Being Balanda

Being Watjala

2010-04-12T18:30:00.002+10:00

While I live today as a Gubba, in Koorie land, and my most intense contact with Indigenous Australia has been as a Balanda, up north, I am originally a Watjala, a whitefella from Perth.

As a suburban boy, my contact with the world of Noongahs was largely speculative. In our neighbourhood, the roof of a bottle shop was adorned with a ‘Jackie’ sculpture of bearded aboriginal man with spear resting his foot on his knee. His silhouette defined our eastern sky. But the figure had as much to do with my childhood world as a Masonic Lodge.

But since I’ve been coming back to WA, I’ve gradually become more acquainted with the Noongah world. Through Nalda Searles I was able to meet the spirited women artists down south-west, in Narrogin, who made us Seven Sisters dolls.

Back for another visit last week, I became much more aware of the Noongah presence in the city of Perth. On Friday night, I was walking up Barrack Street behind a lithe young man with a beat box on his shoulder playing disco music. I was really admiring his footwork, a mixture of Travolta and traditional dance. I felt in touch with Perth as a city, with the energy of its different people’s gathered together.

But it was short-lived. Six policemen came out of nowhere and surrounded the young man. Compared to the dancer, these men were ox-like. One of them got out the blue plastic gloves and they started interrogating him.

Dennis at first tried to be cheeky with them. He was a little out of it, but sharp. The moustached officer who was leading the group maintained a completely impassive face. Eventually, Dennis succumbed and took a submissive position, calling him ‘boss’. I heard them talking about something that had been picked up on a city security camera.

Pedestrians walked around the scene with as much impassiveness as the policeman. But I stood still, about five metres from the group, and kept my gaze fixed at the policeman. He turned to me and asked, ‘You got any questions’. I shook my head but stayed. I was curious to see what happened, but also wanted to be some kind of witness, at least to have some acknowledgment of what was happening.

Eventually, Dennis started being cheeky again. I think he was just getting restless. The policeman’s face seemed to soften. He was a long way from smiling, but it seemed a little more relaxed. They eventually let Dennis go.

I walked away with Dennis and told him I liked the way he danced. He laughed at me and asked for $3. We turned the corner and ran into a small group of Noongah men and women staggering around. They were talking about booze and glue. Dennis bumped into a young woman and she asked him if he wanted a ‘push’.

I doubt the police would admit to being racist. But they don’t need to be. There are racists enough in Perth, eager to get the baseball bat out on a drunken Noongah lad. The police are there just to clean up the mess, and make sure the semblance of public order is maintained.

That Dennis could really dance.

The role of black face

2009-10-16T10:17:00.002+11:00

There's been an outrage about an act involving Black Face in a revived television show Darryl Somers. Australians are seen as being backward and insensitive about the way comedy can ridicule people of different colour. It certainly doesn't place Australia in a great light to be seen as living in this neverland of the Deep South. But I do wonder whether there is potentially a worthwhile purpose in black face. I'm thinking particularly of its version in Cape Town, where people under apartheid known as Coloured were inspired by the American minstrels to create their own version of black face. There's something about this form that acknowledges inauthenticity while engaging with difference. I'd be hopeful that there's a way in which black face can help Australians engage with the difference between non-indigenous and indigenous. We've already seen with the Chooky dancers how effective 'white face' can be. If this was loosened up and there be a testing experimental attitude to it, it would help us come to terms with the essential inauthenticity of white existence in this country, where the best option might be to find ways of assimilating into indigenous culture, but in a way that acknowledges its secondary nature.

The mighty Murtoa stick shed

2009-06-02T09:39:00.001+10:00

Many year ago, when I was working for Museums Australia, I wrote about one of the wonders of Victoria, the Murtoa Stick Shed.

I was very pleased to see recently that Leigh Hammerton has hoisted a website in honour of this ‘found cathedral’. Let’s hope it helps gain a new life as a cultural centre of the Wimmera.

Help Nombeko leap over to Australia

2009-02-20T10:53:00.001+11:00

From Pam Zeplin comes the following request:

Nombeko Rwaxa was one of the B&B hosts for the 2007 South Project Gathering in Soweto. She was an integral part of the supportive local community in Orlando, Soweto that made this event so successful.

Nombeko has also been professionally associated with the music world with figures such as the late Lucky Dube. She received a kidney transplant not long ago and successfully competed in the National Transplant Games in South Africa. This has qualified Nombeko to come to Australia and compete in the World Transplant Games at the Gold Coast (Queensland) (August 22-30 2009), under the auspices of South African Transplant Sports Association (see attached letters and website www.transplantsports.org.za .

This association and its athletes are seeking sponsorship to attend these games. Individual as well as corporate sponsorship can be accepted. As a previous guest at her Zizwe Guesthouse in Orlando, Soweto Nombeko has asked me to help find sponsors for this life affirming project.

For further information Willie Uys, National Chairman, South African Transplant Sports Association (E-mail: info@transplantsports.org.za )

Getting to know wortabokarra

2009-02-11T23:11:00.001+11:00

There are several days in summer when Melbourne is whipped by scorching northerly winds. They come in across the great deserts of the centre and bake this southerly city. They often bring with them the top soil of the Wimmera, and sometimes even ash from nearby bushfires.

Despite living with the curse – and dread – of this wind, we haven’t yet given it a name. While one-off cyclones are personified, this regular visitor remains anonymous. It’s as thought we haven’t yet settled into the land enough yet to have developed the acquaintance.

In Crikey, an Adelaide vertebrate palaeontologist Jim McNamara nominates the Kaurna word wortabokarra:

In 1840, Teichelmann and Schurmann, recorded its meaning as: "north-west wind; tempestuous weather". They also have bokarra: "northwesterly wind, which is very hot during summer and indicates a storm".

This is more like it.

What are the word's roots?

I am not a linguist, but the same book (available as a copy from Google) tells me that worta means "behind" and karra is the redgum tree with other meanings of high, sky and heaven.

Perhaps one response to the tragedy of Black Saturday would be a finally give this wind a name. If anything, it is likely to become a more regular visitor. It’s time we got onto speaking terms with it.

Climate changed!

2009-02-08T11:18:00.001+11:00

The day began with talk of gardens. We are moving into the post-Magnolia era. No longer can we ornament our homes with camellia-centric gardens, no more erect birch trees. It’s back to the natives.

In terms of the disaster, the Victorian bushfires and Melbourne’s inferno is relatively mild. Compared to the disasters that can strike other cities due to earthquakes, the lost of life was small. But there seemed something like a loss of innocence on this day. We can no longer pretend to be a piece of green Europe tucked away in the antipodes. Instead, we’re part of a big brown continent. We can’t escape the cruel logic of its weather.

It’s time to join Australia.

The heatwave we had to have

2009-01-28T12:14:00.001+11:00

It was the week we had been dreading. After a comfortably mild December and early January, the inevitable heat wave was finally coming our way.

And it is going to be a killer. Five days straight of 40-degree heat. Perhaps it’s payment for the overdue hot days we missed so far. Plus the inexorable path of global warming. For a few cool days it seemed that all was pleasant in the world.

And then, on the first of the days, a gentle southerly breeze tempered the heat. Around midday, the temperature suddenly dropped and it seemed that perhaps we could escape the worst. Perhaps a butterfly sneezed in Beijing, and the high that has settled over Tasmania has quickly moved on.

But the northerlies eventually prevailed. If anything, the forecast now has got worst. It is going to be 43 degrees on Thursday.

After the collapse of Wall Street last year, the Australian government introduced a stimulus package to stave off recession. For a while, in December, it seemed that we would escape the worst. Extra dollars poured into shops for Christmas and there was plenty of fruit on the trees. It even rained.

And then there was the Obama inauguration, when the world seemed unified in a vision of hope. A passenger jet landed on the calm waters of the Hudson river. Obama started his mission ‘faithfully’. Jelena Dokic re-emerged from nowhere to win hearts at tennis.

But as the year rolls on, the newspapers are filled with more bad news and commentators are warning that with the downturn in China Australia will not escape economic hardship.

Things will get worse before they get better.

Last night Dokic lost.

It’s enough to make you a Stoic.

Mandatory Europeanism

2009-01-10T17:27:00.001+11:00

The chemist occupies a special place in a neighbourhood. The pharmacist claims a strangely intimate relation to the client. We entrust the man or woman in the white coat with the embarrassing details or our ailments, and niggling concerns about skin conditions and less savoury things. They help us in maintaining the armoury of public life.

Late last year, someone came into our chemist with an offer that was hard to refuse. He was about to open a branch of the super-chain Chemist Warehouse around the corner. ‘You can either sell us your business now, or you will go broke, as there’s no way you can match our prices.’ So they sold.

In its place is a chemist supermarket. The windows are plastered with crazy offers – I it looks cheap and nasty, people will think they are getting a bargain. Inside, it looks like any tacky supermarket, with aisles groaning with remaindered goods.

I decided I had to come and confront these demons soon after they were open, to give them a chance to win me over. Perhaps they are doing a social service, offering medical goods at a price that poor people could afford. No, instead the young man behind the counter sympathised with my position, and could see that it was a loss of neighbourhood. But, he said, ‘That’s what they are doing in Europe now, so, well…’

That’s certainly something to touch the sensitive republican nerve. So it’s done in Europe. Ok, I guess you’re right. Let’s give up on our local values, as if it is happening in Europe now, then it’s inevitable that will be happen here too. Resistance is futile.

This is our international European designer brand mentality, consigning us to the rubbish bin of history at the bottom of the world.

Or is it?

Is this your Australian dreaming?

2008-12-27T14:53:00.001+11:00

I spend most of my during Australia trying to counter my instinct to deconstruct its mythification. It seemed too easy to criticise the way it glossed over reality. Australia is, after all, an entertainment constructed to enchant the great southern land for a new generation. But there were two moments that left me feeling quite uneasy about the Australia that it constructed, particularly for a non-indigenous audience.

The plot of the film revolved largely around the plight of a young half-caste boy, Nulla. To a large degree, this was was the exclusive point of engagement with Aboriginal Australia. As such, it was a profoundly unequal relationship. While Nulla has a little magic at his disposal, he still needed the heroism of the Drover to save his life. The only reciprocal adult relationship was between the Drover and his ex-wife's brother, who taunted him that he didn't belong in this land. But the brother-in-law was removed from the plot, killed while valiantly defending the mission boys.

If I was a Freudian looking for an uncanny moment around while the film unravelled, then I would probably look to the scene when the Drover took charge of his promised stead, Capricornia. This horse differed from others primarily by its colour - jet black. The scene depicts the Drover manfully taming the wild energy of the horse, bringing it under his control and making it part of the business of the farm. It seems emblematic of what the film as a whole does, in subjugating the politically difficult indigenous cultures of Australia into a directorial spectacle. Why such a black horse? Why the absence of black men in the Australia that remained?

The second scene was at the very end. At first, I was relieved that Nulla was allowed to go walkabout with his grandfather. But the final words -- as I can remember them -- were along the lines of 'we are part of the same country, but you have your dreaming and I have mine.' So what did the film suggest was 'our' dreaming?

The overt non-indigenous myth in the film was the Wizard of Oz, which Nulla cleverly was able to elicit as a source of dreaming in the stiff English aristocrat. This choice of film was partly word play - on 'Oz' as the land of Australia and 'Somewhere over the Rainbow' as a reference to the rainbow serpent dreaming. But the Oz story itself reflected American cinema as a factory of dreams. As a product of this factory, Australia seemed more closely modelled on the American western than the tradition of local cinema. It had none of the eccentricity of the great Australian films of the 1970s. It was great to see an actor like Bruce Spence again, but he was left with a thinly stereotyped role, especially compared to the captivating appearance in Mad Max.

Apart from Hollywood as our dreamtime, the other major non-indigenous story was about the cattle industry. Surely at a time when we are more aware of the serious environmental degradation due to beef production, this seems hardly a pursuit on which to model Australia.

Maybe Australia is the last fruit of our spectacle culture. As financial realities knock down the economic house of cards, perhaps a new cinema will emerge to explore the cracks in the façade. After all, that's closer to home.

Gracias

2008-12-26T11:33:00.001+11:00

Kevin Rudd reflecting on his encounter with the Sisters of Mercy mission helping indigenous Peruvians

Thank-you for advancing the task of global reconciliation between settled communities, settler communities and indigenous communities around the world.

'Remarks at Launch of the National Australia Bank Reconciliation Action Plan' Parliament House Canberra' (1/12/2008)

The Tucumán connection

2008-12-26T10:27:00.001+11:00

un amigo es como un hermano pero mejor, porque no heredás su ropa
Originally uploaded by quino para los amigos

We hear that the Queensland race relations policy was the inspiration for South African apartheid legislation. Here's another unfortunate southern connection.

The story of the cultural intervention of the sugar industry in the Calchaquí valley plays out as a perfect metaphor of the white Argentina myth. In Congress, Deputy Padilla and fellow Tucumán representative Juan Simón Padrós fought to obtain a legal recognition of the sugar industry as a “white industry.” This unusual label had nothing to do with the color of the product but with the ethnicity of the workers who toiled in fields and mills. Padilla and Padrós invoked the example of Australia, which in 1914 included the sugar industry under the “White Australia Act,” banning Aboriginal and Melanesian workers and receiving in compensation protective tariffs against cheap Javanese sugar. Argentines wanted similar protection against Cuban and Brazilian sugar, which, according to the industrialists’ twisted explanation, competed favorably with Tucumán sugar because of the exploitation of “inferior races.”86 Tucumán industrialists claimed to be forced to hire only white criollo workers, “whose higher living standards could not be compared to the colored workers of Java, Hawaii, etc.” The industrialists took pride in providing jobs for the large criollo population of the northwest but demanded a protective tariff in recognition of their patriotic commitment.

