Beneath the Skin

Australia is having a bit of a conversation about racism at the moment.  The booing that's oozed all over AFL player Adam Goodes for months may not have started out as racist, but it's certainly morphed into it now.  If you dare to boo at him in upcoming weeks in the way you may have done previously, then you can guarantee that that's the label your booing will receive.  (Which is unfortunate if you happen to be a person who is entirely unracist but who doesn't like something Adam does and wishes to voice your protest by a large boo, as is common to the football-going species.  This will feel entirely unfair and restrictive to you.  But, you know, maybe give it a few weeks until all this blows over.  Booing Adam Goodes this weekend will be like dancing in 3/3 time to a 4/4 song.  You don't really want to seem like a dick.  Just sit it out for a few songs, ya know?)

The whole Goodes saga has climaxed in Australia collectively lifting up a few large rocks to examine whether unconscious racism still scurries underneath our society.  There seems to be quite a bit of scurrying going on it seems.  Some of us feel repelled by that.  But it's not all that surprising.

It's hard for people to change their views in a climate of repulsion though.  Repulsion has the reverse-magnetic effect of moving two unlike groups away from each other, to a space of safety where they will demonise and label and caricature further, and makes everything more underground and poos and scurry-ey.  We seem to like to demonise and label and caricature these days, especially online.  It's why our quality of conversation is generally so inherently unsatisfying.  There's not a whole lot of space for nuance when we're sizing each other up ready to shove each other into rectangular dynolabelled boxes as quickly as we possibly can.  But we feel like we know what we're dealing with a little better that way.  It makes us feel safer.  And hell, there's a lot out there to make us feel unsafe.

Makes sense to push away, because repulsion is a horrid feeling.  But labelling a racist and putting them far from us is sort of interesting when you consider that that is what racists are doing in the first place.  Seems our quick-flex reactions are universal.  And they're understandable, too, on a biological level.  After all, our ancestors taught us, millennia after millennia, to fear that which isn't Our People.  It's leeched in our bones, in our synapses, in our limbic system, at contradistinction to other parts of us that given the right environment yearn to flourish higher than a reactionary state.  We can be higher when we're not being fight-or-flighted.  But that fight-or-flight nervous system response is what pings continually in many of us these days, and we feel it fire up when we see that person in front of us who isn't My People, whether racially or ideologically.  From a limbic perspective, it doesn't matter at all if that person is a minority and you happen to be a majority.  Look at the 1%.  Look at white Australians.  All our ancient limbic system knows is the quick sizzle, that fight-or-flight reaction that suited us on the Serengeti but is so fracturing in our current urban crumbly society.  All the limbic system senses is a possible impending danger clothed in the sinister garb of Not My People.  And depending on how your frizzled central nervous system lets you play it, they can be fucking everywhere.

Despite everything Descartes and your limbic system tell you, you're no more separated from your environment than your body is from your mind.  Everything affects everything else.  Your society affects you personally, and Australia has had racism etched into its own bones because that's what happens when His Majesty's ships come into port and one culture begins being slaughtered to within 10 inches of its life.  It might not feel like it to us, but 230 years is really nothing at all.  That's all the space there is between now and then.

Some of us find it abhorrent to keep talking about it.  We're sick of it, frustrated with what we are supposed to do with that information.  Why should I feel guilty?  Well, you shouldn't.  You weren't there, you didn't do anything to make that happen.  What your response requires is to go micro, to examine your own inbuilt assumptions, to see what you carry around in yourself that you've imbibed, and whether you want to continue to do so.

So we have all of these reactions at a time when our society is changing, as societies continually do ~ examining its biases, refusing to accept distinctions that seemed so obvious to those framing themselves within different stories in different ages that gave them different biases.  This is good.  We call out stuff that sucks, that demeans people, like racism and misogyny.  And like all modern people, we want change to happen last Thursday.  But just because we have decided to move on from an historical position doesn't mean that it's gonna happen even next Thursday.  If we don't allow for our bodies' reaction and our society's shadow to catch up, all we will hear reflected back to us is our own stridency.

We need to make far more space, in this quick-to-judge age, for what repels us in others.  People need space to tease out their biases and their creepiness in some kind of safety, without condemnation from those who are quick to take refuge for their own safety in self-righteousness.   If we don't create that space for each other, then the change will only happen on a superficial level in the macro.  If we desire change as much as we say we do, then we need to care a little more for the micro who make it up, encrusted though they may be.  After all, how else but encrusted could one be after swimming in neoliberal swamp water most of their lives?  And isn't that what we would wish for ourselves?

Control the Chaos (Cosmic Onion Bag)

The Australian Energy Sector's Response

Fuck you.

Fuck you even to the coalminer's granddaughter.  See, it is rather egalitarian when you think about it ...

