Martin Flanagan asks why AFL crowds boo Adam Goodes.  

Adam Goodes has had an aura of destiny about him for years. Accomplished, articulate, independent in his manner and his views, he was always going somewhere. In January, he was named Australian of the Year and last Saturday, during the biggest event on the AFL calendar, he was booed.

In the aftermath of the grand final, I saw a headline saying the AFL hasn’t done enough to stamp out racism, homophobia and sexism. The AFL can’t stamp out racism, homophobia and sexism any more than we, as a society, can stamp out burglary, murder and drunk driving. When I see claims of this sort I sniff a double standard in that it seems a higher standard is routinely demanded of sportspeople than we ask of ourselves as a nation. Never let it be forgotten that earlier this year the Australian government proposed a law that would have meant Adam Goodes could be called an ape with impunity anywhere but on an AFL playing field.

I would suggest that making any current AFL, A-league or NRL player Australian of the Year is asking for trouble. Football matches are volatile environments, volcanoes of emotion where one incident quickly melts into the next. The Goodes saga involves a number of such incidents – the 13-year-old girl who called him an ape, Eddie McGuire’s King Kong gaffe, Goodes’ refusal to accept McGuire’s apology, the way Goodes plays and the very public suggestion by Shane Warne that he stages for free kicks.

There are plenty of Aboriginal players in the AFL who aren’t booed, but the fact remains that Goodes is the one who has spoken out on Aboriginal issues, using his platform as Australian of the Year to add weight to his comments.

Earlier this year, Age sportswriter Jake Niall wrote an outstanding column in which he quoted black American conservative commentator Shelby Steele saying there are two sorts of black public figures in the US: bargainers and challengers. The bargainer, wrote Niall, “adopts a ‘go along to get along’ view”. He quoted Noel Pearson’s description of a bargainer: “I will not use America’s history of racism against you, if you promise not to use my race against me.” Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey fit this model.

Niall wrote: “The challenger, conversely, does not let racism slide. The challenger sees racism as endemic. He does not go along to get along, and often has an angry edge.” Film-maker Spike Lee is a challenger. Goodes, it seems, is a challenger. Earlier this year, after seeing John Pilger’s film, Utopia, on the despair of a remote Aboriginal community, Goodes was clearly shocked by the lack of response to the documentary in mainstream Australia and said so.

The obvious comparison is with Michael Long. In 1995, almost wordlessly, Long took on the AFL over the issue of on-field racial abuse and delivered the AFL its Mandela moment, converting the game’s overwhelmingly white audience to the idea of dignity that he embodied.

The booing of Adam Goodes is to be regretted deeply, both for his sake and ours. White Australians can issue as many reasons as they wish as to why they don’t like Goodes, but in Aboriginal Australia there is a view that it’s because he’s spoken out on Aboriginal issues. Those claiming to boo Goodes for non-racial reasons also need to understand they are providing a cover for racists.

And so we are back at the racial divide. The mistake is to think we ever leave it.

First published by Fairfax October 2014

In the previous “Man as Machine” (Trains Pt 1) Tarquin O’Flaherty introduced us to Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol.
Tarquin O’Flaherty continues:

There were also great names of the railway age such as Samuel Moreton Peto and Thomas Brassey, who formed companies especially to build a particular stretch of railway.  Brassey was probabably the most successful of these contractors.

In 1854, and seven miles from the Crimean port of Balaclava, 30,000 British soldiers, commanded by Lord Raglan, and a much bigger French army, were laying seige to the Russian stronghold of Sevastopol. Raglan was there, not because of his competence as a soldier, but because of his position in society. Consequently the relatively easy task of taking the target was fouled up by insane dithering which allowed Sevastopol to be reinforced. The Crimean winter closed in and roads from the port became impassable. Soldiers began to freeze to death for lack of food and winter clothing.

When word of this got back to England, Peto, now an MP, in partnership with Brassey, offered at cost, to ship from England to the Crimea enough materials and men to build a double rail line from the Port of Balaclava to the English positions at Sevastopol. This was a bargain too great to refuse.

Brassey had finished the Paris- Rouen railway in 1843, using his own gangs of British navigators, or ‘navvies’, who were absolutely loyal to him.  He paid double and triple wages, fed his men very well and completed vast projects in very short periods of time. Peto had adopted the same methods with the same results.  The possibility of working in freezing conditions in Russia didn’t faze the navvies at all.  Brassey, a couple of years earlier had shipped  3,000 navvies to Canada from England to build the 500 miles of rail between Quebec and Lake Huron. Local French-Canadians, unused to the level of work demanded  were physically incapable of the sustained effort required because of their poor diet.  It was estimated that it would take a labouring newcomer at least a year, on a regular meat and vegetable  diet, to begin to approach the level of fitness required of a navvy.

