The Debaser [Online]

When you travel, and when you see other things around the traps, do you ever get that question of “What is (insert location) like?” I find it one of the most difficult questions to answer, but now I find if I was to describe my home town of Sydney I could just direct the question asking person to this YouTube clip:

What did you think? Hilarious right? Saturday night as it usually is in Sydney is a night where all the types come out to play, you have all walks of life from your kids from Cronulla to Hornsby, your family men from Double Bay to Penrith, and they all converge on the various pockets of this city of ours. They drag themselves in on trains and buses, in hotted up cars, and their parents Taragos, to drink their booze, take their drugs, find the love of their life or their love for the night. Some go to fight, others go to leer, but every weekend it is the same. To sum this up is a difficult thing to do, but in this video we have found the answer.

Four Sydney kids take centre stage:

The Northern Beaches girl: The tanned one. To generalise would make a fool of me, but we have to remonstrate that sure, we can only assume that tan is fake, but we’ve been in winter like conditions for a while now, and the sun hasn’t been that strong lately. This girl has just bared witness to a horrible crime, a man is shot in the leg in cold blood on a city street, the gunmen flees and leaves the victim to bleed, and what can this girl do? She follows that age-old Australian way, the Racist stereotype: The typically Australian is a girl standing there, she is attractive, she is smiling, but what comes out of her mouth is just pure trash. She explains how she stumbled out of a tattoo shop to see “The fat wog say to the skinny wog…”. It sounds like a joke from Benny Hill, and after her story including one of the worst impersonations of any kind she ends it with “and that’s all I want to say”, as if she now expects sympathy for witnessing such a heinous act.

The honest indie kid: Before this kid can be hailed as the honest hero, we have to recognise that those glasses he is wearing are typically Sydney: fake. And if they are not? Well they are still so overbearing. You want nothing more than to resize him with a smaller set or punch them so he needs a new pair. He tells his story, he gets on with it, and with the stoic remark of “They have to know what went on”, he is on his way. He is all courage and truth this kid, despite the fact that he just saw something kinda rough. It’s not like this guy just saw a car bombing in Baghdad whilst hoeing into his Burger Fuel. It was a gunshot, not a cluster bomb.

The female friend with concern: She may be #2’s lover, she may be his sister. Whatever it is, she is the typical uni student type, empathetic to the last, and overbearingly pushy. Sure the dude just saw something un-savoury, but I am sure he may cope. I don’t know if she just wanted to get on camera, and that’s why she jumped in, but her next move saw her almost in tears about it all. She was your regular arts student who had just been at World Bar sipping on teapots and talking about how she wants to move to Cambodia and “actually do something”.

The Pissed Mate: The most archetype Australian and easily the funniest. His input was brief, but telling. “I think it was a Glock 9… it was awesome”. Nothing more needs to be said about this bloke, he made me laugh and for that he should be congratulated.

In these few minutes it was a snapshot of a Sydney night, there was the kids with concern who take life too seriously, there was the airhead who had no idea how embarrassing she was and there was the drunken bloke taking the piss, you had your violence going on out of the blue and the hordes just watching on. It happened in Kings Cross, but it could have happened anywhere. Sydney is a place of over 5 million people and with one video and four people it described our youth in just a few minutes.