Whose Australia Day?

Whose Australia Day?

On Jan. 26, 1788, the First Fleet planted the Union Jack on the shore of Botany Bay, on the east coast of Australia. It marked the founding of the British Colony that quickly established itself on the great terra nullius, the vacant land, down under. This Sunday, on the 226th anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet, Australians will gather around the country to celebrate Australia Day and the nation that we’ve become.

The only problem is that the First Fleet didn’t stick their flag into a terra nullius but into a land inhabited by indigenous peoples whose ancestry dates back more than 60,000 years. Out of that initial act, a bloody and unrelenting barrage of murder, conquest, oppression and cultural annihilation followed.

Too often we shrug off these realities as being in the past, but this history continues to define the Australia we live in today. The fact that indigenous Australians have a life expectancy 10 years shorter than that of non-indigenous Australians, the fact that one in four indigenous Australians have been incarcerated and the fact that unemployment for indigenous Australians is almost three times that of all other Australians are not incidental. These great injustices that shame our nation were born of that history. The fact that we still celebrate Australia Day on such a divisive day as Jan. 26 shows that, as a nation, we Australians have yet to come to terms with anything that looks like reconciliation.

The Australia Day celebration is no isolated incident. Instead, it is symptomatic of the ways in which indigenous Australians are institutionally neglected, culturally disregarded and systematically ignored. Time and time again, indigenous Australians are left out of the national project. Time and time again, the nationalisms that define my country — the flag, the national day, the constitution — are steeped in an asymmetrical historical account that ignores our indigenous population. These symbolisms reaffirm a narrative that Australia only came into being when the First Fleet anchored in Botany Bay, entirely alienating and neglecting tens of thousands of years of indigenous history.

In 2008, when Kevin Rudd offered a national apology to the Stolen Generation, it was a watershed moment for Australia. It felt like a moment that might catalyse change, a moment in which Australia might finally move forward, towards a collective reconciliation. Yet days celebrations like Australia Day show just how engrained the prejudice towards indigenous Australians is in our national psyche.

A recent incident, in which t-shirts with the slogan “Australia est. 1788” were printed and sold around the country in preparation for Australia Day, hit a nerve. The t-shirts were deemed “offensive” and “racist” and were quickly withdrawn from the shelves, yet the celebration of our national day on the anniversary of the Jan. 26, 1788 is really no different.

The point is not to rewrite or erase our history. Instead, it is a way of making our national historical narrative more complete. Australians must recognise that, though our history is embellished by economic prosperity, wartime heroics, sporting might and progressive voting rights, it is also marred by the original colonial venture that began on the Jan. 26, 1788. Our history must recognise the past of mass killings, a generation of children stolen from their parents and a constitution that listed Australian Indigenous people as flora and fauna until 1967.

The point is also not to ask Australians to repent or to imagine an Australia without the British but to push for a day that is more inclusive of all and that can celebrate national unity around an identity that we can all be proud of and part of.

Changing the date of Australia Day will not lift communities out of poverty, nor will it address rates of incarceration of Aborigines. For the many tired of the rhetoric of change, a mere change of date may seem to be another tokenistic gesture. However, if you recognise the importance of words, of symbolism and of the performance of national belonging, then it may fundamentally shift the ways in which we celebrate our past and our identity, and that is worth fighting for.

When you go to raise your flag this Sunday, Jan. 26, spare a thought for communities around Australia that are marking the 226th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet as Survival Day.

from: http://www.thegazelle.org/issue/25/opinion/taylor-3/

An alley

AS you trace the curvature of the streets, you reach the point where the curve moves and you move for the divot instead. This blog sits just as that divot, a bastion of private in the public, a place to sit outside and be in the world but far from her prying eyes. Here, you can only see. From here, you cannot possibly be seen.

I write with grand vulnerabilities, that weigh down my chin and yet I do my best to hold it up. That weight is constantly pulling and I must constantly resist and they struggle, they all struggle. In a world where the veneer is so fantastically polished, where bragging is no longer necessary as minted lives are laid out for all to see, this struggle is important. It is a way to becoming human once again, to becoming multi-dimensional, once again.

These images, these flashes of sound and light that barrage our consciousness and inspire images of our own and images of fantastical beauty and devastation and invite us to live in them but we cannot inhabit images. A three-D, slow born, slower raised, flawed, deeply deeply flawed and vulnerable being, cannot live in images.

Do we then open ourselves to a more holistic comparison, to a more thorough judgement-I don't know. Do we miss the point, then?
No, seeing people is what we do, in seeing we realise about ourselves and we becomes, ourselves and seeing people, human beings in flesh is not wrong. It is a way to love that more, it is a way to love the flaw, more, it is a way to explore more, deeper, wider, breadth.

