Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australia

  • 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.

  • Survival Day

    Survival Day gleanings. This is what I cleaned out of my bag after we got home. Started out to hear the speeches and to march, ended up with our hearts broken and opened up all over again, robust in anger and delicately rejoicing, heart flooded like mangrove roots with a myriad various Indigenous faces including people I’d had warm contact with in the past and hadn’t thought of as Indigenous until we met again in this context, fringes of greenery shaping the old wood lace under the eaves of beautiful Jagera Hall every time I looked up to give my mind a digestion break from John Pilger’s movie, bellyful of sweet crumbling smooth bunya nuts and lilipillies, whole handsful of intensely beautiful gleanings from overhead and underfoot. The ones that caught my eye today were the colours of blood, resistance, kidney, heart, lung, fury. Oh and we brought home a bird. Just a tiny baby wattle bird, who fell down out of the overhanging tree onto a lane of the road as we passed and was kept alive in a sun hat filled with grasses and fed on pulped lilipilly and coaxed to take little beaky sips of water fed to it on a stalk of grass. He seemed to bond instantly with my companion and rode home serenely – we walked, under starlight and bursts of fireworks – on an outstretched finger. By the time we had reached the river he was asleep, with his scrappy head tucked into his fledging feathers, bobbing gently as we went along. Yesterday he rode around the house on his new, male, mum’s shoulder and began to let out lovely peeps. Today he is feeling more adventurous and is being given flying lessons, in German, by a man with no feathers, no beak, and no wings.

  • peeling

    I’m peeling. Last time this happened I was about 14. Went for a long long walk and it was early in the morning and I just forgot about the sun. ‘Hey there, zombie girl,’ says my favourite person. He doesn’t, to his credit, reach out to tug shreds of skin off my nose. The lozenge of bright red skin at the base of my neck resembles the neckline of some elegant 1940s bathing costume. I’m just sure it does.

  • the peace yard

    Walking home down rainy streets my last night in this house. Tomorrow unnest, budge myself, nudge, shift. Winter has landed with its big wings. Now the warmth of the indoors folds us in, the subway’s roaring throat, we all descend, we bring our dogs and biscuits. I saw two small boys fighting in the subway train, one slammed his hand down on the other one’s shoulder their sister put back her head and roared. They were hipheight to everyone’s delicate glances, the mother looked estranged. In this city if they serve you tea it is a mess of hot water in a clear jar (hard, chalky water, that dries white) and with spoon and bag of leaves laid on the white milky ceramic… neatly. Effervescent neatness, the German delight: effortless neatless and high art and kitsch. German joy, Friede; German graveyard, Friedhof. I’m leaving I’m leaving. I’m coming I’m coming: Australia wait for me. Maybe forever as jet blurting travel grows inexcusably wrong. Standing stranded on the traffic island as the creamy lights pour in three strands down the hill like pearls and the crimson lights pour like Christmas up: I said something aloud to myself in German, I started to cry. Thank you for your hospitality, your kindness, your warmth to all the strangers, your strangeness, your calm. The leaves shaped like webbed hands that wave in the wind. The strings of lights under the lip of each awning. The Grüss dich, the Tschüssi in shops, the dogs. In 24 mornings more, I’ll be gone.

     

     

  • between the fingers of Fidel Castro

    between the fingers of Fidel Castro

    I know an eighty-year-old cafe where the day passes smooth and coiling as molasses poured out of a dented tin. I sit in the smokers’ room, not because I smoke but because of the candlelight and conversation. Today I stopped at an antiquarian bookshop that has trestle tables out front. A recent conversation reminded me I had never yet read Machiavelli’s The Prince. The bookseller had two copies, an Everyman and a Penguin; two different translators; a quick skim decided me I would buy both, and I carried them to my favourite table and curled up there, thinking if I read these two versions both at once, maybe I’ll be able to triangulate.