It took 23 ships to transport the navvies to Balaclava.  At the same time, at Southampton, ‘the wounded, the blind and insane…’ the army remnants of the Crimean Battle of Inkerman were disembarking.

With the navvies went surgeons, nurses, engineers, clerks and tea boys.  Portable huts for accomodation and administration, cranes, picks, shovels, crowbars, trucks, portable stoves, everything necessary so a man could eat, drink and properly clothe himself, before going out to work.

Then came 1,800 tons of rails, 6,000 sleepers, 600 tons of timber and at least 2,000 tons of fixed engines, wagons, barrows, trucks and all of the other paraphernalia necessary to building seven miles of double rail lines.

When everything was landed, the navvies set to right away. Astonishingly, within the first ten days they built not only their own accomodation huts, but five miles of track as well. In a letter home, a Captain Clifford observed;

‘…the navvies work famously and do more work in a day than a regiment of English soldiers do in a week…’

William Russell, correspondent of the Times, who had alerted England to the plight of the army, came back to his home to find his courtyard demolished and a railway line running across it.  A huge tree had been pulled down, destroying his balcony, breaking his windows and smashing the roof.  Was it for this he spoke disparagingly about the navvies?

In all, nearly thirty miles of track were laid to accommodate various points in the army lines.

This work was done extraordinarily quickly, with perhaps less care than would have been used in less troubled times and conditions.  The orders were to finish the job as fast as possible as mens’ lives were at risk.  The navvies started and finished the work, in the bitter Crimean winter, in just over two months.  This included all of the necessary embankments, bridges, cuttings and earthworks.  This amazing achievement, with the navvies working night and day, was estimated, shortly after completion, to have already  carried a quarter of a million tons of food, 1000 tons of ammunition, and another 3,600 tons of normal army supplies.  These goods were initially pulled by horses, as well as by stationary engines using cables, and finally by locomotives shipped out from Britain.  The armies were rejuvenated and Sevastopol fell in September, 1855.

TO BE CONTINUED

Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Ira Maine, Poetry Editor, has this to say:

Our Dispatch today was first published on 24 April 2011.  Still the racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity, the deliberate destruction of language is ongoing.  A look at Argentina.

¿Que tal?

The first gramophone record that came into my father’s possession in the 1920’s was by Dajos Bela. It was entitled Sehnsucht. I believe Sehnsucht is the German word closest to the Spanish word añoranzas that I mentioned in my previous Dispatch. (Actually  13 September in PCBYCP)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSkvAlVeYfw

In the 1950’s my parents had an unforgettable evening at El Galeón, which featured Dajos Bela y su orquesta. My parents had a long conversation with Dajos Bela (in Dutch and German). At dad’s request they played the ‘Kaiser Waltzer’.
http://youtu.be/g7YE7xFNdhE

Dajos Bela was responsible for attracting many European Jewish musicians to Argentina before the shit hit the fan. He is buried at a Jewish cemetery in Buenos Aires.

So a dispatchee informs me the Welsh word for añoranzas is hiraeth.

Señor Isasmendi had been sacked from the Argentine education system. He was anti-Peronist. So he struggled with a private academy. Señor Isasmendi was an inspiring teacher. Many a Palomar child was launched into a lifetime of eager learning by Señor Isasmendi. Once a year, we all trotted off to external exams in Buenos Aires which we passed with flying colours. One of the subjects we were examined in was Justicialismo (Peronist dogma). I vaguely recall us entering a room one by one in which we were asked perplexing questions about Justicialismo. We didn’t have a clue. We passed with flying colours.

Years later my father explained that although Justicialismo was compulsory, Señor Isasmendi had refused to teach it. He had bribed the examiners.

Latin America has been stereotyped by the sajones (English speakers) as being a thoroughly corrupt, incompetent, backward part of the world.

Remote Australian Aboriginal communities are stereotyped as dysfunctional and depraved.

As with all stereotypes a certain element of where there is smoke there is fire applies. Señor Isasmendi had acted corruptly, no cabe duda. I’m glad he did.

Stereotypes often result from ethnocentric value-judgements. A refusal to look into the mirror.