Oscar Chamosa 'Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley' Hispanic American Historical Review 2008, 88: 1, pp. 71-106, p. 100

'From out part of the world...'

2008-11-18T08:52:00.001+11:00

In Kevin Rudd's friendly chat about what's been happening at the G20 Summit, note how he opens his address, talking about the nations that were present. He talks about the 'US, other major economies around the world, and a lot from our part of the world as well...'

How refreshing to hear Australia linked to its neighbours. Is a subtle move away from the old idea of 'deputy sheriff', being the proxy for the more powerful countries in the distant north.

Farewell to post-colonialism

2008-08-24T12:24:00.001+10:00

The third Guangzhou Triennial is just about to open with a theme 'farewell to post-colonialism'. It is interesting to see their take on this. From the introduction:

For some years major international contemporary exhibitions around the world have worked towards building up ‘discursive sites for a cacophony of voices’ and ‘negotiated spaces of diverse values’, emphasising ‘correctness’ in cultural politics; these have inadvertently triumphed to the neglect of independent pursuit of artistic creativity and alternative imaginative worlds. Concepts of identity, multiplicity and difference are now slowly losing their edge to become new restrictions for artistic practice, succumbing to the phenomena of ‘false representation’ and ‘multi-cultural managerialism’.

It will be interesting to see if this is a departure from politics itself, towards what appears to be a large movement towards enchantment - the power of art not to change the world but to provide relief from it.

An alternative farewell to post-colonialism reflects the changing world order with previous victims of Western imperialism, like India and China, now aspiring to be active agents in the world order themselves. Perhaps this is part of it. Perhaps it doesn't need to be said.

Two sides of the Pacific

2008-07-29T23:12:00.001+10:00

Offered for exclusive tastes in Santiago is high class Australian meat cuisine.

Meanwhile, Melbourne artist Peter Burke is filling Altona billboards with the real drama on the streets of this southern city.

Dark clouds not on the horizon

2008-07-29T13:08:00.001+10:00

Within the liberal classes, we have become so used to our own sense of tolerance and cosmopolitanism, we may be blind to the danger of complacent insularity from within.

The People's Republic of Brunswick is a widely celebrated bastion of multiculturalism. After Italian, Greek and Arab, the latest region to add its culture to the suburb's diversity is African. In Lygon Street is the new store with goods and crafts from east Africa. Mahmoud Leman is here holding a bowl made by local Eritreans from recycled materials. His wife Halima Sheikhdin has been particularly involved in this activity.

I visited this store on my way to a 'town hall' meeting at the East Brunswick Hotel where a panel was discussing the latest plan for development in Brunswick. The hotel was packed to the gills with locals keenly interested to ensure that their suburb was protected from threats from outside. One of the proposals considered was a ring road to direct cars away from Brunswick.

Looking around at the crowd, it was hard to find anyone - including myself - who was not Anglo middle class. There were no Greeks or Africans present. While seeming noble in motive, reflecting a shared consensus in 'green' values, I couldn't repress a feeling of apprehension that this is a kind of middle class gentility whose hidden purpose is to ensure homogeneity. It's a terrible thought, which I attribute to some devil whispering in my ear. But I await the voice of the angel to dispute this.

And last night, I went to the surprise lecture of the next director of the Sydney Biennale, David Elliot. While celebrating 'impurity' in art, he actually contextualised this within the consciousness of the artist, rather than a critical engagement with impurity as we have seen in psychoanalysis or postcolonialism. The sense was that the free bohemian artist was above the crude divisions that exist in the world. This disengagement of art from the world (suggested partly in this year's Biennale) does not bode well for responses to climate change. Will re-localisation prove to create comfort zones for well-endowed elites?

Well, someone has to ask the question, if only to be proved wrong.

Gubbaworld

2008-07-27T12:16:00.001+10:00

At Melbourne's Platform gallery is a curious exhibition for us commuters to reflect on our lack of belonging to the land.

Here's how Sharon West explains Gubbaworld:

Presenting colonial pseudo-histories and other follies
Gubbaworld is derived from the Koori name for white people. This exhibition parodies the notion of the museum diorama cabinet, offering pseudo narratives of Victorian settler history and draws reference on the Indigenous dioramas of Melbourne Museum and the Great Colonial Exhibitions of the late 1800s. The work themes also focus on settler and Indigenous contact, exploring parables and inversions that satirise the ideas of the great Southern land, the Noble Savage and white colonisation.

It's a humorous take on the naïve settler romance about native peoples. There's some reversals, as in the piece below, which put Koori's in the place of cultural tourists.

The effect of this exhibition is for us to laugh at the outmoded colonial movements, such as Jindyworabaks, who essentialised Indigenous cultures. But it does raise the question of where this places us today. Is the now official acknowledgement of Indigenous custodianship enough? Where do non-Indigenous now place themselves in this scene today?

A new Jerusalem
An attempt in the transplantation of British culture onto the Indigenous landscape. The Koori campsite is remodelled into a pleasant English village

We're in, they're out

2008-07-10T23:56:00.001+10:00

The Occidental is, primarily, the place of hegemonic epistemology rather than a geographical sector on the map. Samuel Huntington demonstrated as much when he placed Australia in the First World and in the West while leaving Latin America out.

Walter Mignolo The Idea of Latin America Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 37

Two leaders of the South

2008-07-09T12:57:00.001+10:00

Recently two leaders of southern nations have delivered lectures at the London School of Economics. Though both coming from ex-colonised on the other side of the world, and representing fresh democratic energies, they had very different stories to tell.

The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd started his address on 7 April with jokes about the Australian superiority in cricket. His 'colonial strut' reflected a young boisterous nation goading its slow-moving but beloved parent. The speech was an opportunity to outline Britain's relation to the aspiration that Australia be the 'most Asia-literate nation in the collective West.' He made an emphatic point that:

Today I want to argue that, in a rapidly changing world, Australia and the United Kingdom have a lot to gain from working with each other to shape the emerging global order – particularly given Britain’s strength in Europe and Australia’s standing in Asia.

So here is the arrangement of the two close Anglo nations within the collective West. Britain looks after Europe, and Australia looks after Asia. The assumption is that the collective West is the principle actor on the world stage, steering history on a safe course. No doubt this assumption will be seriously challenged in future years.

Three days before, the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet addressed the LSE about the situation in her country. It began as a very serious talk, emphasising issues of statecraft and the role of the government in transcending competing interests between different groups. While a little dry, she had some interesting things to say about the challenge to confront the culture of political belligerence and create a civic discourse in which opposing points of view can debate calmly. Towards the end, she started to make some jokes in a way far more spontaneous than Rudd. There was no reference to Britain whatsoever in her talk.

As she left he podium, Bachelet was presented with a cup similar to that given to Nelson Mandela. As another leader of the South, was Rudd given a similar gift?

Betancourt's release - it's not all good news

2008-07-06T18:39:00.001+10:00

So after six years in jungle captivity, Ingrid Betancourt is finally released. Certainly, one can only share the joy of her release, the relief of a painless rescue and the ecstasy of a family re-united.

But there's also case for some regret. One of Betancourt's first acts on release is to fly to France and express her appreciation for the support of the French people, particularly the President, Nicolas Sarkosy. 'I owe my life to France', she says.

It seems a strange statement for her to make. France apparently had no role in the rescue operation. It was the Colombians who risked their lives for her.

The immediate flight to France, where she has begun to give details of the horrors of the Colombian jungle, can only confirm the belief in most first world counties of the lawlessness and barbarity of the South.

There are many references in the story of her rescue to a Hollywood script. It's as though she was saved not by real soldiers but by Stephen Spielberg. The way the story has been told is testimony to the cultural hegemony of the West, and the fantasy of world redemption that is enacted in US action films.

So, despite the joy of Betancourt's reunion with family and friends, I feel a twinge of regret that this episode only confirms the hierarchy of North and South - the powerful, civilised force of the North, pitted against the disorganised, barbaric forces of the South.

It reaffirms the aspirational perspective of the South, where the lucky few who are able to escape are lauded as great national heroes.

None of this counters the pleasure in Betancourt's release. I just wish she would have stayed in Colombia.

The Zimbabwe issue

2008-06-23T23:33:00.001+10:00

The incessant stories of corruption, violence and ineptitude from the current Zimbabwe government make it impossible to consider that their position is based on anything other than self-interest.

But there's always another point of view. Where would it be? Try listening to the BBC interview with the Zimbabwe information minister Ndlovu. At one point, the interview hectors the minister 'Well, it's practice in our country to asks questions of the politicians!' The tone was so redolent of imperialism, you could understand how the present government is able to sustain its belief that the colonials are still a threat.

There may be many more stories about Zimbabwe that we never get to hear. It makes you wonder if the news blockade is not so much about information getting into Zimbabwe as anything other than the story of chaos emerging from Zimbabwe itself.

Our Other Hemisphere

2008-06-20T16:29:00.001+10:00

Below is the original of a slightly edited article for The Age:

Kevin Rudd has spent the last week heralding an Asian century. Now he has returned back to Australian soil, it’s timely to open up Rudd’s narrative to scrutiny. There are some big questions yet to be asked.

Rudd claims that ‘Australia has to make itself the most Asia-literate country in the collective West'. Debate so far has focused on becoming more engaged with the Asian region. But this misses the wood for the trees. There’s a larger assumption in Rudd’s statement that has so far escaped our attention.

‘Collective West’?

Curious, isn’t it, for a country in the South-East end of the world to be part of the West. It’s more politics than geography. The ‘collective West’ is a natural complement to the earlier grouping, the ‘Global South’, which includes countries in the geographical North such as China and India. Our position inside this ‘collective West’, yet located South, should prompt more discussion than it does.

The 'collective West' is conjured today in a number of ways. Positively, it is the bastion of liberal values, promoting democracy, religious tolerance and individual freedom. Defensively, it is the target of resentment by those on its fringes, such as Islamic fundamentalists and ex-communists. Conservative commentator Victor Hansen describes the ‘collective West’ as a ‘wandering Odysseus’ encountering monsters at every turn. It is an epic of progress that we share with the first rank of nations.

But the phrase has a particular meaning to Kevin Rudd. In his 2005 address to University of New South Wales, Rudd described how Christianity has been displaced from its once privileged position at the centre of the 'collective West' to its current status as a marginal faith, returning to its origins.

This concept of a minority belief sets up Australia’s position as a marginal but friendly force within the wider Asian context. Rudd used his Indonesian visit to call for an interfaith dialogue to explore common values of Christian and Muslim societies. Rudd’s ‘collective West’ is no crusading power, seeking to bring the world under its dominion. It can be a key player in someone else’s game.

So why should one of its lesser powers, Australia, be granted this privileged position in Asia? Geographic location seems an obvious advantage, but it is quicker to fly to Beijing from London than Sydney. More likely it is our shared time zones and—as a younger nation—our capacity to adapt to Asian values.

And why should we want this position? For a politician, Asia brings home the bacon. We hope to ride the Asian tiger, feeding its hunger for development with our minerals and degrees. But what does this say about our identity as a nation? Are we anything more than regional opportunists?

The ‘collective West’ ennobles our ambitions. It is heartening to be part of a bigger team. In colonial times, Australia was the 'last outpost of the British empire'. During the war on terror, we proudly wore the badge of ‘Deputy Sheriff’.

Australia lost the first position when Britain joined the European Union. Our position of deputy is now endangered by the emergence of a new Sheriff, China. Rather than continue to be left out of the main game, Rudd offers the hope that we can be at the centre of our own regional grouping, an Asia Pacific Union.

But it’s only one side of the story. Rudd talks about the need for a spirit of cooperation in ‘our hemisphere’. Let’s not forget our other hemisphere. That mysterious title ‘Great Southern Land’ has traditionally identified Australia with the antipodes. Despite these romantic images, we maintain a blinkered vision, only looking north.

We tend to see ourselves alone in the South. Our common boast is to possess the 'biggest in the Southern Hemisphere,’ which can apply to anything from Highland Gatherings to car parks. This South is a kind of B League where we can excel, knowing we would be thrashed in the Premiership Division.

But Australia is not alone in this aspiration. When you look on the Internet, you find that Brazil, the China of the South, has twice as many claims to this distinction as Australia. Our ‘big pond’ mentality blinds us to those across our own latitude.

What about the view to our east, with the emerging economies and creative talents of Latin America? Or to our west, with the trade in our other ‘big pond’, the Indian Ocean? With strengthening democracy and economic growth averaging 5%, the South is a region waiting for our attention.

We have more in common that we realise. It’s with the South that we share the irony of a summer Christmas, imagining we’re in the North Pole while it’s 40 degrees outside. Australia is just one of many Southern countries increasingly dependent on China’s hunger for our resources. And we share the challenge of talent drain, as our best and brightest are lured to the prizes of the North. Aspirationalism alone doesn’t change that fundamental global asymmetry. We need to re-imagine what it means to live in the South.

Regardless of continental shift and rising water levels, we’re likely to remain in the South. We will continue to dwell in that half of the world which the West once chose as its collective mine, farm and prison. We share with other countries in this region a common legacy of repression and similar hopes of reconciliation.

There’s no doubt that our main bets will be placed with Asia, at least for economic reasons. However, we need to complement this northern push with an increased engagement across our South. Finding a place among our southern cousins is just as much part of our journey as doing business in Asia.

As Nelson Mandela says, ‘True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.’ Nor should progress consist in forgetting where you are now.

