Imagine that. Imagine claiming a whole vast and fast continent was empty, naming it Terra Nullius. The land of nothing. Imagine thinking you could fill it up with people you had no use for, people who had stolen, who had committed crimes. Imagine emptying your prison ships squalling on the Thames into big boats and sending those off far away south. And then you let your people starve, too proud and stupid to ask advice of the local native people, to ask them, “So what do you eat?” Imagine giving blankets out as donations, as a kindness, that had been seeded with deadly smallpox virus. Imagine poisoning waterholes. You steal their children and rape women and enslave women and men. You classify them as animals in the first Constitution, flora and fauna. You won’t let them out at night and Australia is crosshatched with Boundary Streets and Boundary Roads. You torment and torture men and women who have not paid a fine or who are drunk and disorderly and allow malicious racist police to murder them in cells. Imagine tolerating the suffering of a longstanding people who contract in their remote communities Dickensian diseases. Imagine ignoring the wisdom and courage of this oldest continual culture on all the earth, while you set fire to the continent you have stolen and then plundered. A billion native animals die. You won’t help and you won’t be helped. A coup arrives, a coup de grace, a shaft of insight in the form of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written so graciously and with such courage and truth, and all the 3% of our population who have survived ongoing genocide ask for is just to be heard and to have some say in the running of the place, imagine just that, and you turn it down, call it division instead of progress, spit in the mouth of everything real and lasting, imagine currying the No vote and seeding doubt and calling it selfish and mean, imagine turning down this very small and modest and ambitious and generous-minded offer: we will help you run the place. We will bring our warriors and our mind. We’ll bring our heart back into the nation. Imagine turning down all of that. Inglorious, short-breathed, and stupid, and stale. Australia this is a referendum on our truthfulness and kindness. We are not enough.
Tag: democracy
-
if this is democracy, I’m a jam donut
The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’
Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom have been women. For a long time I have been understanding their appeal as a longing for certainty in perilous times. In our heart and in our gut each of us knows we are in trouble. Climate chaos, mega fires, top soil stripping to the bones of our sea-eaten land. Sea levels rising to drown whole Pacific nations. Population explosion, terrorism, and refugee crisis. Our drinking water is at risk and the world seems everywhere at war.
How to deal with this? The honest way doesn’t soundbite well. As the banner says, if your beliefs fit on a poster — think again. Any honest leader in these times is saying something like: This is unprecedented. I’m not sure how we best handle these pressing disastrous issues. All these massive interlocking crises are unbalancing each other, making our difficulties more complicated. Let’s all pull together and pool our wisdom; we need all hands on deck; all aboard, and it’s going to be a long night.
How comforting, then, to take refuge and fall in behind the skirts of a raised-fisted demagogue who claims he knows the way out of this place. “Follow me! I have the solution!”
Such simple mindedness has always had its appeal, hence the abiding popularity of sentimentality, cults, and religions: but the fact is no one on earth knows for sure how we are going to get ourselves out of trouble. From terrorism to water wars, we are facing new perils. The solutions are complex and require much sacrifice. What a relief to imagine we can evolve some magic pill that finds a scapegoat for our fears and renders us immune.
In 2006 I attended a public meeting at the edge of the desert in South Australia, Australia’s driest state. Its purpose was to discuss the state government’s plan to build a water desalination plant. The idea was they would reef in sea water and desalt it, then pour the waste salt back into the bay in a deadly, suffocating spume.
This stretch of South Australian coastline is barely tidal and is home to an enormous proportion of the world’s most exotic and rare sea animals. There lives in these waters a creature called the Leafy Sea Dragon, resembling a seahorse who’s gotten tangled in seaweed. These majestic and bizarre fellow beings would have smothered in large numbers, taking with them — as a side effect — chunks of lucrative tourism.
Meanwhile the crudity of the proposed solution seemed to ignore even its own best financial interests. A man in the crowd was wearing a red t-shirt which said: Well, At Least Sell the Salt.
A councillor spoke from a neighbouring region twenty kilometres north. Same low rainfall, same climate, same parching, blaring heat. He told us how their council had been harvesting rainwater and driving it down to store in the groundwater aquifer. They resell this water, which virtually everywhere else in Australia is wasted, to households, football clubs, schools. He told us how they had more business than they can keep up with.
Call me stupid, he said, but maybe what is working for us might also work for you.
