Do we still love a sunburned country?

and are we all sick of Australians being ordinary?

I’m wondering how you feel about this political cartoon by Jon Kudelka. I spotted it on ABC’s Insiders program (which I highly recommend everyone watch as we head to an election, Sundays 9am or on iview).

JON KUDELKA CARTOON, MARCH 12, 2022...appeared in The Saturday Paper.

Some context:

• Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (there he is in his Hawaiian shirt doing some remiss flood victim comforting stuff) has a thing for reciting parochial poetry at odd times, particularly, as it happens, that of his Great Great Aunt Dame Mary Gilmore.

• But wait. Dame Mary, for surreal effect, is one of Australia’s most famous radicals (woot!), a democratic socialist, unionist, activist for Aboriginal rights, Marxist and pro-labour agitator. Back in the 1920s and 1930s she campaigned for the Labor Party and supported pioneering female ALP candidates. ScoMo chooses to gloss over these realities when he recites his “Aunt Mary” around the joint.

• The cartoon poem above is a mishmash of themes from Donald Horne’s iconic book Lucky Country and Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country …“I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rain…”.

• Want some more surrealism? I did a dig around (because that’s what I like to do). Whitehaven Coal now owns the former Mackellar family property near Gunnedah in north-west NSW, which inspired the poem. And Whitehaven currently has an application before the state’s independent planning commission to expand the nearby Vickery mine, which, say some experts, is likely to destroy the homestead if it goes ahead.

• I dug a bit more. (And it all gets even more circular and, I guess, reflective, of the whole mess we are in in this country; of course all of the messes are intersectional.) Vickery mine might sound familiar…Well, as it happens, this is the application behind the case that hit headlines this week, the one that saw Environment Minister Sussan Ley *actually fight* eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun to prove she does not have a duty of care to young people to protect them from the effects of climate change that would result from that project going ahead. Yep, that one. Ley won BTW. And inside the 24 hours of her “win” Scott Morrison declared to a Sky News event he would be keeping coal mines open for as long as he could if elected in May and Ley announced the coalition would be making it easier going forward for mines to bypass approval processes.

  

  Young climate activist Luca Saunders and two of the other teens outside the Federal Court after the verdict was announced. Via Sydney Morning Herald.

• Donald Horne’s Lucky Country - and apologies if all this is known to you already - is a lament of Australia’s apathy and mediocrity written in 1964. Horne observes that our wealth and power was derived from luck (riding sheep’s backs) rather than innovation and ambition. He lamented the complacency and indifference to intellectual matters in Australia, the social conservatism, the lack of engagement….um. Yes. History repeats.

So, what do you make of the reworked poem?

Me, I think it picks up on something I’ve been feeling for a long time… but have only been able to share with close friends and family. Because, you know, in Australia, we don’t rock boats, get above our rank, get all “top poppy” on the hoi polloi. We don’t upset those who just want to take it easy (double shuckers!!) and have their “quiet Australian” lives.

This is what I’ve wanted to say via megaphone, however:

My beautiful country has become ordinary.

Worse, it has become a country that glorifies ordinary and sinks, cowardly, into all the things that mark an ordinary existence. Things like shirking from responsibility, blaming when things get difficult, taking shortcuts and easy routes, dodging discomfort, pushing back on difficult discussions, avoiding nuance and deferring to blah-binary finger pointing and, yes, lacking in curiosity. It’s being small and acedic, as I describe it in my book This One Wild and Precious Life.

And here are the double-flip ironies of all this:

We still ride on luck. It used to be off the sheep’s back, now it’s off coal and fossil fuels. But, poetically (!), our luck is running out precisely because of our coal and fossil fuel relationship. As the latest IPCC report tells us, Australia is going to be the worst hit of all OECD countries in coming years (not decades).

We still ride on the jingoism. Old white men still tell us we are an egalitarian country where ordinary people can pull themselves up by bootstraps and have a fair go. But the gap between the rich and poor is widening, ditto the gap between old white men and women and minorities, and the gap between First Nations people and the rest of us. And for triple-pike effect - while ever our old white male leaders insist on this jingoistic egalitarian line, it silences and separates further.

We mock people who care and who are engaged in politics or who are “intellectual”. They’re “too intense” (and never just intense per se…it’s always couched as “too much”). They are the latte set. The inner-city cappuccino chatterers.

And you know how this bears out? Bad shit happens (floods and fires our leaders were warned of), or we suddenly realise all the structures that used to protect our egalitarian values (and I do believe most Australians subscribe to them deep down) have been stripped from us, right as we need them. Shitballs, it happened while we weren’t paying attention! While we were out surfing, relaxing, taking it easy, avoiding “drama”! The Romans distracted the masses with bread and circuses. Scott Morrison et al does it with “she’ll be right”, “let’s just stay comfortable” lingo.

While I still have my megaphone, can I implore, Australia please wake up.

Please stop buying the “ordinary” message. Notice it when it’s rolled out and ask, do I want this country to be ordinary on my watch?

Stop writing on your dating profile, “Looking for someone who’s laid back and no drama”. Really? You really want vanilla blancmange? You want a corpse?

Think twice before saying you’re not into politics, or accusing someone (even if it’s to yourself in your head) of being “too intense” for your liking when they’re being courageous enough to care.

These are extra-ordinary times. We are in trouble, our luck has just about run out. Things are getting uncomfortable and to pretend otherwise is gaslighting and dangerous. Ordinary and comfortable doesn’t cut it any more.

Thoughts?

---

Some more cringe poetry…eeeeeek

i love when a theme emerges

Here's Nancy Pelosi, apparently a huge U2 fan, reading a poem yesterday written (I'm guessing in some haste) by Bono on the Ukraine crisis.

Here's a snippet:

Ireland's sorrow and pain

Is now the Ukraine

And Saint Patrick's name is now Zelenskyy.

[I cringe.]

Some more class considerations

because not enough of us are talking about it

My latest Wild podcast chat is with Peter Singer, dubbed the 'world’s most influential philosopher’ and we talk: Can you be good if you don’t give a chunk of your income away? Is it moral to send your kids to private school? And should we shame the rich who don’t give? It’s being getting a fair bit of debate going…wonderfully!

While you’re there…who else would you like to see on my podcast going forward? I have listened and followed up on suggestions from many of you already…

Oh, and please share the podcast with friends!

I’m sorry, you need to know this: “planetary boundaries”.

an ongoing series of 101s pertaining to our existence on this planet

I’ve mentioned “planetary boundaries” a few times in the past. Here’s what you need to know in one paragraph:

There are 9 such Planetary Boundaries, including climate change, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle. The framework was developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen from the Australian National University, who I’ve interviewed before. It marks the limits within which humanity can safely operate. We have already crossed four of the nine boundaries: climate change, biodiversity, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus imbalance).

---

I’m writing this while taking part in a resilience conference with heads of banks and insurance companies (Zoom; video off). I will now go pay more attention.

See you in the comments later today.

Sarah xx