The Empire Fights Back at the Empire Writes Back

2008-06-17T22:20:00.001+10:00

Tonight a voice of the new confident India emerged out of the ashes of postcolonialism. The Centre for Postcolonial Writing at Monash University hosted a forum at the State Library with a keynote address by Professor Harish Trivedi on the subject 'An Alternative Postcolonial: Language, Location and Culture'.

His address seemed aimed squarely at one of the panelists, Bill Ashcroft, who thirty years ago is credited with inventing the term 'postcolonial' in the seminal publication The Empire Writes Back. Trivedi's point was the colonialism was a mere 'blip' in India's history and postcolonialism is an anglo-centric discourse which ignores the rich precolonial and contemporary literature in languages like Hindi. He claimed that the field ignores the critical difference between white settler societies like Australia and brown cultures like India.

As an address, it was tendentious and arrogant. But Trivedi did expose an issue within the framework of postcolonial. His insistence points to the need for an academic discourse that can encompass what is loosely called 'world literature', which includes but goes beyond the colonial experience.

The challenge he is to find the critical language to analyse this corpus. For Trivedi, this seemed about the tensions between nationalities and globalisation.

It was wonderful to find a forum where a voice like Trivedi's could be expressed, though how Australian academic institutions respond to this challenge remains to be seen.

From Guam to Brisbane

2008-06-16T15:13:00.001+10:00

It's great to see dialogue between Australia and lesser-known communities in the Pacific:

Attend the Public Forum: The Hidden War in the Pacific & Community Dinner
For over 60 years, the United States has held the people of Guam hostage to its military ambitions – US bases cover one third of the total land area of the small Pacific island and there are plans to expand the bases and flood Guam with upwards of 50,000 military personnel and their dependents. The indigenous people of Guam, the Chamoru, have waged a long struggle to protect their land and culture from the effects of militiarisation and colonisation.
Two representatives of the Chamoru people will be in Brisbane to discuss and to build support for their struggle, to strengthen links between the peace movement in Australia and the people of Guam, and to increase awareness and understanding of the role Australia is playing in the militarisation of the Pacific.
Both the special guest speakers at the public forum represented the Chamoru people at the Seventh Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York in April 2008.
Saturday June 28. BBQ: 1pm. Public meeting: 2pm
St Mary’s Church, cnr Peel & Merivale Sts, Sth Brisbane
Community Dinner (Potluck) to welcome both Chamoru activists and Darumbal elders to Brisbane.
Thursday June 26, 6pm at St Mary’s Church house. Please bring something to share.

Winter in the South

2008-06-01T21:33:00.001+10:00

Winter begins in the South...

Australians read extraordinary news that 'normal rainfall' predicted for this winter.
Australian Opposition leader berates the Prime Minister to understand the serious consequences of the variance in petrol prices, which make the difference between whether the family will eat 'processed sausage or chops' that night.
The Australian art world tries to take the high ground in response to charges of obscenity, but find it now highly contested territory.
In Santiago, Chile, water supplies are cut after 'too much rain'.
News of riots in Johannesburg confirms old prejudices about South Africa.
No news of the millions of acts of daily kindness that sustain the complex web of ethnic differences in the 'rainbow nation'
We look for our favourite old scarf, down South.

A tale of two slaves

2008-05-02T08:29:00.001+10:00

Recent time spent in Chile has prompted some thoughts about its position in relation to Australia. So what does it mean that Australia speaks the same language as the masters of globalisation, England and USA? Does this give Australia a privileged status in the South, or prevent it recognising its shared marginality with countries like Argentina or Chile?

One way of thinking about this is to imagine the scenario of two slaves:

There were two slaves, John and Juan. John is the descendent of a local family who had been slaves for many generations. Juan was captured during a raid on a foreign country and purchased in a local slave market.

While John and Juan were both equally good with their hands, they were quite different in important ways. Juan was by far the more handsome of the two. Having once been a freeman, Latin slave had elegant manners and style. However, Juan still had trouble understanding English and always felt a foreigner. Being an Englishman himself, John was much more confident, despite his crude manners.

Their master, Mr Bull, was a merchant with a thriving business selling and buying spices from overseas colonies. He was blessed with a beautiful daughter, Mary, who was the object of devotion by many young men in the town. Mr Bull and his daughter were callous towards their two slaves. They enjoyed throwing them bones at mealtime and laughed heartily as John and Juan scrambled after the scraps of food.

Both John and Juan were captivated by the beauty of the daughter. John even fantasised that one day he would be freed and could marry Mary. Any attention from Mary, even if was abusive, was taken as a sign of affection by John. ‘Get me a bag of cinnamon, boy’ she would shout, and he would feel honoured to be singled out for this important mission.

For Juan it was a different story. While he could well appreciate the beauty of Mary, he had no delusions that a day would come when he could ever win her heart, or gain acceptance in the Bull family. He knew he didn’t belong. Instead, he would content himself with the occasional small theft of food or wine. Sometimes he would be caught and whipped harshly. But he grew more clever and deceitful.

So the two slaves sit together in the evening, chewing on what bones were left for them. John says, ‘Hey Juan, you dirty Latin thief, pity you’re not smart enough to respect the ways of the Bulls and avoid the lash.’ Juan knew enough English to understand the meaning of these words. But rather than answer directly, he would dwell in his resentment, ‘You think you’re so special, being English. But in the end, we’re both scum in the eyes of the Bulls. At least I can see that.’

So John and Juan endure their bondage, divided from each other as much as from their masters. It’s a shame. Perhaps if they worked together they could collaborate on an escape—John’s understanding of the master tongue combined with Juan’s guile.

Can Matilda learn to tango?

Tale of two cities

2008-03-31T14:20:00.001+11:00

	In New South Wales, commuters are being asked to imagine a 'Euro-style Metro' as the future horizon for Sydney's troubled transport system. 'Euro' here signifies a system which is slick, clean, efficient.
	While in Melbourne, The Age newspaper tried to publicise the transport woes with the image of the new train system in Delhi, India. It says:

AS MELBOURNE tinkers with its largely pre-World War II public transport system and puts up with congested roads, commuters in the Indian capital, New Delhi, are revelling in a state-of-the-art Metro

So what's it going to be? Euro or Indian? While Euro might be more familiar, I think there's more to learn on the train to Delhi.

Octave Mannoni

2008-03-09T17:11:00.001+11:00

Octave Mannoni was a Lacanian psychoanalyst who used his experience in Madagascar to comment in the psychological experience of colonisation. His views are widely discredited as ill-informed and chauvinist. However, his prognostication about the future non-indigenous peoples in the South is worth a sober glance:

...it would not be over-bold to foresee in the distant future the development of a new kind of white or near-white humanity over almost the whole of the southern hemisphere of the ancient world, a type more different, psychologically, from that of the north than any of the northern peoples are from each other from east to west. If national psychologies remain as constant as appears to be the case, we can already forecast what the main characteristics of this new type will be: lack of originality and creativity, a distinct taste for feudal types of organisation, and a lively desire to avoid infection from the complexes of the northern hemisphere… the new white or near-white (white enough at any rate not to feel inferior in the southern hemisphere) human beings I have envisaged would on the whole be far less worthy products than are Europeans, unless as a result of having to grapple with fresh difficulties they acquired some qualities other than mere pride in the race of their birth.

Octave Mannoni Prospero And Caliban: The Psychology Of Colonization (trans. Pamela Powesland) Ann Arbor: University of Michegan Press, 1990, p. 128

There's always awkwardness in engaging in these terms of debate. The future of 'white peoples' evokes the racist discourse associated with laws such as the White Australia Policy. However, the argument is worth considering. According to Mannoni, the sense of superiority felt by colonists retards their development. They are complacent in their righteous culture and resist innovation.

Those of us in Australia who have just emerged from the Howard era might find an echo of truth in his analysis. The challenge now is to find sources of cultural change in the recent recognition of culpability. Rather than a simple squaring of accounts, it should be followed by a critical examination of the settler experience. If we are not returning back the land that we stole, what productive use are we going to find for this ill-gotten gain?

A 'Dirty Mile' through the enchanted forest

2008-02-26T18:07:00.001+11:00

Ilbijerri Theatre have developed a tour of Fitzroy's Gertrude Street, highlighting the Koori Sites of Significance. Based on a concept of the late Lisa Bellear, actors take the audience along time and space, from the original European contact in the Carlton Gardens to the infamous Charcoal Lane, the site of Archie Roach's song.

While there, audience members were given pieces of chalk and asked to leave messages. If you click on the image, you can get a larger version that will be easier to read.

It's a quite an intimate and visceral theatre, with audience being constantly herded along streets. Sometimes, the passersby look as though they could be extras, but that's Fitzroy for you.

The underlying story of repression and resilience. It's a powerful counterpoint to the commercial image of Gertrude Streets, which consistently evokes the European forest.

I imagine it's hard to get tickets for this season, but well worth the try.

Kosovo at last

2008-02-17T11:52:00.001+11:00

Here's the Victorian Herald-Sun from 17 May 1999, when the Premier Jeff Kennett greeted refugees from Kosovo in the Albanian language. That was when Australians embraced these people and presented an image of this wide brown land as an open-hearted refuge for persecuted peoples.

We lost the plot for a while. The shock jocks and Pauline Hansen made sure the Kosovars did not outstay their welcome. Howard cultivated a xenophobia towards refugees. But now we have a 'new page', so let's hope we can recover that sense of welcome that we extended back in 1999.

And today, Kosovo will finally be granted independence. Albanians in Australia have fought long and hard for this day. Congratulations. The struggle of great figures like Ibrahim Rugova has been worth it. There are many challenges ahead, but destiny is now in your hands.

Urime!, Përgëzime!

Smooth the pillow?

2008-02-17T11:38:00.001+11:00

Inge Glendinnen is a widely-respected intelligent writer who has described with great care and sensitivity the workings of cultures as distant from our own as the Aztecs. She was recently a strong supporter of the Federal Government 'intervention' in Northern Territory. Her post-Howard article in The Age is cause for some concern.

She writes about the harsh and violent conditions in the most remote Aboriginal communities. Invoking the term 'self-modernisation', she sees intervention as a matter of giving Aboriginal people the choice to either stay with their isolation or become more like everyone else. She admits, this might see the end of Aboriginal culture:

The next decade might see the end of that most obdurate element of Aboriginal "resistance": their determination, sustained since first contact, to remain themselves by living among themselves. Should that happen, it will become our duty to measure and mourn what we, and they, have lost.

It's an extremely sensitive issue, but lurking at the back of Glendinnen's remarks is the idea that the responsibility of whitefellas is to 'smooth the pillow of the dying race' -- expressing sadness at the loss of these people, but complying with a positivist model of civilisation and the ultimate dominance of Western culture. That may seem harsh, but is there another way to look at it?

A beautiful sorry morning

2008-02-13T10:33:00.001+11:00

On a cool summer morning, someone said 'sorry'. He spoke of 'non-indigenous' Australians as 'them'. He attributed total responsibility to government. It's an inspiring beginning, but where will we go from here?

Given the emotion of the day, what seemed most powerful about Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations was respectful silence that accompanied it. Despite the personal traumas experienced directly and witness associated with the policy of racial assimilation, there seemed little display of emotion in the actual presentation of the apology. Rudd’s faltering delivery was workmanlike. Bob Hawke would certainly have been in tears. For today, emotions can wait. Let’s get the business over first.

It’s a defining moment in the ‘new chapter’ of Australia. In laying blame for the Stolen Generation, Rudd was careful to exempt those who carried out the policies. Instead, he attributed responsibility to the parliament who framed the legislation. He ended by inviting the leader of the opposition to join him in a commission that would ‘change the way Australians think about themselves.’ While today is critical in the unfinished story of reconciliation, it is also a day for asserting the authority of government. Is this good for the culture of a nation? Should government be the only conduit for change?

One very reassuring aspect of Rudd’s speech is the way he addressed ‘non-indigenous Australians’. He spoke of ‘them’ in the third person, just as he had the ‘Indigenous Australians’. This was critical. If he has spoken of ‘us’, then it would have been another post-colonial confession admitting past wrongs but maintaining the dominant position. There was a relatively equal place in Rudd’s language for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Of course, this does not reflect the inequalities between the two—the economic superiority of whitefellas and the cultural richness of Indigenous Australians. But we can begin to think of them as in dialogue with each other.

In terms of Australia’s recent history, there was a sense of historic justice in the focus on the white Australian practice of stealing children from their families. In recent years, we’ve experienced a number of xenophobic scandals associated with acts like Tampa that have focused on disregard for children as the ultimate sign of being ‘unAustralian’. Yet here, at the core of Australian history, is an official practice of breaking apart families.

‘Turning the page together’ on a ‘new chapter’ in Australia’s history, it’s a wonderful morning for us all. It’s a good moment to start thinking anew about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous identity.

Melbourne Forecast
Issued at 4:50 am EDT on Wednesday 13 February 2008
Fine apart from a brief shower or two this morning. Partly cloudy with a moderate to occasionally fresh southerly wind.
Precis: Clearing shower or two.
City: Max 20

The flame of civilization

2008-01-20T13:56:00.001+11:00

I've just finished reading Tropical Truth, but Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso. It's an extremely contentious, but inspiring witness to the creative energies around the nexus of art and music in 20th century Brazil.

