Griffith REVIEW Editon 36: What Is Australia For?

36 A QUARTERLY OF NEW WRITING & IDEAS ESSAYS & MEMOIR, FICTION & REPORTAGE Frank Moorhouse, Kim Mahood, Jim Davidson, Robyn Archer Dennis Altman, Michael Wesley, Nick Bryant, Leah Kaminsky, Romy Ash, David Astle, Some Provocations Peter Mares, Cameron Muir, Bruce Pascoe GriffithREVIEW36 SOME PROVOCATIONS eISBN 978-0-9873135-0-8 Publisher Marilyn McMeniman AM Editor Julianne Schultz AM Deputy Editor Nicholas Bray Production Manager Paul Thwaites Proofreader Alan Vaarwerk Editorial Interns Alecia Wood, Michelle Chitts, Coco McGrath Administration Andrea Huynh GRIFFITH REVIEW South Bank Campus, Griffith University PO Box 3370, South Brisbane QLD 4101 Australia Ph +617 3735 3071 Fax +617 3735 3272 [email protected] www.griffithreview.com TEXT PUBLISHING Swann House, 22 William St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Ph +613 8610 4500 Fax +613 9629 8621 [email protected] www.textpublishing.com.au SUBSCRIPTIONS Within Australia: 1 year (4 editions) $111.80 RRP, inc. P&H and GST Outside Australia: 1 year (4 editions) A$161.80 RRP, inc. P&H Institutional and bulk rates available on application. COPYRIGHT The copyright of all material published in Griffith REVIEW and on its website remains the property of the author, artist or photographer, and is subject to copyright laws. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. ||| Opinions published in Griffith REVIEW are not necessarily those of the Publisher, Editor, Griffith University or Text Publishing. FEEDBACK AND COMMENT www.griffithreview.com ADVERTISING Each issue of Griffith REVIEW has a circulation of at least 4,000 copies. Full-page adverts are available to selected advertisers. To book your advert, in the first instance please email Griffith REVIEW: [email protected] INTRODUCTION Grabbing the moment Julianne Schultz THE first weeks of June 2012 were an auspicious time tobe launching this collection. During these past weeks we have been celebrating two crucial milestones in the creation of modern Australia – the transit of Venus, and the twentieth anniversary of the High Court’s Mabo decision. In many ways these two events provided a useful backdrop for asking the question, what is Australia for? This collection is by no means comprehensive. It is designed asadiscussion starter on some topics that need to be taken more seriously and addressed with well informed imagination: cities, environment and sustainability; culture; the Asian century; reconciliation; mining; research; identity; manufacturing; governance. There are of course many other topics that could be addressed – but this is a start. Over the next two weeks some of these essays will be extracted onThe Conversation (www.theconversation.edu.au) so you can engage with the issues raised; others will be made available elsewhere in the media. There is an odd disjunction in Australian public life at the moment – we know we are doing better than the rest of the world economically, but this is failing to translate into a sense of well-‐‑being or ambition about the future. The problem is that golden moments like this do not come around very often – if we fail to grasp this one to think and act ambitiously about thefuture, moment will pass; other countries will fill the gaps and we will lookbackand wonder how we let it slip through our fingers. It is time to be bold and pragmatically ambitious. By publishing this special e-‐‑book Griffith REVIEW hopes to contribute to a lively, proactive discussion. As a SPECIAL OFFER to readers of this collection, Griffith REVIEW is offering 20% OFF the digital version of Griffith REVIEW 36: What Is Australia For? This discount also applies to everything else in our Online Store for a limited time. Take advantage of these savings by entering the discount coupon code WIAF2012 when you process your order in the shopping cart. ESSAY Not beyond imagining Songlines for a new world Brendan Gleeson IT’S five-‐‑ish on a dark November evening in Maynooth, the thriving university town on the edge of Dublin where I presently live and work. I’m standing in the middle of a massive tarmac that seems to beckon the arrival of asquadronof Superfortress bombers. But to the locals it’s merely the ‘wonderfully grand’ car park in the busy edge-‐‑of-‐‑town shopping centre that opened a couple of years ago. Apart from the withering rain and the blustering Kildare wind, I could be in an Australian suburb. Cars wend their way constantly through theasphalted paddocks; people surge in and out of the luminescent shops, especially the mega-‐‑sized Tesco supermarket. Loaded trolleys with children hanging off them descend ramps to waiting vehicles, many of them expensive-‐‑looking four-‐‑wheel-‐‑ drives. The shopping fleet is engorged by the steady arrival ofcommuters stopping by after work, a small sample of the tens of thousands of single-‐‑driver vehicles that burden Dublin’s motorways in the evening and morning peaks. Even in a scarifying recession the consumption show must go on. I’m not a detached observer. I have to eat; I have to stock my own cupboards. And this is how