Whispers from the Melbourne Underground

Duty called and I responded. This column was smuggled out of my cell in deepest, darkest Danistan, where I’ve been working with members of my birth city’s heroic Melbourne Resistance. Well, the full name of our group is actually the Melbourne Andrews Resistance, because Agent 19—she lives in Northcote—objected to the abbreviation “MR”. Too suggestive and supportive of the patriarchy, apparently. She was really very insistent on the change.

Matters weren’t helped when Agent 3—a Quadrant staffer, as it happens—idly observed that the abbreviation for French Resistance was “FR”. “That’s a contraction for a Catholic ‘father’ or priest,” Agent 3 mused, unwittingly provoking another feminist meltdown from our comrade. At one point Agent 19 screamed for seven minutes straight and then appeared to pass out, so I tried to remove  her mask and check her breathing.

Agent 19 instantly swatted me away and stalked out of our meeting. She’s an odd one, but utterly dedicated to freedom, just so long as we get the words right.

I can’t precisely reveal how I was smuggled into Dan Andrews’s Melbourne. Let’s just say that one of the new coffins recently delivered to a Melbourne funeral home wasn’t completely empty. I waited in my hiding box until funeral home staff fell asleep from exhaustion while counting their week’s takings—it’s a triple-shift job in Melbourne these days—and then escaped to join my comrades.

My first mission for the Resistance seemed easy enough. I was required to demonstrate loyalty to the cause by venturing beyond the permitted five-kilometre boundary to buy Agent 1 some butter chicken. Carrying a false ID and moving with great stealth, I quickly obtained the dish and returned to headquarters without incident.

“Very nice,” said Agent 1, our leader, as he nibbled on his meal. “How’d you pay for it?”

“Credit card,” I replied.

“You fool!” Agent 1 roared. “Never leave a record! Always pay with cash! Never leave a trace of your movements!”

I lowered my head in shame and silently vowed to avoid such carelessness in future. Several agonising minutes later, Agent 1 spoke again. “Here,” he said, this time in what I took to be a gentle, conciliatory tone. “Eat this.”

When I looked up, expecting a flavoursome peace offering, Agent 1 was holding the receipt. This was a serious crowd, and I had to learn quickly or else I could imperil the entire operation.

Subsequent missions ran more smoothly. I bravely went fishing, remained outdoors for a full twelve minutes after curfew, and even walked away from a television set before Premier Andrews had finished one of his daily briefings. These may seem like inconsequential incidents to those of you fortunate enough to be living in the free world, but here in Danistan they are considered acts of insurrection.

On one or two occasions our ambition and over-confidence led to errors. An attempt to airlift elderly residents out of their nursing home failed when our fleet of drones was blown off course, eventually depositing the confused seniors outside the offices of the Age. One of them walked in, believing she’d merely been returned to her assisted living facility. I think she’s now the news editor.

And then there was the Monaro incident. Agent 35 wanted to get his 1972 Holden Monaro detailed, but the nearest secret undercover detailing joint was more than 600 metres beyond the permitted five-kilometre range.

Co-ordinating with our network of operatives, we soon devised a plan. Agent 35 would drive the vehicle to his five-kilometre limit and then transfer his Monaro to Agent 47, a resident of the adjoining sector, who would drive it to the detailing destination. All went well until the changeover. Agent 47 was a young man, not even thirty years old, and therefore had no idea how to operate a manual car.

He managed to bunny-hop the coupe for about 200 metres or so, but then happened upon a police checkpoint. When the officers motioned for him to stop, Agent 47 mixed up the brake and clutch pedals and inadvertently sailed right by. They say you could hear the barrage of gunshots even in Lower Templestowe.

Anyway, we thought our big breakthrough might come in Operation Placard. Flicking through the Age one morning, past all the stories demanding visits from grandchildren, tastier pudding and at least two additional bingo nights a week, I noticed a small piece about a scheduled Black Lives Matter rally in central Melbourne.

