2023-09-03

On “White” indigenous Australians …..

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by Neil Godfrey

The many fair-haired blue-eyed Indigenous Australians (who often trigger scepticism and resentment in non-Indigenous Australians) were usually raised by Aboriginal mothers or removed from their Aboriginal mothers and placed in brutal institutions. They identify as Aboriginal because their white fathers, and often grandfathers too, never lifted a finger to help, or were only fleetingly in their lives. Their formative loving relationships were with their Aboriginal family.

It is one more reason why I am voting Yes – because our parliamentary representatives do not read Aboriginal memoirs and show no compassion for the decades of personal abuse inflicted on generations of Aboriginal families.

If you don’t know, please pick up any of the brilliant Aboriginal autobiographies that have been published over the past 50 years. They are all great reads and insights into this country and its history.

—– Libby Connors, Facebook post, 2nd September 2023

(I’ve referenced Libby Connors before …. see my post, Where None Shall Hunger. I quoted from her historical research published as Warrior — a book that opened my eyes to many aspects of the lives of the Aboriginal people who were once at home in the region where I now live.)

I can’t go beyond the following case for voting Yes in the coming referendum:

Massacred. Raped. Poisoned. Enslaved. Their children stolen. Their lands taken. Their religions, their culture and their languages destroyed.. yet there’s a No campaign?

—– Philip Adams, X, 24th February 2023

I dearly hope that the positive emphasis of the Yes campaign will turn back the shame that looms from the efforts of its opponents: A No vote will be Australia’s Trump moment.


2021-10-01

Why We Stopped Flogging

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by Neil Godfrey

And I thought we were just getting nicer. Nope, the data seems to point to another reason.

Norfolk Island, flogging 1823, from State Library NSW

According to an article by Penelope Edmonds and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘The whip is a very contagious kind of thing’: flogging and humanitarian reform in penal Australia, the reasons for the declining use of flogging were complex but two factors do stand out as primary movers.

  1. A more effective method of behaviour control was found: solitary confinement in particular. It was so effective that it had the proven ability to send men mad, and shorten their life-spans. Prisoners feared solitary confinement more than they did whipping. Where flogging was prevalent such as in the chain gangs, the convicts were generally reluctant workers, doing the bare minimum to avoid being flayed. Where prisons had the resources to be able to build solitary confinement facilities there work productivity improved while fewer men had to be punished that way. The treadmill was another penalizing innovation that some prisons introduced with a similar effect.

The decline in flogging in Van Diemen’s Land appears to have had more deep-seated causes than top-down reform powered by humanitarian advocacy. Our analysis suggests that it occurred in inverse proportion to the capacity of penal stations to punish convicts. This is an important finding. It suggests that the colonial state deployed different forms of terror at different times and for different purposes. As the array of punishments available to it expanded, less use was made of public displays of violence, whether through execution or flogging. Such an approach is consistent with Foucault’s famous observation about the decline in the use of judicial terror in Western Europe. [Discipline and Punish, 293-308. My bolding in both quotations]

  1. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak, it is said, but there was one way convicts could “fight back”:

Many reformers were particularly concerned about the manner in which convicts turned the performance of flogging into counter-theatre. The prisoner who resisted the violent will of the state by refusing to scream was lauded, while the man who broke down was shamed. Flogging became a battle of wills—a form of blood sport fought out across the frame of the prisoner.

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Two implications come to mind:

What does it mean for our interest to combat the practice of the public displays of terror in states like Saudi Arabia?

What of humanity’s future if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change or if for some other reason our societies revert to a major decline in resources and a breakdown in central authority?

There are other significant questions, too, that are raised by Michel Foucault in Disciple and Punish.


Edmonds, Penelope, and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. “‘The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing’: Flogging and Humanitarian Reform in Penal Australia.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2016.0006.



2021-09-30

Still the Same after 162 years: Our attitude towards other races looking to us for refuge

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by Neil Godfrey

I so often find a real fascination in reading old newspapers. How refreshing it is to read editorials, articles and letters using cheeky tones to address the most serious political and social issues of their day. If only more news and social media could be more like those days! Is it my imagination or has something in our national mood seriously shifted in a darker direction since the nineteenth century?

Anyway, here’s the point of this post. Read how alike are the thoughts expressed here in a letter to the colonial newspaper that we find expressed and discussed today — our confidence that we are not racists being compared with our attitude towards immigrants of a different race fleeing horrendous conditions in their own country and seeking refuge with us.

