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As George Orwell once noted, “a humanitarian is always a hypocrite”. He also took a swipe “at all that dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come knocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”.
It’s almost like he was looking through a crystal ball at the Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy.
If Victoria is Australia’s wokest state, then North Fitzroy is the epicentre of its wokeism. A once working-class suburb, in the early ’80s artists flocked to its cheap rents and empty warehouses and lofts. Then, as happened in New York’s SoHo, flocks of the nouveau-riche left followed, chattering and squawking, in their wake in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
I personally knew several of them. Arts-degree types, mostly on the taxpayer dime, buying up the cheap terrace homes that rapidly ceased to be cheap at all, as the median house price surged past a million dollars. Naturally, this millionaire hipster enclave is the heartland of the Greens and so-called ‘progressive’ politics in Melbourne.
Academics, progressive lawyers, journalists, ex-ABC broadcasters, Guardian readers – we have them by the Volvo-load.
On every key indicator of wokeness, North Fitzroy performs at the elite level. At our primary schools, all children (or wokelings) are fluent in Welcome To Country and acknowledgement of traditional owners. Many, no doubt, can also spell out each part of LGBTQI. Naturally, their parents are firm advocates for climate action and refugees.
Except that their children don’t go to primary schools in Fitzroy itself. Fitzroy has one of the highest rates in Melbourne of children studying at private schools well outside their home suburb. That’s because the fringe of the suburb is also home to one of the oldest social housing projects in Melbourne. Built in the 1960s, again by ‘progressives’, these drab tower blocks house high numbers of African and Middle-Eastern migrants, whose children go to the Fitzroy government schools that the wealthy white leftists down the road avoid like the plague.
They might ‘advocate’ for refugees – they just don’t want their kids anywhere near them.
In our streets, we sometimes have bicycle traffic jams. In our cafes, you don’t ask if soy milk lattes are on the menu, you just order them (if you must).
But for me, the clincher for North Fitzroy’s podium woke status came in last year’s referendum on a Voice to parliament. As most of Australia embraced Dutton’s exhortation to vote No, North Fitzroy emphatically went the other way. The polling station at the school where my daughters go recorded a Yes vote of about 87 per cent. How woke is that?
And Fitzroy is, it should surprise no one, very white. Very, very, very white. It was at a friend’s wedding in Fitzroy in the early ’90s that I first encountered the ludicrous ritual of a room full of pasty-white Anglo-Saxons (I’m pretty sure my wife was the only ‘ethnic’ present) solemnly intoning a Welcome to Country.
Oddly for a woke haven, North Fitzroy is conspicuously lacking in ethnic diversity.
There’s nothing odd about it, if you’re not a wokester with your head jammed firmly up your own arse. Woke is very much a White People thing.
At the height of the political wars in Canberra over boat people, many local houses were adorned with ‘refugees welcome here’ signs. Curiously, amid all the compassion, North Fitzroy’s refugee population appeared to remain steady – around zero.
We’ve also been mostly bypassed by the recent waves of migrants from Asia.
The Age
A humanitarian is always a hypocrite. Always.
