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.”

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

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.

Tag: Tasmania

Australia (as millispheres)