I have often pondered why the Assimilationists are so determinedly dogmatic in pushing their agenda. The best explanation I can come up with is that they are afraid to look into the mirror held up to them by societies with different world views. They are intent on destroying the mirror, rather than face up to what they see in it. We will all be the poorer for it, if you ask me.
http://youtu.be/dt0uK3VXCoQ

So what about corrupt, incompetent, backward Argentina?

Argentina has a subsidised public transport system that Australian authorities can only dream about. My nostalgic train trip to the town of my childhood cost me the princely sum of two pesos ida y vuelta (return) equivalent to 50 Australian cents.

A free-enterprise, highly competitive and efficient luxury coach system criss-crosses the interior, and would be the envy of any Australian state. The colectivo ticket  to Rosario (a 300Km.trip) cost a quarter of what it costs an equal distance from  Alice Springs to Yuendumu on the twice weekly Bush Bus.

As for its treatment of its indigenous population, in the short time I was there, I got the impression that the situation on the ground isn’t much better than that in Australia. The more I look into it the more I get the impression that the screwing of indigenous peoples is as universal as climate change.

In a speech at the Congress I attended, Jose Maria Iñet (a Mocovi indian) explained the current status of los Pueblos Originarios in Argentina in relation to “Rangelands”. He saw his main role to be that of an interpreter. Interpreting an indigenous world view to mainstream Argentines.
… these knives that we dance with awaken the spirits of this land….. http://youtu.be/Enm1da-0lB4

Mid-way through his speech he suddenly grinned like the Cheshire Cat “en un ratito estaban distraidos, y introducimos a los derechos de los pueblos indigenas en la constitución….”  (For a moment they paid no attention and we snuck in indigenous rights into Argentina’s constitution). That was in 1994.

Reconocer la preexistencia étnica y cultural de los pueblos indígenas argentinos. Garantizar el respeto a su identidad y el derecho a una educación bilingüe e intercultural; reconocer la personería jurídica de sus comunidades, y la posesión y propiedad comunitarias de las tierras que tradicionalmente ocupan; y regular la entrega de otras aptas y suficientes para el desarrollo humano; ninguna de ellas será enajenable, transmisible, ni susceptible de gravámenes o embargos. Asegurar su participación en la gestión referida a sus recursos naturales y a los demás intereses que los afectan. Las provincias pueden ejercer concurrentemente estas atribuciones.”
Artículo 75, Inciso 17 de la Constitución Nacional.

I’ll do my best in translating it:

To recognise the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of Argentine indigenous societies (in other words a rebuttal of Terra Nullius). To guarantee respect of their identity and their right to an intercultural and bilingual education; to recognise the legal status of their communities and the possession and communal ownership of the lands they traditionally occupy, and regulate the granting of other lands sufficient for human development; none of these lands will be sold or transferred or be subject to liens or caveats. The participation in the management of their natural resources and other interests that affect them will be ensured. The provinces may jointly exercise these powers (obligations?).

In practice these glorious words may be no more meaningful than Kevin Rudd’s Apology turned out to be in hindsight.
… no one saying what they mean… http://youtu.be/PrSoKnwIku0

but one thing is certain, the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the Intervention) would have been unconstitutional in Argentina, as would the NT Dept. of Education’s “4 hours English only” edict. The current push to force Aboriginal societies to become less communal, and embrace the mainstream ideal of individual ownership would also be unconstitutional in Argentina.

But then the “dirty war” (Argentina 1976-1983) didn’t exactly meet  the requirements of their constitution either.

Jose Maria Iñet invited a group of us into his home one evening, he sang a Mocovi song. Navaya, a delegate from Tanzania, had us all singing a Masai song. Jose Maria and I sang Los ejes de mi carreta…
http://youtu.be/nY-EXKzaLqc

http://youtu.be/w9g9jvZ4yJ0

http://youtu.be/WdohmW4SYFE

Chau,

Franklin

by Tarquin O’Flaherty 

As mentioned elsewhere, the Industrial Revolution was built on canals and turnips.  The turnip allowed the breeding of the best animals by keeping them well fed and healthy over Winter.  Canals allowed huge quantities of materials (coal, rock, gravel and sand etc) to be moved easily to where the great industrial cities (Manchester, Birmingham, etc) were rising.

But the greatest contributor to the advance of the Industrial Revolution was undoubtedly the railway.