you do it in suburban Dublin, unless you are rich enough – and have time enough – to get your food from the widely dispersed and shrinking array of local providores and markets. That’s now the exclusive provinceofa dwindling brood of determined old ladies and hard-‐‑fastened locals. I lumber with bulging bags across the glistening tarmac, towards thetown and my semi-‐‑detached villa. Like Australians, and most westerners, theIrish love suburban living. No romantic attachment to ‘urban villages’ here,thanks. Most of the vehicles arriving and leaving the shopping centre are parked each evening in suburban driveways or garages within the haphazardly strewn commuter estates that encircle outer Dublin, a legacy of the Celtic Tigerboom that hit the wall with sudden destructive force in 2008.Many of the people swarming through the retail park around me are debt-‐‑burdened, with hurriedly built suburban villas in negative equity, credit cards creaking towards default, the strands of wider family support stretched to breaking. From Griffith REVIEW Edition 36: What is Australia For? - Some Provocations. © Copyright 2012 Griffith University & the author. But the good life, the necessary life, must be made and remade every day; suburban lots don’t produce food, or clothes, or the gadgets thatkids(and adults) crave. All roads lead to Tesco and its packaged retailers. And I shouldn’t neglect Harvey Norman, purveyor of home goodies to Australians. Harvey has a substantial beachhead in the Dublin commuter belt, its raucous Australian ads squawking improbably from TVs and radios – an antipodean contribution to the white noise of everyday life in the mouldering suburbs of contemporary Ireland. Mark Latham would surely be delighted with this export of Australian desire. Except for the weather, I could be in outer Brisbane, or an‘outoftown’ shopping centre in England, or a beltway retail park in ‘Anyburg’, USA. I could be anywheren i the English-‐‑speaking world, and therefore it feels likeIam nowhere. Dublin’s inner city is still unique, but even here thecelebrated quirkiness is ebbing away as retail and tourist facilities are repackagedand harmonised to satisfy the universal expectation for quick ingestion and safe surprise: fast food, caricatured tourist offerings, themed bars (withblaring widescreen TVs), ‘contemporary dining experiences’. Open-‐‑topped amphibious ‘ducks’ haul sodden tourists through the city streets in a parodic encounter with the city’s Viking past. Except for the frigid rain, this could be the Aussie Duck tourist experience, familiar on Sydney’s streets and waterways. CITIES WERE ONCE the crucibles and kilns of the western imagination, where the cultural synapses fired and misfired, and from whence flared marvellous, sometimes terrifying new propositions about the good and the possible. They were defined and threatened by their unruly glowering innards: the dangerous slums, the perfidious elements that lurked within them and which on occasion turned the civilised world on its head. In 1871 Parisian communards proclaimed a new socialist city-‐‑state in defiance of laissez-‐‑faire capitalism. It ended ina bloodied retributive ,orgy when reason, order and imperial ambition were re-‐‑ established by force. The communards fell but their vision stood through the twentieth century as a counter proposition to liberal and social democracy. In Australia, the historian Chris McConville reminds us, disruptive and profane slum orders troubled officialdom and the usually ridiculous self-‐‑regard of the colonial elite. He describes one rough confluence of light and dark in the 1890s, when a parade of Salvationists encountered a push of ‘ruffians’ in North Melbourne. The fur was torn aside as clashing ideals of the urban ‘good’life were put to the test publicly. The Sabbatarians were opposed by those who could expect no rest in a heartless industrial order. Cities were also pedestals of vaulting ambition, where bold new statements of scientific and commercial desire were pushed into the sky: from the nineteenth-‐‑ century international fairs of industrial progress, which left Melbourne with its marvellous Exhibition Building, to the first skyscrapers of American cities, which From Griffith REVIEW Edition 36: What is Australia For? - Some Provocations. © Copyright 2012 Griffith University & the author. poked defiant fingers at heaven. A brazen new technology of movement blew aside the traditional bounds of human assembly and productivity. Railways, tramways and later motorways cut their way through country to create a new circuit board of economic and cultural ambition. Through this was fired the burgeoning human desire for freedom and-‐‑ self determination. Modernity promised much to our species. Stadtluft macht frei (city air brings freedom) was the rejoining cry of the first moderns – cities would be the vessels of liberation. Not the most practical of visions, given the plenitudes that wanted to clamber aboard. Progress demanded a compromise and a workable way forward through modern necessity and challenge.

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