i've never really believed the egalitarian myth about australia, and just recently i've been thinking bout it again. sure, we're meant to be all middle class now, or most of us, but through counselling/soup van, i get to meet people with whom i have almost nothing in common. even football, the melbourne universal, fails to get me through - i don't know enough to even feign an interest. i know a lack of common ground does not equal a class divide, but this does: i went round to the house of one of the guys who regularly came to the van on a saturday morning, in an effort to get to know him better. he offered me cask wine at 10 am, a dank room dominated by the ghoulish flickering of the telly. cigarette smoke infused into the walls/paint peeling/dark, small, damp on the walls, unclean, unclean. he and his friend drank and we tried - awkwardly - to talk, conversation in fits and starts, with even my conversational staple of ask about the other person a lot failing occasionally; the present and immediate past a no-go zone, with my lack of familiarity preventing me further in. then bang, we hit paydirt - the underworld, and his connections to it, a long time ago. he won't talk about it much, letting looks and silences speak, multiply implications, but it's fascinating, and before long he's talking about growing up in richmond, thirty years ago before the onslaught of yuppies. abrupt: what school did you go to, and i tell him: an new-ish private school with aspirations, nothing special, nothing with a boy's club culture or installation of class mores, but the words 'private school' are enough and he looks at me, a long pause with narrowed eyes. "thirty years ago, i would have punched your lights out for going to a private school", he says, and a drawn silence settles in around us, before he grins. "but that was a long time ago".

more than this: on my internship, i tagged along as a couple of reporters went to cover the boy who was pushed in front of a train in mooroolbark, a surprisingly well treed housing estate enclave in the far east of melbourne. as an aside, the 'leafy eastern suburbs' of kew-balwyn-camberwell-toorak is a code for european trees; poplars, oaks, the things we brought with us; further east, they've gone native, aussie drawl and eucalypts. serious - you can notice it. so, mooroolbark - a fiercely parochial suburb-town within a city; a sense of self, defined against the worse places up and down the train line. this is what the kids told me; thirty, forty of them, drinking at midday, mourning their mate, who seemed to be a hero, an older role model, protective of friends, who stepped in to defend a girl's honour only to be pushed in front of a train. the guy they all thought did the deed was not from mooroolbark, maybe from lilydale, a worse place, a place of violence. here was (previously) serene, hanging out satdays at the station, drinking, living, sticking together, a little tribe who had lost one of their leaders.

as i talked - or tried to talk - to the kids (12-22?), i couldn't help but notice the little flashpoints, the near fights - a girl drove off two others who were supposedly laughing about bourkey's death, little clusters of "so i says to him, and then he says to me", little antagonisms which seem to be a common thread of this thing i have noticed, this class thing, class in the sense of difference, and also, no doubt, of money. on trains, the transport of the poor, there is this frequently, the young mothers with prams and a partner, bickering, arguing openly and publicly. while this may seem to be me making value judgements, one thing from mooroolbark that stuck with me was a girl, 15, 16 maybe, arguing with her mother - as an equal. the argument ranged widely - i didn't say that to him, you should know that of all people, what about you mum, what did you say - and the thing that has stayed with me is how close they were. they fought, and the ease with which they did it indicates much practice, but they were also close, and they were equals, without the distance between parents and children that i think is found in monied households, in the middle/upper classes. i'd never talk like that with my mother.

the famous communications scholar harrold innis wrote a book on the 'bias of communication', in which he charted the history of humankind via its communicative methods. he notes that the print cultures that arose after gutenberg's revolution are characterised by class and hierarchy, which he argues derives from the innately distanced nature of print; print is a solo thing, a distanced thing. previously, he argued, oral culture existed: orality meant that communication was more fluid, more immediate, and that the flow on effects were that there was less distinction between children and adults than in literate societies - children saw sex (slept in the same bed as adults) saw death, grew up earlier. now, in the age of television, orality is back, in a new form: television is oral, immediate, and also visual, a medium which favours emotion over print's rational thought. television is the medium of our time, and the class distinction i think exists is to some extent created by television, by its socialising effects, and in the inner eastern suburbs, there is this uneasy coexistence of print culture and television culture, enough to ensure this distance and these distinctions between groups of we melbournians.