Because the Labor government feared being thought of as racist even more than they feared a third wave of coronavirus infections, very little police opposition to the rally was anticipated. So we constructed a number of signs denouncing racism, white people and capitalism, and arranged to infiltrate the event.

Our strategy was to march with the demonstrators for a time and then strip our signs of their deceptive outer layers, revealing a range of anti-Andrews, pro-Resistance slogans concealed beneath. “When the people see those revolutionary calls to arms,” Agent 19 predicted, “they will finally be roused from their torpor. Their consciousness raised, the people will join us and overthrow the oppressors!”

We were putting the final touches to our signs when the raid happened. Armed members of Thought Squadron, the Premier’s feared personal security unit, swarmed our headquarters, handcuffing us and dragging us outside to waiting windowless vans.

That’s when Agent 19 stepped forward, removed her mask for the first time in our presence, and began instructing the arresting officers. “There’s no need for any court appearances,” Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen told the lawmen. “Just take them straight to Metropolitan Remand.”

“How long should we leave them there?” an officer asked. Van Diemen, our ally turned betrayer, who’d earlier come to public notice for comparing the coronavirus to Captain Cook’s arrival, didn’t seem to care. She dismissed the duration of our extrajudicial confinement as solely “a police matter”.

The van doors were closing as I heard Van Diemen’s final words. “Metropolitan Remand,” she said. “Abbreviation MR. That should make you Resistance boys very happy.”

CANCEL CULTURE—the removal of people, products and philosophies judged offensive by individuals whose actions reveal their own offensiveness—is scarcely a modern phenomenon.

Josef Stalin was an enthusiastic practitioner of the obscuring arts. Not only did he cancel the lives of up to eight million human beings, but he also continued cancelling some of them in the afterlife.

After he’d ordered the execution of Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin’s underlings obligingly took steps to further erase the Soviet secret police official. A photograph showing comrades Stalin and Yezhov side by side was retouched to subtract Yezhov. Where once he’d stood, now could only be seen a further expanse of the scenic Moscow Canal.

A 1926 shot of Stalin with three deputies was sequentially altered as each deputy underwent cancellation by firing squad. Stalin was eventually the last commie in the frame. Soviets couldn’t master their command economy, couldn’t build decent cars and couldn’t feed most of their population, but credit where it’s due. They were dab hands in the darkroom.

Perhaps in tribute, Australian unionists loyal to the Soviet Union sought to cancel any expressions of joy when Stalin was finally delivered to hell in 1953. Sir Frank Packer, then the owner of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, ordered an improvement to a planned poster that merely declared “Stalin Dead”. Packer added a jaunty “Hooray!” and sent the document to be published. The printers’ union wasn’t having it. They refused to print a poster celebrating the death of a mass-murdering psychopath and for a time went on strike.

French officials in 2005 decided to celebrate the centenary of doom-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s birth, but a problem quickly became apparent. Almost every photograph of Sartre showed him smoking. Perhaps they could have gotten around this by using an image of Sartre as a child, but he was probably smoking in those shots, too. So the French were compelled to follow Stalin’s tactic. In a promotional poster, they airbrushed Jean-Paul’s cigarette into invisibility. You can find the shot online. It shows Sartre’s hand poised to hold a smoke that decades later was snatched away by politically-correct Gitanes gendarmes.

Smoking, too, was an issue for the makers of a 2016 miniseries about the life of Australian racing driver Peter Brock (who, even in death, might be surprised to find himself sharing column space with a Paris-based existentialist). The peak of Brock’s career, you see, coincided with the sponsorship of his Holden team by tobacco brand Marlboro. Archival 1979 footage of Brock at Bathurst was digitally edited to delete the offending signage.

And so to the present day. In June, US Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden marked Father’s Day by sharing online an old photograph of himself with his young son. But when the photograph appeared again in September, during a CNN special feature, something had changed. A logo for NFL team the Washington Redskins, on a hat worn by Biden’s son, was gone. The Biden camp removed it because the name is now considered racist. And then they claimed they’d done so due to copyright concerns.

How appropriate. They cancelled the truth.