God Bless Barry Dickens...

...Even if it was him that scoffed the Tim Tams! Fitzroy resident, Tony McMahon, takes us back to CAG public meeting where we were treated to poetry, citizen participation and politicians.

I thought I saw Jose Ramos Horta at the Collingwood Action Group (CAG) public meeting the other night. It wasn’t the Nobel Prize winner though, it was Barry Dickins, the Roy Boy seer, his hair dishevelled as an ALP election campaign, and as much of a ratbag as ever.

Someone should give Dickins the Fitzroyal equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He challenged the developer to a game of ping-pong. Free lattes for life, I reckon, for suggesting that residents and Banco settle their differences over the controversial Smith Street development with bats missing the rubber on one side and balls like stale egg shells.

And this could be a model for how we settle disputes in the future, too. I can just imagine it; freezing, cavernous church halls, full of well dressed building types and scruffy, dreadlocked Fitzroyals, slogging it out. There’s no way we’d lose either, not with the Mighty Roy Boy on our side.

There would be small, sad cups of Tetley tea and Nescafe, just like there are at all public meetings in cold church halls, and Arnott’s Assorted Creams, and tragic Tim Tams. Of course, the Tim Tams would go first, they always do. There was even a rumour going round that Dickins scoffed more than his share the other night, but then he read a poem about Smith Street and we all forgave him.

God Help Smith Street it was called. And it was beautiful, it really was. People cried into their Nescafe. They even stopped doing that thing, out of respect I think, where you bite each end off your Tim Tam and suck the coffee through.

Even politicians – who are not really people – and councillors – who are well on their way to not being people – cried as well, although I think they were crying because the meeting went for so long, and so many people were calling them names under their breath.

The real Fitzroyals loved it though, and the longer it went the more they loved it. The poem that is, not the meeting, like I said, the Tim Tams ran out pretty quickly, and, no matter how many poems get read, it looks like some kind of development is destined to go ahead in Smith Street.

But Fitzroy needs more people who are crazy enough to read long poems about Smith Street at public meetings and challenge developers to games of ping-pong. It really does. God bless you Barry Dickins, and God help Smith Street without you.