Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: taking care of the place

  • we want our country back

    Most joyous demo/march I’ve ever been involved in. There was a sense of colourful exultation, a kind of rejoicing, a feeling of laughing at each others’ placards and of coming together to ridicule the ridiculous. So many intelligent, open facial expressions, so many cool handmade signs. Someone had made extra signs, proper ones on poles, and left them leaning on the corner of the old Treasury building for people to pick up: one of those said: YOU WORK FOR US. There was HOW DARE YOU, ABBOTT, HANDS OFF OUR WORLD HERITAGE. There was a family of three solemnly crossing the road every time the traffic stopped, holding high their placards so the waiting drivers could read them. Before the march, joyous reefs of cheers rose up during the distant speeches. The square was teeming and people stood thickly on the sidewalks on all sides, holding their signs. When we set off, an upper storey of more drunken Australians leaned over from the balcony of the Irish pub, cheering and clapping and unfurling huge flags. My friend dropped out to get a bit of shade and when we ran into each other again, she was exultant: there were people going past me for ten minutes!

    I fell back, attracted by the band. They had struck up a spurling tumultuous din and I boogied and jittered my way down shady Adelaide Street and back into the sun. I’ve never seen so many people lining the route of a march holding up their own signs: LET THEM LAND, LET THEM STAY, and HANDS OFF OUR COUNTRY. A guy up a tree rattled his sign and whistled and waved. A man propped against a light post held: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CARING, SHARING AUSTRALIA? I ARRIVED AS A REFUGEE 26 YEARS BACK.

    Everywhere evidence of people’s sincerity and generosity. Four girls in front of us had on boat hats folded from newspaper. A bikie with a creamy white beard stood in front of his motorbike on his head and his big boots did the splits up in the air – his friends either side held up placards and everybody hooted and hollered. An eight year old boy had made his own fiercely vehement, illegibly penciled sign on a folded piece of paper studded with exclamation points and was wearing it paperclipped to his visor.

    Now, I hate marches. I’m shy and I don’t enjoy crowds. I find it mildly traumatic to be around mobs of angry people, even when I agree with them. But this was delicious from start to end. We rounded the corner back into the shade, there were colourful people filling the street as far forward and as far back as I could see. A man marched on crutches. A plump guy held a gigantic placard saying YOU KNOW THINGS ARE BAD WHEN EVEN I GET OFF THE COUCH. The feeling that ran through the whole gathering, for me, was that reasonable, kind, humane, open, curious-minded people have mobilized and sat up and said, man, this is an outrage, we’re putting a stop to it. Before all the dancing I was marching in hot aching tears: for my country, beloved and troubled occupation that has yet to face its own history. For the goodness and generosity in our hearts. For the inexplicable bold kind tyranny that fearless truth-telling and balanced perspective have over shady dealings, and dire manipulations, and all the kinds of politics that sink us into the stupidest and most destructive, dangerous kind of animal.

    “If this was in Germany,” my companion pointed out, “the entire route would be thickly lined with riot police in riot gear.” Instead, our friend told him, the Queensland police have been really supportive of this gathering. I could feel joy and celebration in the air and I felt we were all on the same page, same rambunctious rampage. A bewilderness of thrumming democracy, an entire array of people, a luscious diversity, a beautiful thing.

     

     

  • stop stopping the boats

    Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to “the taint” of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a cachet. It’s true we would undoubtedly respond with more compassion as a nation if boatloads of stricken Finns, Belgians and Scots were finding their way to our shores. But I also think we are not a confident nation and this reflects in a kind of arrogance-paired-with-self-loathing. It is sad to hate boat people when we are boat people. More than 90% of us are descended from recent migrants – that is, arrived within the last two centuries. And the waxy hysteria over a few hundred vessels reminds me of the hatred of sexuality which infests certain fundamentalist churches: the Catholic Church, for example. No hatred is more personal, more poisonous, than the mother of them all: self-loathing.

  • what’s mined is ours

    I think mining is a really primitive way of making a living. You gouge it out of the earth and you ship it away. It can never be sustainable: unlike a forest, where you can say “Well, we plant two trees for every one cut and we leave behind the nests and the habitats, we use the forest for eco-tours and to teach about local Indigenous culture.” Once it’s mined it’s gone, it can never grow back: the uranium, ore, oil or copper and the mountaintop as well. We call them ‘mines’ when really they are ‘ourses’ or even ‘earth’s’. Australian Conservation Foundation point out the mines in Western Australia make close to a billion dollars profit a week taking minerals “they didn’t make, out of land they don’t own.” Mining turns irreplaceable materials into disposable products; it fuels industries which have not caught up with the parlous state of the poisoned world; it’s a primitive, dangerous occupation and I think it attracts primitive, dangerous people.