The Two Ends of the Power Cord

I was one of the estimated 30,000 Melburnians who Marched in March over the weekend from the State Library to Parliament House to register a vote of no confidence in the current government.  I am very proud to have done so. 

It was a messy hodgepodge of people and placards, some of which I was in favour of and others which I wasn't.  That's how it goes, I guess, in a democracy – a loud mix of voices, some contradictory, which can feel uncomfortable and not entirely safe.

This might sound ridiculous in the face of internet trolls, the NSA, city bashings, Kyle Sandilands, reality TV, familial incest, Russia, the US and China sticking out their chests and the Abbott Government, but I really don't believe that humanity has reached anywhere near its highest potential.  We march slowly, slowly forward into unity in diversity, greater compassion and equality, a space where we can all feel safer and freer to express our humanity.  But it's an uncomfortable march – it requires us to not only speak truth to power, but also to own our own shit after a fashion, to own the bits that we don't like about ourselves.

Now, just in case I possibly give the impression of being a preachy Girl Guide with her entire shit together talking about love, rainbows and unity, to dispel that misconception I will share a couple of home truths about myself as well, helpfully highlighted in bold.

Anyway, I never made it to Girl Guides.  I distinctly remember as a 10 year old dancing as a Brownie around a plastic mushroom with my fellow Junjarins and thinking, “What a bloody load of cods this is.”

It's the hardest of hard work to understand your cultural place in history, to see the shadows and blind spots that others in 500 years' time will be able to see very clearly.  But as evidenced on the weekend, there are some spots that come into focus and beam like beacons – unfair distribution of power and wealth which shows up in the way previous governments on both sides have treated refugees, the way those in power are increasingly treating us. 

I like one Bryan Adams song and love another one.

And yet while it's right to march and voice your opinion and empower yourself, it's a victim's stance to believe that all of the power lies in the hands of the powerful.  After all, hard as it is to believe, they are human as well.  I try to put myself in their position and imagine how all of us would appear to them.  The mob has never been pretty and for all of our moves forward into tolerance and diversity we are still just as intolerant and hateful and despising and dualistic in our thinking as we've ever been when it comes to those who we believe are wrong.  If I was a politician, I would be scared of us.  And as much as I would hate to imagine it, I would be swept along in the fear and revolt that formed in me in response to that and, swept along with the revolting political machine would find myself where most politicians find themselves, toeing the line and stifling my idealism and speaking lies and bullshit.

On the train on the way to the march I saw an Anglo guy sitting with an Asian woman and my initial thought until I rejected it was that he had probably spent money to have her sitting next to him with her hand entwined in his hair.

Power is a corrupter, as we all know.  Like money, I imagine there doesn't ever quite seem to be enough of it.  It doesn’t fill up the hole of insecurity like we imagine it might.  It seems that within Maslow's hierarchy of needs, more than enough of both money and power starts to rot and decay us from the inside.

We all know that pretty well, and for most of us it's why we were marching on the weekend.

When I was a teenager I used to call Aboriginal people boongs and not think twice about what I was saying.

I didn’t stay for any of the speeches at the march because quite frankly I was starving and my feet were killing me and my energy had run out.  So perhaps my view is a little more glowing than of those who did stay because I left with lovely action-ey feelings of marching in spotty rain with thousands of people in unity.  I didn't end up listening to individual people with individual views who might have appeared to some to be hijacking the whole event for their own ends.  I don’t know.  I didn’t hear any of that – I was eating a footlong flatbread Seafood Sensation at Subway and dreaming beautiful thoughts of the potential of humanity.

Beautiful ideas about humanity are so much easier to handle than the messy blobs of it that show up in our lives, after all, with their own ideas and how to go about achieving them and the defensiveness that flares up within our selves in response.  Perhaps that's why ideas that seem so wonderful fall to poo when wielded in the hands of people on behalf of other people.

Perhaps that's what will stand out so starkly in 500 years' time – what control freaks we were when we thought we weren't.  Our beautiful ideas always end up falling into the stink of control because those filth out there don't know how to do them properly so we in here need to enforce the parameters with which they do them.  It's not only powerful people who do this stuff.

I sometimes expect people with depression and anxiety to “snap out of it” if I happen to be having a good run of not experiencing those things myself.  I suffer from those demons myself and have been clinically depressed in the past.

I do not think that we are very good at putting our ideas out there into the world and letting them be.  We are micromanagers and control freaks.  We do not trust each other, not one bit.  And sometimes we won't give each other an inch without a fight, either.  We have been so easily divided and conquered by those at the top for so many millennia that we too easily fight amongst ourselves for the spoils they leave us, and whenever our egos are threatened by someone who thinks differently than us. 