We don’t have a manual for dealing with mass species loss and the human loneliness it leaves in us. No one knows how we’ll cope with a three-degree global temperature rise because no one has ever been through it. “The government better do something!” becomes “We Are Currently Constructing a 16 Billion Dollar Desalination Plant!” and drowns out the more realistic response of perhaps, “See, it’s like a patchwork. We all need to conserve more water, stop washing our concrete driveways and sweep, take shorter showers; and you should install a rainwater tank if you can; and let’s look at industrial waste and stormwater catchment.”
The man who says I Have a Magic Silver Bullet can sound so persuasive to a population desperate with suppressed fear. For one thing, these seemingly easy solutions do not demand that we think any further about such terrifyingly complex and new issues. To face the looming disasters of modernity takes so much courage, and it hurts. Energy crisis? “Nuclear power plant!” Or: “Well, see we’ll need to maximise our use of the sun’s energy, and use the wind; and coastal areas can harness the waves and let’s redesign our appliances so they don’t waste passive energy all night and all day, for starters.”
The delusion in our disaffected and bored suburban lives that one Good Guy with a Gun can be a hero again, as his bear-shooting ancestors were; that a single man can bring us back from the brink of disaster by banishing one group of people or persecuting another; that job loss can be blamed on something visible — migration — rather than something seemingly irreversible — automation: all of these delusions in their shoebox have brought us this week to a potentially ruinous election result in the US. It’s happening elsewhere: Egypt, Turkey, Denmark. I fear the toxic masculinity and Hollywood hero narrative that have enabled this disaster. At this instant I am watching Trump and his Trumphalist family taking the stage in New York City — he is applauding himself, like the class act that he is — and all I can see in his expression is the fearful wryness that confesses: he cannot deliver the fantasy he has promised. No one can.
Maybe it would be wonderful to be rescued, rather than having to knuckle down, ourselves. Maybe the fight against prejudice and privilege would be easier if it didn’t entail anyone making sacrifices of their own. But as Trump with his thin-skinned narcissism eloquently demonstrates, pseudo heroes and demagogues seem protective because they’re so defensive. Trump seems strong, because he is weak. It takes far more courage to face the unknown and the uncertain, to open our hearts and tune our ears to one another — even people we dislike, even people who challenge us — and to embrace the crucial issue of our time: how our fear is driving us deeper into the behaviours, such as expansionist, exploitative industrialisation, that have brought about these emergencies in the first place. You can’t fight fear with fear. The only way to fight fear is using our courage, and courage is love.
-
the oliver twist
I have a friend who teaches piano. Today she said to me, “I have two students now from Australia. And both of them are called Oliver.”
“Wow,” I said, “how many Australians called Oliver can there really be? There’s only like twenty-five million of us.”
“Not that many,” she said, “because they’re all over here.”
“They’re Oliver here,” I realised, making us both laugh, yay me.
There are so many Australians in Berlin, I hear our accent in the streets. And three of my Berlin friends are Kiwis, which means that one in a million New Zealanders is not only living in Berlin but is within my own personal circle of acquaintance. This seems so astonishing and improbable.
We were heading towards the door and she held it open for me so that I could carry my bike through. I was thinking of the election in five weeks which will hopefully depose inhumanity in Australia in favour of humanity; and how I hope all these Berliner Australians will get to the booths. I thought about our strange and resonant homelands so far away and as we parted at the foot of the stairs I burst out, “You know, sometimes I kind of get the feeling, like – who’s looking after the place?”
-
suffragette
Good god, I just voted. By email in Queensland, which is currently in the grip of a miniature narcissist who’s funding his own higher-than-POTUS salary increase with cuts to essential services. It took me 45 minutes on the phone yesterday to organise and an hour today to complete the forms and scan and mail them back and forth to Australia to be witnessed by someone who is an enrolled Australian voter. And before that I spent twenty minutes on the phone to a man at the Berlin Australian Embassy last week: he professed himself baffled that the closest physical voting booth in this election was in Singapore. “For some reason,” he said, “we just haven’t received any electoral materials this time round. And it all seems to be being conducted in rather a hurry.” I said, “But I voted in the federal election… in 2013. In your embassy.” “Yes,” he said. “Anyone would think they were wanting to make it difficult for people to lodge their votes.” But I have voted. Totally worth it. Democracy, I adore you and I believe in us.