Englishmen are great admirers of abstract philanthropy. They delight in all those exhibitions of human rights which awaken the profoundest emotions. They can weep over the pain and suffering endured by men of colour, and they warm towards all the inferior races who groan under the power of tyrants. But when these forms of misery and wretchedness come within their own vicinity, and present themselves in the aspect of some barbarian Chinaman, driven from the home of his fathers by an internecine war, and seeking the shadow of institutions said to be founded on the common benefit, all their philanthropy vanishes.

— , 13 June 1859, 4.

That was written not long after the Opium Wars and an earlier part of the same letter made mention of a sense of national “war guilt” for imposing reparations on the Chinese for daring to resist the British right to sell opium to their citizens. Reference is also made to the horrific wars in China at that time. That would be the Taiping Rebellion. The same letter acknowledged “backward” customs of the Chinese but concluded by reminding readers of “their veneration of parents, their love of knowledge, and their quiet and tolerant spirit.”

 

 

 

 


2021-05-17

The Mask Wearing Experience in the 1918-20 Spanish Flu Pandemic – Australia

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by Neil Godfrey

Here’s a snippet from a historian’s description of how Australia experienced the 1918-20 Influenza Epidemic. I’ve selected the mask experience for this post. It’s from

  • McQueen, Humphrey. 1976. “The ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic in Australia, 1918-19.” In Social Policy in Australia: Some Perspectives, 1901-1975, edited by Jill Roe. Stanmore, N.S.W: Cassell Australia. p. 136

I have added the images, most of them taken from the endnotes in Humphrey McQueen’s chapter. Bolded highlighting is my own.

If only on grounds of personal comfort the wearing of masks was a hotly contested issue in New South Wales where it was most strenuously enforced. The demand for masks was so extensive that to prevent profiteering the Commonwealth Government declared butter muslin and gauze to be ‘necessary commodities’ within proclaimed areas. This meant that maximum prices could not exceed those charged generally on 24 January 1919.

One doctor supported masks because they would help keep germs in and thus lessen contagion. Opposition came from those who saw them as breeding grounds for infection or as sapping the community’s ‘vital force’. A ‘Bovril’ advertisement alleged that anti-influenza masks were ‘like using barbed wire fences to shut out flies’.

Western Argus (Kalgoorlie, WA : 1916 – 1938), Tuesday 17 June 1919, page 5

With genuine if unconscious insight into the behaviour patterns of its readers, the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that resistance to masks stemmed from a distaste for making oneself conspicuous and that this would fade away ‘[o]nce the pioneers have introduced the fashion’ whereupon wearing a mask would become as natural as wearing a hat’.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Wednesday 29 January 1919, page 10

But if masks were supposed to keep germs out, declared the Rhinologist at St Vincents, a simple cloth cover over mouth and/or nose was inadequate and he called for a full face mask with mica eye pieces. Others proposed variants included masks with handles for outdoor work and the ‘Lightning Germ Arrestor for Telephones’. The Director of Quarantine defended masks because they reassured ‘nervous persons’ and provided a ‘tangible.. .indication that precautions are being taken’.

Herald (Melbourne, Vic. : 1861 – 1954), Saturday 9 August 1919, page 8
World (Hobart, Tas. : 1918 – 1924), Wednesday 20 August 1919, page 2

Leaving the article behind, I can’t resist adding some other items I came across while searching for the above.

I came across a family namesake of mine — possibly a distantly related ancestor of some sort — facing court for refusing to wear a mask in a train carriage:

Some masks from 1919, the normal and the creative:

Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 – 1954), Monday 10 February 1919, page 6
Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 – 1954), Thursday 6 February 1919, page 4
Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW : 1888 – 1954), Saturday 8 February 1919, page 4

 


2020-11-24

Petition for Australian readers re David McBride

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by Neil Godfrey

Invitation to sign the online petition to Australia’s Attorney-General, Christian Porter. — From change.org:

David McBride (Photo from Sydney Morning Herald)

In light of the Defence Dept releasing the Breton Report on the Afghan Files investigation it is even clearer that the Government did everything they could to muzzle David McBride. Mr McBride reported internally the information contained in the newly released report and was effectively managed out of the Defence Dept. After he informed some journalists of what he knew this Government had him charged and he is facing the possibility of a 50 year prison sentence.. We now know heinous crimes have been committed by a small number of SAS members and they will face criminal trials and hopefully time in prison. The stench of this Australian Government corruption is strong.

