Acerbic comment: We're so good at this

We Australians are a glorious people. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. While the stupid Italians build their racetracks in stinking Tuscany, where the hills are all green, and there’s a shithole called Florence full of ratty museums and haughty teenage supermodels just down the road, we have the twin glories of Sydney Motorsport Park and Phillip Island.

Located handily to the stunning cultural suburbalopolis of Blacktown, Sydney Motorsport Park (SMP) was once named Eastern Creek Raceway. But since its relatively recent and celebrated makeover, which consisted of installing a coffee machine, painting bits of it yellow and adding seven new corners that no-one likes, it has been renamed.

Certainly it’s in Sydney and certainly motorsport is being conducted there, but I have yet to see a park of any kind taking shape within its fences. But since I don’t know anything about making parks, the process could already be well underway, and the luscious trees and exotic plants are being brought to maturity elsewhere before being transported and replanted at SMP.

And you never know. After all it’s possible the largest garbage dump in the southern hemisphere will be re-purposed in this way. It is, after all, directly next door to SMP, and while it is the only toxic tip I have ever seen that is constantly perfumed via a host of atomisers that run atop the barbed-wire permitter fence, the stench it emits remains quite astonishing. Take a deep breath and you can actually feel parts of your brain getting leprosy.

Still, the tip does seem like the ideal place for a park. It draws every one of those disgusting diseased ibises from miles around, so there is a great wildlife aspect to the place. You can see the scabby, long-beaked garbage-pickers nesting in the dead trees on your way to the entry at gate seven. But mind you don’t look at them too long, or your speedo might drift to the other side of 60km/h, at which point the Highway Patrol, which has it base around the corner and uses the road around SMP to train its squadrons, will run you down and beat you with rusty chains. And then the ibises will come down from their perches and siphon through the remains with their terrible hooked beaks.

Never mind. We do have Phillip Island, don’t we? That showpiece of racetracky magnificence that Melbourne likes to state is in Melbourne, when in fact it is two hours away. At least our perfumed landfill is actually in Sydney, so we don’t have to tell lies.

But I have to admit that Phillip Island does look great from the air. If I was a seagull I would fly above it a lot and be very pleased with what I could see. And if I chose to land, I would hope I had enough brains in my seagull-head not to land somewhere a speeding bastard could kill me with his motorcycle.

If there was a covered grandstand I could maybe land there.  But we Australians are a hardy bunch. We don’t really need a covered grandstand. We are staunch enough to endure anything the weather, which comes either from the dank fishing village of Melbourne, or more usually straight out of the Antarctic, throws at us. It’s the rest of the soft world that needs a covered grandstand, not bloody us, and not the bloody lazy bastard seagulls.

So relax, Mr Lindsay Fox. We don’t want or need any covered grandstands you might be thinking about building one day. We don’t want people to think we’re soft. We’re not. We’re certainly hardy enough to stand in shin-deep mud if it rains because we know you have a higher purpose for any spare gravel you might have lying about the joint. And we have been thumbing our melanomas at the sun for so long, that even if you built us a covered grandstand, bunged up some shade cloth, or maybe planted a tree or two, we wouldn’t use them anyway. Yeah, look, I know them trees are a right bastard to grow. The mob at SMP seems to be struggling with them as well.

So they can keep their Mugellos, Le Manses and Barcelonas. They can keep all their burning flares, wild parties, and stupidly passionate celebrations of motorcycle road-racing that’s conducted in places with grandstands, trees, grass, toilets, food, and that ineffable and wondrous thing called atmosphere.

We Australians have no use for any of that crap. We’re perfectly happy with our two superb motor racing facilities. The one in Sydney with the scented tip, the ibises, the cops, and the edgy atmosphere of Blacktown to liven up the evenings, and the one that’s not in Melbourne, looks great from the air, and lets you camp in a barren, wind-scoured and mud-ready field provided you don’t make too much noise.

Because that’s what we’re all about.