    I read very slowly, laying each book face down at the end of a chapter and taking up its companion. Three tall, lanky, and very good-looking men came through in waterproof jackets, carrying boxes and boxes of lettuce and potatoes. Afterwards they sat down at a small table under the pastel portrait of Fidel Castro (cigar) and drank coffee and argued for over an hour. I tried something new off the menu: it’s German food, everything is new. Fidel Castro’s fingers resembled an abstract of a human hand carved from potato. Everything carved from potato. After the War Berliners relied on an American Rosinenbomber (the “raisin bomber”) dropping boxes of foodstuffs and dug up the forest called Tiergarten in order to sow vegetables. I thought of the various cafes I know in Brisbane and wondered how it will feel to adjust. The temperature has plummeted, and isn’t that a most marvellous word: like a fruit yet unripened on the branch, that finally gives in and plunges to the ground. Last night returning from a long forest hike it was perishing, four degrees. I ate my Weisswurst and Brezel and thought about the differences between reading in a cafe full of other people reading, and the dinner experience of last night, in an unreconstituted jazz and blues pub, where the cute barkeep turned down his infestation of immemorial blues and turned on a large white roped-up screen. Oh, God: Tatort. The awful detective show Germans watch as Sunday religion. Somehow the roomful of unstirring people watching a fourteen-year-old girl’s character get raped – the oldest man put his head into his hand, others watched unmoved – was so blinding and so effing awful, we got up and left. That household full of habitual viewers sharing the dirty hot tub of popular TV had somehow less in common than the people crouched in corners at my newly beloved red checked clothed cafe: reading newspapers or, in three cases, books, we were each of us turned away from our commonality but yet reminded me of swimmers foraging deep in the saltiest water, where the sunshine is sweet, where the strands of warmer and colder waters pass over one’s legs caressingly and there is always something further to be discovered. In only the one ocean, in always the one sea.

     

  • democracy

    democracy

    Voted! Gosh it feels wonderful. For those few minutes with ballot paper in hand, we are utterly sovereign, entirely free.

    It turned out something of an odyssey to get there: which feels also appropriate and fitting. So many people have died for our right. I got sidetracked, absorbed in some other work I was doing, suddenly looked up and it was late. I rang the Embassy. Yes, they said, just come on in, we’re open for another twenty-five minutes.

    I was twenty minutes away by train. So I jumped on my bike. Me and bike climbed on the wrong train at the right station (U-Bahn, S-Bahn, Strassenbahn… who can tell the difference here?) and as we travelled uncomfortably it occurred to me maybe you’re not supposed to bring your bike onto the Underground. The cars are narrow. It was hard for other people to climb on and get off. But they were very friendly about the inconvenience. Four stations later realizing this line (now travelling through the treetops – it’s confusing) did not connect with the above-ground line I needed, me & my bike jumped off.

    Locked up bike and flagged a cab. “Can you take me to the Australian Embassy?” We got there at three minutes to four. There was a little queue outside, of people clutching passports. “It’s not clear we’ll still get in,” a woman explained. “Ah,” I said. “So maybe the government will be decided by people who are just that little bit more organised. Maybe that’s a good thing!” The guard let us in. I was the last through the doors. We had to give up our bags for screening, the fellow next to me (a songwriter from Melbourne who later told me his life’s summary) seemed to have endless pockets full of coins. He literally made a pile on the security guard’s counter, two handsful. He had travelled from Hamburg.

    The Embassy smelled of Australia, possibly because of the charcoal artworks in the beautiful foyer. It really was beautiful. The staff were casually dressed, like people who have not have time to iron. A woman in trodden-down loafers and white jeans came out with handsful of ballot papers, calling out names. “Rosie? Molly? Hugh?” We stood about like pub patrons at the tiny high tables, bent over our forms. People were chatting as they voted. Democracy, I love you. On the U-Bahn platform on my way back to collect the bike I watched a man in salmon-coloured jeans hitched very high on a black leather belt, so old his skin was reptilian, prance down the platform very slowly whilst carrying what looked at first like an old fashioned suitcase, black and with white corners. Turned out it was an immaculate but disposable carrier bag from a glossy store. He stood waiting and felt round the bottom of his (empty ~ I peeked) huge bag to pull out its contents: a small plastic comb. Nervously he smoothed his hair back one more time.