The Australian people call on the Attorney General to drop the charges pending against David McBride. Some of us are wondering if the LNP went down this path in order to attempt to protect a current sitting member of Parliament. The Attorney General has already conceded charges against the journalists could not be pursued. It is now time to admit the grave error he made by pursuing David McBride.

It was good to read a piece by Geoffrey Robertson

His conclusion:

I know from my own experience of presiding over a war crimes court just how hard it is for witnesses to come forward if threatened with reprisals – especially from “mates”. This takes even more courage than needs to be shown on a battlefield. Each should be given, because they deserve it, an Order of Australia.


2020-09-01

The Shape of the New World Dawning?

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by Neil Godfrey

American readers closer to the mises en scène will be able to help this outsider more clearly focus his observations.

From here in Australia I see

    • a President of the U.S. who speaks out against one side involved in violent clashes there, and speaks defensively on behalf of the others involved and who are his supporters;
    • a President of the U.S. who blurs into one violent image both peaceful and violent protests (those whom his own supporters oppose) as if they were all one and the same and all violent and destructive;
    • a President who focuses almost to the exclusion of all else the violence and destruction of one side without at any time addressing the issues, the complaints, the causes both immediate and long-term, that has led to the protests in the first place;
    • following from the point above, a President who frames all the protests (all of them being portrayed as violent) as a “law and order” issue, that is, as nothing more than a situation that needs to be crushed by force.

Is the above a fair synopsis?

Oh, and one other thing that keeps bugging me. An Australian Prime Minister who happens to be a Pentecostal fundamentalist and a bit of a narcissist (Australian style) and comes across as a pet puppy keen to make a good impression for his master so has dutifully acted on his master’s wishes and called on an investigation into a prejudged assessment of China’s criminal negligence with respect to the coronavirus. That’s all fine except that China is now powerful enough to throw around the sort of bully beef we expect the U.S. to apply to disobedient small-fry. Now Australia is subject to early trade sanctions and other disincentives (putting a squeeze on our hitherto lucrative Chinese student intake into our universities) from its largest trading partner as well as “arbitrary” detention of its citizens who happen to be in Chinese territory. Nice one — that sort of thing is supposed to happen to “them”, not to “us”. I still envy New Zealand for maintaining a degree of independence that seems far too rare in modern Australian history.

Posts on Vridar have been somewhat patchy in regularity lately with extended family business taking over priorities at the moment, but the above thoughts have been playing on my mind. So here they are.


2020-04-27

What Could Australia Be without War?

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by Neil Godfrey

We hear over and over that Australian nationalism was forged in the crucible of war.

The Australian War Memorial preaches this belief with its Forging the Nation exhibition.

The renowned war historian C.E.W. Bean made the message clear in his history of Australia in World War 1:

And then, during four years in which nearly the whole world was tested, the people in Australia looked on from afar [and] saw their own men flash across the world’s consciousness like a shooting star. Australians watched the name of their country rise high in the esteem of the world’s oldest and greatest nations. Every Australian bears that name proudly abroad today; and by the daily doings, great and small, which these pages have narrated, the Australian nation came to know itself…

We are repeatedly reminded of headlines like the following:

But it’s not true. It is a myth. Australian nationalism was alive and flourishing in the years preceding and following Federation in 1901. An Australian identity — the one that is propagandized today with its stress on mateship and egalitarianism — was there in the cultural, social and political life of Australians before 1914.

I wish I could locate the source of the words now but I recently heard a woman being interviewed on Late Night Live, I think it was, remarking that the Great War broke Australia. It changed us as a nation. We lost our confidence not just from the immediate trauma of the four years of battle but from the many traumas of trying to rebuild lives in the years following.

With Federation in 1901 the big question was what sort of nation Australians wanted to build:

‘’A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millenial Eden ’neath your face?”

Was the continent to see repeated the evils of other civilizations, the ravages of war, the co-existence of great wealth and abysmal poverty, the rigid class structure of privilege, or was it, on the other hand, free of the taint of older societies, to produce a civilization in which the individual dignity of man had full respect?

(Greenwood, 199. The poetry is from the Bernard O’Dowd’s prize-winning poem challenging the emerging nation in 1900 to ask what sort of society it would make of itself.)

