Just as the Roman Emperors knew to give the proles bread and circuses, so too does Victoria’s very own dictator Dan Andrews. But instead of chariot races and gladiators, the Andrews government is giving Victorians an ice-skating rink, 10,000 free kazoos and nightly moon worshipping. Never mind the fact that Melbourne CBD has become a dangerous, filthy, graffitied shadow of its former self, just look at the moon!

One of the strangest partnerships of ‘Rising’ is between Metro Trains and Kimberly Moulton, a ‘proud Yorta Yorta woman and Senior Curator of South Easter Aboriginal Collections at Museum Victoria’. Together, they have created ‘Rising: Shadow Spirit’, which is billed as a ‘new First Peoples’ exhibition (which I presume means that the exhibition is new, not the First Peoples) and which will be held in Flinders Street Station’s abandoned rooms.

Metro Trains promises that attendees will be ‘immersed in Ancestral systems of knowledge’, that they will ‘traverse time and celestial worlds’ and that they will be able to ‘reflect on the shadow of Australia’s history’. The latter means of course that the non-Aboriginal attendees will be lectured by a First Person about how sovereignty was never ceded and that they are on stolen land. I’d prefer that Metro Trains delivered a timely and efficient metropolitan rail service, but I’m just old fashioned that way.

The website informs us that the exhibition will have sub- themes. Normally, this would be a helpful addition to an art installation, but there is always an exception to every rule. The theme Weaving Time for example, ‘considers the multi-dimensional space of being in our world that goes back to the morning of the first sunrise. We are in an ever-present slip stream of what we know as time. It was then, it is now, and it is yet to happen.’

In Spirit Ecologies ‘we see that Country has spirit and holds stories of other worldly beings that bring warnings and protection’. Absent Presence informs us that ‘there is the space between what we feel and what we know, what the body tells us in opposition to what the mind wants us to think.’ Furthermore, ‘there are things that feel very present but that cannot be seen, sometimes they bring warning or mischief, sometimes they feel unwanted.’

Hapless punters attempting to comprehend this nonsense will be as enlightened as an audience attending a Kamala Harris disquisition on the metaphysical mysteries of time and space.

That Metro Trains should be focusing on its appointed task, which is getting passengers from A to B, rather than dabbling in the painfully woke ‘Arts’ and ‘Culture’, goes without saying. Victoria is now Australia’s highest-taxed state. The Victorians who were locked up by Andrews are not only being forced to posthumously pay for their imprisonment as well as the ruination of the state, but they are being compelled to pay for what only can be described as a massive distraction from the real problems at hand.