    Beside us a young girl with glitter round her eyes forged through the pages of the novel she was carrying. She held it right up to her nose, almost literally immersed. If anyone is curious my voting method ran as follows: 1. Greens. Because our environment is a bigger issue than any other. 2. Start putting all of the cruelest people last. Above the belt, below the line. I had to carry my vote into a glass-fronted office where a man said, cheerfully, “All done?” and sealed up the envelope for me with sticky tape. “Such a friendly embassy,” I told him, “thank you.” I love you, Australia.

    H2O HoL snowy australia globe

     

  • gambolling habit

    gambolling habit

    A few years back this young cat came up to me in a kitten shelter and climbed onto my lap. I didn’t want her, the others were all fluffy, rolypoly babies winsome with whiskers and she was an awkward teenager with a big splotch on her nose. Whenever I visited the shelter there were kittens cutely gambolling all over and sucking on my toes (“they like the sweat” explained the cat breeder, who loved animals and had bred so many the Council were compelling her to give some away)… then I looked down and this skinny, weird-looking animal had stowed her sharp chin on my hip. Every time. I put her in a banana box and took her home. Her name is Tisch, I miss her sometimes but she is a lousy correspondent.

    H2O HoL tisch goofyshy

  • Eddie McGuire & Adam Goodes

    Eddie McGuire & Adam Goodes

    Eddie McGuire, prominent Australian broadcaster, compares Adam Goodes, respected Aboriginal footballer, to King Kong. The conversation, outraged on both sides, focuses on whether or not Eddie “is” racist. Thus it gets nowhere because no one can establish what lurks in the depths of his heart.

    If a child gets run over “by accident”, or because a distracted driver did not take sufficient care to prevent it, the child is still run over whether or not that driver “is” a “killer.” Let’s stop competing for most enlightened person who has the most Aboriginal friends, and focus on the damage and pain our unconscious, casual, lazy, habitual, over-entitled, selfish, spoilt racism inflicts.

    Even the fact that I label Adam Goodes “Aboriginal” and Eddie McGuire “Australian” shows racism. And ill logic, given that the truest possible “Australians” are indigenous. Let’s move this conversation on and start urgently examining and addressing our actions, our inaction, and their effects, before we get round to finally being more honest about the subtle motivations and conflicts in our hearts.

     

  • dochdach, dochdach

    dochdach, dochdach

    Back in Berlin for a few days: what a strange feeling. Now there is no snow on the ground and the trees have appeared from nowhere, they are green, green, green. We ate at a Turkish grillhouse where you sit around a glass-cased cooktop fired with coals, onto which four brawny and frankly handsome men in white shirts loaded blade after blade of minced meat, chicken wings, lamb ribs, skewer after skewer of whole, red tomatoes and prongs of scarlet peppers like jewels. They scoop the heat together in a bottomless tin of blackened aluminium. Everything stinks of cookstove fuel. We drank several copper tumblers apiece of ayran, the salty fresh yoghurt drink, eyeing the mirrored cabinet of meats: a tray of kidneys, maroon and flecked with gristly white, a tray of ribs ready to be sliced and grilled, a tray of chops, a tray of wings. Afterwards a long, long bicycle ride through the city forest which leads in from a smurfish village of cutesy summer houses with adorable, tiny gardens. The sign at the side gate says “Freiheit” but the “Freiheit” gate is locked. Everything as pretty as a thousand words and worth a picture. A young waiter smoking on the gingerbread verandah of his Black Forest-styled Gasthaus told us, using the informal “you”, “you can’t get out that way.”

    Drank a beer, one of those long German beers, on board a boat on the river which has a wooden cabin built on it, housing the kitchen and bar. There is grass growing on the roof. Grass, and little purple flowers. I stood in front of it blocking the way with my bike saying over and over and over, “It has grass! On the roof!” I had never seen that before: grass! on the roof! I am tired from travelling and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. When Berlin’s petticoat woods tilted up to meet the plane I felt a rush of unaccustomed homesickness: Australia, be less far away. Australia, be less vast. I miss you though I had almost forgotten, persuaded myself I had forgotten. This big city is not my city and that river is not my river. Doch.

    H2O HoL chili turkish grillhaus

  • the Australian flag

    the Australian flag

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

    cat_oz_flag_06_aussie