The other day I was running late for work, trying not to get rained on too much, and generally failing. As I scrambled out the gate I grabbed a lumpy-looking envelope from the mailbox and shoved it in my bag, and forgot about it.
Later that day I was fishing around for some lip balm, when I found the envelope, which turned out to be not an envelope at all but a A4 sheet of paper, printed on one side with diagrams of the brain and folded and taped up around a soft, oddly luminous piece of cloth. The return address was my address. It could only have come from one person.
Inside was a note, hastily scrawled on graph paper, that said, in part, I bet you're not getting your required share of funny, kitsch 1950s Australiana. [...] I only noticed after I had purchased this gem for you that it is a racist scarf. It's silk, antique, and yours.
Sure enough, the cloth the note was wrapped around was a handprinted silk square depicting a map of Australia fringed with postcard scenes of famous landmarks, native flora and fauna - and some naked, ethnographically-inaccurate indigenous children squatting in the dirt, captioned "Aboriginal Children OR 'Piccaninnies'".
Many thanks to Adelaide Jess for providing a perfect moment of joy in an otherwise fraught week. I might not say it enough, but my friends are fucking awesome. Back when Henry and Jess were living in Melbourne, they partook of a very sophisticated program of mail fraud, which saw drawings of Groucho Marx (mine), cocktail recipes and newspaper clipping fraudulently exchanged between various corners of the city. I miss that and might start regularly mailing people, because email is nice, but a racist scarf on an otherwise irredeemable day? Is just about fucking perfect.
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