Tag: Australia

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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.

 

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Papua

Millisphere (noun). A discrete region of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

This weekend the protracted elections in Papua New Guinea (PNG) finally came up with a winner. Peter O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (tainted with accusations of corruption) won – but with a reduced majority.

The ABC commented that the average Australian knew more about “what Donald Trump had for breakfast” than they did about their neighbour PNG – partly due to the number of ABC journalists covering PNG being slashed from six to one.

Pre-European contact the Sultan of Tidore in the Mollacas included the western “bird’s head” end of New Guinea in his sultanate – collecting a tribute of tortoiseshell and bird of paradise feathers – which were then traded all the way to China and Europe.

.The first recorded European contact was in 1528 when a Spanish ship kidnapped three men from Manus Island and took them to the Philippines. One year later the ship passed Manus Island again and the three islanders jumped overboard and swam for shore.

In 1494 the world’s maritime trade had been divided between the Portuguese and the Spanish by the “Tordesilla Line” along the 321st meridian, dividing South America. In 1529 the circle was closed at the anti-meridian on the 141st meridian – the north/south line that divides PNG from Papua in Indonesia to this day.

Before World War One PNG was divided into German New Guinea to the north and British Papua in the south. Administered as one by Australia from 1914 until independence in 1975 and with a population of 7.1 million PNG qualifies as a millisphere. Another option is to combine the various tribes and languages into the one millisphere of “Papua” covering the entire island (total population 11.5 million).

The previously Dutch territory, once known as Irian Jaya, now the Indonesian provinces of Papua (3.5m) and West Papua (0.9m), could equally qualify as a millisphere. Before annexation by Indonesia in 1969 Papua/W Papua was almost entirely Melanesian, now, because of migration, the population is almost half Indonesian/Malay, colonising the lowlands for palm-oil, while the Papuans are still the majority in the highlands.

Indonesia claims to have eleven million Melanesians, counting the Melanesian/Malay inhabitants in the Moluccas and East Nusa Tenggara, and there are another million Melanesian/Polynesians in the millisphere of Te Moananui (covering the Pacific) giving a total nearing 20 million.

The “Melanesian Spearhead,” was formed in 1986 by Fiji, PNG, The Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanaks of New Caledonia to create a united Melanesian voice. The Melanesian Spearhead has a HQ funded by China in Port Vila (Vanuatu) and it calls for a “free West Papua,” a position endorsed by New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginals.

Because half of all “Melanesians” are Indonesian, Indonesia has applied to join the Melanesian Spearhead and have appointed Tantowi Yahya as their ambassador to  NZ and the Pacific.The son of a plastic recycler from Sumatra, Tantawi rose to become a TV presenter and country music singer before turning to politics. His job, he says, is to correct the “misperception” about the Indonesian presence in Papua.

Meanwhile in New Zealand this month a small group of MPs from National, Labour, the Maori Party and the Greens signed a  declaration calling for “ an internationally supervised self-determination vote in Papua.”

The Free Papua Movement  was formed in 1963. “We do not want modern life! We refuse any kinds of development: religious groups, aid agencies and government organisations, just leave us alone!” they said at the time.

On YouTube you can find “Everything can be burnt,” a video by RNZ’s Johnny Blades and Koroi Hawkins about their recent trip across the border from PNG into Indonesia’s Papua province, to report on the campaign for Papuan independence there.

“You should go to the highlands,” Johnny told me, “the gardens there are amazing.” Agriculture is said to have started simultaneously in Asia, Europe and the Papuan highlands – where gardening is still practiced in the old way. Melanesians are to this day differentiated by altitude and their true homeland is in the New Guinea highlands – on both sides of the 141st meridian.

 

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Surabaya

Millisphere, noun. A region with approximately one thousandth of the total world population, around seven million people.

Last Tuesday I saw the new crescent moon appear in the winter sky and I warmly remembered the tropics. On the island of Java (population 145 million) in Indonesia (over 260 million and doubling every 35 years) I knew that all hell would be breaking loose as a hundred million Muslims hit the road for Idul Fitri (Eid-al-Fitr in Arabic) the festival that marks the end of Ramadan.

A few days on either side of Idul Fitri is not a good time to travel in Java and I can remember once pushing my travel companion up into a baggage car at the end of a packed passenger train so that we could make the ferry connection to Bali.

We had been in Surabaya during Idul Fitri and we had been randomly invited in for ice-cream and a game of scrabble by a widow who prided herself on her command of the English language. During Idul Fitri it is considered good form to host some wayfaring strangers.

With twenty millispheres on a land area about the size of the North Island of Aotearoa, Java is world’s the most populace island and the millisphere of Surabaya (metropolitan population nearly 7 million) includes Indonesia’s second largest city.

I’ve passed through this congested, chaotic, polluted metropolis a couple of of times, but I am tempted to go back and check out the changes since the election of Surabaya’s Green mayoress, Tri Rismaharini.

Affectionately known as “Bu (Mother) Risma,” she is an architect with a masters in Urban Development and she headed Surabaya’s Town Planning Department before winning the mayoralty in 2010.

Since 1999 Indonesia has experienced one of the most radical decentralisation programs in the world. During the 1998 Asian economic meltdown it was observed that Surabaya was more financially resilient than Jakarta, where the state had a strong (and often corrupt) guiding hand in the capital’s economy.

In 2012 Surabaya was awarded the ASEAN Environmentally Sustainable City award. Today it takes 17 days to process a foreign direct investment application in Surabaya compared with 50 days in Jakarta.

Mayor Rismaharini’s policy was to make the most of “empty” land. Under her leadership the city constructed sixty public parks with Wi-Fi access, libraries and sports facilities. These parks are used for public meetings, weddings and “water absorptions spaces”. Unlike Jakarta, Surabaya now has virtually no flooding.

“Bu Risma” developed a partnership with the kampongs (villages) that make up Surabaya. The city would repair the lanes (designed to exclude cars) and drains and the residents cleaned the rubbish out of the canals and established and maintain the landscaping, creating an urban forest of green lanes and streets. Fish farms have returned to the river as the water quality improves and there is an active mangrove regeneration program.

The new mayoress inherited a rubbish crisis – common to many large Indonesian cities. Surabaya’s main rubbish dump (the Keputih Disposal Area) had just been closed because of opposition from local residents (and because it was full). The amount of waste Surabaya now produces has been halved since 2010.

Utilising aid from a sister city in Japan, Surabaya generates energy by burning rubbish and methane from landfills and now collects data on waste volume and points of waste generation etc. It has created composting stations and “waste bank portals” where the city buys recyclables, crediting the resident’s account with an app. on their phone.

In the last decade “Green and Clean” Surabaya has seen big changes in the liveability of the city. “There is a new sense of vitality and common purpose,” residents report. The city runs an annual essay writing competition for school children on the subject: “If I were the Minister for the Environment,” with a first prize of a trip to meet Australian junior Greenies.

Another place I’d go back to is the PPLH Seloliman Environment Centre, up a volcano near Trawas, a couple of hours drive from Surabaya. At Seloliman there is a dormitory which was built with aid money from the government of New Zealand. The dormitory is used to host parties of school children from the kampongs of Surabaya.