An Abbott and two Bishops. Are we actually being governed by some weird splinter faction of the Catholic Church?
Tag: Australia
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bristanbul
Brisbane always was like this…. for me. Suburban and shrill in the day; shadowed and sultry by night.
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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.
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poor freedom
Queenslanders! If you want to feel good about everything, get yourself a European recently arrived from their winter and take him to the beach. Mine had never seen waves above hip-height before, but he charged into the surf like a snuffling dog. Every time I wiped the salt from my eyes there he was, plunging and lounging, spearing under curly-headed wavelets like a cormorant, trying to catch already broken arriving waves (“This one’s mine!”), surfacing with a massive smile across his face. I lay in the water, it’s been so long, and the line of buildings tilted on one end of the sea and the mountaintops tilted at the other. Plumped up Australians dragged their bellies and boards. When I was a child only ladies who’d had children were jiggly, and old men might have a beer belly: now it seems the whole nation’s jiggling, even muscular men in their 20s. Sugar, sugar. The water accepted us all. The ocean too is thicker and slower than it used to be and off the coast of California, apparently, carpeted with deceased sea creatures. But on the surface between the flags we were quite happy, one of us ecstatic. He plunged past me spluttering in sheer joy, legs flailing. “It’s… like…. pure freedom!” he shouted.
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tall
The other day we found a bookstore which has a cafe in it. These are little paradices, or is it paradie. What a sweet cool feeling to leave behind the clamour of the street and let the doors close on a spacious room whose wall to wall shelving is interrupted only by a serving counter, an espresso machine, a stack of cups.
We separated and began foraging round the overfull shelves like fish nibbling at the walls of a fish tank. I pounced on exactly the book I wanted, Alan Bennett’s diary extracts and essays; he carried to the table a small pyramid of Marshall McLuhans. Our coffee arrived. We began to read. The older couple at the next table got up and came past us on their way to the counter. The man, a bluff, rural Queenslander type, addressed me across my companion’s back. “So. How tall IS he?”
I said, “He’s right here. Why don’t you ask him yourself, if you want to know. Don’t you think it’s rude to talk across somebody about them, without addressing them directly?”
He was hurt. “I just noticed as he was wandering round the shop. I kept wondering, how tall is that bloke.”
I put my hand on my companion’s beautiful shoulder. He closed his book. “Imagine he gets asked that question a lot. Imagine we both do. Maybe it feels dehumanising to constantly be asked about something you can’t do anything about. I get asked it, too.”
His wife said, “Our daughter’s tall.”
I said, “Well, then, she will know what it feels like. It’s amazing how people feel entitled to ask that question when we are not even in conversation, we haven’t even spoken. I’ve even had people ask me my height, and then refuse to give their own – as though mine were some kind of freakish public statistic but theirs is personal information.”
“Our daughter’s six foot two,” she said, gamely. “Me too,” I said. Her husband said, across me, “Seven feet?”
“Nearly,” said the Marshall McLuhan fan.
“He’s about six foot eight,” I said. A series of fresh questions ran through my head: How old are you? How much do you weigh? Have you measured that beer belly, what’s its circumference? But the poor man was labouring so hard to restore the goodwill he imagined he’d lost, was so awkward in his warm-heartedness, that I didn’t want to make the point because clearly he would think I was being hurtful, he wouldn’t get it, he would perhaps even not have the resources for self-expression and processing his emotions that some of us have worked hard for, and I didn’t want to leave him with an insect sting all the rest of the long hot trafficky afternoon. The only thing I feel certain of in life is this: you don’t gain ground by hurting the people who have hurt you.
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sun crema
Sunday. Drive down to the beach. Past all the worlds. Seaworld, Dreamworld, Movieworld. This tiny horseshoe strand was a favourite of mine. Now to get to it you have to round a dozen roundabouts: long miles of wilderness which now are smooth resorts. At the mouth of the bay a smooth cafe stands. It is full with people in smooth shoes and clothes. The irons have entered their souls. Only a few dozen are on the beach itself, or in the ocean, the water and sand rough on their skin. Years before, the beach would be full, the cafe empty. As we come down the hard-trod beach bridge with our feet scritching the yowling hot dry soft sand a girl comes up past us, body folded round her swimsuit the way a skin forms on sour yoghurt, smooth youth creased and jiggling like old age, her eyes down, her thumb ardently scrolling the smooth glassy surface of the palm-sized computer which gives her a mirror, I suppose, of who she is on this wildly sunny day on this hidden beach between the shaggy headlands and behind the smooth cafe. She has bought a lifetime season ticket to Phoneworld. She is never alone, but she’s always alone. Oblivious and knowing behind her the surf brings in its trays of crema.
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underStorey
Kookaburra under the eaves of the giant Storey Bridge, last night as it grew dusk and we were all gathering to watch Utopia. Laughing and laughing and laughing. The laughter echoed and magnified around the joists and girders and cars passed overhead, one at a time, each one thumping quietly the joints that let that bridge breathe and expand. Maybe bridges don’t breathe. Maybe birds don’t laugh. But I stand here with my human head thrown back and this is about all I see.
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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.