The mateship was there long before Gallipoli as anyone who has read Henry Lawson’s poetry should know.

Bitten deep into the consciousness of the men and women who espoused the Labour cause was a belief in the importance of solidarity, of sticking together, of being able to rely on one’s mate. (200)

And it wasn’t confined to the labouring class, either:

While the more advanced liberals had in common with the leaders of political Labour a belief in experimentation, a sense of Australianism, a recognition of the necessity for remedying social injustice by State action, and, in the larger view, an optimistic acceptance of the social democratic doctrine of progress, all this sprang from genuine conviction, for the faith to which they held and by which they acted was their own and not merely a pale reflection of Labour doctrine. (203)

Australian values (good and bad) were being self-consciously “defined and firmly established” from at least as early as 1901. There was a confidence we would scarcely recognize today, a confidence in the ability to transform and make a more just society, one free of poverty and inequality and exploitation (205).

There was a tone of self-confidence about the pre-1914 nationalist creed. The world was young, and despite the turmoil and depression of the nineties there was an idyllic and anticipatory assumption of future triumphs. Power and creative vigour, the impulse to assert the dignity of the ordinary man through a new Australian social order and the exhilaration of building towards an independent and native cultural tradition all belong to the movement. (207)

Geographic realities meant that the nation had to come together to work through a centralizing power. (See Australia and the United States – Interesting Comparisons for a comment on Australia’s attitude towards central government.) There was also the labour movement’s felt need to take control of the power that had formerly been used to oppress them into accepting unsafe and intolerable conditions. But the core values were shared by both sides of politics:

Humanitarian liberalism, whether of the Deakin [i.e. Liberal] or Fisher [i.e. Labor] variety, was in the ascendant until the war of 1914. Liberal and Labour governnicnts testified in action to their belief in the efficacy of State enterprise. Their social and economic principles were worked out in the field of public policy, and by experimentation they endeavoured to forge new instruments of social and economic justice . . . . Social aims, however, touched almost all legislation . . . . (210-11)

So what were some of the achievements of that “social experiment” of the pre-War years? What particulars are worthy of being remembered and celebrated and embraced as proud achievements of a nation? Here are a few: Continue reading “What Could Australia Be without War?”


2020-01-07

Ammunition for Climate Change Deniers (The Facts Are Bad Enough)

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by Neil Godfrey

I posted a familiar looking photo in “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs” that I have now replaced with one of the current situation. It reminded me of scenes I had seen in another bushfire year and I thought, “Here we go again” – but no, I have learned that that photo was recycled from a 2013 bushfire in Tasmania.

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And now there is this infographic circulating on Twitter, Reddit and everywhere else, I guess. Infographic.tv awarded it one of “the best”. The critical comment comes from cupboard.com.

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Here is my own “infographic” based on the same data. Bear in mind I am no mathematician so more mathematically endowed readers are welcome to offer corrections:

California —  AmazonSiberiaAustralia
Bottom row — the scales as depicted in the infographic, all compared with California. Top row — a truer representation according to the figures (my rough calculation).

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Certain maps hit home as definitely misleading from the moment I saw them. They do not represent what is happening now. They “point” to areas where we have had bushfires since September 1919, and the “pinpointing” is with a thick marker pen rather than a precision pen.

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Here’s a more realistic satellite image of where the most serious threats are at the moment:

From space.com

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There are other more informative maps for residents, too, on the various state fire service sites. These are bad enough:

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Left: Today’s map from NSW Rural Fire Service.
Right: Qld Rural Fire Service current map

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I can see the climate change deniers (who include our current political leaders in the pockets of the coal industry and Pentecostal faith) eventually standing up for Murdoch’s media coverage as some more “realistic” perspective:

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From theguardian.com

 


2020-01-04

“Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs”

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by Neil Godfrey

Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames . . . Photo by Allison Marion of her son Finn; see ABC News article: Victoria bushfire evacuee . . . .

A novelist has the words to best describe it:

Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.

The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.

The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.

Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.

All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning.

Flanagan, Richard. 2020. “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” The New York Times, January 4, 2020, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-fires-climate-change.html. (With thanks to the reader who sent me a link to this article.)

