smashed avocado … shouldn’t they be saving for a house. Thoughts?

  I saw the tweet go live and at the time I thought, ‘That doesn’t look good.’

  Within three hours I was fielding calls from the BBC in London. This thing went global, viral and feral almost immediately. There was no link in the tweet to the original piece. Apparently, people read a tweet and take it as a full and correct encapsulation of someone’s position. No need to read the article. All the evidence that is required for a conviction and a condemnation is contained within that tweet.

  By mid-afternoon ‘smashed avocado’ and ‘Bernard Salt’ were trending on Twitter. The comedian Wil Anderson was making comments; I thought they were witty. Others jumped on board; it was escalating, and I knew that this wasn’t going to blow over any time soon. There were abusive direct messages. Someone from South Africa sent me a message, ‘You are a …’, which prompted me to learn, quickly, how to block on Twitter. I’d had no occasion to learn that function previously.

  Now social media really jumped on board or ‘piled on’, I think, is the more correct term. A lot of it was very funny. I especially liked a two-panel meme that was up within a day: ‘I stopped eating smashed avocado [picture of a smashed avocado with a diagonal line through it] … and now I own a castle.’ With a picture of a fairy-tale castle replete with turrets.

  The comedians at SBS developed a parody version of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs, showing how to build a model house out of toast and avocado. By the end of the week ‘smashed avocado’ was quoted in the Australian parliament; it was used as a me
taphor for the housing affordability crisis. I spoke with my boss at the consulting firm where I was a partner, and informed him of what was unfolding. The firm was very good, very supportive.

  My family was upset at some of the more abusive online comments directed at me personally, but I held a more sanguine view of the whole smashed-avo catastrophe. I thought, perhaps naively, well, these people heaping abuse on me will be horribly embarrassed once they read the full column and realise that they have misinterpreted its pitch and its target (baby boomers).

  Here are some of the learnings I took from the experience. There was nothing in that column that I would have written differently. Social media generally, and Twitter in particular, can ‘verbal’ a subject, meaning that it can restate an attributed position, and escalation and condemnation follow from there. Then again, I figured that I had been writing close to 100,000 published words every year since 2002, and so perhaps being caught in a media storm was only ever a matter of time.

  I knew not to inflame the situation; not to add commentary that could be misconstrued or maliciously used to further the case against me. And then I realised how this looked from outside my bubble: I am a middle-aged male from the corporate world writing in what is perceived to be a right-leaning newspaper. I was a scalp worthy of pursuit, apparently.

  Although, to be fair, I reckon that any magazine column that opens with, Shhhh. Come close to the page. I don’t want anyone to overhear what I want to talk about – as mine did – isn’t being serious. The issue is that those outraged by my comments hadn’t read the column. They relied upon a Twitter summation, and then they proceeded, forthwith and happily, to anger and to condemnation.

  On the following Saturday, 22 October, I wrote an explanatory piece in The Australian. I said that my magazine column was written as a parody of middle age – it was even entitled ‘Middle-aged moralisers’ – and that this parody was evident with any full and fair reading of the original piece. I politely suggested to the Twitterati that while I understood their outrage, the target of my column wasn’t young people but rather middle-aged, moralising baby boomers. Online responses ridiculed my counter-argument; they said, ‘So, The Australian is now The Onion … who knew,’ or words to that effect.

  I think there is a lesson in this for us all: make sure you have read or fully understand a person’s position before proceeding to conviction. In the Twitter commentary that followed my explanation I saw one person write, Oh, I hadn’t read the actual column … I can now see that I got that wrong. Sorry. The way social media works is that no one or very few people are accountable.

  There is another observation that I have made following this experience. It is that, once you’re caught on the wrong side of a social media storm, anyone who has ever hated you or merely disliked you, or has been envious of you professionally, will find that storm and gleefully enter the fray. And then when it all dies away, these adversaries will slink back into the shadows, biding their time, waiting to emerge again whenever they think you might be mortally wounded. Such is human nature, I suppose.

  About a year later, the Australian 60 Minutes program ran a story on the housing market and interviewed a thirty-something property developer, who made comments about young people’s spending priorities. A link was drawn with the then still incendiary term ‘smashed avocado’. That interview was picked up by the American 60 Minutes and the whole avocado issue reverberated throughout the US. Americans today will talk of the ‘Avocado Toast generation’.

  I should have trademarked the term. I should have commandeered the web address smashedavo.com.au, which within a week someone had offered to sell to me. My generous offer of $22 still stands.

  I think I got through this experience lightly. There was a misunderstanding of what I was saying. I was harshly criticised, but not badly and not over a sustained period. Today, the Australian people have embraced all things relating to smashed avocado. I now include a story about the column in my corporate presentations. Audiences all over Australia love it. I have suggested that we make smashed avocado the Australian national dish.