-
reggae punk
Night walk in the late afternoon. There is a large punk stationed outside the supermarket, asking for coins as people emerge from the light within; he is tall, broad, and mighty, wearing a lycra miniskirt and dark stockings, his hands pouched in the pockets of a worn khaki windbreaker. He has as they say in German few “hairs”, but they are scraped from all corners of his scalp into a wispy but somehow fierce high ponytail.
There are three Polish tourists who ask us where they can find some reggae. My partner remarks afterwards that the combination of “reggae” with the German, Reggaeveranstaltung, “sounds like the death of paradise”. There is a windblown American stationed at the autotellers who speaks slushy, gentle German and is homeless, or on the skids; his calling is to sweep open the doors of the bank’s glass vestibule with a big smile and a grave, deep, “Well, good evening.” He has his dog with him and a large coffee tin into which people sometimes cast coins. He’s always cheerful.
There is a demonstration outside the refugee centre which necessitates the whole street being blocked off by police. Around ninety or a hundred people stand about looking, mostly, like spectators who have wandered in on their way home, around a central tableau in which a huge white banner spread on the street is flecked with flowers and lined with flickering golden tealight candles. Two activists in baggy coats pull a blanket and then several cushions out of a large plastic bag and begin setting up a vantage point beside this shrine, on the kerb.
A photographer is prowling the sparse crowd, attentive but bored. The police all seem like giants in their militant uniforms. They are laughing and chatting. Loud music from a boombox strapped to the top of a van is interrupted by a speech in German-accented English. What enchants me is the two busloads of surplus police officers, waiting in their seats out of the cold, just in case. Their green and white striped minibuses stand parked diagonally across the entrance to the roadway, as an obstacle. At the other end of the barricaded demonstration area five police officers stop us when we would pass: they are jovial and unbudging: even an ID card showing you live in this very street will not get you through unless your apartment building happens to be in this end of the blockaded road. We shrug and turn away, threading our way through the inactive demonstrators to where the police buses parked in the roadway seem weirdly unchanged. There is something so strange about their attitude of waiting. We walk from tail to nose and then nose to tail of the two vehicles slowly, glancing up. Every seat is filled and the seated officers are absolutely motionless, as though underwater. Each has his head bowed and it takes me a moment to work out why this could be. Are they sleeping? Are they praying? Are they each lost in some meditative private world, like soldiers about to go over the top, asking forgiveness, giving thanks? They are on their phones. Each of them curved round the spell of his own little screen. They look monklike and freed from all anxiety.
-
climate chains
God, I feel so depressed about the American midterm results today. What seems clear is: the more frightened people become about the horrors of climate disaster, water wars, drought refugees, the more they vote for these cowboys in the big hats who say: The Lord spoke to me personally, and told me… how to save us all.
No matter how many studies associate extreme Conservatism with lower IQ… no matter how clearly we know that intelligence is dimmed by terror… we still reach for the Big Man’s Salvation in a crisis. Crises deepen and worsen on every side. Therefore we leap straight from 100% denial into “well, there’s nothing we can do about that now, it’s too late… batten down the hatches.” When oh when will we allow the love that is in us to rule our hearts, our world, our hearts?
-
election earring
A federal election approaches Germany, they’ve a Conservative government to vote back in. It’s an unequal fight: the sitting Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is called “Mummy” by the press and one of her would-be opponents is the Pirate Party (they’re good, but they’re goofy). This town is festooned with candidates’ placards. Barely a one unadorned with some form of wry or dark or daft commentary. Most common, because easiest, is the black-marker scribble under the nose which denotes A Moustache Like Hitler’s.
One of the locally beloved candidates approached in the markets last weekend, handing out leaflets in person. He is well into his eighties. On his election posters he appears to be wearing lipstick and a light powder, has in his glaringly perfect false teeth. His posters are the least defaced. Today I saw a poster on a bus stop which had grainy B&W pictures of the two major party leaders with the legend, “Who sucks most? Vote with your gum.” People had stuck wads of gum onto the faces of each, an almost literal vox pop. On the poles down the cafe strip I noticed official campaign placards have been interspersed, must have been overnight, with photos of cheesy-looking 70s fashion models from large-format old magazines. Mounted on cardboard and strapped between candidates they look to me eminently electable. Though possibly the recent experience of picking through the bizarre and downright crazy single-issue Senate candidates for Australia may have soured my outlook.
-
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.
