Monthly Archives: January 2014

Some of our stories

Posted on by

88 proved to be as good as most reviewers have said. Having been part of the crowd who cheered as the Indigenous marchers wheeled from Elizabeth Street into Eddy Avenue, it thrilled me again to hear how some participants felt in that moment. I joined the procession at that point, partly as a “white Australian” supporting the recognition of our nation’s far longer history and the sadness that is dispossession, but also as one even then aware of the probability that the story my father and mother told me was true – that one of my own grandmothers may well have been of Aboriginal descent.  It was a great day, as far as I am concerned, 26 January 1988 – and that day and the people I met around that time altered forever my view of this country, of myself, and of my place in this land. I still of course had much to learn, and am still learning to this day.

By chance I happened on a treat on NITV earlier in the week: a 2001 work from Blackfella Films’ Rachel Perkins. It had passed me by at the time, though presumably it had screened on ABC. In part it rehearses the archetype of the child lost in the bush, so much a part of the Australian literary and artistic tradition.

McCubbin_lost

One Night the Moon is a 2001 Australian musical non-feature film starring husband and wife team Paul Kelly, a singer-songwriter, and Kaarin Fairfax, a film and television actress, and their daughter Memphis Kelly.[ Directed by Rachel Perkins and written by Perkins with John Romeril, it was filmed on Andyamathanha land in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia for six weeks in early 2000. Kelton Pell portrayed an Aboriginal tracker, Albert Yang,  with Ruby Hunter playing his wife, who searches for the missing child. Musical score was by Kelly, Kev Carmody and Mairead Hannan, and with other artists they also contributed to the soundtrack. The film won ten awards, including two Australian Film Institute(AFI) Awards.

One Night the Moon was inspired by the story of indigenous tracker, Alexander Riley as depicted in Black Tracker (1997), a documentary directed by Riley’s grandson, Michael Riley. Alexander Riley had worked for the New South Wales police in Dubbo in the early 1900s, finding wanted criminals, missing persons and hidden caches. Composer/singer Mairead Hannan saw the documentary and formed a project with her sister Deirdre Hannan, Kelly, Carmody, Alice Garner, Romeril and Perkins. Aside from the search for a missing child, the film deals with the racist attitude depicted by the father’s refusal to use an indigenous tracker. The film was Paul Kelly’s cinematic debut, while his then wife, Fairfax had a lead role in two related TV mini-series Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange in 1987, and roles in films Belinda (1988) and Young Einstein (1989). Fairfax had her film debut with a minor role in 1982’s Starstruck which had Paul Kelly and the Dots supplying a song for the soundtrack….

What a pedigree! But it is also an oddity, as this JJJ review noted.

One Night The Moon is a “strange bird”, one of the oddest musicals to come our way since Dancer In The Dark(2000), with its dark story of racism and tragedy. Radiancedirector Rachel Perkins and a rock solid collaborative team are behind One Night The Moon, not the least of whom were the film’s music composers Paul Kelly, Kev Carmody and Mairead Hannan….

Paul Kelly, Kaarin Fairfax and Kelton Pell manage One Night The Moon’s sung dialogue and heavy emotional turf with grace and quiet determination. It’s powerful and timely film, a poetic hybrid of opera and music video, which dishes out some home truths about Australia’s chequered past.

I am glad I saw it at last.

I had thought, by the way, to do a post today on recent trends here in Oz called “The Triumph of the Dill”.  Nice title, eh? From a field now so depressingly vast as dilldom rules at the moment I might have selected Andrew Bolt claims to be an Indigenous Australian on the “Snide” Report – not that Barry Everingham is a dill – far from it. Read that piece. Like the rabbit, the camel and the cane toad, Andrew Bolt is an Australian Indigene, it appears. However, I find I have used the title already in another place: Triumph of the dill.

And let me say something nice about the present government, as Nigel Scullion is one of its better people – so that I would still commend Indigenous.gov.au – at least for the time being.

