Month: July 2018

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Tasmania

The millisphere of Tasmania covers the watershed east and south from the Australian Alps, and includes Melbourne (4.9 million) and the island of Tasmania (half-a-million).

When we visited Tasmania again in October 2001 air travel had changed dramatically. Osama bin Laden had just leveled the “twin towers” in New York  and the New Zealand army manned the Auckland airport and the Australian army was there to meet the plane in Melbourne. Australia, New Zealand and the United States are technically in the Cold War ANZUS defense alliance, although in the 1980s New Zealand was “partially suspended” because of its “nuclear free” position.

“No worries mate, this building is owned by the Kuwait royal family,” joked the Lebanese lift operator as I ascend the Melbourne’s Rialto Tower – the tallest building in the southern hemisphere – so I could draw a picture from the top.

We explored Victoria, including  a pilgrimage stop at the Holden Museum in Echuca. At Ballarat we found the site of the Eureka Stockade, now a carpark waiting development, where in 1854, gold miners rebelled against the colonial authority of the United Kingdom and swore allegiance to the Southern Cross.

Victorian “bush larrikin” and son of a transported convict, Ned Kelly, appropriately born also in 1854, took on the system, denouncing the police, state government, and the British Empire. Ned was still in his twenties when he was captured in Glenrowan and hung in Melbourne in 1880.

We checked out Ned Kelly’s old stamping ground before pointing the Holden east into the Australian alps. In 1890, a decade after Ned’s hanging, Banjo Paterson set his narrative poem, The Man from Snowy River in the Australian Alps. “But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head … and he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed” celebrates the bush larrikin.

In New Zealand we drive around mountains, in Australia they drive over them. It is a country of “low relief” and we dropped south into Gippsland and back to Melbourne and checked out their art scene. At a contemporary art gallery an installation featured a Holden hearse painted in Aboriginal colours, commenting, I think, on genocide. Modernist painter, Sidney Nolan, portrayed another view of the Ned Kelly mythology and a Melbourne larrikin, Barry Humphries, gave the world “Dame Edna Everage”.

Commenting on the #metoo movement that had drifted across the millisphere of Te Moananui, from Los Angeles, feminist writer, public intellectual and good Catholic girl from Melbourne, Germaine Greer, said “if you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll get you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that it is tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about it”.  You don’t necessarily need to be man to be a larrikin!

Internet larrikin, Julian Assange, studied programming, maths and physics at Melbourne University before helping set up WikiLeaks in 2006. Like a modern-day Ned Kelly Assange attacked the “Nation of Darkness” (the United States), publishing sensitive classified information, but as young Ned discovered there are consequences. “The internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism.” said Assange.

The last time we passed through Melbourne we were flying home from Bali.  We had just a spent a month in Java which coincided with the month of Ramadan and Indonesia was even more alcohol-free than usual.

“Jeez we had fun, got peesed evree noight” said an Aussie tourist with a beer gut in a singlet at the Denpasar terminal. Transiting through Melbourne, we were met by a young woman with a tray of glasses marketing free shots of a new RTD (ready to drink alcohol), but cigarette smoking had been banned in the entire terminal. In Indonesia they did it the other way around, no one drank in public and everyone smoked wherever they liked.

Anglos united against the rest: New Zealand, Australia, The United States, The United Kingdom and Canada are in “The Five Eyes,” strategic information sharing alliance. Going back to the Second World War, the Five Eyes countries also standardise their military equipment and generally fight together.

American NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a “supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the known laws of its own countries.”

 

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OZ

The watershed flowing west into the Murray/Darling river system, which is often dry when it discharges into the Great Australian Bight near Adelaide (population 1.3 million) and the rest of Australia all the way to Perth (population 2 million) on the west coast, are needed to form the millisphere of OZ.

In 1997, I first saw OZ looking west from the Blue Mountains, a days train ride from Sydney. Another day on a bus heading inland and we were still just on the edge of OZ. Scrubby plains curved off over the horizon.

At Bathurst, “the objective and terminal point of the only inland journey made by Charles Darwin in Australia in January 1836”, I sketched Eucalyptus leaves and seeds used as a motif on a cast iron verandah pole at the railway station, now servicing mainly buses.

Bathurst is where Sydney artist Brett Whiteley’s was sent to boarding school but it’s better known for its race track, where the annual Holden/Ford high performance production car race was held (the Australian Holden finished production in 2017). A Bathurst farmer was going to drive to Sydney; when asked which route he was going to take, replied “I think I’ll take the wife”. That was an Aussie joke! After Sydney, Bathurst had noticeably fewer “immigrants,” meaning the non-British stock who had come after Australia’s “whites only” immigration policy ended in 1973.