Like many other Brazilian artists, Veloso's work seems borne of the struggle against the exoticisation of the south. Rather than present the South as primitive other to the rational North, he advocates a continuity of the rationalist project, albeit with a detour:

The great movement that carried the flame of civilization from the globe's warm regions into the cold of the northern hemisphere - thence on to Japan and the neocapitalist Asian tigers and neocommunist China - this movement is ripe for a detour. And it may have as its horizon a myth of Brazil - the American, Lusophonic, mestizo giant of the southern hemisphere.
Caetano Veloso Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution in Brazil New York: De Capo Press, 2002 (orig. 1997), p. 324

There's a reasonable quota of Lusophone mysticism in the book. But it results in a dense creativity, woven in the dialogue between musicians and artists and through samba, Bossa Nova and Tropicalismo. How can we connect this to other creative energies in the South?

Where is a Melbourne of the north?

2008-01-11T17:02:00.001+11:00

The Age editorial (7/1/2008) advocated for Melbourne's position as the next UNESCO City of Literature by seeing that the city could be a mirror of the north:

In this respect, Melbourne has all the qualifications to be the Edinburgh of the south: our rich literary tradition, nourished by support from writers and readers but also from government and local government, sets the stage or builds the shelf (pick your metaphor) for this city to be a national and international centre for literature and all its offshoots.
Melbourne: city of literature and literacy - Editorial - Opinion - theage.com.au

This phrase 'x of the south' subscribes to a model of the world where the origins exist on the north, and it is left for those cities in the south like Melbourne to aspire to be like them.

I like Fergus Hume's citation, in the world's first detective novel, set in Melbourne.

Some writer has described Melbourne as Glasgow, with the sky of Alexandria; and certainly the beautiful climate of Australia, so Italian in its brightness, must have a great effect on the nature of such an adaptable race as the Anglo-Saxon… Climatic influence should be taken into account with regard to the future Australian, and our prosperity will be no more like us than the luxurious Venetians resembled their hardy forefathers, who first started to build on those lonely sandy islands of the Adriatic.
Fergus Hume The Mystery of a Hansom Cab Melbourne: Sun Books, 1971 (orig. 1886)

While Melbourne aspires alternatively to be a Glasgow or Edinburgh of the south, is there a town in Scotland that is one day hoping people will call it the 'Melbourne of the north'?

The limits of mateship

2008-01-09T15:19:00.001+11:00

An enduring image of the last-minute Australian victory over India in the second Test was the wild celebrations by the triumphant cricketers. While excited to embrace and cavort with their 'mates', none of the Aussies sought a sportsmanlike handshake with the Indian batsmen who had contributed to the exciting finish. This has caused outrage in not only in the sub-continent, but Australia as well. It highlights the paradox in the value of mateship, which brings together white men in a bond of camaraderie, though casts a shadow over those who are considered foreign. It includes by excluding.

It's the same kind of mistake that occurs in the Australian colony in Paraguay. Though built on the ideal of a fellowship of man, it cast the darker man as an enemy.

The assumption that Anglo-Saxons were inherently superior to Hispano-Indians was as much a part of the colony's creed as teetotalism, a principle which had also been made explicit in the New Australia articles of association, but was now an unwritten law. The racial attitudes the colonists had brought with them from Australia were revealed by some of the facetious advertisements in Evening Notes: 'Boycott the Chinkie and save yourselves from the Yellow Agony by buying your vegetables from white gardener -- John Wilson'; 'Baxter's shoes - Nigger tickler clogs.'… this was not gracious, for on the whole Cosme fared well in its deadlings with the Government of Paraguay.
Gavin Souter A Peculiar People: The Australians In Paraguay Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968

But this is clearly not representative of all Australians. Counter-balancing this xenophobic mateship is a 'fair go' egalitarianism that assumes all are equal. Let's hope this value is encouraged by the conflict between Australia and India, rather than deepening trenches.

An Advanced Diploma in Mumbo Jumbo

2007-12-31T15:54:00.001+11:00

As part of what's been heralded as 'new Southern Studies', a number of critical texts have been focusing on the unacknowledged inheritance of African values in the American South. These texts have something to offer not such for an understanding of American culture, but for cultures like Australia that have been influenced by the dominant force.

I've just finished Keith Cartwright's Reading Africa Into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 2004). It's a fascinating analysis West African roots. Cartwright covers the Uncle Remus stories, Creole languages, second-sight and Senegambian values. Especially interesting is his analysis of the way literate Muslim slaves were treated. While early in the history of the south, their education was respected and many were freed, in a later more racist time their learning was demeaned. A product of this 'mumbo jumbo', which is still alive as a denigration of African learning. The inscrutable Arabic text became a symbol of primitive mystification:

The question here is what happened when the growing racial ideologies behind American 'Samboism' clashed with the reality of a literate Muslim slave presence in America. The presence of literate, black African Muslims as slaves in American often caused moments of doubt, challenge, and embarrassment to supports of a racial justification of slavery. (p. 160)

Threaded throughout Cartwright's book is a series of Africanisms - words from Senegambian culture that have become part of the American idiom. He ends the book with a call for a recovery of these African roots:

As we work to read Africa and Africanist ideologies into their long-standing core position in American identity, culture, and literature, we are taking a step toward finding historical truth and needful balm for festering, long-ignored wounds. And as we come to respect some of the energies of action channeled through the pharmacopoeia of the Senegalese mocho'o (medicine worker), we make return to the vital work of treating the foundational 'mojo' of transatlantic chattle slavery, a 'mojo' that is (in its ever-rippling causes and effects) a source of the nation's most enduring curses and simultaneously a source of our peculiarly American genius. (p. 229)

Official: Australia is not the 'biggest in the Southern Hemisphere'

2007-12-21T12:09:00.001+11:00

Image from recent demonstration to keep North Melbourne football club in Victoria.

In Australia, we are keen to boast our various claims to be the 'biggest in the Southern Hemisphere.' Googling this phrase in English reveals 3,840 instances on the Internet (by comparison, ‘biggest in the Northern Hemisphere’ is only mentioned 8 times). The subjects of this claim include cultural activities (Scottish Highland Festival, temple and casino), sports (rodeo, triathalon and marathon) and man-made structures (desalination plant, drive-in and telescope).

With the aid of Google, it is possible to test whether Australia’s boast is the most common in the Southern Hemisphere. To search for the equivalent phrase in Spanish produced only 1,530 hits, however the Portuguese had 4,690. A sampling of country references in the three languages, weighted by the frequency of language, reveals the following table of claims in order of percentage frequency:

COUNTRY	CLAIMS
Brazil	44%
Australia	21%
South Africa	16%
New Zealand	6%
Argentina	4%
Multinationals	4%
Chile	2%
Pacific	2%
Other African	2%

Given the population and economy of Brazil, it is no surprise that it has twice as many claims as Australia. While putting Australia in its place, this table does prompt us to consider Australia as part of a community of nations inhabiting the South. But what do they share in common apart from this aspirationalism?

Is there a South for Rudd?

2007-12-13T22:14:00.001+11:00

The first days of the Rudd government have revealed an interesting exclusion. In discussing the appointment of West Australian Stephen Smith as Foreign Minister, Rudd claimed:

This nation doesn't just look east, it looks north and it looks west.

That's three directions. Is there another direction missing?

Then in 12 December, Rudd greeted with the world with a stirring declaration of the new government's commitment to global cooperation over climate change.

As our host, President Yudhoyono, said to me when we met yesterday, there can be no North or South, given the dimensions of this challenge. Together we are custodians of the planet.

It seems an important and inevitable gesture to take a united perspective. And it's a wonderful role for Australia play as a mediator between North and South. But this role can only be successful if Australia is sensitive to the history of the South and its suspicion of the North.

Someone, somewhere, decided that there would be a North and a South. And that North would be above South. It doesn't mean that they can't work together. But can we deny the difference?

Chairman Rudd slays the dragon

2007-11-30T00:51:00.001+11:00

There is definitely a sense of euphoria around Melbourne in the wake of Labor's victory in the polls. But there's also something curious at play in the way China is beginning to loom in Australia's future.

There is a Chinese saying: 'In order to obtain the pearly necklace from the dragon, it is first necessary to find the man to slay the dragon.' Everything is to be done in the correct way and in the correct sequence.

Kevin Rudd has slayed the dragon.

A lifelong Sinophile, Kevin Rudd seems a kind of Anglo-Irish version of a Chinese leader. His victory speech was epic and formalistic - 'this, our great nation'. And he call for fellow MPs to visit homeless shelters has a sound of the cultural revolution about it.

With a nation of such uncertain identity as Australia, it seem to be an easy host for alternative cultural paradigms.

The previous Labor rule under Bob Hawke was characterised by the Scandinavian model. The success of the Accord on which a stable industrial relations was built came from visits to the Volvo factories in Sweden.

So how will Australia now develop under the Chinese model? We've had the battle between cosmopolitanism and parochialism in the dispute between Keating and Howard. Now what will happen to ideological divides?

Will Rudd transcend this with a Confucian respect for hierarchy married with a revolutionary sense of urgency? While it promises an Australia that is more open to the world (not confined by global elites as under Keating), there is the danger that it brooks no argument. Urgency may be used to avoid an acknowledgement of difference, whether ideological or cultural.

We are now on the verge of a bright and glorious future for this, our great nation, under the leadership of our new shiny Prime Minister. Let a thousand laptops bloom.

Nation 'too parochial' to engage - Merewether's lament

2007-11-05T20:53:00.001+11:00

The curator of last year's Sydney Biennale Charles Merewether has just taken a job as deputy Director of a $33 billion new cultural district in Abu Dhabi. He leaves embittered by the response to his biennale:

Merewether says he is disappointed by "the lack of residue, the lack of ongoing discussion" it instigated.
"We may have failed to distinguish issues that could be discussed in an ongoing manner. I had hoped, for instance, that the work from the Middle East might have raised issues about what is going on there, culturally and artistically. Likewise with work from the Balkans. But in the end, it had no traction. It was if it were all just a passing event, a fashion.
Nation 'too parochial' to engage | The Australian

The problem is not that Merewether's was too radical for Australia, it was too predictable. The biennale colluded with a seeming noble interest of western liberals in the plight of those in transitional zones, such as the Middle East or the Balkans. But such an interest presumes a pity for those who are unable to enjoy the benefits of the west. There is nothing in this art that conveys the validity of the culture from whence it arises. It is simply there to attract our victimist gaze. The biennale thus left its audience feeling just as 'relaxed and comfortable' as it was before. The fact that it included 'difficult' issues like the MIddle East does not mask its globalised position.

For the biennale to be more than fashion, we needed to see something of ourselves as visitors in the picture, to understand our own place in this world. Without that, the world is just 'an amazing place'.

Time to start a Black Party in Australia

2007-10-04T20:29:00.001+10:00

While the Australian Minister for Immigration Kevin Andrews made the decision to cut the refugee intake form Africa a few weeks ago, he has come out now to politicise the issue, no doubt with the whiff of an election in the air. The xenophobia card has got the Liberals out of jail before, when the Tampa crisis raised the spectre of Australia being flooded with Middle Eastern refugees.

Now the art of 'double speak' that cutting this intake is designed to protect the immigration program:

A day after conceding that a failure of African migrants to "integrate" into Australian society had prompted the decision, Mr Andrews told journalists in Melbourne he was acting to maintain community confidence in Australia's immigration program.
Andrews releases 'evidence' - National - theage.com.au

Andrews' evidence is vague and repeats the allegations that have been made towards other refugee groups in the past, such as the Vietnamese. Naturally, the opposition have followed their Liberal Lite strategy and backed Andrews on this kind of discrimination.

It's a very sad state of politics where the two major parties feel they have to appeal to the racists and selfish instincts of the population. For Australia to continue as a white fortress is to cut the nation off from the world and to create a false sense of complacency.

Thankfully the church has come out:

Reverend David Pargeter, from the Uniting Church's Synod of Victoria and Tasmania, said: "When a Government minister, on the eve of an election, connects violent action with one particular cultural group, we know we have reached deeply into the darkness of racial politics."
Minister's African dossier renews racial tensions

As the Greens Party promotes the cause of the environment, it would be good to have a political voice that specifically championed an open Australia, that celebrated its multicultural fabric with a generosity and openness that has marked other great nations of immigration. If there was a Black Party, which had a broad platform of cultural dialogue, both in Indigenous and migrant voices, I would certainly support it.

Flower power in Melbourne

2007-09-17T00:01:00.000+10:00

Today I visited the Tulip Festival in Silvan. Though originally a Dutch festival, it has now a very strong Turkish flavour. The program featured some very impressive performances by local Turkish dancers and performers. Strangely, the day seemed to be attended mostly by Indians. A Dutch festival performed by Turks and watched by Indians -- only in Melbourne!

The dark side of Australian politics

2007-08-26T18:34:00.001+10:00

With the re-entry of Pauline Hanson into Australian politics, we are seeing the return of the kind of meanness that is determined to protect white privilege. Here she is on ABC radio:

DONNA FIELD: Ms Hanson says she knows a lot of white South Africans who have immigrated to Australia, and they've been subjected to medical tests. But she's concerned the same can't be said for black Africans.

And on queue, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Kevin Andrews issued a press statement that refugee intake from the African region would be reduced to 30 per cent, with a likely further reduction in the future. Let's hope that someone can let some light into the white fortress.

Crikey - Politics - Pauline whistles, Howard jumps. Again

São Paulo unveiled

2007-08-18T13:48:00.001+10:00

Under the control of its mayor Gilberto Kassab, São Paulo has implemented a Lei Cidade Limpa or Clean City Law, which outlaws outdoor advertising. Kassab argues it is part of an anti-pollution campaign:

The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.
Adbusters : The Magazine - #73 Carbon Neutral Culture / São Paulo: A City Without Ads

The advertising ban appears to be popular with the majority of Paulistas, though there are reports of people getting lost without familiar landmarks. The demolition of billboards has revealed strange scenes, such as Bolivian migrant communities. Some companies are responding by painting the outside of their buildings in bold colours reflecting their corporate image. Will this set a trend in the metropolitan centres of the south?