The Ministry of Truth is recruiting today…

Posted on by

Posted this on Facebook yesterday:

P1290478

I wrote: Chilling at Steelers Club. Great lunch. And an app whose batteries don’t run out! And no idea what nonsense the abominable Abbott was apparently spouting at the time. Words fail me about him! Why did anyone think HE was a good idea?

Here is what Mr A was saying on Sydney’s best connected radio station these days:

Just to remind you of some greatest hits:

And a couple of opinions from the comment thread on that last one:

    • Hadley is magnificent , just luv it wen the left wing braindeads abuse u , the coup de grace is wen tony abbott becomes their prime minister , LOV IT!!!
    • I cannot believe idiots believe and listen to this idiot??? Not the sharpest knives in the draw, bless!

Tones these days is faster than a ferret up a drain pipe when it comes to tooling with Ray H! Not so keen on appearing on QandA or 7.30 or Lateline.

Mind you, it is all proving a bit much for Malcolm Turnbull. Intelligence will out, eventually.

”What’s the alternative … the editor-in-chief [of the ABC] becomes the prime minister?” he said. ”Politicians, whether prime ministers or communications ministers, will often be unhappy with the ABC … but you can’t tell them what to write.”

The furore was sparked by the emergence of a note on Wednesday from an ABC reporter who said of the broadcaster’s allegations asylum seekers were burnt by navy staff: ”My boss believes the allegations are likely to be untrue …”

Mr Abbott told radio 2GB that Australians wanted ”some basic affection for the home team”, but Mr Turnbull said the broadcaster was more constrained by rules around editorial fairness than its competitors in commercial media….

So many of us rather agree with this FB comment by my former teaching colleague Maximos – an Order of Australia Medal winner by the way for what he contributed in Bali after the bombings of 2002: “Waiting for Abbott to form a Ministry of Truth to replace the ABC. Smile“

On the other hand, it should be noted, as the Sydney Morning Herald does this morning, that having potshots at the ABC didn’t begin with Tony Abbott and hasn’t ever been an exclusively non-Labor activity.

See also Tony Abbott blasts national broadcaster: ABC takes ‘everyone’s side but Australia’s’ and Tony Abbott’s ABC outburst sits uneasily with ideals of a robust democracy.

In The Age Jonathan Holmes notes a delicious irony:

Like almost everyone else, I find the notion that members of the Australian navy would deliberately inflict agonising pain on helpless civilians very hard indeed to believe. But so is the notion that would-be asylum seekers would inflict this kind of pain on themselves at the behest of scheming people smugglers.

No doubt there is an explanation for those burns – probably one that the navy could readily give us, if it were allowed to. But there is no way that I can see that the ABC could have ignored the evidence of injury, and the allegations surrounding them.

Rather than yet more ABC-bashing, perhaps The Australian could echo the call of its News Corp stablemate.

Back on January 8 – the day this story first broke – The Herald Sun editorialised: “Let’s put an end to secrecy on the high seas.”

Meanwhile the Sydney Daily Telegraph – not really a newspaper any longer  by the way, as any read of the print version quickly shows: very little hard news ever graces its colourful and highly opinionated pages these days – tub-thumps disgracefully:

Tony Abbott: You can spell treachery A-B-C

There is a poll after that, and as you might expect YES is currently winning, but I am rather chuffed that 30% are saying NO to “Do you agree with Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s criticism of the ABC?” There is a follow-up story suggesting Anti-Aussie’ ABC service faces axe, meaning the Australia Network Asian Service. That would be dumb, but seeing  the history it is quite likely to happen.

That pic yesterday was to make a point: I am not a rusted-on leftie, despite what you might think.

Picture0103a

I have never been a Marxist, or even a Marxist’s bootlace. I continue to hope against hope – because the man is such a headcase – that the Abbott government could do some good. I acknowledge bad smells coming from the CFMEU stories lately and the Health Industries Union before that – but I think the disappearance of unions would be a very bad idea.  In the morass that Indigenous politics has become I can listen with a high degree of sympathy to what Warren Mundine had to say on Australia Day.  There is much in Jonathan Green’s Racial radicalism and the moderating middle on The Drum:

It remains to be seen whether Abbott’s push for recognition will succeed, but his enthusiasm for it echoes a broad sense among the great body of Australians that there is something meaningful and good to be done here.