And our faith-infused prime minister, Scott Morrison, as per one of the videos posted in the previous post, tells us that we have always had to face disasters and challenges of one kind or another, and this is no different, and we will, as we have beaten other challenges, likewise rise up and beat this one. He is not talking about climate change. He is talking about the historic catastrophic fire season in Australia as if its a one-off.

After yesterday’s post another video emerged that shows the PM getting a bit of humiliating flack for a change.

In my previous post I dwelt on the PM’s faith perspective. I think it’s fair to say he does not believe in evolution nor that the Bible has anything to say about climate change. Richard Flanagan’s article reminded me of another more material factor that attracted an inordinate amount of attention in the last election:

In no small part Mr. Morrison owes his narrow election victory last year to the coal-mining oligarch Clive Palmer, who formed a puppet party to keep the Labor Party — which had been committed to limited but real climate-change action — out of government. Mr. Palmer’s advertising budget for the campaign was more than double that of the two major parties combined. Mr. Palmer subsequently announced plans to build the biggest coal mine in Australia.

Clive Palmer has a deep record of dishonesty in business and with clients that surely rivals Donald Trump’s. The poster above shows how attached he was to imitating his U.S. alter ego in that election campaign.

Palmer himself had no chance of becoming PM but his votes lent support to the Scott Morrison government. Who is Scott Morrison? He is acceptable to many Australians as a PM because he is said to be “authentic”. Yes, he’s a “daggy dad” and even a pentecostal, but Australians are a tolerant lot and can accept neighbours down the street who are like that. We have proven we are just as likely to vote for atheists and, god-forbid, unmarried women, as prime ministers. What is Morrison’s political background? I have never liked him for the reason given by Flanagan:

Mr. Morrison made his name as immigration minister, perfecting the cruelty of a policy that interns refugees in hellish Pacific-island camps, and seems indifferent to human suffering. Now his government has taken a disturbing authoritarian turn, cracking down on unions, civic organizations and journalists. Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating.

“Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” wrote the leading broadcaster Hugh Riminton, speaking for many. To which he might have added “idiots,” after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure.

Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.

Most Australians want serious action on climate change. I’m keeping a close eye on Extinction Rebellion (Australian branch) with a view to contributing actively to that movement — I took special notice of them at the same time as Morrison who wanted to limit their ability to make a public impact with their activism. Scott Morrison and his party appear to be firmly indebted to contributions from the coal industry. I understand that the opposition party has also begun taking significant donations from that industry.

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.

Mr. Morrison may have a massive propaganda machine in the Murdoch press and no opposition, but his moral authority is bleeding away by the hour. On Thursday, after walking away from a pregnant woman asking for help, he was forced to flee the angry, heckling residents of a burned-out town. A local conservative politician described his own leader’s humiliation as “the welcome he probably deserved.”

As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?

Evacuees at Mallacoota Wharf (Jan 2020). Picture: Twitter/Bluefestblues Source:Twitter — From news.com.au

 

P.S. I recall the days when an election was about advancing a more humane, just and sustainable society. Today, the debates seem to have very little imagination beyond the theme of “economic growth”, led, of course, by mining giants et al.

 


Flanagan, Richard. 2020. “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” The New York Times, January 4, 2020, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-fires-climate-change.html.


 

 


2020-01-03

Apocalypse Now: Rapture Into Denial for Pentecostal Leaders

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by Neil Godfrey

I’m wondering if any Australians who comment here from time to time have been affected by the bushfires that seem to have been with us and only getting worse for months now. What’s happening now is horrendous and unlike anything else I’ve ever heard of, and I know Indonesia, the Amazon, Africa, the United States Arctic regions and god knows where else have been experiencing similar. I am finding it hard to get my head to imagine the following scenario in which a young firefighter was killed. No-one would think this possible . . .

A young volunteer firefighter and soon-to-be father was killed when a “freakish weather event” lifted his fire truck off the ground, the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) says.

Samuel McPaul, 28, died yesterday after his truck flipped in the Green Valley blaze in Jingellic, 70 kilometres east of Albury near the NSW-Victoria border.

NSW RFS district manager Superintendent Patrick Westwood said Mr McPaul was “doing everything right” when tragedy struck.

He and two others had been mustering cattle caught in a paddock on flat ground.

“The crew decided to move away from that area and, quite unexpectedly, very suddenly, they experienced extreme winds and what could only be described as a fire tornado that lifted the back of the truck, fully inverted it and landed it on its roof, trapping three people, three crew that is, and unfortunately, one of them fatally,” Superintendent Westwood said.

