A week in which Mark Latham becomes the Leader of the Opposition and begins talking about ‘rungs of opportunity’ to which the Prime Minister, riposting with, among other things, his Medicare reforms, announces that ‘a safety net can be a rung’ is a week of rare circumstance.
And sure enough, as if to put—in the argot of award-winning sportspeople—the icing on the cake, what should come sloshing into Melbourne’s Station Pier but the Star Princess. This is a cruise vessel that had all the pundits whipping through the Oxford Dictionary of Outrageous Hyperbole to embroider their already breathlessly overawed descriptions. The Star Princess, we were told, is twice as long as the MCG. No-one bothered to point out that the Star Princess could not possibly substitute for the MCG. For all its multi-decked extravaganza of astonishments, the vessel would be useless as a venue for football, cricket or athletics, whereas, as all those know who have spent hours and days of their life there, the MCG could quite easily be navigated up the bay and through the Rip, with 100,000 people on board (five times the number on the Star Princess), if this happened to become necessary. It’s just that the need has never arisen. Or am I missing something?
What is more, we were assured, if you stood the Star Princess on its stern, it would be some extraordinarily significant amount higher than the Rialto building. No-one mentioned that everything, including the water in the several pools, would crash down the vertical decks gathering up everything along the way and accumulate in a great heterogeneous lump at the blunt end. All of which is only to say that, take it for all in all, the Star Princess is a ship and is at its best on water, horizontal and far away from the playing fields of Melbourne, let alone Eton. Its essential distinctiveness will in the end belong not to its dimensions and accoutrements but to the way its cruising incumbents behave. And that’s another story.
Cruise ships, whether incomparably equipped or not, all have an uncanny capacity to transform their passengers.
Straggling grimly through an early morning Melbourne fog to board the SS Black Orpington or the MV Falling Star or the RSVP M. Aroyd—or, indeed, the Star Princess—passengers will be conservatively dressed, apprehensive in manner and generally resigned, as if in an eerie and reverse re-enactment of the convicts of