Australia’s essential peace and equanimity is evidence of that generous body of our people who see no sense of threat in ethnic difference or identity, all of it expressed within the textured and many faceted wholeness of our easy multiculturalism.

These are accepted tenets of middle Australia, a reality nowhere better expressed than in the great and politically powerful sweep of Western Sydney, a focus of our centrist, marginal politics and a meeting place of all the nations on earth.

That same middle ground inertia that keeps us from dealing imaginatively and energetically with many of the core issues that confront us socially, economically and environmentally may at least do us the great favour of keeping the racial radicalism of the aggrieved and vocal right at bay.

It was nice to be reminded in the Frank Hardy episode of Persons of Interest on Tuesday night that Communist Frank and the LIb Minister Billy Wentworth could work together on the famous Gurindji land rights claim. Wikipedia:

Wentworth’s other long-term interest was in Aboriginal affairs. He was one of the Liberal backbenchers who supported a constitutional referendum to give the Commonwealth the power to legislate specifically for the benefit of indigenous Australians, something which was finally achieved under Menzies’ successor Harold Holt in 1967 (see Australian referendum, 1967 (Aboriginals)). When Wentworth’s friend John Gorton succeeded Holt, he made Wentworth Minister for Social Services and Minister in Charge of Aboriginal Affairs, the first minister to hold this office.

As Minister, Wentworth was disappointed that the Cabinet was reluctant to take any steps to pass the kind of far-reaching legislation he wanted, mainly due to the resistance of pastoral interests represented by the Country Party. Nevertheless, Wentworth took the first practical step towards the granting of indigenous land rights when he proposed giving the Gurindji people control of their land at Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory (which was at that time under Commonwealth control): this scheme, in a fine irony given Wentworth’s history, was denounced as “communist inspired” by the Cattle Producers Council (a reference to the fact that the Communist writer Frank Hardy was an adviser to the Gurindji).

Speaking of such things: do watch 88 on – yes – OUR ABC tonight! Good on Graeme Blundell at The Oz for this:

THIS superbly crafted documentary from Adrian Russell Wills and Michaela Perske looks at January 26, 1988, when more than 2.5 million people lined the streets of Sydney Harbour to commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet in NSW. While it was coined the “Celebration of a Nation”, the re-enactment held a very different meaning for Australia’s Aboriginal community, and on that same day a convoy carrying Aboriginal people from across the country also cruised into Sydney. They had travelled from every corner of the nation to take part in the March for Freedom, Hope and Justice, the largest gathering of indigenous people this country has ever seen….

I participated that day.

Update

See another Liberal with a brain. Reblogged from Advice from one Liberal MP to his ABC-hating colleagues: if you don’t like it, change the channel.

Craig Laundy MP, Federal Member for Reid (Lib, NSW) has some advice for people who are unhappy with the way the media cover the news in this country: change the channel, the dial, or the website you visit

Laundy’s full statement 30 January 2014

There are many great things about living in a democracy – one of them the luxury of free speech.

Free speech, when coupled with freedom of the press, is a VERY powerful thing. The beauty of free speech is that it can be used to say things some people like, and some people don’t like – but they can always be said.

I’ve been watching, with interest, arguments over the ABC and the quality of their coverage of different issues.
Do I believe they should have aired the story re Indonesia – probably not.
Do I believe they should have run the story about abuse claims re the Navy – definitely not.

However – as a proud Liberal, they ABSOLUTELY have the right to do so without fear or favour. The best part of “freedom of the press” is that you get a HUGE variety of views – just as you get in society.

My advice to those who don’t like the job the ABC are doing, my colleagues included, is to do what those living a democracy have been doing since “Adam was a boy”….change the channel, the dial, or the website you visit. And before the howls of “but they’re funded by the taxpayer” breaks out – stop and think about how vast Australia is, and diverse it’s {sic} media needs are, as well as how commercially “unviable” the media markets are outside of our major cities …i.e. rural Australia.

