The rebranding of Dismal Swamp

There wasn't much to write home about today 0ther than the Asians with the table gave up on cheap socks after one day, returning with cheap jewellery. I can't wait to see if they rock up tomorrow with second hand books - maybe they'll be like that guy in Burnie who had a closing down carpet sale advertised on TV...for three years. Blue eye shadow girl looked sad, perhaps concerned about the random nature of violence in contemporary society (I think she's a deep thinker concerned with the fading nature of humanity when she's probably ruminating on the plot of Beverly Hills Chihuahua), and a body turned up in the water, but it's best not to think about it. No one appears to have been stabbed today, but my Mum, being the worrier that she is, is already planning to lock me in the basement rather than have me queue for a taxi at night. I'm more concerned with being exposed to the musical stylings of Lady GaGa (please god don't let her sing live!) in some Hobart nightspot or the punch happy bouncers than I am random stabbings (although that doesn't apply to Canadian buses). I don't know whether it's my age or my in built cynical fatigue, but out of going out to Hobart nightspots or sitting in a pub at a 75th birthday party (my two social obligations on Saturday) I'm actually more looking forward to the 75th. At least I'll be allowed in and there won't be bouncers. There'll just be stimulating conversation from a man who once nearly drove us into a tree because he thought he saw his brother in another car and veered off the road. Since it's in a Kingston pub, there will inevitably be men in jeans not quite pulled up right, some slightly shady gambling bets and debts, and best of all, a jukebox that no one ever uses that hasn't been updated since the glory days of Magic Dirt, covered in a firm film of dust and grime. Kingston really is crying out for a pub, but of course, with the NIMBYs in the area, that's more of a dream than a reality.

What has upset me today though is the fact that one of the North West Coasts main (and I think Smithtons only) tourist attractions has had a, sigh, "rebranding". There's nothing lamer in this world than a rebranding, and I should know since my company has had one, and someone gets paid a lot of money to redo the logo and nothing changes about the company at all. Anyway, there's a tourist attraction called "Dismal Swamp" - there's a slide, that's all you really need to know. When I went there, some old woman hilariously pretended to have lost her teeth on the slide, which is an awesome prank you must admit if you have false teeth. Some Japanese people took pictures and offered to go down the slide and find her teeth for insurance purposes. The reason it was called Dismal Swamp is because some explorers had a terrible night there and then found a much better swamp and that's Welcome Swamp. A little bit like getting tickets to a Powderfinger gig and then finding out Miley Cyrus is performing instead (erm, maybe not for everyone). However, because some people found the name "offputting", Dismal Swamp has now been rebranded "Tarkine Forest Adventures" - I was absolutely shattered when I found this out. Some kids didn't want to go to a place called "Dismal Swamp?" - I'd have killed when I was a kid to be packed into the car and taken there, it would have made a great change from buying yellow T-shirts at Ulverstone K-Mart being called "an outing". I instantly rang up Dad and said it wasn't right and he said "What are you talking about? What swamp? Who lost their teeth?" which I took as a sign that he was outraged like me. I guess I'm a traditionalist - there's a hairdressers in Penguin called Swannies that just doesn't feel the same now Swanny is dead and they probably don't give out musk sticks to kids after they have their hair cut or their ear slashed in half (depending on Swannies mood)...how can I go into that hairdressers without that 50/50 chance or a musk stick at the end? It's just not the same...

When I moved away from Burnie and came back - I can't quite remember the exact year, but the KMart mall, where I once worked at the magical Coles Supermarkets, they decided to give the front of the mall a bit of a repaint and a facelift and a good old rebranding. This was in response to a massive and evergrowing queue of bogans who stood outside it looking bogany and cool as they wiled away their days until death. One of these bogans incidentally my was my school principal, a fat bloke who always seemed to be outside licking a lollipop. And yes, one of these bogans sometimes was me, although it was usually I was waiting for Mum and got involved by proxy, trying to chat up bogan girls with lines about popular musical acts of the day. From memory, the front of the mall was grey, and pretty faceless, the colour of a Sting solo album really. By the time I came back to Burnie in a terrible attempt to rekindle old dying friendships, the mall had been rebranded a plaza and painted a magical shade of tropical wonder - orange, blue, a different shade of orange, some sort of weird arse pink, then a bit more orange. It was a brilliantly stupid idea, as befits a town that's officially a city but has the population of a town which should disqualify it as a city but since no one in the town can be bothered filling in the paperwork to disqualify it as a city it's not a town but a city (thankyou Dr Seuss). I always remember seeing it painted in those colours and standing looking at it and an old bloke in a pork pie hat and some giant coke bottle glasses sauntered up to me. My natural suspicion of strangers kicked in and I tried to get away, but he was staring at it, and I guess so was I, and he wasn't leaving. He stroked his stubbled chin, nodded and said "Well, they fucked that up then" and wandered off. I was going to chase after him and try and get him to apply for a position on the town planning commission, but he had wandered off to Toyworld, I guess to just have a pop at the big Purple bear...

I guess I have a natural suspicion of rebranding, I think it's just a way of spending money on something that never works. I'm suspicious of people who rebrand and reposition themselves as well - my cousin, one time when I went back to Scotland, he was completely different. When we had known him, he was, in the best sense of the word, a character, by which I don't mean he's been made up for the purposes of narrative construct, because he was real, but let's just say he taught us all how wearing a Scotland soccer tracksuit can be used to pick up, and how not to run into the young Conservatives conference drunk and yell "Up the Unions!", among other stories. When I went back, he had a steady girlfriend called Kathryn (a hairdresser who hated the song "Stayin Alive" by N-Trance, which was quite bad for her that we all knew it, because my cousin just played it louder), was committed to his career, and was trying to get fit by playing five a side soccer on a Friday night. His Mum was really proud of him, telling us how much he had changed and how well he was doing. I felt good for him, especially when I found out he was saving for a boat, although as with most of the holiday 95, I was disappointed that everyone had changed so much in the intervening three years (including me I guess). I went round to his house on Champions League night to watch a game on television, and he was chatting about amicable things - work, pension plans, my job at Coles (got to get to that soon). One of this friends came round, and they talked about much the same things, work, pension plans, the merits of Roy Evans playing Fowler on his own up front. As I hung out in the kitchen pondering my own life and wondering if I should grow up and abandon childish plans for my own late night talk show, his friend casually mentioned that Kathryn wasn't around. "Nah," said my cousin, leaning back in his recliner, "she's no happy wi me - she caught me shaggin the neighbour..." - and with that, a whole year of rebranding collapsed to the ground, and I had my old cousin back. Later, he went looking for hookers outside the train station, and all was right with the world...

Incidentally, despite the paint job, the air of despair, alienation and hopelessness continued to permeate...in Brashs. Man, those people, they hated selling CDs...