“The driver was a veteran captain of 35 years-plus experience.

“He thought he was in the right spot — as he was, from what I can understand — and just this freakish weather event that would have to be seen to be believed. Even then, other veteran firefighters don’t believe what they saw, [it] engulfed that vehicle with flame, fire, and strong winds and literally picked up an 8-tonne truck and flipped it over.

(From ABC News)

Many readers have probably already seen the horrific scenes of apocalyptic-like doom, the navy rescuing people stranded on the beach as their town was being destroyed, and no doubt similar scenes elsewhere in the world.

A few weeks ago fires several kilometres away were causing our view across town to be hazed out by smoke. To go outside was to breathe smoke and return inside smelling strongly of smoke. A few days later I thought it was clearing and went outside at twilight and saw what looked for all the world like a “glorious red sunset” — but not where the sun sets in the west; it was in the south! Reflections of the fire in the clouds. An apocalyptic poet would find words to depict something like the sun being thrown out of its orbit.

A Timeline

2017

That Coal Prop in Parliament

 

2018

Inside a Pentecostal Hillsong Church (link is to analysis of the influence of his religious beliefs on his politics, inc climate change) (And here’s another.)

 

2018 (Nov)

And a similar message was delivered directly for Greta Thunberg.

 

2019

Brian Houston, Pentecostal Hillsong Pastor, is a potential liability publicity wise given coming under a cloud for failing to report to police evidence that his father had been guilty of child sex abuse in his church. (And one more about the Devil and Scott Morrison.)

2020


2019-05-19

I Wish I Could Understand Australia Better

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by Neil Godfrey

I am an Australian but I think that makes it harder for me to understand Australia in some ways, especially the weekend’s depressing election results. Perhaps that’s because what I would like to see obscures my view of the reality.

Scott Morrison, a Pentecostal churchgoer who attributed his election victory to a miracle, is once again Australia’s Prime Minister — after winning an election that broke the standard rules of the game. His Liberal-National coalition was meant to be thrashed at the polls after all sorts of not very secret political power plays that saw ugly challenges and changes of party leadership prior to the election.

The good news:

Tony Abbott, ex-Prime Minister, eater of raw onions with skin, Catholic, anti-abortion, a climate change denier who becomes a climate change believer when he sees his support base waning, and back-stabber and leaker-of-dirt-on-colleagues-to-the-press-in-chief, lost his seat and is finally out of Parliament for good.

The bad news:

Peter Dutton, an alt-right type racist and all-round bigot who was the one Abbott and others in the Liberal National coalition hoped would be the new Prime Minister could not be unseated despite massive campaigns from all sorts of movements and notable persons to target him in his electorate.

Following on from the entrenched support for Dutton we have further alt-right type persons, racists, fear-mongerers, — Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer — giving their preferences votes to Scott Morrison’s party and handing him a secure and unexpected sweeping victory in north Queensland. That is despite Pauline Hansons’s party being caught out in a sting operation by Al Jazeera journalists approaching the U.S.’s National Rifle Association for donations and Clive Palmer being such an obviously dishonest jerk going all out to imitate Donald Trump’s worst attributes. (Palmer cheated workers of wages when one of his mining businesses collapsed and promised to “repay” them just on the eve of the election — surely such an obvious con no-one could possibly take him seriously.

But surely racism and fear of job losses as a result of environmental priorities is not the whole story. Those states of mind are always going to be with us.

On the other side, I find myself despairing of public “debates” and interviews. Political leaders now have the art of evading direct answers to questions down to a fine art. Scott Morrison doesn’t use the term “fake news” but he does regularly speak of the “Canberra bubble” to dismiss any serious questions. Same thing, just an Australian branding.

Yet the “serious” interviewers don’t do seriously informative interviews. They play the game of asking questions from the opposing party’s point of view. They don’t stand back and challenge the respective parties from the perspective of the broader public. Interviewing a Liberal politician they challenge them with Labor Party points; and vice versa and so on. It’s all removed from the real world.

Except for the shock-jocks — who play the anti-immigrant and fear cards.

And the shock-jocks and the mainstream interviewers are earning fortunes to do their work of trying to score political points and win audience ratings. And meanwhile both major parties are dancing and dining comfortably with big business and careful not to upset the media giants.