To the best of our knowledge, railed ways of some type or another have been in use for a very long time.  Wheeled, horse-drawn wagons on wooden rails were used to haul timber from dense forests, or to drag materials out of the bowels of the earth.  A wheeled and loaded vehicle, once inertia was overcome, could carry a considerable load for long distances providing the horses were not allowed to stop.  Once inertia was re-established then it would take a huge amount of heaving and pulling to get  the load moving again.

The first passenger carrying train in Britain, established in 1822, was the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the Northeast of England.  It was, of course, a glorified, open air coalmine tramroad, and was hauled by horses.  This first railway ran for twenty five miles up hill and down dale.  Ten or more of these miles were downhill where the train needed no pulling at all, and the horse was required only to trot alongside on a tether.  This was so hard on the animals that very quickly a wagon for the horse was established and towed along behind.  The story goes that when the slow descent began, the horse would be detached, where it would promptly gallop along behind and leap into its carriage, where food and water awaited.

Here is a quote from the Liverpool Echo of the time;

He gallops up, and jumps into it at full speed, and can be got out and attached again without stopping….should the …recent…explosions lead to the abandonment of the locomotive engine…. The saving to the Stockton and Darlington Railway cannot be estimated at less than a thousand a year.

The ‘locomotive engine’ of the time could not pull its way out of a paper bag.  It could haul a few carriages along providing the ground was relatively flat, but the moment an incline was encountered the almost entire lack of friction between the wheels and the rails meant that the whole kit and caboodle came to a halt.

By 1835, Isambard Kingdom Brunel,(what a glorious name!) because of this power problem, built the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol with a mean gradient of 1 in 1380. This massive undertaking was known as ‘Brunel’s billiard table’.  To maintain this gradient it became necessary to drive tunnels through mountains and span valleys with viaducts.  Deep swamps were dealt with by sinking vast rafts of oak into the mud to create a firm base, and literally ‘floating’ the railway on piles resting on the oak rafts. Incredible earth embankments were built to carry the line over more shallow ground, and endless bridges were built over both roads and rivers. Not one bit of this stupendous work was performed  by the sorts of  machinery we have available today. Almost the entire network, throughout the British Isles, was built by hand, using picks, shovels and gunpowder. By the late nineteenth century this astonishing transformation  was virtually  complete. The system revolutionised transport, made tourism and holidays available to the working class and, by establishing new towns all along the railway’s length, created both suburban life and the habit of the commuter.

The system also made the fortunes and reputations of a number of individuals. Brunel, of course, who went on to build the first paddle driven ship to cross the Atlantic, the SS Great Eastern, and the first ever, all steel, propellor driven, ocean going ship, The SS Great Britain.

. . .   To Be Continued

A First Hand Account by Quentin Cockburn
(Lawson, in search of, with ‘the three tenors’.)

It is with breathless excitement that we report on the recent expedition of Composer John Thorn, Professor John Barnes and Quentin Cockburn, to the  outer reaches of known civilisation itself Bourke.

Fragments from Lawson’s life as Australia’s’ foremost bush poet were given the royal treatment by John Thorn and his celebrated  orchestral reworking of some of the more enduring pieces, in ‘Looking for Lawson’ last week.  Held on the anniversary 92 years after his death, the inaugural international premiere of Johns compositions, nineteen in all, were performed in dedication to the six months Lawson spent there in the sumer of 1892-1893.

Sent there by Bulletin proprietor J.F. Archibald to “Dry Out” and send copy, Lawson took advantage of the nineteen pubs, (in a town of three thousand people!!) to soak deeply on the lives of ordinary people, the workers, shearers strikes, dust, flies, and outback.   John Thorn’s compositions have given renewed life to a message that is timeless, and universal.  ‘Don’t go to the dry outback to dry out.’   or…‘There is life there beyond the cities and the coastal fringe, but not life as we know it’!

In honour of the man and his legacy, the locals turned up and filled the Toorale room at the Port of Bourke Hotel, (the sole remaining hotel) to capacity, and had a rollicking time.  John Thorn was rapturously received.  John Barnes gave the occasion gravity and offered us an insight to the man himself, variously described as Australia’s’ finest, bush poet, drunk, ….ratbag.  Indeed you must agree, Lawson captures the bush myth eternal as a ‘true savage’ .

We royal three were then sumptuously entertained at the Port of Bourke, for the remainder of Tuesday evening. We then joined somewhat underwhelmed on the tour to Hungerford to celebrate the long trek, (variously described as the ‘D.T Shuffle’ or the ‘Central Australian Crawl’) undertaken by Lawson in search of work, meaning and respite from creditors. Hungerford welcomed us with enthusiasm, barracks food, another live performance, a taciturn french waitress and other local colour.