  Every week I receive emails and social media links with any form of avocado paraphernalia. I have been given avocado socks, an avocado pillow case, an avocado tie, avocado Christmas decorations, and hampers of avocado and bottled feta. I have been made aware that there is an Avocado Street in Mildura where some houses are (or were) affordably priced at less than $200,000. I now know that there is a suburb in Los Angeles called Avocado.

  In 2018, I received an anonymous photo of a defaced road sign 13 kilometres from the Victorian township of Avoca. Graffitists had been at work. They amended Avoca to Avocado. They added the word ‘smashed’. And they put a $ sign in front of the number 13. Thus, the amended road sign read ‘Smashed Avocado $13’. I immediately forwarded the photo to The Australian, which promptly published both the photo and a story about the Australian penchant for amending official signs. I suggested to VicRoads that they leave it there as a tourist attraction. Sadly, VicRoads did not agree and the sign was replaced. There is a World Avocado Conference held every second year in Bogota, Colombia. I approached the organisers with an offer to speak at the next event so that I could tell my avocado story, but they seemed very confused as to who I was and what my ‘avocado research paper’ might be.

  Apparently, at the time of the column, my name and ‘smashed avocado’ made page 3 of a Stuttgart newspaper in Germany and the newspapers in Caracas, Venezuela. I know that smashed avocado was debated in London and that it made the media in Hong Kong, Dubai, Dublin and Auckland. In the middle of it all, I was contacted by a laconic wheat farmer from Western Australia who asked, ‘Do you think you could do for wheat what you’ve done for avocados?’

  And so, more than two years later, what has been the fallout? I am now mightily cautious of Twitter; it’s not so much what you say as how what you say might be used against you. In many ways I am grateful for the smashed-avocado catastrophe, even though it was painful at the time. There is a fatigue factor in speaking and writing regularly: audiences get to know your shtick. Smashed avocado super-charged my profile and career at a time in life when I might otherwise have just wafted off into retirement.

  Actually, I was never going to waft off into retirement. I enjoy writing and speaking and engaging with the Australian people, whom I regard as being fundamentally fair-minded. I think most Australians – even outraged Millennials – liked the whole smashed-avocado catastrophe. It highlighted the issue of housing affordability and showcased a modern-day and much-loved social behaviour – the experience of eating smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toast in an al fresco cafe.

  Somehow, I don’t think the Australian people are going to let go of their outrageous smashed-avocado indulgence any time soon.

  Curry in a Flurry

  Jeremy Fernandez

  THERE’S A VERY particular tradition in my family, which I trace back to my late paternal grandparents, Betty and Cyril Fernandez. It concerns our collective love of food.

  Grandma and Grandpa were born in Kerala in South India, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, into low-to-middle-class families with big aspirations. The single greatest pillar of their upbringing was the belief in advancement through education. It was instilled in them at a young age that initiative and study were the keys to giving the next generation a better life. It was one of the reasons why they moved to Malaysia as young adults – to search for better opportunities in work and education for themselves and their children.

  Betty and Cyril were both intrepid, enterprising and hardworking. In the early days, they lived in a two-bedroom wooden cottage with their eight kids. Grandpa had a job as a truck driver for the British Army, and Grandma would sell Tupperware to earn some cash.

  By the time they retired, Grandpa had served as the private secretary to the Malaysian king. He and Grandma had built a beautiful home, acquired material comforts, educated their children, earned the respect of their community, and had t
he capacity to help others less fortunate. Like so many migrant families, one of the ways they expressed love and prosperity was through food. Food was everywhere. That’s because over time, it had become easier to put food on the table. That’s why food explains a big part of my family’s identity.

  My parents migrated from Malaysia to Perth in the 1990s, with my two sisters and me in tow. And though I now live in Sydney, I see them in Perth regularly. Every time I greet them, I can reliably predict the first three things they’ll say to me:

  1. Hello

  2. How was your flight?

  3. Are you hungry?

  Without fail comes this inquiry about whether I might be famished.

  Sometimes Dad will ask, ‘Did you eat anything on the plane?’, and I’m often too embarrassed to answer because I can sense his perfectly legitimate pity and disdain when I’d tell him about the overcooked eggs and rubbery sausages, served in a sweaty cardboard box. But I needn’t worry, because there’s always a freshly cooked banquet laid out at Mum and Dad’s house.

  Just like my grandparents, my parents’ home is well stocked with food: jars of biscuits and preserved fruit, chocolates, fresh fruit and herbs from the garden, spicy Indian crisps such as pappadums and muruku. There are claypots full of curry, casserole dishes of Dad’s bolognaise sauce – with a suspicious hint of Indian spices (we jokingly call it curry pasta). In fact, in some rooms in their house you don’t have to reach more than about 2.5 metres to find something to eat. If a flash of hunger were to overcome you, your survival in this house would be guaranteed. You could just close your eyes, reach out in any direction, and something would inevitably fall into your hands, if not directly into your mouth.