On the bus, before changing at Cootamundra for Canberra, we passed through Gundagai, immortalised in one of Banjo Paterson’s poems. “Branching off there runs a track, across the foothills grim and black, across the plains and ranges grey to Sydney City far away. … The tracks are clear she made reply, this goes down to Sydney Town and that one goes to Gundagai.” Following a beautiful woman to Sydney in Paterson’s poem is a metaphor for the attraction of the big city. The Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas combined have around a half of all Australia’s population.

“Though I’ve covered many roads in my lifetime, I just can’t wait to see what the next road will bring,” sang Slim Dusty, evoking long distance rides and wanderlust. With Slim on the CD of the hired silver Holden Commodore we headed to the Murray River, flowing sluggishly flowing through OZ.

Dusty merino sheep grazed dry paddocks. When we found the river we made our way through dry gum forest, bare underneath apart from a carpet of gum bark. We kept an eye out for snakes. Compared with lush New Zealand it seemed very dry.

Australia was in the lead up to “the big dry”, the 1996-2010 “millennium drought” caused by lower rainfall and higher temperatures. The ecology of the Murray/Darling river basin (population 2 million), which drains one seventh of Australia’s land mass, was, by all accounts, already in poor health.

In 1938 Aborigine William Cooper petitioned the Nazi German embassy in Melbourne against the Kristallnacht and the treatment of Jews in Germany; his people knew about genocide. When the British set up the first penal colonies on the coast there were around one million aboriginals in Australia a century later it had dropped by 80% to 200,000 (It’s now 400,000).

In pre-British times the Murray/Darling wetlands were a huge source of food for Aborigines. Historically the white man (and woman) pushed the Australian Aborigine off the best land and into the desert.

There are still Aborigine communities in the Murray/Darling and their needs are listed as a matter of course in management plans aimed at bringing the rivers and wetlands back to health.

There has been much resistance from irrigators against any move to return “environmental water” to the river, but it is generally accepted that since the 1970s, when increasing amounts of water was taken for irrigation, the river has ceased to flow more often and for longer periods. The reality is that at the river mouth has to continuously dredged because the river flow is not great enough to discharge the sand into the sea.

One problem is the rivers flow through four states, a problem that the establishment of the Murray/Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) was meant to overcome, and periodically states threaten to leave  the MDBA.

“A four billion dollar (Australian) waste of taxpayer money,” is one assessment of the MDBA’s work so far.

 

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Gold Coast

In 1997, before I’d invented the millisphere model for unpacking human geography, I’d traveled to the millisphere of “Gold Coast” (the eastern watershed of Australia north of  Canberra). Technically The Gold Coast (GC) is the tourist strip of beach-side apartments, malls and theme parks south of Brisbane and north of Sydney but I get to name millispheres and sunshine and beaches seemed an appropriate image.

The first view from a passenger jet records Australia as a brown line on the horizon; and blue cross hatching the Tasman Sea below. I remember feelings of anticipation and excitement. Australia and New Zealand have a shared history; the ANZACs fought together for the British Empire a century ago. Brothers-in-arms in the 20th century we are now like distant cousins, drifting apart since 2001.

The statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park has him “born at Marton Yorkshire 1728”. The small town next door to where we live in New Zealand is also named after Cook’s hometown. In Hyde Park, Cook stands next to an Australian Araucaria conifer, a Bunya Bunya pine; an Australian ibis, like a grubby white fowl with a long beak, searched for picnic leftovers at his feet. In 1770 Cook called terra australis “New South Wales”, nullifying the Dutch “New Holland”, and claimed it for the British Crown.

Across the busy street is the museum where I met my first Aborigine. He’d come thousands of miles from the Kimberley Ranges to meet with government officials, he said, but he knew about the “Pakaitore occupation” in Whanganui, my hometown, where local Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, in 1995, had occupied a park to draw attention to their land claim. I realised both that I was a foreigner in his land and that race relations were different on the other side of the Tasman.

A pencil sketch records the curves of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House with my travel companion in the foreground sunbathing. She is the better artist and the one who wanted to go to “Aussie”. There is a photo of us, two decades younger, outside Brett Whiteley’s Studio. Next to a sign which reads “Endlessnessism!”, we are standing by two three-metre matches – one  burnt out. Whiteley (1939-93) had died of a heroin overdose.

At his studio the late painter described a Zen landscape painting technique he used (via video); to sit and meditate for several hours on a view and then to move inside and paint it. At Toowoomba, in the Blue Mountains, I decided to give it a go. On the plateau edge I watched the red sun set over OZ to the west; slowly my eyes became accustomed to the dark and I could make out, dimly in the distance, here and there, bushfires. In the dark, in the bushes nearby, something started rustling and I thought of snakes.