See for yourself in this short film.

The end of the Rudd era

2007-08-11T16:15:00.001+10:00

After his historic win against the long-standing John Howard in November 2007, Rudd has counterbalanced the political ledger with four terms at Prime Minister. But like his predecessor, the elusive fifth-term seems beyond his reach.

The Rudd era has seen a number of radical developments. Australia's close relationship with China has been the cause of much consternation, particularly given the country's poor record in carbon emissions and human rights in Africa. Kevin Rudd's support for China's invasion of Taiwan in 2015 has been the subject of growing protest.

The past eleven years have also seen a wholesale change in state politics, as Labor governments have all now succumbed to Liberal victories, leaving the Federal stage as the only remaining bastion of Labor power.

While initially supported as a fresh new leader, Rudd's popularism seems to have worn thin with both media and voters. For many years, his 'focus group' approach has been for long effective in countering Liberal opposition. But Rudd is now perceived as weak and lacking in vision.

Opinion polls in the middle of 2018 show a dramatic surge of support for the Liberal party, under its dynamic new leader Richard Howard, son of the former Prime Minister. Rudd is trying to counter this by a frantic series of new legislation, including Indigenous health support and a ban on old-growth logging in Tasmania. But to the cynical public, this is perceived as a desperate attempt to add vision now the end is nigh.

So what will Richard Howard be like as the new Prime Minister? Many critics see his close ties to the US as playing a major role. The recent election of Jenna Bush to the US Presidency has returned conservatives to power after years in the wilderness during Hillary Clinton's rule. Australia can once again turn to the US as its primary ally. Howard has already promised to boost Australia's already extensive troop commitments in the continuing war in Iraq.

And how long is Howard's reign as Prime Minister likely to last? Time will tell.

Alice wakes up from dreamtime

2007-07-19T19:19:00.001+10:00

Alice Springs is the town I've often dreamt about when thinking about settling somewhere far away from the distractions of a big city, where there might be time and space to think and write. In Alice you would not suffer from lack of company. I'd been impressed with the strong community there of artists and vagrants, sometimes 'new age', practically feminist, but resilient and cheerful. And the town is surrounded by Aboriginal communities that exist on a very different calendar to the mechanical time of white cities, reminding us of the relativity of our own particular capitalist order.

But rust never sleeps. There were a number of changes I noticed. First, the very charming Bar Doppio is being sold, with the promise of introducing 'the taste of Melbourne's Brunswick Street'. The local health food store Afghan Traders no longer sells wattle seed bread -- there's no one left who can make it. And they can't get the bush tomatoes. Todd Street mall feels like its been worn flat by the hordes of German and Japanese tourists who have poured through over the decades.

Still, the Beanie Festival is powering on. They took more than $100,000 this year. And tjanpi Aboriginal women's craft program is continuing to produce curious and wonderful work.

Maybe it's not the inexorable tide of global capital. Perhaps it's just the endless game of tag between development and exploitation. I hope so.

Is deracialization the best future for non-indigenous?

2007-07-01T13:52:00.001+10:00

Melissa Steyn

In African Studies Review, Thomas Blaser reviews Melissa Steyn's book Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Steyn advocates a future for whites in South Africa that involves transcending concepts of race. Blaser is skeptical:

I agree that deracialization is the objective, but perhaps we will have to settle for a mutual acknowledgment of differences that minimizes conflict. Steyn does not approve of such a multicultural approach to race and ethnic relations, for it leaves the white master narrative untouched. Nonetheless, to shed the skin of white identity and move beyond imaginaries of the Other requires processes that take time. It also is not clear what makes white people adopt the narrative of hybridization.

Thomas Blaser 'Changing South Africa'

So is there an alternative between white supremacy and deracialisation? Perhaps it is worth seeking meanings for whiteness that already exist in indigenous cultures.

'the Third World among us'

2007-07-01T13:40:00.001+10:00

The Age editorial We have crossed the Rubicon (30/7/07) rallies readers to the cause of indigenous welfare. The serious health and economic issues aside, this editorial is interesting for the way it uses the label 'third world' as a goad for action.

Whether the reasons were moral or political, Mr Howard has focused attention on the Third World among us.

Some questions:

What exactly is it about Aboriginal Australia that is 'third world'?
In addressing the 'third world' status, are we also introducing a form of cultural homogenisation?
Is there anything about the 'third world' lifestyle that is worth preserving?
Is the only destiny of 'third world' to hope one day to be 'first'?

Vanity Africa

2007-06-24T11:24:00.001+10:00

Glossy magazine Vanity Fair has commissioned U2 singer Bono has the editor of a special issue on Africa. The issue features celebrity photos by Annie Leibowitz, coverage of the Kwani Kenyan literary festival, Bill Clinton's tribute to Nelson Mandela and an essay on genetics by Spencer Wells. It's easy to be cynical about celebrity causes, but it's worth looking at what they have to say.

From Bono's editorial, two points emerge.

First, the message of humanism:

Africa is the proving ground for whether or not we really believe in equality

This Africa is a theatre for the demonstrating values of compassion and efficacy. Bono's editorial is filled with philanthropic brands like RED, DATA, the One Campaign and Edun. He promotes the benefits of corporations to make a difference in the world.

The second is a little more rock'n roll:

We needed help in describing the continent of Africa as an opportunity, as an adventure, not a burden.

After all, this is a glossy magazine, and readers expect to find sources of pleasure not guilt. So there are many photos of Westerners enjoying the exotic scenes that Africa provides.

With these two points, Bono evokes an Africa that we can assist without changing any of our own values. It is an Africa that does not seem to have a voice of its own. It is an Africa that we have little to learn from, other than affirming our own system.

But perhaps that's unfair. Time to read the articles...

Memo executives: try Paraguay, where the living is easy

2007-06-19T09:43:00.001+10:00

From a recent report quoted in The Age about living expenses in different cities. Perhaps it is time to re-start a colony in Paraguay.

And if you are an Australian and do not want to worry about high housing costs or expensive food, then maybe a few years in Asuncion, Paraguay, is the answer.
That is if your employer has an office in Asuncion, the world's cheapest city, and the capital of the landlocked South American country.

Memo executives: try Paraguay, where the living is easy

The first white man

2007-06-10T11:18:00.001+10:00

The remarkable story of William Buckley has inspired many different tellings since his re-appearance in 1835. At the legendary Carlton theatre La Mama, Jan Wositzky has compiled a one-man show that gathers many of these threads together. It's quite a casual performance, conducted on beach sand with sticks as props. He is particularly good at drawing together connections between William Buckley and contemporary Melbourne, such as the reactions of those who now live in sites which Buckley inhabited. While it was a one-man white show, Wositzky focused particularly on the Woirorong language and song, often intoning words such as adamante to give the performance a distinctive linguistic landscape. It felt particularly refreshing to return to the story of Melbourne, particularly before it was transformed into just another 'world class' city.

Cueca culture

2007-05-24T21:48:00.000+10:00

Back in Chile, I was quite surprised to come across what seemed a revival in popular Chilean culture. In Valparaiso, some students took me too a Guachaca club. Guacha is Chilean slang for an odd sock, referring to a particularly low form of life, abandoned and unwanted. The students proudly ordered a special Guachaca drink called the Tsunami, which was basically a wine spider -- a portion of red wine covered in a mountain of ice cream. Funny how national cultures model themselves often on exactly what strangers might find repulsive, like 'garlic' as the guilty secret of so many European cultures.

The photo above was taken from a special club in Santiago that has cueca evenings. As the national dance of Chile, the cueca is often a subject of embarrassment, signifying kitsch sentimentalism rather than something real and exciting. Well a new generation seem to want to re-appropriate the dance in an urban context and flooded the dance floors of the La Habana Club. The musicians were full of energy -- funny and tuneful. Various cueca legends were called up from the audience to take guest spots.

Watching the dancing -- there was no way an Aussie could stumble into that dance floor -- I noticed how courtly the gestures were. Integral to the dance are the white handkerchiefs that both male and females hold in their hands. There are flourished and dangled enticingly before partners, at times like the way the matador holds his red cloth. The dance is relatively short, but very intense and the bright flashing eyes are constantly engaging each other. Quite unique.

But imagine this in Australia. Could there be a club in the heart of Melbourne where young things secretly gather to enjoy bush dancing and listen to Slim Dusty? Hmmm.

Out of the Woods

2007-05-24T21:36:00.001+10:00

Here are some fresh Austro-Paraguayan faces. There's Florence Wood, Rodrigo Wood, his wife Carmen and son Brian. Rodrigo is a most agreeable Para-Aussie. He invited me to a special annual event hosted by Las Damas de Britanicas. A special curry dinner was cooked for nearly two hundred guests to celebrate those of Anglo-Saxon descent. While there were many English looking faces, certainly their energy on the dance floor seemed more towards the Latin end of the genetic spectrum. By the end of the evening Rodrigo was goading me to join him in some choruses of Waltzing Matilda.

I must say, it felt good to be Australian in this setting. Any sentimentalism about national identity back home (in Australia) seems too easily recruited to political or consumer interests. It's just too easily and ready-made. But on the other side of the world, deep in the heart of South America, Australianness seemed like an exotic flower. Could we even imagine a universal Australianness, appearing in all cultures, emerging with an innocent voice, blinking, happy to see things anew?

Museo del Barro (Museum of Mud) in Asunción, Paraguay

2007-05-15T09:40:00.001+10:00

	The Museo del Barro is a private museum originally established to show contemporary ceramic works from Paraguay. There had been a number of innovations with kilns that enabled more sculptoral works to develop, and the museum was seen as an imporant vehicle for this ceramic work to graduate from the street side sales in towns like Aregua, to a gallery context in the city
	The institution was given a new life by a unique collaboration between three directors, Ticio Escobar (shown to the left), Carlos Columbino and Osvaldo Salerno. They brought together a collection that reflects the unique range of artistic life in Paraguay. This starts with the Hispanic Guarani Baroque originating in the Jesuit missions of the 16th-19th century. The marionette-like figures are designed to be dressed with real clothes. There are strong popular traditions, such as the masks donnned during the fiestas, and rediscovered ritual arts from the different Guarani tribes. A rather conservative craft tradition had led to highly intricate forms, such as the Nanduti, or 'spider web' needlework. Alongside this is a contemporary visual art that has responded strongly to the years of repression under the dictatorship of Stroessner.
	The museum installation is quite beautiful, not just because of the well constructed display cases and lighting, but the way different traditional and modern is mixed together. Contemporary popular versions of saints are combined with quite dramatic figures dating back to the 16th century.
Contemporary exhibitions of popular and contemporary art are shown in rooms adjacent to historical displays	Some intricate work in Paraguayan lace, ñandutí..
Some popular landscapes in watercolour	Guarani carvings.
Quite uncanny words by Osvaldo Solerno.	Cabichuí, a quite remarkable collection of cartoons depicting the War of the Triple Alliance, when Paraguay took on Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Some contemporary popular ceramics from the town of Tribatí.	A shot from the interior courtyard.
Getting to Asunción is not easy, but it is worth it to visit Museo del Barro and then going on to encounter the living traditions on which it is based. Another example of the amazing rich treasury of southern cultures

The Leon Cadogan Foundation today

2007-05-14T09:53:00.000+10:00

It was my great pleasure today to meet with Rogerio Cadogan, the son of the legendary León Cadogan who fought so hard for the rights of indigenous peoples in Paraguay, especially the Aché and the Mbya. Rogerio took me to a park where about 200 Aché had camped in preparation for a demonstration in front of parliament the next day. Next he took me to a community of Mbya camped near a tip quite close to the town of Asunción -- a place called Cerro Poty.

The León Cadogan Foundation is still working hard publishing various materials related to the preservation of indigenous cultures. They are now housed in the Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociales.

Sadly, none of León's work has been translated into English, despite his Australian ancestry. That is a project that certainly deserves attention. I tried to get a copy of his most influential complication, Ayvu Rapyta, the story of the Mbya people, but none of the bookshops I found had copies.

Somewhere in Asunción, Paraguay

2007-05-13T14:54:00.000+10:00

Paraguayans seem to enjoy feeling nationalistic. Here's a bit of street theatre happening down the main street in Asunsión on Friday night. Seven characters dressed in period costume from the time of the country's independence, though why they are each wearing bibs with the names of the week, I don't know. On asking various locals about this -- even an expert in street theatre -- no one seemed to have any idea who they were. That seems a typical story of Paraguay.

More strange and interesting by the hour.

Asunción, Paraguay 12 May 2007
Sunday Chance of Rain. Overcast. High: 22° C. Wind light. Chance of precipitation 40%.

Getting to know the Latin neighbours

2007-05-06T13:46:00.001+10:00

The article 'Getting to know the Latin neighbours' has been uploaded here.

Toubab tales

2007-05-06T13:04:00.001+10:00

Here's a new term for non-indigenous, which I learnt from an article in Le Monde.

It's best explained in the website A Toubab Traveller's Tales:

A Toubab is the generic name for a white person in West and Central Africa ..
it is not a derogatory term of address and is more especially used in The Gambia and Senegal.

Depending on which you wish to believe .. the name Toubab has many suggested derivations, amongst which are: A corruption of the Arab word Tabib meaning doctor .. a verb in the Wolof language meaning 'to convert' (the early doctors and missionaries during colonial times, being whites coming from Europe) or the generally preferred .. that it is derived from the two bob (two shilling) coin of pre-decimalisation UK currency when The Gambia was a British Colony

Tabib (doctor) is similar in meaning to the Bantu umlungu (magician).