  • treaty

    treaty

    February 6

    On this day in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in New Zealand to make peace between British invaders and North Island Maori chiefs. To this day no treaty has ever been signed with the Indigenous nations of Australia, so you could say we are still at war. In his film Welcome to Australia John Pilger points out that though we lionize the fallen of the disastrous Gallipoli conflict in World War One, the cenotaph standing in every tiny Australian town is unaccompanied by any monument to the Aboriginal warriors who died fighting to defend their land. Nor to the women and children slain with poisoned flour and poisoned waterholes. Nor to the young men who manage mysteriously to hang themselves on boot laces whilst under police custody.

    At the Dreaming festival at Woodford I saw a powerful performance by a Maori singer who introduced the other members of her band. She said to the audience, Don’t you worry ’bout them haka boys, I’m gonna introduce you to the really scary members of my band. The ‘haka boys’ crouched with tongues out, ferocious faces. The really scary band members were her sister and sister-in-law, who sang backing vocals. She told us how when they had landed at Cairns airport a few days before, “your whole bloody Australian army was swarming the place.” Her backing vocalists amused themselves by going up to soldiers in camouflage gear and saying, Eh. Boys. We can still see you.

    Recognising the wrongs of the past, righting the wrongs of the present. Rejoicing in the wit and verve and resilience, the sacred seriousness of the displaced cultures, honouring our own settler/invader cultures by humbly asking Indigenous culture to be once again the root, the stem, the foundation of our nations: surely it’s time.

  • Invasion Day

    The Queen should say sorry. One of the most pungent ideas from today’s pre-march speeches and an opportunity for her to be truly generous, gracious, timely, influential, and just.

  • we need to talk about the war

    “The local press spoke with the unrelenting language of a war front. ‘We have seized their country by the right of might and by the right of might of whites will continue to possess it’, promised the Moreton Bay Courier in 1847. Aboriginal retribution, conducted ‘in the mere wantonness of patriotism’, it reasoned, simply forced white settlers, in the spirit of ‘conquest’ and ‘self-protection’, to ‘rise en masse and take the law into their own hands.’ Colonists needed to be more ‘cruel and cunning’ than their Indigenous foes, it counselled in 1848: ‘With a gun in your hand keep them at bay… Shoot… (them) though the head if you can’. The ruling presumptions of this undeclared land war – escalatory and indiscriminate, pre-emptive and retaliatory – could not have been spelt out any more clearly. For the most part it was a markedly asymmetrical struggle, with the whites having the advantage of increasing numbers, superior economic support, and an improving military technology. Yet Aboriginal resistance was fierce and determined and, waged with enhanced environmental knowledge and bigger initial populations, was sometimes capable of driving white settlement out and back.”

    In Mackay by 1870, “half the local Aboriginal population of four large ‘tribes’ had either succumbed to illness or been shot down… (…) It was a similar tale all over the colony. A settler at Laidley on the Downs wrote in 1876 that the local ‘tribes’ had dwindled from many hundreds to two or three individuals, adding: ‘the work of extermination is virtually an accomplished fact… They have been shot and poisoned wholesale, not by black troopers but by white settlers. And now the same work is going on elsewhere and there is no general outcry against it.’ (…) Frontier newspapers were replete with advice like that offered in the Cooktown Courier of July 1874 to northern settlers to ‘shoot every blackfellow they found’ in spite of ‘the pseudo-philanthropists’ in the south. Lyrics to a tune in a Queensland camp-fire songbook (sung to the melody of ‘Happy are we darkies so Gay’) ran:

    ‘I’ve been out exploring in search of a run
    With my packhorse, and pistol, my compass and gun.
    We feasted delicious, ha, ha, hah.
    And shot black-fellows vicious, ha, ha, hah.”

     

    ~ Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland

    We need to talk properly about the war. We need to negotiate treaties and start to make peace. Let the past rest at last. Let people mourn and grieve. Stop murdering Aboriginal men in prisons and watch houses. C’mon Australia.