It’s all out of touch with reality — at least the reality of the root drivers of the forces shaping the worlds of most of us.

Democracy and political debates is primarily about media management and media images. And that gives the victory to the cleverest or luckiest and/or richest manipulator.

There’s something ugly happening here and we’re waiting for something positive to return to the play. That’s how it seems to me. I wish I could understand it more clearly.

 

 


2019-04-24

Anzac Day, 2019

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by Neil Godfrey

Lake and Reynold’s book was published in 2010. I wish it weren’t as relevant today, or even moreso, as it was then.

Like the many Australians who are concerned with the homage paid to the Anzac spirit and associated militarisation of our history, we are concerned about the ways in which history is used to define our national heritage and national values. We suggest that Australians might look to alternative national traditions that gave pride of place to equality of opportunity and the pursuit of social justice: the idea of a living wage and sexual and racial equality. In the myth of Anzac, military achievements are exalted above civilian ones; events overseas are given priority over Australian developments; slow and patient nation-building is eclipsed by the bloody drama of battle; action is exalted above contemplation. The key premise of the Anzac legend is that nations and men are made in war. It is an idea that had currency a hundred years ago. Is it not now time for Australia to cast it aside?

Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds. 2010. What’s Wrong with ANZAC?: The Militarisation of Australian History. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. (p. 185)


2019-04-02

Australia’s Lost Narrative and Identity

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by Neil Godfrey

This is a parochial post. It concerns only my little corner of the world. I have liked to think of myself as an internationalist, one who has surpassed all attachment to the accident of the place of his birth, but in my more honest moments I know I still have a special attachment to Australia, for all its ugliness and outbreaks of inhumanity.

So this post is an outline of a discussion among various prominent persons that I watched on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s free-to-air TV program The Drum last Friday, 29th March 2019. The discussion was initiated by Australian government’s decision to inject massive amounts of money into extending Australia’s War Memorial in our national capital city, Canberra. A key participant in the discussion was Professor Marilyn Lake of the University of Melbourne. I liked just about everything she said. She expressed so very much of what had been bugging the back of my mind for years now — what appears to me as a steadily growing nationalistic focus on war and the warrior as core to Australia’s identity.

Lake spoke of the “excessive militarisation of Australian history” over the last twenty years. Yes. Lake was speaking of the government investment in raising war consciousness among Australians, in museums, in the War Memorial, in the new war centre in France, and even the Department of Veteran Affairs’ supply of study guides for schools! (As Lake suggested, curriculum materials should surely be the responsibility of the education department.) Further, we have seen books and films promoting Australia’s warrior history over that same time.

But only the last 20 years? Certainly 20 years ago we saw Prime Minister Keating push to Australia’s consciousness the historic significance of the Kokoda Track campaign in New Guinea in order to delay the Japanese advance towards our homeland. As a boy I had been impressed by the story of the Kokoda episode but I had never heard it promoted to a place of greater significance, for Australia’s identity, than Gallipoli. The context was the political led push for Australia to become a republic. To break all ties with the British monarchy. But after Keating came Howard and a return to all ties British.

Australian nationalism would seem to be inseparable from war, beginning with Gallipoli. That has certainly been the dominant official message for some decades now. But what might be the alternative?

Here Marilyn Lake reminded me of all those history lessons I had endured in junior high school. I had not fully appreciated them at the time but I have been glad many times since that I had them.

The question Lake was answering was something like “What is the Australian story, the so-called radical social democratic experiment, before World War 1?”

The Australian story, pre-WW1 – the social democratic commitment to the common good. 

A long list of social and political legislation begins in the nineteenth century:

  • Manhood suffrage
  • Secret ballt
  • Eight hour day
  • First legal minimum wage (Victoria, 1896)
  • A basic living wage (the Higgins judgment in 1907)
  • Old age pensions
  • Invalid pensions
  • Maternity allowance

And these things were paid for out of general revenue. One did not have to “put in” to “get out” as one did in places like Britain and Germany.

Justice Higgins said at the time that Australia was torn between two ideals: the common good and private greed. (What has changed? In what direction?)

This was the social democratic commitment to the common good.

Yes, there was an ugly side. All of these historic developments were framed by the White Australia Policy — the official policy that excluded non-whites from migrating to Australia to live.

But notice what was happening within.

Women of all backgrounds, and aboriginals and migrants and even earlier Asian migrants and their descendants all participated in extending that founding vision of democracy to much broader one, not just to white males but to include ALL persons.