This is vulnerability. These are my dimensions
This is the flawed mind that does not think as I want it to. That does not miss when I beg it to, that does not cry when I ask it to, that does not tick over when I need it to. This is the body that I have loved and hated and been so scared of when hair first grew, these are the eyes that I look into and some days they are far too close together and some days they are just beautiful as they need to be.

A painful jealousy and a whole love, a love that is prodded but never tested, that is reshaped but never compromised.

This head that I fight with that reproduces images and thoughts that I disagree with and I am these two thoughts at once and who knows who planted such thoughts in my head. But they grew in the fertile soil of fear and insecurity and I fear to weed them out for thoughts have been weeded out before. And they will never grow again. Warm thoughts of an innocence, thoughts of what I might possibly be --thoughts of a nascent love, a vulnerable interest that could never swim in a sea of 3D images.

I begin by allowing my struggle to move outside of me, so that I might be able to project a more whole union in this alleyway, a few turns from the main curves and we humans leap as it all rushes. The adrenaline moves from our toes to our heads and there is that second where an alternate possibility washes over our thoughts and it is there we must leap. It may and almost certainly will come again but then we are forced to wait, and weigh other decisions and our mind clouds and slows so when it comes along again, we might just miss it once more and so our mind clouds and slows and that rush rushes over until it feels like nothing but a tingle on our skin.

- Laurence, Anyways
A critical love from a compromised self. In that compromise, can we find our way back to wholeness?

Collecting Stories

Collecting remarkable, distressing stories of all the faces of humanity.

Allied Forces Trickery of the Axis in World War Two: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/20/outfoxing_beats_outgunning

Father Dies Shielding His Daughter from a Storm: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-04/father-dies-sheltering-girl-from-japan-blizzard/4552156

Crosshairs

The freckled girl dreamt of Monroe

In the crosshairs of society

She grew blonde hair from a roux doo

Her lips grew, drooped

And the dots of her face were varnished

But the twins who changed places

Ended up instead as Liz

Orange suited

She stares into the barrel of the camera

That same lens that will see her

Turn and cry, disbelieving

Will see

Mother and daughter

Peroxide hair entangled

Share a kiss

Will see

A Porsche crumpled on a highway

“Has Miss Lohan chosen to accept the people’s offer?”

Certainly she has

Sweet dreams, Lohan

Scaffolding

The red man flashes and the road clears. A few brave or time-pressed scuttle across the street, throwing their hands at the cars that wait - somewhere between an apology and a warding off. I hold back.

She leans back, scowling at him. He must have said something stupid. He takes this as an invitation and leans further in. They move with one another. I think I see a hand feel out her knee, but my vantage point isn’t ideal. I stroll over to the other foot of the scaffolding, look around and lean on a pole, the smug, mapped out routine of an insecure douchebag.

She rolls her eyes almost comically, as he mumbles words at her. He must have a whole arsenal of stupid things to say as it sets off a Ferris wheel of irritation. Then she clicks her lips and its clear that she is ready to respond. He senses this and leans back, his hand slipping from her knee as if to fortify himself against the coming barrage of words.

The white man beckons across the avenue crossing but I know that I am too invested to leave. I sense my place in the scene as the necessary observer. I am the audience goading the players. They are playing for me.

I need not lean in to hear her grievances. She has in fact remarkable projection and maybe even a history of public speaking, or at least fighting. She leans forward from her seat on the scaffolding, while her hands accentuate each accusation. In the flurry of activity, I find myself watching rather than listening. He turns his face away, offering pathetic endearments to try and pacify her, but she is in full flight. At one point she moves to stand up but then self-consciously sits back into the scaffolding, she must know she is in for the long haul.

The red man flashes as she rages. This time, no one sneaks across the street. They all take their places around the scaffolding. A girl comes up next to me and, looking around, pauses her music. The Shins in all their greatness never had the lungs of this woman.

A man steps up to join the cluster of pedestrians and the couple disappears behind him. This image suddenly seems ludicrous as his great hands remove a tissue from his pocket. A soundtrack of expletives accompanies him as he moves the tissue to his nose and blows twice. Its over. Looking up, the man buries the tissue in his pocket and walks. The woman falls silent and tilts her head away.

I push off the pole and without looking back, see his hand feel out her knee. And she waits patiently for her audience to reassemble. 

"Have you ever heard of The Curse of the Traveler?

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this:

The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that's perfect (we all know there's no Shangri-La), but just for a place that's "just right for you." But the curse is that the odds of finding "just right" get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can't travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you've seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It's just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that's like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand."

darien_gap on reddit.com/r/IWantOut

REPUBLIC OF INTELLECT

"Reason and desire"

Teute, The Love of the Plants