Enter Cosgrove

Posted on by

Picture0103a

I may elaborate on that later on…

Let me add that I think General Peter Cosgrove is a pretty good choice as Governor-General of Australia.

In Abbott should heed Cosgrove’s warning about the republic Alan Stokes reminds us about General Cosgrove’s 2009 Boyer Lectures:

In his 2009 Boyer lectures for that lefty elitist inner city money-guzzler ABC Radio National, Cosgrove said Australians are at once politically lazy and acutely politically sensitive.

We are, he said, sometimes blithely disengaged from all the noise and heat of the day to day political dialogue and combat.

”We leave that to the political class, and if they get too noisy and are not doing their jobs properly, we tip them out.”

Cosgrove hardly fits the far right anti-multiculturalism view either: ”We worry greatly about immigration issues because we know intuitively that we need and want successful immigration well into the future … to enrich our society in spiritual, cultural and material ways. We worry because it can put at risk one of the greatest treasures of our identity, our social cohesion … it is unthinkable for us to see it degrade.”

On indigenous affairs he said, ”Things cannot be right in the Australia of our minds if there is a remediable inequity in our society.”

Cosgrove supported immediate action on climate change, too. ”Let’s not muck about any more, let’s start now to solve the problems that we own,” he said.

And from the final 2009 Boyer lecture:

If there is a truly modern challenge, it is the spectre of climate change of such a profound nature as to threaten livelihood and even lives. Before a growing weight of scientific opinion drew the issue to worldwide attention, our energy concerns focused on the rapid rate at which we were drawing down the global stock of petro carbon energy resources. Sustainable and renewable energy options became priority subjects for research and development. With the advent of climate change predictions and the early evidence of global warming, this research and development gained enormous extra impetus.

The sort of climate change evidence and predictions shown to us were dire. Rising temperatures, melting ice caps, substantial rises in sea levels, disappearing islands and coastal communities, species destroyed, agriculture stifled for lack of irrigation, untold numbers of people without the food or water to survive. Say all that to me and I say back to you, ‘you have my full attention’ and ‘can you prove all that?’ To a large degree at the moment the climate change debate is a battle for the minds of the vast unscientific multitudes who must believe in order to act or to permit governments to act.

To me the science on either side of the debate resembles the sort of military intelligence I have been considering over the long decades of my military service: fact-based but leading from there with a series of assumptions to a future scenario upon which in all prudence we should base actions now and in the future. The climate change debate is probably more rigorously based than the usual military intelligence estimate because the forward projections are based on some widely agreed formulae, whereas military intelligence estimates have to try to get into the mind of the potential adversary (always very tough—think about Saddam Hussein and WMD!) But we are left with a preponderance of scientific opinion pointing to dire outcomes and presently a minority who might be called ‘climate change sceptics’. So you and I have to balance what we have been told and decide if and how we will ‘pay it forward’.

I come at this from the viewpoint that while I really don’t know if all that I have been told is true but if we are at risk of quite catastrophic climate change outcomes, say during the life of grandkids who might come along for my wife and me, then I am very uneasy about dicing with their future. I am very conscious of the huge change in direction and the expense and the turmoil and the impact on jobs, entailed in a radical move to non-carbon energy for Australia. But if we don’t do it, a country with our values, a country presently in the top 20 wealthiest countries in the world, a country depended on by millions of people who are our powerless friends and neighbours, how can we expect other nations to act and thus offset our lack of action. So let’s not muck about any more, let’s start now to solve the problems that we own.

At times like this when you are invited to act strategically, to look forward say 50 years, you see the downside of the relatively rapid electoral cycle of governments. The government of the day and the opposition are extraordinarily sensitive to the forthcoming federal election and the prism of the election and the need to retain or gain government starts to flavour agendas and actions. The will gets eroded and the intent gets blurred. I wonder if we need, through bipartisan support, a Commonwealth climate change commission with a charter and statutory powers to monitor and enforce a long duration, climate change mitigation strategy. We can’t have governments and oppositions daily scrapping over the concerted and co-ordinated action we need to take across the national community, if on a balance of probabilities we need to start our action now to avoid the climate change ‘noose’ sometime later in the century…