Maybe this is partially what keeps us weak and the powerful strong.  Maybe the work of correcting the imbalance rests more with us than we think it does.  Maybe our actions in our own lives to those of us who we consider our enemies is about loving them, as some carpenter dude said once and others have said before and after him.  Maybe our actions there affect the greater whole in ways we can't quite understand in our cause and effect reasoning.  After all, we live in an era when the unified field of consciousness has moved from the realms of fancy into the realms of science as a reality we can stand on.  On more levels than the mushy Hallmark one, we really are one.

I have engaged quite happily when at get-togethers with friends in talking about whoever isn't there even though I hate it when other people gossip about me.

When we truly believe this and know this, we might not need to march.  But if we do, we will not be able to walk past the homeless guy and pretend he's not there while we're doing it.  And we won't ignore the red traffic lights either just because we can, forcing the unfortunate cars finding themselves in the city at that time to bank themselves up and beep.

I once gave someone a blowjob in my car in the street. 

When we marched round the corner from Swanston Street onto Bourke Street, there was a young woman and a homeless guy. 

I vacuum four times a year tops.

The homeless guy sat with a cardboard sign and a couple of bags surrounding him and downcast eyes as we all marched past him.  We really are one.

I walked past the homeless guy myself.

I used to go to school with a guy who was quite obviously not very clever.  I knew this but I was very insecure.  I used to say things in front of my other classmates to make myself look better and to make him look even stupider.  His response was always a goofy smile.  I guess that is its own  punishment.

The young woman was playing Auld Lang Syne on the erdu.  A traditional Scottish poem, played by a Chinese woman, on the streets of Melbourne.  It seemed a fitting, beautiful accompaniment for a walk where people from one of the most multicultural countries on the earth were marching partially against the treatment of those who seek asylum here. 

Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, yes, we really are one.

Survival Day 2014

If I don't head off to Belgrave Survival Day again next January 26, going to the movies to see the Australian release of John Pilger's latest, Utopia, will be a time rather well spent on that day, mereckons.

Dividing for Unity

The time has come for Australia Day to divide itself, in the name of unity, into two.

It sounds paradoxical, but stick with me.

Surely the day when we celebrate ourselves as a nation should fall on any day other than the one when Captain Arthur Phillip first stuck an English flag into Sydney Cove soil and claimed it for Mother England. That day began the process of the British Empire usurping nation upon nation of people from their homeland.

To celebrate on the day when indigenous people mourn, when there are 364 others we could choose, is seeming stranger with every passing year. It sticks the boot once more into those indigenous descendents who are still suffering the effects of that invasion (225 years is really not so long a time when it comes to the grief and trauma of genocide).

It’s time to change it.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating the good fortune of your country. There is nothing wrong with feeling gratitude for the beautiful things about your life, the beautiful land you live on (just as long as you don't get paranoid about it, start sweating about the Other coming to take it away from you). But there is also nothing wrong with marking the evil of the past, and remembering the things about your country which will be left out of glossed-up news reports. To ignore the things that make us flinch about our past stops us healing from them. Flinching from the evils of the past makes it harder to see how far we have come.

Consider the changes that occurred in the years between the 150th and this year's 225th anniversaries of Australia's "founding". In 1938 a standard part of Australia Day celebrations were to re-enact Captain Phillips’ landing, including driving off a token group of Aboriginal people. In 1938, the people who were to play the part of those Aboriginal people in the re-enactment were brought there against their will to do so. Indigenous Australian activists refused to participate, calling it instead the Day of Mourning.

By 1988, 50 years later, those re-enactments had been discontinued. In 1992 the first Survival Day concert was held in Sydney. Many indigenous people call the day Survival Day, to note and honour the culture that still survives after Empire attempts to kill it outright. Since then, the focus on Survival Day has grown until now there are Survival Day commemorations in many Australian cities.

Now it is 2013, the 75th anniversary of that first Day of Mourning in 1938 and some non-indigenous Australians are now choosing to mark the day by siding with their indigenous brothers and sisters as a mark of solidarity. Most capital cities have something going on – in Darwin, a Survival Day Movie. In Melbourne, Share the Spirit, Belgrave Survival Day and Frankston Foreshore Survival Day. In Sydney, Yabun and on the mid-north coast of NSW, Saltwater Freshwater. In Perth, Survival Perth. In Adelaide, Tandanya.

It’s time to seriously think about moving Australia Day to another day. Perhaps it could be held on 22 December, the day of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, to celebrate what so many Australians enjoy about living here. Or perhaps it could be at the other end, at the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, where people have traditionally celebrated the beginning of the return of the sun. A winter's celebration full of good food and warmth and gratitude and anticipation. A public holiday to brighten the soul at the beginning of winter. Or perhaps it could be on the first day of the Australian Open, to celebrate our national obsession with sport. Those are a few things to come to mind and they're all maybe a little cliched. But any of them would be a more fitting way to celebrate ourselves as a country than the current version.