Whiteness just isn't what it used to be

2007-05-05T13:09:00.001+10:00

The ANC website has been running an interesting series of articles in a series 'White Identity in a Changing SA'. A core text in this analysis is Whiteness just isn't what is used to be.

The narratives in Steyn's book include:

Still colonial after all these years
This shouldn't happen to a white
Don't think white, it's alright
A whiter shade of white
Under African skies (or white, not quite)
Whiteness just ain't what it used to be

Here's a sample of the ANC discussion:

In the introduction of the book, Steyn notes this tendency - "of considerable resistance to talking about race as a social category" - represented, in part, by questions such as "Aren't we beyond this?"

Let us return to the strand, 'Whites are doing it for themselves', in the present narrative. "Perhaps," continues the insurance broker speculatively, "being white affected my life in a positive way, while being black affected many blacks negatively." The insurance broker concludes with the punch line: "White people tend to care more about their surroundings and keeping it clean than blacks do."

The familiar subtext - of a superior culture - underlying the previous narratives, infuses the 'Whites doing for themselves' strand of the 'Don't think white, It's all right' narrative.

Melissa E. Steyn Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) read

The day I met an Australian

2007-04-22T22:18:00.000+10:00

This week, it was my great pleasure to make the acquaintance of Reinaldo Mongelos, the new consul for Paraguay in Melbourne. Melbourne has around 45 Paraguayans, but there are many more in Sydney and around Griffith in NSW. Señor Mongelos is a builder and has been consul in an honorary capacity for many years. He is also an amateur ceramicist and a keen advocate of crafts, particularly from Guarani. With Señor Mongelos is Señor Christian Wood, a fourth generation Australian, descended from the original utopian settlers who came to Paraguay from Sydney in the late 19th century. Christian's grandfather Donald found in the horrible Chaco war against Bolivia. His father Alcides is a lawyer in Incarnación who tried to 'return' to Australia, but found that he missed Paraguay too much. Christian is following his father's footsteps and studying law at Melbourne University.

What if?

2007-03-29T18:45:00.001+10:00

I recently reviewed the volume What if: Australia as it Might have Been for ABC Radio National Book Show. You can find the 'full' transcript, here.

Australians are hard to digest

2007-03-12T14:10:00.001+11:00

John Gimlette's At The Tomb of The Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay is the most recent book on Paraguay that I have consumed. At first I thought it was sensationalist, but I am very impressed with this scholarship. The Paraguay that emerges from his book is a country that has been the subject of utopian fantasies from all corners of the earth -- usually with tragic results.

I learnt from this book about León Cadogan, descended from Australian settlers, who became an expert on Guaraní culture. Less appetising, was Gimlette's portait of Aussie descendents such as Bruce Murray, who seem unable to warm to the Latin ways. Even the Japanese proved more adaptable.

My encounter with Murray should not have troubled me as much as it did. Father Feehan had warned me: 'People here don't have the warmth of other Paraguayans. There is not that sense of belonging.' I thought about this as I made my way back through the square. It was planted with silky oaks, brought from Australia with the first settlers. There was a plaque to the villagers who'd perished in the war against Bolivia: Drakeford, Jones, King, Shepperson and Douglas Kennedy. Dying for Paraguay was, I supposed, only part of belonging to it. The Australians had obviously proved rather harder to digest than the Japanese.

John Gimlette At The Tomb of The Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay New York: Vintage, 2003, p. 228

A Black week

2007-02-05T00:15:00.001+11:00

This has not been a good week for tolerance. Not that there has been any overt violence against others, like in the Cronulla riots, but that material has been gathered to make it more difficult for people who are different from the mainstream, particularly in colour.

The Sudanese man Hakeem Hakeem was sentenced to 24 years this week for serious offences against three women. This has prompted the Federal government minister Kevin Andrews to consider limiting intake from the Horn of Africa. I was in the court when Hakeem was sentenced and met his father, who attends the same Catholic Church as my father. Hakeem's crimes do seem heinious and inexcusable, but he has a punishment to fit that. With the little I know of the family, I can merely guess what a shock it is to move from the chaos of civil war in Sudan to the eerily quiet security of Melbourne. You would hope that as a community we could see their problems as our problems, rather than an alien infiltration.

Then there was the Geoff Clark case. And last night I saw Fox Studios Last King of Africa, which reinforces every prejudice you might have about black African men. It's not that it is inaccurate in its portrayal about Idi Amin, but that it leaves with the audience with virtually no knowledge of the culture of Uganda, it only confirms the suspicion that white people have to be wary of their black neighbours.

A saving grace was finishing the novel by André Brink, which tells the story of a Khoi San man who converts and tries to become a missionary. His mentor, the Reverend James Reed, writes about the experience of coming to grips with Africa:

How old and remote Europe seemed from here: old, and remote, and -- yes -- beautiful, but inexorably sinking, drowning, fading into futility and pastness. Where here, in the midst of these sounds of menace and violence and lurking death, here was something different, a timelessness, an awareness of futurity, a still untamed, unpredictable, savage energy, a passion unquenched and unquenchable, a force that might destroy people and lives, but which was life itself, a physical reality, a closeness, an urgency, a rare and unspeakable presence of wonderment and joy.
André Brink Praying Mantis London: Secker & Warburg, 2005, p. 140

Yes, let's not forget the 'wonderment and joy'...

A tale of two utopias

2007-01-28T18:49:00.001+11:00

This summer I've had the opportunity of learning about two seemingly contrary stories of collective aspiration. The Australian colony in Paraguay was a botched socialist project espousing equality of men, except for those who weren't white. On the other had, the freedom struggle in South Africa was an inspiring struggle for equality of men, which resulted in a workable nation state that provides a place for all colours.

The leader William Lane combined his desire for worker's justice with a strong moral commitment to 'straightness', which included teetotalism and racial purity. It was interesting to read that after the failure of the colony in Paraguay, Lane went on to become editor of the New Zealand Herald, where he became a critic of unionism and advocate of imperialism, speaking often of 'We British...' There seem to be many reasons for the failure of the utopian quality, but a large measure of blame seems to lie with Lane whose self-pity left him unable to respond to the problems of others.

Gavin Souter writes about the racism in New Australia:

'...the assumption that Anglo-Saxons were inherently superior to Hispano-Indians was as much a part of the colony's creed as teetotalism, a principle which had also been made explicit in the New Australia articles of association, but was now an unwritten law. The racial attitudes the colonists had brought with them from Australia were revealed by some of the facetious advertisements in Evening Notes: 'Boycott the Chinkie and save yourselves from the Yellow Agony by buying your vegetables from white gardener -- John Wilson'; 'Baxter's shoes - Nigger tickler clogs.'… this was not gracious, for on the whole Cosme fared well in its deadlings with the Government of Paraguay.'
Gavin Souter A Peculiar People: The Australians In Paraguay Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968

By contrast, the lives of Walter and Albertina Sisulu demonstrated enormous courage and fortitude. The scenes at the Rivonia trial in 1963 were extraordinary, as men like Walter and Mandela were getting ready to spend an indefinite period in Robben Island, and their wives Albertina and Winnie virtual widowhood. At the time, it seemed like the apartheid regime so lacked legitimacy that it was bound to crumble. To think that it would take another thirty years to finally end.

A recent book by their daughter-in-law Elinor artlessly balances dramas on the main political stage with the small domestic scenes that hold life togther. Here's an interesting practice that developed late in the struggle:

'The Sisulu family observed a 'Black Christmas' at the end of 1985. This was the practice, began after the 1976 uprising, of eschewing the luxuries associated with Christmas and keeping expenditure to a bare minimum. Black South Africans felt that they had nothing to celebrate and saw no reason to swell the coffers of white-owned businesses. By 1985, there was almost a total observation of 'Black Christmas' in black communities around the country. Some white also observed this practice…'
Elinor Sisulu Walter & Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime London: Abacus, 2003 (orig. 2002), p. 430

I realise that this kind of comparison is in danger of being judged an expression of self-loathing typical of liberal elite in Australia. Rather than settling into a fixed position about Australia as a 'white fortress', I prefer to see its history as a challenge for the future. Lane's experiment provides us today with the challenge of establishing a relationship with the Guaraní that he disregarded. It was interesting to meet with Ticio Escobar, the director of Paraguay's Museo del Barro (Museum of Mud), which houses work of the Hispanic-Guaraní Baroque. He had never heard of Nuevo Australia. Here perhaps is an opportunity to restore the conversation, and bring something of the Paraguayan culture to Australia.

The example of South Africa shows that 'our roots aren't our leaves'. The failures of the past point us to the potential successes of the future.

Eat the Bustard!

2007-01-26T13:38:00.001+11:00

An article in New Matilda argues that Australians are missing the opportunity to use its own resources -- choosing to farm the American turkey and chicken rather than its own indigenous bustard.

Given the palatability of the bird, why did Australians begin to lose interest in bustards and refocus instead on importing American turkeys - yet another introduced species that could potentially harm Australia? Why didn't they build an industry around sustainably harvesting, and in the process conserving, a valued Australian bird? Our guess is that native foods were increasingly seen as 'poor man's tucker' and as such were gradually removed from Australian cookbooks.
The contrast between the current status of the bustard and the chicken in Australia is stark: the former is struggling to survive and in decline, the latter is the continent's most numerous bird. Indeed, the chicken is now thought to be the world's most numerous bird, all eight billion of them.

Bob Beale and Michael Archer are co-authors of Going Native: Living in the Australian Environment (Hodder Headline)
Bob Beale and Michael Archer 'Sustainability: Eat the Bustard!' New Matilda www.newmatilda.com/home/articledetail.asp?ArticleID=1932&CategoryID (22/11/2006)

Pommie Balandas

2007-01-10T10:09:00.001+11:00

An article in the UK Telegraph by Richard Madden promotes the Gama Festival for English tourists. He positions it as an event for Balanda:

Garma is Australia's leading cultural exchange event, attended by about 1,200 tribal members from 20 clan groups of the local Yolngu people and about 800 Balanda - non-aboriginal "white fellas" like me.

In particular, he praises the festival as an experience of reconciliation. Yunupingu's position seems similar to the South African value of Ubuntu.

"We will walk side by side with each other, even with our worst enemy," Mandawuy Yunupingu had proclaimed on the first morning of Garma. Five days later, on the final night, as I watched him lead his band Yothu Yindi in front of an ecstatic crowd, it was hard not to become wrapped up in the spirit of optimism and reconciliation that Garma creates.

Euraustralians Unite

2007-01-07T19:17:00.000+11:00

A recently replayed program on ABC Radio National features Xavier Herbert's letter to his publisher 'Inky' Stephenson, when he argues for the rights of the 'Euraustralians', those non-indigenous or half-breed settlers who cannot be called 'real Australians' because they lack Aboriginal identity, but belong here more than the 'pommies'. Hindsight - 24 September 2006 - In Capricornia Country: the Legend of Xavier Herbert

Land-Without-Evil

2007-01-06T18:07:00.000+11:00

I've just finished Hélène Clastres The Land-Without-Evil (trans. Jacqueline Grenez Brovender) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995 (orig. 1975). As an account of the Guaraní and Tupí cultures, it seems very conceptual, reflecting the Parisian critique of commodification. But there are many very interesting asides that suggest alternative narratives for first contact. It appears that the Guaraní have a belief in the Land-Without-Evil (yvy marä ey), which is a distant place to the east, across vast waters, where humans can achieve immortality. Their history has been marked by prophets (karai) who have led tribes to find this land, always with disastrous consequences. When they encountered Jesuit priests, they found in the Christian story of the hereafter a version of their own utopianism, but kept a convenient distance from this world. They adopted these priests as their new prophets. Well, that's one story.

Being Paraguayan

2007-01-01T16:50:00.001+11:00

I'm reading a few books about the Guaraní in Paraguay. Barbara Ganson's The Guaraní Under Spanish Rule In The Río De La Plata (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 2003) is a plainly written book. The subject is fascinating, but her narrative fails to inspire. I am particularly interested in tracing the exchanges between the Jesuits and Guaraní that led to mutual cultural influence. Ganson is mostly dependent on written records, so she tends to extrapolate from the official dialogue of the time (including some canny if quite obsequious Guaraní letters to Spanish rulers). What interests me particularly is the Hispanic-Guaraní Baroque that developed in the Jesuit missions during the 17c and 18c. What frames all this is on stunning contemporary fact about Paraguay:

According to the 1992 census, 49 percent of the population of Paraguay spoke Guaraní and Spanish, 39.3 percent were monolingual Guaraní speakers, and 6.4 percent spoke only Spanish… Paraguay has the distinction of being the only country in the Western hemisphere where a native language is more widely spoken than a European one…. Today, less than 1-3 percent of the population in Paraguay is considered 'Indian'. (Ganson, 2003, p.185)

Imagine that in Australia. With roughly similar proportion of indigenous people in our population, yet was all spoke Aboriginal languages. Perhaps the 'tyranny of distance' was not that we were too far away from Europe, but not isolated enough. More to follow.

Catch an interesting film

2006-11-26T15:31:00.000+11:00

Given the celebration of Rabbit Proof Fence, it seems strange that Philip Noyce's follow up film Catch a Fire seems to have such a low profile. The film is particularly interesting for the portrayal of Nik Vos by Tim Robbins. In one scene, the Boer anti-terrorist expert is shown singing a gentle folk song accompanied by guitar with his young family. The film touches on the anxiety that formed the base to Apartheid, as well as the demoralising effects this had on its victims.