  • lord snowdon’s bicycle

    lord snowdon’s bicycle

    Rounding the corner on my bike just now I accidentally took part in a mass demonstration. I don’t know what it was about, maybe just a celebration of biking. People seemed easy and relaxed, it is a sweet sunny day with high white cloud, a blue sky, the pack of people travelling at jogging pace over the bridge, guarded by police on massive motorbikes, reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of her father’s experience of riding up out of the river bluffs with a big wolf pack travelling on all sides, they must have just killed and eaten, he told her, they showed no interest in me whatsoever. This was a quiet deed: shared, fruity, holy; some cyclists had dressed up, about a third were wearing helmets, but most of us travelled incognito, as our regular selves, quiet chat here and there like flowers in the grass or fishes occasionally leaping from the water. At my street corner I peeled off and passed the flower stall that has suddenly appeared since the weather turned autumnal, the strands of cut purple grasses stirring their flimmish pretty seedheads in the breeze like a prairie. America once was all prairie. A body of buffalo roamed it from end to end, turning each time they eventually reached the coast, nosing each other, “it’s not here! go back!” like the sparkling water in a snowdome slapping from end to end slowly. This may not be the exact scientific truth.

  • hitting the child

    Today on the markets I saw a man hit his child. He and his wife were standing among the racks of a bright clothing stall, I did not see what the boy had done but I noticed a woman sitting at her sock & beanie stall knitting had stilled her two needles and taken up watch. He said to his son, We are sick of you today. You must stop this. Look: people are staring. The child looked unhappy. He was maybe 7 or 8. Maybe he had done something monstrous, we were bystanders. I exchanged glances with the sock lady and her mouth tightened. Walking towards the little family I saw that the boy had flung himself on his father, wrapping his body around the man’s leg, his arms tightly clasped round the thigh and his face buried in the fabric of his father’s jeans. The father was speaking to his wife about clothes. I went up close to him. I dropped my hand quietly on his shoulder. “Let him say sorry,” I coaxed.

    “Eh?” He looked up. I repeated, “He wants to say sorry. Let him say sorry.” My hand came up to cup the back of the boy’s small, silky head. “Yeah, yeah,” said the father, dismissively, “we will.” But his own hand crept up into the boy’s hair. Because I think, whether we are parent and child or two adults, by instinct we follow each other’s example. Later I wondered how had I got away with it. Why had the father not slapped me, as well. I think because I had no sense of righteousness, I didn’t feel entitled, I felt irresistibly moved. I felt back to my voice, my tone, and felt its gentleness. I felt the way my eyes were burning with love in my head. You know how you can feel them in their sockets, fires in the skull, your soul on fire inside them, like a pair of windows opening out instead of in.

  • blood of the camellia

    blood of the camellia

    Proud of a conversation I had, in German, with the guy in the corner shop just now. He met me just inside the door, and rolled his eyes vehemently. “I was just about to close!” With a sigh he swung his swag of chains – yes, chains, that’s how you shut up a shop in Berlin – over the back of a chair and came round the counter to serve me. I stayed courteous and curious and soon he was telling me about his day. The Ordnungsamt, sort of a local city police, came in and made him change his display. He can sell ice cream by the cone tomorrow, and beef jerky and foiled sausages, but no beer and no ice creams already packaged. “No ice?” I said, misunderstanding the word. “Only if it’s not already wrapped,” he said gloomily. “But, ah – because of… God?” I wondered (Gotteswegens?) Yes, he said. He started showing me one by one the items on his crowded counter that would have to be stowed away at the end of every week so as not to offend the Lord. I said, You know, whoever God may be… don’t you wonder… whether maybe this is not quite what he meant? “Ihr koennt das kaufen, und das und das, aber nicht das.” Yes, he said, I’m not convinced that God minds what I sell, either.

    I used to sing in a tiny madrigal ensemble which performed in an old cathedral and we would have to sit through the services as they droned on in what, to me, might as well have been Latin. Choristers brought puzzle books and read poetry. Every Sunday after the service everyone would be invited to partake of the blood of the camellia bush and the bread of the fields, sponge cake and tea bags served with plastic plates and (mega groan) polystyrene disposable cups. I was almost thrown out of the choir for suggesting that if there is a God, and if you believe God has made this whole earth for our dominion and we are somehow or other in charge…. wouldn’t God want you to wash up your cups and use them again? Isn’t God, by God’s very nature, fundamentally opposed to polystyrene? I mentioned this to the choir at large and to the choir master and also, a couple of times, to the minister and his wife. Oh, they said vaguely, the washing up…. Later the choir master visited me at home, to tell me two of the sopranos had made a deputation to request I be thrown out, as a troublemaker. Aren’t the manufacturers and purchasers of polystyrene the real troublemakers? I feel like Charlton Heston brooding over his precious gun, or Scarlett O’Hara clutching her handful of carrots. This is my land, it’s our land, so help me I’ll never give up. Because ‘not til the last tree is felled and the last river dried up’ will we realize, it seems, that you cannot eat God.

    H2O HoL nuts

  • the Australian flag

    the Australian flag

    My design for a new Australian flag. I hope you like it!

    cat_oz_flag_06_aussie