Australia Day

In 1967 the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Harold Holt, disappeared while swimming at Portsea.  His body was never found.

A rather Australian gesture of memorial was to name a public swimming pool after him.  The Harold Holt Swim Centre remains today, a monument to his name and to the pastime that he loved that also claimed his life.

It's kind of amusing really, a rather ironically Australian flavour of humour that's hard to decipher (truly, and probably becoming harder even for Australians to decipher because we are a changing breed.  Change is, after all, the way of a flowing life.)

I love my country.  I fear for where we're going, but I am so grateful to live where I live in this deeply flawed, overbureaucratised, beautiful nation that is fearful in so many ways, easily fearmongered, and struggling with its own identity (Murdochia does not help).

That's not to say that I don't find patriotism to truly be the last refuge for a scoundrel.  The Australian flags flying off many cars and utes lately fill me with a slight trepidation.  There is so often a sinister element to patriotism, a refusal to look at the underbelly, a defining of yourself against another to find the other wanting.

Despite being one of the most multicultural countries on the earth - and a particularly successful one at that - there is a deep fear of the outsider here.  Especially from the whitie Anglos amongst us (the ones, I could claim, with the greatest identity problem of all) we look with mistrust to the boats coming across our seas as if we are going to be swamped.  Many of us in our white suburban enclaves look with mistrust at those who are already here who are not us.  As if we've always been here or something.

I understand the desire to belong.  It is a particularly strong element.  To be able to trace your roots is something that is important enough that there are silly ads on television for an ancestry website (with joining fee), and shows on televisions that show celebrities tracing their histories, often with some surprises - and quite a bit of emotion, too).

My mother's side of the family originally hail from Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, near England and France.  It was particularly poignant a few weeks ago to see if I could trace online our history in Guernsey, to find that it's already been done and my earliest recorded ancestor in those parts was a Pierre Brehaut, who was born around 1360.

There is something truly comforting in that for me.  I do not quite understand why, but it's one more tether that helps me feel part of the earth.

There's nothing wrong with having a day to celebrate your country and way of life.  It's a good thing to be able to stop and have gratitude for the good and wonderful bounty you've been fortunate by the stroke of luck and genetics to enjoy.  So many don't.

It's just that I can't do it on the anniversary of the day that powerful imperialism sailed into the bay and began systematic genocide on the oldest culture on the earth.

That's the underbelly.  And celebrating Australia Day on this anniversary will seem an anomaly from taste to generations in the future.  A scratching of the head and saying, "How on earth could they have thought that that was okay?"

It's not.  There's another perfectly good 350 or so days of the year we could do it on.  Let's do it on one of those instead.

The Politics of Australia

"What does it say of a nation - what does it say to a nation - when in a time of austerity, of slashing of essential public services, that $1 billion of Australian taxpayers' money - our money - is being spent annually to persecute, damage and sometimes destroy the lives of people of whom between 80 and 95% are finally proven to be genuine refugees? That is to hurt the most powerless and helpless and deserving of help and kindness. It shames us a nation that claims to be both humane and generous, it belittles us as a people, and none of it will deter the wretched of the earth, forced to choose between despair and hope, from continuing to choose hope" - Richard Flanagan

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/richard-flanagan-on-the-decline-of-love-and-freedom/3583396#comments

I'm rather taken by the work of Carl Jung.  He's the one behind the Myers Briggs Indicator you've probably taken at some point.  He coined the idea of the collective consciosness, and of the shadow side of a personality - the place where we repress and suppress those things which we cannot consciously integrate or handle.  What lies out on Australia's shadow side - a country founded only a couple of hundred years ago on genocide and displacement of a people?  What happens if we cannot bear to think too much about that element of our history?  Does it transfer itself into paranoia that what hunted will now be hunted?

So much media space has been taken up in this country in recent years on both sides of the political spectrum fearmongering about the boat people.  Terrified we'll be overrun by the boat people, the boat people - the same people who make up just a blip on the radar of people who arrive on our shores every year.  Because of a politically-fostered myth that just continues to be perpetuated because of the stain in our psyche and the bloodstained earth, the politicians of our country persist in punishing the most vulnerable who arrive here.  How much longer do we put up with it?

They are the 99%

Valoracion by Alfonso Maggiolo Peirano

The lucky country, the land of friendly Aussies ...

... is a good selling point.  Sunlight-dappled advertisements for "where the bloody hell are ya?"  Come visit the land of the amiable, friendly Aussie.

When in reality, Australia has changed beyond recognition in the past 20 years.

You couldn't put it on a travel advertisement, but more and more often the reality resembles something more like this.