In an inteview for Emanuel Levy, Noyce admits a particular resonance as an Australian working on a film set in South Africa.

For Noyce, the most challenging part of making Catch a Fire was “being a white Australian tackling a South African story that deals with so many events of historical significance to that country. I very quickly began immersing myself in South African culture and history.

And reflecting on his experiences in researching white South Africans:

Talking to those police officers as I did — to many of them, ex-police officers in South Africa — I realized that they all saw themselves as Africans. That was a strange concept to me: How could a white person think of himself as African? And yet many of them lay claim to 300 years or more of continued residency in southern Africa. Some of them said, "Well, I've been here longer than Patrick Chamusso, than his forefathers. I'm African." Others said, "We were fighting a vicious, determined enemy, who was determined to destroy everything that we'd fought to build up here."

Elsewhere, he says...

the South Africans are a beacon to the rest of us; they are the light at the end of the tunnel that we never seem to see an end to - the tunnel of seemingly irresolvable differences between us all

The lost world of Australia

2006-11-19T22:10:00.000+11:00

A recent exhibition Coathangers at Shepparton Art Gallery was a reminder of how distant contemporary Australian culture has come from the idioms of local flora and fauna that once were conventional symbols of national identity. The country crafts that feature gumnuts, kookaburras and platypuses (?) seem almost baroque now, in their distance from urban life. Not that there aren't animals in contemporary decorative arts, just that they are almost all European -- deers, owls, wolves and rabbits. The time is ripe for a radical move within the arts to use local flora and fauna for shock value.

Embrace the night

2006-11-10T16:41:00.000+11:00

Imagine the City of Melbourne dedicating one night to darkness. Across the city, street lights are turned off and residents advised to extinguish their house lights. Cars stop. Residents venture onto the street and gaze up to the night sky. Parents explain to their children how the ancient Greeks saw mythological creatures in the sky. Adolescents turn off their phones and see where the Southern Cross is. A magic at hand...

Authorities in the capital Reykjavik will turn off street lights on Thursday evening and people are also being encouraged to sit in their houses in the dark, writer Andri Snaer Magnason said on Wednesday. While the lights are out, an astronomer will describe the night sky over national radio.

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/world/article1474652.ece

On the road to elsewhere

2006-10-24T15:03:00.000+10:00

This advertisement sits on the corner of Holden and Nicholson Street, Brunswick, Melbourne. It reads:

Simplify your life as Europeans do... Live well, embrace the richness of the exciting, well-serviced Nicholson Street community and reduce the clutter and burden of typical property ownership. Designed with a contemporary lifestyle in mind, these stylish apartments present comfortable, efficient function in a slick European environment. An oustanding opportunity for couples and singles who want to live or invest in this fabulous area.

An interesting exchange this. While it directs our gaze upwards, to the 'slick' and 'stylish' European manner, it actually resigns us to reduced living space. While higher density might be desirable, is there a way of selling this without having us pretend that we are living at the opposite end of the planet?

Multiculturalism at large in Brunswick

2006-10-20T08:32:00.000+10:00

A reliable source informs me of the following scene at a Lebanese restaurant in Brunswick. Tiba's is a notoriously good place to eat, especially during Ramadan, where the food is always fresh and full of flavour. Despite their non-alcohol policy, they attract many non-Muslims from the neighbourhood.

Last night, apparently, a group entered which included a Jewish couple (man in yamulkah and woman in wig) together with a couple of young Muslim woman. They were overheard talking about 'our Jewish brothers and sisters'.

There are growing signs of creeping multiculturalism in our midst. What's happened to the fear and distrust that we have come to rely on?

What will be next? Sorry?

Looking towards a medieval Australia

2006-08-26T15:19:00.000+10:00

Cultural Translations: Remaking the Early European Past in Australasia
Sponsored by the Network for Early European Research
2-3 November, 2006
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
Convenors: Dr Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland) and Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)
The Cultural Translations symposium will for the first of its kind: an attempt to think through, across a range of disciplines, the nature of Australasian encounters and engagements with the medieval and early modern British and European pasts.
The symposium has two broad themes. The first relates to the issue of British and European cultural memory in Australasia. What roles have the cultural, aesthetic, literary, legal, constitutional, political-ideological, religious and social discourses and practices of medieval and early modern Britain and Europe played in the settler-colonial societies of Australia and New Zealand? What has been the relation of these societies to the medieval and early European past? what uses have nationalist discourses in these societies found, or failed to find, in medieval and early modern cultural moments? What have been the broader cultural politics of remembering in a multicultural, postcolonial, and globalized twenty-first century Australasia?
A second theme is in some ways more empirical and concerns scholarship, or how the early European past has in practice been reconstructed by scholars and intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand. What precise contributions to the study and interpretation of these key phases in the history of Western civilization have been made by scholarship in Australia and New Zealand? Have there been particular distinguishing characteristics of Australasian scholarship-in any field-on these civilizational moments? What function has the study of Medieval, Renaissance, or Enlightenment cultural and intellectual modes and movements played in the political, social, and cultural life of Australasia? What role have particular scholars, institutions (schools, universities, museums, churches, parliaments), or practices (antiquarianism, collecting, editing and bibliography, curatorship) devoted to the British or European medieval or early modern played in Australia or New Zealand?
All welcome.
Invited speakers include:
Geraldine Barnes (University of Sydney)
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland)
Glenn Burgess (University of Hull)
Conal Condren (University of New South Wales)
Leigh Dale (University of Queensland)
Robert Dixon (University of Queensland)
Louise D'Arcens (University of Wollongong)
John Frow (University of Melbourne)
John Gascoigne (University of New South Wales)
Ian Hunter (University of Queensland)
Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia)
The combined expertise of this group ranges across such fields as English Literature, Political and Intellectual History, the History of Art, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. In regards to historical reach, its expertise ranges from the medieval period to the Eighteenth Century, and to the history of Australasia. We think it particularly exciting that the symposium will provide an opportunity for members of such a variety of disciplines to talk to each other about the meaning of the European past in Australasia.
Detailed abstracts of the papers will be available on the symposium Web site by the beginning of September. If you would like to be part of the programme as a formal respondent, please let us know.
NEER will provide financial assistance to postgraduate students and early career researchers wishing to attend this symposium.
For any inquiries, please contact the Cultural Translations Administrative Assistant, Helen Hickey University of Melbourne (T: +61 3 8344 5506, F: +61 3 8344 5494, E: h.hickey@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au)
http://www.english.unimelb.edu.au/FrontPageDoc/CulturalTranslations.html/

Alex Buzo dies

2006-08-19T12:22:00.000+10:00

Australian-Albanian author Alex Buzo passed away this week. Here's a brief extract from Neverland and makes reference to his views. Alex Buzo’s Norm and Akif The sudden reversal from warm hospitality to cold expulsion evokes a fear of difference that seems buried deep in the Australian psyche. Akif’s own plight had been anticipated in dramatic form by Alex Buzo, who is Australia’s most prominent person of Albanian stock. Buzo’s father was born in the ancient Albanian town of Berat in 1912 and was educated in American schools before arriving in Australia in the 1930s. The name ‘Buzo’ means ‘diver’ in Spanish. Alex Buzo’s mother was of Irish descent. Buzo’s first play, Norm and Ahmed (1968), anticipated the denouement of the Kosovar’s Australian reception. A construction worker asks for a light from a passing Pakistani student. The ocker host tries to loosen up this deferential visitor and introduce him to Australian ways, but he is intimidated by the student’s formal way of speaking. With almost sadistic pleasure, Buzo lures the audience into thinking that there is some real rapprochement occurring. This is swiftly undermined in the final moment of the play, where Norm dispatches the Pakistani with the epitaph ‘fuckin’ boong’. The play was recently revised as Normie and Tuon (1999); the foreigner has become a Vietnamese, who confronts a war veteran. Buzo compares the friendly/hostile switch to the Kosovar story: ‘The big thing in the Kosovar case was the lack of perceived gratitude.’ Despite the parallel theme, and his Albanian ancestry, Alex Buzo has never been called on to speak about the Kosovar refugees. He is better known as an expert on the peculiarities of Australian culture, with publications such as Real Men Don't Eat Quiche and A Dictionary of the Almost Obvious. In this respect, Buzo is a prime candidate for the position of ‘Albanian for the other’. With gentle mockery, he documents the idiosyncrasies of Australian culture. Buzo is a proud nationalist; his 1972 play Macquarie passionately upholds the reputation of Governor Macquarie above the mean-spirited policies of Samuel Marsden. Yet at the same time, there is a fatalism running through Buzo’s writing about the possibility of reconciliation between Aussie and foreigner. His pessimism remains a challenge to the bright-eyed parade of Aussie icons that stands for national pride. (Image to the left is the cover of the Herald Sun when Victoria opened its hearts to the Kosovar refugees. The first, and perhaps only, time that the tabloid has sported a headline in Albanian.}

Woven opening

2006-07-01T17:50:00.000+10:00

Opening of Woven by Gayle Maddigan and Megan Evans at Ballarat Fine Art Gallery 30 June 2006 This exhibition is a wonderful meeting of opposites—the outside of public art and the inside of the art gallery, the ground on which we stand as individuals and the stars that bring us together, the fifth generation Australian artist, and an artist whose people have been here for thousands of generations. Interesting things happen when you bring these opposites together. We normally understand the earth as the land we travel, and the stars as lights that guide our journey. But a little over fourteen years ago, Australia was blessed by a different knowledge. In the ground-breaking Mabo case (literally), the Australian High Court decided in favour of the people of Mer, the Meriam people, who followed the teachings of the ancestor Malo, which assigned rules of land tenure, succession and trespass. Witnesses such as Koiki Mabo for the Mer invoked the allegorical expression ‘Stars follow their own path . . .’ when giving their testimony. History may prescribe certain twists and turns in the fate of mankind, but the underlying rules of culture remain constant, just as stars follow their own path. Of course, this evening we are following the path of the southern cross. In fact, I came here from the newly renamed Southern Cross Station, launched by the Ballarat-born Premier Steve Bracks as a symbol of multiculturalism. We saw the ongoing energy of that symbol on Wednesday at the Workers Rights Rally, when United Firefighters Union of Australia state secretary Peter Marshall, a rally organiser, urged the crowd to repeat rebellion leader Peter Lalor’s oath: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’ So ingrained is the Southern Cross symbol in our sense of what is worth fighting for, that we can be excused for forgetting that the stars belong to no one story. They are a bridge between cultures. One of the wonders of the South Project is finding such links between countries that have been separated by the very thing they share in common. Like the flightless birds that grace our lands, countries like Australia and Brazil are so used to looking north that we don’t see each other. We only need to look up to the stars. This fact is very much in our face at the moment as we see the Brazilian flag proudly waved at the World Cup. The flag features the night sky above Rio as it was on 10:30am 15 November 1889. We can find the southern cross in the flags of New Guinea, New Zealand, Samoa... But my favourite story of the Southern Cross originates right here. As recorded by the grazier William Stanbridge, to the Philosophical Institute in Melbourne in 1857, the Boorong people see in the southern constellation a tree which protects Bunya, an opossum, who is pursued by Tchingal, an emu, represented by the Coal Sack. The Pointers are the two great hunters who kill the emu and their spears are stuck in the tree. A common feature of various Aboriginal stories of the stars is a tree that enables its heroes to move between heaven and earth. The connection between trees and the stars they point to is quite powerful in this exhibition. The artists have approached the link from many different angles. Gayle Maddigan has used the ash from the burnt branches to create quite visceral drawings on paper. Megan Evens has adopted a more craft-life approach in her meticulous oil paintings of gigantic leaves. Together they have produced an amazingly powerful white ochre landscape painted directly on the gallery wall opposite the Eureka flag. Woven is a wonderful journey that takes us back through the trauma of invasion to the timeless values of indigenous Australia. Here is a path for stars, and for us to guide our way to the future. I would like to conclude with four lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy, when we finally meets his beloved Beatrice: [Canto XXXIII] From that most holy wave I now returned to Beatrice; remade, as new trees are renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was pure and prepared to climb into the stars Alighieri Dante The Divine Comedy (trans. Eugenio Montale) : Everyman Books, 1985 (orig. 1313), p. 375 Image of Gayle Maddigan, elder Murray Harrison and Megan Evans

Martin Flanagan on South Africa

2006-04-30T11:55:00.000+10:00

From Martin Flanagan's Age article, Straight shooting:
I don't know if I could live in South Africa. You'd need strong nerves. But I do know there is something in what Max du Preez said at the end of his book. South Africa has problems far greater than this country's, but in South Africa you keep coming across a great invigorating passion for the future that is unlike anything here. We equate nationalism with beating the drum on Anzac Day and playing up sporting wins. They have people like the little man who took us through Soweto.

Ngapartji Ngapartji

2006-04-23T21:28:00.000+10:00

Ngapartji Ngapartji a course/performance on the Pitjantjatjara language is know calling for pparticipants.

awelye

2006-04-23T12:12:00.000+10:00

From article about Cassandra Fahey: During a leisurely drive to the Healesville Sanctuary to see the seductively named platypusary, Fahey's musings on work, life, love and spirituality suggest someone who is instinctive, uninhibited and inspired by the big, hazy picture. She cites nature and the work and thoughts of Aboriginal painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye among her key influences. "When badgered by white people, collectors and so forth to name her works, (Emily) always said awelye, and she said that meant 'the whole bang lot' . . . and this is beautiful," Fahey says, with a certain longing. "This is such an incredibly positive thing that Australian Aboriginality has that we just struggle to get." Talking architecture and life with Fahey is a little like getting "the whole bang lot".

