Stand and Deliver!

Before we begin, please note that in Australia, ‘wog’ is a relatively safe term that isn’t really considered offensive. It’s mostly applied to people of European extraction, often by those self same people of European extraction. It is not short for ‘golliwog’ as it is in the UK.

Furthermore, except for the odd Trinity Boys flick – and even they’ve dated badly enough to no longer be the exception to the rule – people shooting each other is no laughing matter. Not even when it takes place at 2am in Sydney’s beloved red-light district of Kings Cross. But when you see witnesses, off their heads, being interviewed to camera, it's hard not to feel some emotion. That’s no doubt why my mate Dene posted a link to the clip of it on his Facebook. As it turns out, I'm now madly in love with Swan’s friend, and you will be too after you see her in action. Here’s the news clip originally from NineMSN. Or download the soundfile, if you prefer. What’s not to love?

She’s just been getting a hairy biker to etch an image onto her body. Or her friend has:

“My friend Swan and I came out o the tattoo parlour and there were these two wogs fighting,” she says. “And the fatter wog said to the skinnier wog, ‘oi, bro’, you slept with my cousin, eh?’ And the other one said, ‘Nah, man, I didn’t fer shit, eh?’ The other one goes, ‘I will call on my fully sick boys…’ and then they pulled out a gun and just went, ‘ch-chick — BOOM!’ and I ran away, because that’s all I wanted to see.”

A second after miming the cocking and firing of a gun (with a little bit too much enthusiasm, if you ask me), her voice almost cracks with sorrow, remembering that moment of tragedy and her fear. She does the ‘little sad poppet’ face she no doubt has to pull whenever she wants more attention than she’s getting from her man – more than his job, his car or his newspaper, no doubt.

But then the journalist asks where it happened, and she vaguely points to one of the strip joints, and when the journalist thanks her, she says ‘you’re welcome’, beaming a big smile with all the enthusiasm and confidence she’s been taught to have – despite only seconds ago being manically trigger-happy and then on the verge of tears for the tragic, scary memory, in rapid succession.

How can you not be madly in love with this woman? A mate of mine reckons, judging by her awesome impression of ‘two wogs fighting’, she can only be a gun-toting gangster wog’s moll.

Straight after Swan’s friend, it’s Jay’s turn to explain what he saw. We know his name is Jay because his concerned girlfriend appears from across the road to try to talk him out of being an identifiable and therefore threatenable witness on national television: “Jay, c’mon, you’ve seen enough tonight, it’s all right. No, seriously man, YOU’VE SEEN ENOUGH TONIGHT!” (You can just see her peeking over the NineSMS watermark.)

But no, Jay insists: “I need to tell ’em what happened”. Maybe he can take his glasses off and be rendered unrecogniseable, like Superman, after Clark Kent takes his glasses off.

Then there’s another guy who says, “I saw the gun, it was a Glock 9, it was awesome…”. Yeah, cool, totally; it's 2am at the Cross and that guy thinks he's in the middle of a game of Grand Theft Auto.

If you watch to the end, there’s a lovely point at which a horde of police are on top of a guy; camera pans to the right, someone in a hoodie is casually sitting in a gutter, sculling a drink, virtually oblivious to the arrest going on just next to him. Another mate asks the essential question: is it a serious report on a real event? Or is it an ad for Schoolies Week?

Of course, it’s an EPIC FAIL for the journo – he should have gotten Swan’s friend, the gun-toting gangster wog’s moll, to show us her tatt(s).