Schools would do well, for example, to include in Australia’s history the story of aboriginal activism. How many Australians today even know about the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association formed in the 1920s to push for full citizenship of aboriginals and their land rights.

We need to know the stories of a whole range of people demanding that our nation become more inclusive.

World War 1 —

World War 1, says Marilyn Lake, “broke Australia’s soul”. We know the stats. Out of a population yet not 5 million, 60,000 dead and nearly a half million wounded, gassed or imprisoned. And not the experience of the aboriginals: fought and died alongside whites in the trenches and then when returned to Australia were treated as non-citizens of no account.

Another comparison with the United States

Nearly a month ago I wrote Australia and the United States – Interesting Comparisons

The United States, observes Lake, are devoted to Freedom (e.g. freedom to own guns), but wea  in Australia are more devoted to Fairness, equality of opportunity, — the Civil Rights movement took this Freedom narrative on board. But Australians were demanding equality, not freedom.

Note the American historian Eric Foner.

The alternative story

Though all of this was happening within a “White Australia” it gave a platform for other groups — women, aboriginals, Chinese Australians — to also demand equality or fairness and would become the Australian story of how we sould achieve that ideal of equal citizenship. Women of all backgrounds, and aboriginals and migrants and even earlier Asian migrants and their descendants all participated in extending that founding vision of democracy to much broader one, not just to white males but to include ALL persons.

We need the stories of activism of all these oppressed groups and how they struggled to gain their rights in Australia.

Mention was made of Rebecca Huntley who said that the (relatively recent) global financial crisis precipitated an intensified desire for government to be activist and reformist in the interest of fairness.

Vida Goldstein visited the United States and people from around the world flocked to see this Australian experiment.

Yet how many in Australia know William Cooper‘s story — the only aboriginal to protest Nazi Germany?

Or Pearl Gibbs and Margaret Tucker, aboriginal women who fought for equality?

Vital references:

Australia Fair: Listening to the Nation ((Rebecca Huntley)

Birth of a nation: how Australia empowering women taught the world a lesson

Mapping the massacres of Australia’s colonial frontier


2019-03-09

Australia and the United States – Interesting Comparisons

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by Neil Godfrey

Why are Australians more accepting and trusting of the role of government than Americans?

  • The United States was settled primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by people fleeing from tyrannies;
  • Australia was settled primarily in the nineteenth century in a land much harsher and more difficult to settle than North America — government was needed to provide roads, water, finance, health services, to enable people to move and populate much of the land. Government was viewed more positively than had been the historical attitude in America. Settlers weren’t fleeing to Australia from governments, either. They were being transported by governments and relied on governments services for survival.

I’ve also found Australia at times to be a very controlled country, too tidy and neat and orderly sometimes. Australians pride themselves on the larrakin tradition, the disrespectful and self-reliant “digger” of Gallipoli, that sort of thing, which is seen as originating in the convict past, and many of the convicts were Irish rebels. But there is also a stifling authoritarian and reactionary strain in Australia, led by conservative politicians, churches, wealthy businesses and various clubs like the Returned Services League. And that, I have heard it said, might be seen as traced back to the other sector of our convict days, the guards, soldiers, police, brutal applications of power. It’s that second element that I feel has been depressingly dominant for far too long now, especially since it is led by political figures who want to take us towards the American ways of privatization of what have traditionally been seen as public services, such as health care and education.

What are the voting (government participation) differences?

  • Voting is not compulsory in the United States, or course, and voting takes place on a Tuesday;
  • I think many Australians look askance at both of those practices. By making voting compulsory the poorer and otherwise voiceless sectors will have a say and those seeking election cannot avoid taking their interests into account; that’s a good thing. Also by making it compulsory the otherwise “silent majority” will have their say so that radical partisan movements of either the left or right cannot take over the government by default.
  • It is more democratic to have voting on a Saturday. That’s a holiday or half-day holiday for most people so it is much easier for people to arrange to get out to vote. Sunday would have been better but we have the influence of the churches insisting generations ago that Sunday people should be in church and reading the Bible, not getting mixed up with worldly things.

Such are some interesting (to me) reflections inspired by an interview with historian Judith Brett and comments on a recent Drum program by David Marr. Some of the ideas may be myths, but they make interesting discussion topics — well for some of us anyway.