And what survives of the man himself? To this day the middens of broken whiskey bottles adorn the site of hotels and grog shanties long gone. Forensics failed to identify those consumed by Lawson, or his lesser known compatriots, Morant, Ogilvie and Swampy.   It is said that ‘his ghost may still be heard’ out along the Queensland Border, locals tell of the sound of clinking bottles, a catarrhal wheeze, and faint odure of unwashed and over worn socks.

Special thanks to the good folk of Bourke and particular mention of Paul and Johnno, who made us feel very much a part of Bourke.  We shall as General Douglas Macarthur so famously said “return”, and trust that the sun will set upon another glorious adventure in the Passive Complicity annals, that shall offer no incentive to turn histories page marked ‘L’ ever again.

The Real Lawson… Report from The Inaugural Premiere  “Looking for Lawson”
By Quentin Cockburn

An opportunity arose to accompany my friend and composer John Thorn on a journey to Bourke in celebration of Lawson’s work. Apocryphally, Lawson was sent there in the sumer of 1893 by his frustrated editor J. F. Archibald,  editor of the nationalist, republican, socialist, racist,  and popular Bulletin, to dry out.  That was Archibald first mistake.  Bourke then had nineteen hotels, and those were the official grog shanties.  As evidenced by the shards of whiskey, beer, schnapps and porter bottles that glint from every ruin, sand bar, and wasteland, that refreshment was to be had in plenty, and when the rivers dried, thirst could still be slaked.  Lawson, it goes, had a terrible thirst.  And there is a truism borne by evidential and the anecdotal: the dry outback is not the place to go if you have an unquenchable thirst.

Lawson said the outback started at Bourke, and I suppose he was right.  It is out there, but it’s also a window into something else, perhaps our souls, or the realities of subconscious and unresolved thoughts we carry with us, about aboriginality, mining, exploitation, and the stillness of a land ravaged by over exploitation, and now depopulated.  There are half as many as there used to be in Bourke, or in a polite way the movers and shakers have moved on, leaving those who for whatever reason have stayed.  Perhaps that’s why they need thirty police to service the population of twenty-five hundred, because the true locals refuse to go away.  Elsewhere the sites of former towns, hotels, sheds, outhouses, are erased from memory. I suppose that’s what the outback does, it constantly reasserts the anonymity of timelessness, and the things that are best forgot.

So what of Lawson?  I boned up on his ouvre, ‘figuratively’ I hasten to add.  He was there for about six months.  He got off the train with his one way ticket and the five pounds Archibald had advanced to him, and made his way to several hotels to establish himself until his funds ran out.  He then took on some work at the local newspaper, the Western Herald and found odd jobs as a general hand, working on the union strike, and penning the odd short story about the place, its people and the landscape.  He liked the Heidelberg painters, and like them, was more or less content with feeding the bush mythology from the comfort of the coastal cities.  Where credit is due Lawson, for one reason or another,  he strayed into the bush for a little longer.  It had a lasting impact upon him, and propelled him in one way or another to London several years later, with one hundred pounds gifted by the Governor of NSW, and the best wishes from friends and contributors alike. Eternally, recognition for any artist is assured though acceptance in London, then and still the epicentre.  The cultural cringe, colonialisms triumph, still rules over all of us in this unfinished country.  And in the great tradition of artists, Lawson failed. Returning cowered, chastened, and an enigmatic figure.

Perhaps this was what Lawson found in Bourke.  The more I heard the more I gained an inkling to some eternal truths and cliches. I understand Lawson’s work, but I realised that the cliches about this country, and Maccas, “Australia all Over’ persist to this day.  What I did not know that after the premiere of John’s cycle, “ Looking for Lawson”, we’d witness the tradition of Bush balladeering  and come to know, in the shared room at the Port of Bourke Hotel just a little bit too much of ourselves.  Bad art is always best avoided, but bad poetry sinks though the skin, with a bed bug persistence.  Gladly I can report there were no parasites, but a persistence in doggerel that says much about ourselves.  He died ninety two years ago, bereft, broke, and boozed, writing copy for advertisements,  anything to keep up the cash flow as his life literally oozed out of him.  Killed by Copy!   A working mans death perhaps not ‘more blood upon the wattle’, but atrophy on the typewriter.

To Be Continued