Jorge Malley watch

2006-04-05T16:37:00.000+10:00

The notorious Jorge Malley has surfaced again in the trendy online magazine New Matilda. Jorge is suspected to be one of a long line of literary hoaxes that have dogged Australian culture. His latest entry, a confabulation about the Queen moving to Australia, is an underhand attack on the proud Republican aspirations of our country. Though the prospect of having our own head of state does seem impossible, we should still live in hope. Who is Jorges Malley? I suspect some monarchist smirking at Australia's fraught future.

Light at the end of the temple

2006-04-03T04:58:00.000+10:00

I wondered into Notre Dame Cathedral with what seemed like a few minutes spare in my life. Here was a moment to luxuriate in a seeming vast expanse of time. I joined a stream of tourists that circulated around the margins of the cathedral. I was first struck by the dishes of candles, glittering in the darkness. Beyond that, believers were sitting patiently waiting to go to confession. Rather than opaque boxes, these confessions were now heard within glass doors. I wondered further with my fellow tourists and eventually settled on a pew down the rear of the church at a small chapel. At first, I was struck by the intense devotion of the several believers, kneeling in prayer. But then I began to be aware of the flashes illuminating the chapel at irregular intervals. Along with the constant shuffle of comfortable shoes behind me was a series of random flashes as digital pilgrims drank in the darkness. Some of the flashes were not single. They were preceded by a faint red flash before two flashed went off in short succession. I realised that their cameras were set on red eye. Not only would flashes be incapable of reaching the dark cavities of the chapel, you certainly wouldn’t expect any eyes looking back at you. After a while, there seemed an odd balance between the intense stillness of religious devotion and the restless hunger of the digital cameras. Were they praying for the cameras to stop? Were the tourists challenged by the believers to break their concentration? As a global tourist centre, the Notre Dame cathedral seemed like a flashpoint for the monstrous consumer spectre that has gripped late capitalism. We are like a creature who can no longer bear experience in the real. We need the small screens on the backs of cameras and mobiles to filter reality into snaps. We are masticating the real world and absorbing into our digital bowels. These cameras are like rear view mirrors constantly before us, guiding our journey through the spectacle. I stood transfixed at the spectacle of the spectacle. Tourists paused at the main vestibule with their silver hearts with glowing green eyes, holding the camera up to the sublime ceiling, flashing into the void, and then gazing back into the preview screens, then shuffling on. It was ceaseless. I must have stood for about twenty minutes until the organ began resonating through the cathedral, following by a sublime solo female voice. A line of elderly people filed to the side of the altar, the women dressed in black lace and the men in white vestments with ornate Latin lettering. A phalanx of priests followed and finally the bishop arrived and gave his blessing to the congregation. It was the first anniversary of Pope John Paul’s death. Incense poured through the church. I was swept up by the spectacle. I was distracted from the cameras and beholden to the gravitas of the catholic mass, my entire body covered in goose bumps. Then it happened. My phone started ringing. I tried to ignore it, but my message back must not have been working and they kept ringing. I was being drawn away from the mass and back into the river of tourism spilling out of the church. On my way out I looked back. Then I saw it. Every pillar had a flat screen showing close-ups of the service. The camera looked back. It was quite awesome. I left the cathedral, chastened.

From one traditional owner to another

2006-03-19T23:53:00.000+11:00

From one traditional owner to another
The Melbourne Commonwealth Games opening ceremony bore close resemblance to Sydney’s epic spectacle six years previously. Both events gave Indigenous Australia a significant profile and used an innocent child to make the link with non-Indigenous Australia. In Melbourne, Nicki Webster was replaced by a young boy holding a duck. Clearly, these spectacles require some kind of link to connect its original inhabitants with majority white Australia. However, in the absence of a treaty, it is simpler to use a child without any adult history as the point of connection with Aboriginal culture. It seems we are still not mature enough to have an adult relationship between the two worlds. Any attempt to mature this relationship on the grand stage would only make more obvious the lack of treaty in our history.
In Melbourne, the absence of real connection with Aboriginal Australia was made additionally obvious in the second boy’s role. The young ambassador from Plan Australia described the queen as the ‘glue’ that keeps the Commonwealth together. Clearly, cultural dialogue, shared colonial experience and common humanity is not enough. Mother England still holds us together.
But there are signs that the royals might be a touch impatient for Australia to loosen its hold on the apron strings. Last Saturday, I was lined up to have a conversation with the youngest son, Prince Edward. I introduced him to the Common Goods exhibition, pointed out the 100th Anniversary of Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign and the way Indian darners had honoured our proud Eureka flag. In the face of a proud republican tradition, the Prince exclaimed ‘Smashing!’
Minutes later, he was at the podium opening the Spirit of the Games exhibition, at the Melbourne Museum. The crowd hushed in respect as the Earl of Wessex entered the room. Before welcoming the Prince, the Museum Director Dr Patrick Greene acknowledged the traditional owners of the land, the people of the Kulin nation. He was followed by the Premier Steve Backs, how also commenced with the same script. Then Arts & Sport Minister Rod Kemp spoke about the joys of combining both ministries. Finally, Museum chair Harold Mitchell acknowledged traditional owners and then mentioned the real chair on which the ‘little old lady’ sat that is now on display (to gasps of horror in the audience). Finally, Prince Edward took to the podium, fresh-faced and without notes. And even he began with the refrain ‘I would like to acknowledge the original…’ he hesitated for a second before correcting himself, ‘…traditional owners of the land’. Steve Bracks looked particularly pleased at this royal acknowledgment.
While Australia’s future as a republic seems on indefinite hold, the symbolic status of indigeneity is now rivalling the English monarchy as a way of legitimating our identity.

Performance in Lygon Street

2006-02-24T17:00:00.000+11:00

I came across this radical collective in a South American restaurant, Lygon Street. Obviously an issue that the Melbourne locals feel passionately about.

A roar from the white fortress

2006-01-05T09:46:00.000+11:00

It is sickening that the most disgusting remnants of South African racists have found refuge in Australia, where they can yell out the kinds of words that would now get them lynched back where they came from. Is this our most visible connection with South Africa? Racial abuse interrupts Test match - Cricket - Sport - theage.com.au "The South African paceman, a target of crowds because of his colourful antics, was among the five Proteas players racially abused during the first Test in Perth. Makhaya Ntini, South Africa's first black Test cricketer, along with Shaun Pollock, Ashwell Prince, Garnett Kruger and Justin Kemp were called "kaffirs", a derogatory term for indigenous South Africans, or "kaffir boeties", a spiteful term for whites friendly with blacks, by a drunken section of the WACA crowd." I have written a letter to the South African High Commissioner apologising on behalf of the Australian people.

Melb-Italy

2005-12-23T15:14:00.000+11:00

Things are so Latin-centric at the top end of town that a new bar has opened in Flinders Lane calling itself Tazio. It offers the three facilities: birraria, pizzeria, cucina. Much better than 'bar, pizza, kitchen', eh?

Going back home

2005-09-11T11:33:00.000+10:00

Listing to Geraldine Dogue on Radio National Saturday morning discussing our favourite spots on the Thames

The Ashes cricket test as the major sporting battle of our time

Hearing Shane Warne's English accent

New Age column 'Eye on Britain' by British journalist Alan Taylor for the British editor Andrew Jaspan

New haka

2005-08-30T15:34:00.000+10:00

There’s a story running about the new haka by the All Blacks rugby side. The new haka supposedly includes reference to the other cultures of New Zealand. They may try it out against the Wallabies in the upcoming match. When will Australian players develop a war cry?

White women from Africa

2005-08-21T13:12:00.000+10:00

There have been two films recently that celebrate the African value of forgiveness. The Interpreter with Nicole Kidman concerns a fictional African country Motabo and the culture of Koo who grant the family of a murder victim the opportunity to 'save' the life of the murderer. And In My Country, based on the book by Antjie Krog, features Juliet Binoche playing a journalist trying to teach an American about the African value of forgiveness in Ubuntu. Why is it that potentially liberating aspects of African culture are brought to our screens by these whiter than white heroines? Does this provide us with a door to Western intervention in Africa, seeing its core values represented best not by its black inhabitants but by its white women?

Going Balanda

2005-08-07T21:44:00.000+10:00

L. Leichardt (1845) Journal Overland Expedition. They knew the white people of Victoria, and called them Balanda, which is nothing more than 'Hollanders'; a name used by the Malays, from whom they received it [Image of Dutch Masters exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria]

Faranji

2005-07-31T18:41:00.000+10:00

In the Divehi language spoken by the people of Maldives, the word for white person is 'faranji'. This applies to most imported goods and those of non-Muslim beliefs. Among items forbidden in the Maldives are: alcohol, idols and dogs.

Oyimbo

2005-06-12T21:37:00.000+10:00

A word for non-indigenous in Nigeria seems to be 'oyimbo', the source of complaint about the hardship faced by Nigeria migrants in the west: "Every day our doctors go there and end up washing plates for oyimbo because oyimbo does not think we study medicine right. Our lawyers go and drive taxis because oyimbo does not trust how we train them in law." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Purple Hibiscus London: Harper, 2005

Johannesburg

2005-06-07T12:58:00.000+10:00

Michael is a recent arrival from Mozambique. He has perched on the edge of a craft market in Newtown with his hand-built architecture. His buildings are made out of grass that has been varnished and his housing block is made out of black cardboard. Michael is very particular about the way the rooms are planned within the house. He doesn't seem to have a definite plan of what he is going to do in Johannesburg. For the time being, he is eking a living making models of the architecture that he doesn't yet enjoy himself.

2005-04-24T18:01:00.000+10:00

It was difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived then in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own. We could open the paper, even the business section or the legal page, or we would read the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, and there was poetry waiting to take over our dreams. So that for us aborigines from every province, Bogotá was the capital of the country and the seat of government, but above all it was the city where poets lived. Gabriel García Marquez Living To Tell The Tale London: Jonathan Cape, 2003

Where the fashion forward meet

2005-03-27T11:12:00.000+10:00

The date is set now for 31 March 2005 -- the location, Perth.

Fashion forward -- what next?

2005-03-22T20:29:00.000+11:00

The term 'fashion forward' seems to mean items that are ahead of current trends. It is used often as a label for newcomers to fashion, such as Hip Hop or technology. I wonder how long it will be before it is applied to the arts. Will we have 'art forward', to include works that are ahead of their time? Will 'Shock of the Yet to Be' replace 'Shock of the New'? The advance of art from traditional, to modern, to contemporary still seems to have territory to cover. Wait for the Museum of Forward Art.

Do a runner

2005-03-20T02:44:00.000+11:00

A survey last year by the New Zealand Herald found that one in three under-graduates plans to seek work overseas immediately after graduation, and that 66 per cent intend to leave the country by the age of 30. True, Kiwis have always loved to travel - many see the "overseas experience" as an essential part of their personal and professional development - but the question now is how many of these graduates will ever return home. The 2003 students' association report found "a clear link between going overseas and student loan debt, as non-resident borrowers have significantly higher average student loan debt than resident borrowers".

Stuart Dunn 'Graduate debt? Do a runner . . .' New Statesman (7/02/2005)

___

Forecast for Melbourne Issued at 0505 on Thursday the 10th of March 2005
Fine apart from an early morning light shower or two. A mostly sunny afternoon with light southerly wind and seabreezes.
Max 22

How hard can it be?

2005-03-19T20:14:00.000+11:00

Pause for thought at the traffic lights this afternoon. Under the railway is an ad for Puma shoes. There's an average looking Aussie kid holding a football, admiring the Apollonian image of the football hero. All this is familiar enough, except that the setting looks more like Havana, than Hawthorn. There's a Cuban looking old man sitting on the step, and the wall in the ad is worn with time that no surface in Melbourne would be allowed to acquire. Interesting that the very element that makes us look down on Latin countries -- the seeming hopelessness -- here is the source of a romantic aura. It suggests that rags to riches glory that is more possible in a country were there are still rags, than one like Australia where is seems less reason to struggle.

Those whose ears reflect the light of the sun

2005-03-12T19:33:00.000+11:00

An excerpt from a recent South African novel uses one of my favourite phrases for non-indigenous person: '...that part of kwaXhosa that had been conquered and settled by the children of Queen Victoria -- they whose ears reflected the light of the sun -- continued to eat.' Zakes Mda Heart of Redness New York: Farrar, Strauss & Young, 2000, p. 74

Colombians at the market

2005-03-12T12:22:00.000+11:00

At the south corner of the Victoria market, there is normally a South American band playing folk music, as you find in markets and malls around the world. This morning, a couple of Colombian guys were unpacking some terracotta ceramics which they had imported from their home country. It was a revelation to see some real craft emerging, given the cheap factory crap that is everywhere else at the market. Of coure, they didn't have a permit and had been sternly spoken to my the security guard. They innocently said that they would try somewhere else to show their work. Pity there isn't room for the street in Melbourne.

Wear it out

2005-03-09T21:16:00.000+11:00

The National Australia Bank is running a series of ads featuring a man and woman wearing the new 'mini' credit card as jewellery. They are quite curious images. The man and woman look almost identity, with bold Roman profiles that shroud half their faces in chiaroscuro. But credit cards as jewellery? While it is a tongue in cheek campaign, it does reflect the increasing use of capital and ornament. Like the labels on underwear that were exposed above the waist. Or the sexy mobile phones to carry around. All this does suggest some sort of implosion, where the medium of capital becomes its central message, and as consumers we identify not with the objects we buy but the cards we use to make these purchases.

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