The trip to Aussie in 1997 seemed like a luxury at the time. All that hard earned money spent on just going to have a look at another country, on being a tourist.

When writing up a millisphere I like to have been there or at least talk with someone who has. Arrogant as it is summarize seven million people’ s lives, and what it is like where the live, the project of mapping the millispheres is part selective fact, part subjective impressions.

In Gold Coast I was a foreigner in a country bigger than my own; where my New Zealand accent was considered cute; where there is a city that was bigger and wealthier than any I’d seen before.

Another sketchbook recorded a quick stopover in Brisbane on the way to Saigon. Flying over Australia on the way Asia you see how vast and dry it is.

One impression which stands out from my first visit to Gold Coast is a glimpse of the Sydney suburb of Redfern from a train heading for the Blue Mountains. Suddenly I was looking at an Aboriginal suburb looting like small patch of the third world in first world Sydney. Another impression was of a group of drunk Aboriginal men and women, in middle of a sunny day, in a mall in Brisbane, oblivious to needs of the capitalist city – soon the police arrived.

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Australia (as millispheres)

Millisphere, abstract noun. A region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population, around seven million people. A lens to examine human geography.

map Australia

Australia (2018 population 25 million) can be neatly divided into three millispheres: Gold Coast, Tasmania and OZ. Most of Australia’s population hugs the east coast, as do the Great Dividing Range and the Australian Alps.

Designed from scratch and sited near the watershed the capital, Canberra, by some conceptual fluke, sits where Australia’s three millispheres meet.

Gold Coast, to the north, includes Sydney (5.1 million) and Brisbane (2.4 million) and the short rivers flowing east towards the Pacific. Tasmania, to the south, includes Melbourne (4.9 million) and the island of Tasmania (half-a-million) and the watershed east and south from the Australian Alps. The watershed flowing west into the Murray/Darling river system, which is often dry when it discharges into the Great Australian Bight near Adelaide (population 1.3 million), and the rest of Australia all the way to Perth (population 2 million), on the west coast, are needed to form the third millisphere, OZ.

Australia is the world’s 13th largest economy, with the 10th highest per capita income and it attracts New Zealand economic emigrants. By New Zealand standards Australians are a stay-at-home lot. One million Aussies (4%) live outside Australia while around one million Kiwis (20%) live outside New Zealand – half of those live in Australia. Of the NZ population moving to Australia, NZ Maori have proved more inclined to emigrate than their Pakeha (European) fellow citizens. Over the past two years Australia has forcibly deported one thousand New Zealanders (many of them Maori) following the automatic cancellation of their visas if convicted of an offence that could incur more than 12 months in prison.

Australia has made a point of turning away Iraqi, Afghan and other asylum seekers arriving by boat from populous Muslim Indonesia to the north. The 2002 Bali nightclub bombing which killed 94 Australian tourists and the 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta confirmed Australian paranoia. Australia’s “Pacific solution” has been to detain asylum seekers in camps in Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru and to try and convince them to go home or somewhere else.

“Why don’t they take the Afghan boat people?” someone in Europe asked me after the “Tampa” incident, “they are used to living in a desert, aren’t they?” The reality is that the Australian interior is so dry as to be virtually uninhabitable and around the coast there is barely enough water for the people already there. Australia has recently cancelled its A$10 million funding to the United Nations for the Palestinians, following Donald Trump’s lead.

Australia has just experienced the “millennium drought”, the worst drought since European settlement and municipal water supplies were drying up. Irrigation was identified as the main culprit for the ecological catastrophe inflicting the Murray/Darling river system. In 2008 the government established the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), attempting to mediate inter-state water rivalries and manage the river in an integrated sustainable manner.

 

Australia is the world’s fourth highest wine exporting country, much of it from the MDBA (population two million). One third of Australia’s agricultural production comes from the MDBA, but getting the cotton growers of Queensland and New South Wales to give up their irrigation water for the ecological health of the river is a very big ask.

During the “big dry” the coastal cities all initiated expensive desalination schemes. Sydney’s cost A$1.8 billion, Melbourne opened one in 2011 at the cost of A$3.1 billion. Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide all fired up smaller pilot plants to drought-proof their cities.

Down under the red-brown landscape of the virtually uninhabitable interior are Australia’s mines. “The lucky  country” is the world’s largest coal exporter, it is one of the world’s biggest uranium exporters, and it will soon be the world’s largest gas explorer. Australia also has the world’s highest power prices and some of the highest carbon emission rates. Australia with 0.3% of the global population produces 1.3% of total global emissions.

By signing the Paris accord Australia has committed to reducing its own CO2 emissions. Australia’s environmental movement is largely an urban phenomenon but ironically Australia’s economy, and its cities, are underpinned by mining. Australia introduced a carbon tax in 2012, but scrapped it in 2014.