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 Rachel Cook terrorizes middle Australia.
On Wednesday I tried to smuggle a large kitchen knife onto a domestic flight bound for the Gold Coast.
Of course, I didn’t know it was there; it had somehow found its way into the video camera case after a recent picnic in the Edinburgh Gardens. So there I was at the baggage scanner, with the 45,000 representatives of middle Australia standing in the queue behind me becoming increasingly irate because my bag had to go through the scanner six times, until eventually I opened it and went through the contents with security; all the while rolling my eyes and saying, “No, I don’t have a knife in there”: at which point the very stern and officious man held up the six-inch carving utensil and said, “So, what’s this?”
All 90,000 eyes turned on me, and my only response was to laugh it off as if it was some sort of joke I’d planned all along. Needless to say my girlfriend was then checked for explosives.
The airport can be a precarious place for the homosexual. That you can now fly around this country for the same price as a bottle of vodka means that middle Australia has taken to the air en masse. The check-in at Virgin Blue is a sea of overweight families who all look so similar you could be in Tasmania; and we - especially me with my obvious dykey presentation - really gave the impression that ‘one of these kids is not like the others’.
The people of middle Australia can grow aggressive when enveloped in the self-affirming milieu that is Tullamarine. Looking like they’ve all taken part in a cloning program, they feel the strength of their numbers; and faced with lesbian infiltrators the women do nothing to hide their disdain. The men - who have arrived at the airport early so they can get drunk before they even board the plane - huddle around small tables, only pausing their scull to leer at the lesbians and then growl the obligatory, “dyke”.
How pleasant.
I must admit I do nothing to hide my disdain of them.
As a child, I recall, air travel seemed like a glamorous thing to do. Adults dressed up for the event. They drank scotch on ice and smoked Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, and my six-inch carving knife would have been welcomed on board. Now the dress code is tracksuit pants, a clashing t-shirt and a surly edge.
On boarding the plane it became obvious security had warned the flight attendants about the possible lesbian terrorist, for not only did their eyes never leave me: when I got up to grab my laptop from the overhead locker after take-off, the cabin crew all assumed some sort of emergency formation. They didn’t relax until I was back in my seat and had been given the once-over by a particularly diligent attendant patrolling the aisle.
The saving grace of this flight was that they’d seated the only other homosexual on the plane next to us. I’m amazed at how often this happens to me. I can only surmise that it’s check-in policy to seat all homosexuals together, so that in the case of an emergency they know who to sacrifice.
Later, as we stood at Coolangatta airport waiting for our transfer to Byron Bay, a group of representatives of middle Australia plodded past us on their way to Dreamworld or Sea World or some other godforsaken place that embraces sports labels and beer guts; and still, none of them smiled.
I wondered what had happened to them to make them so miserable; then I realised nothing has happened to them, and that’s precisely what the problem is.
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Opinion 
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